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What voice, then, has said to tins mighty ocean of Primeval 
Force, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no farther, and here shall 
thy proud waves be stayed ? 
By the laws of force, however, so far as science has detected 
or conjectured them, the force depends on the inverse distance, 
and will be infinite when two particles touch or coalesce. The 
energy, which is the integral of the force, will then become 
infinite also. What the doctrine, therefore, requires, is a vast 
summation of infinites, a strict, equated total, made out of 
trillions of trillions of things each immeasurable. 
Such is the five-fold contradiction involved in the so-called 
Persistence, Constancy, or Indestructibility of Force, on its 
dynamical side. But the metaphysical or ontological falsehoods 
it involves are not less numerous. 
The first of these is the same as with the twin doctrine, the 
Indestructibility of Matter. In the Neo-Lucretian philosophy 
God is a Being wholly unknowable and unknown. “The 
Power which the universe manifests to us is utterly inscru- 
table” (F. P., p. 146). And Force, too, like God and Matter, 
is wholly unknown. “It is a truism to say that its nature is 
inscrutable” (p. 170). “It is impossible to form any idea of 
Force in itself, and equally impossible to comprehend its mode 
of exercise or law of variation” (p. 61). Yet we are taught 
that this wholly unknown Being, whether he has a will to do 
it or not, cannot destroy one particle of this wholly unknown 
and unknowable thing or quality, which we call Force or 
Energy. Nay, we are assured that this is an a priori truth 
of the first order, on which all science is based, which every 
one has always believed without knowing it, and could not 
help believing. Can there be conceived, I would ask, a worse 
superlative of hopeless, incurable contradiction ? 
Contradiction the second. The doctrine assumes that motion 
or Kinetic Energy is the same identical thing or quality with 
Potential Energy, because of a numerical equivalence, when 
reckoned in one especial way. But this is wholly untrue. A 
rectangle, when its breadth is the unit of distance, has its 
length and its area or surface expressed by the same number. 
But a length and a surface are not on that account the same. 
Kinetic Energy is the sum of the squared velocities, or the 
squares of the rates of speed at which every pair of atoms 
change their distance from each other. Potential Energy is 
the sum of all the pulling or pushing forces that might or would 
be exerted under a given law of force, in the change from one 
distance to another. A rate of actual speed, multiplied into 
itself, is one idea. A sum of pushes or pulls, not actual, but 
