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possible in many successive instants to come, is clearly another. 
To call them the same thing transformed, because the number 
denoting them may be the same, is not more reasonable than 
to say that a company of travellers are the same with their own 
railway tickets, or that these tickets are the travellers them- 
selves transformed. A cannon-bali is shot upward at the rate 
of a thousand feet a second. The doctrine affirms this speed or 
motion to be the very same thing with the place of that ball on 
the top of a mountain three miles high. But such an identity 
is metaphysically inconceivable, and practically absurd. 
Contradiction the third. Motion,, by the theory, may be 
transferred from one body to another, remaining the same 
motion still. It may reverse its direction, and be the same 
motion, if its rate be the same. On this assumption alone can 
the indestructibility or persistence of that part of the Energy, 
which consists of motions, be maintained. The motion is to be 
one and the same, whether it moves five feet a second north- 
ward, or rebounding from a wall, five feet a second southward ; 
or whether B, after collision, moves five feet a second northward, 
and A is at rest ; or whether A is at rest, and twenty-five other 
bodies move one foot a second northward, or whether B moves 
four feet a second in one direction, and C three feet a second 
at right angles, A being at rest. But the sameness and identity 
of motions, when neither the moving thing, nor the direction, 
not the speed is the same, but all in turn different, does violence 
to the fundamental laws of human thought. The transfer of 
motion, in a few simple cases, is a lawful and expressive term. 
It describes the fact by an easy figure. But when mistaken 
for a logical truth, and turned into the basis of a theory of the 
universe, it is wholly and palpably groundless. In a collision, 
the motion of the body arrested, and of the body impelled, are 
not and cannot be the same motion. They are not the same 
in the subject, and motion is the quality or state of a thing, not 
a separate existence. They are not the same in time, for one 
has ceased when they separate, and the other has no existence 
before contact. Thev are not the same even in direction, 
except in a very limited class of collisions. In short they admit 
of every conceivable kind of diversity. 
Contradiction the fourth. The motions, which compose and 
form the Kinetic Energy, need to be abstracted from their 
direction, and from the particles or bodies which move, and 
when this separation has been made, to be summed in a total, 
which constitutes one main part of the new indestructible 
divinity. But by this severance, the motions neutralize each 
other, and the total disappears. In a universe, the parts of 
