The Grammar of Science, Volume 1 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1900 Excerpt: ...our friends' matter as their nonmatter in motion. We shall then find that our senseimpressions of hardness, weight, colour, temperature, cohesion, and chemical constitution, may all be described by aid of the motions of a single medium, which itself is conceived to have no hardness, weight, colour, temperature, nor indeed elasticity of the ordinary perceptual type. This would mean an immeasurably great advance in our scientific power of description. Yet if physicists even then persist in projecting the conceptual into the sphere of sense-impression, and in asserting a phenomenal existence for the ether, we should still be ignorant of what it is that moves, of what ether-matter may really consist in. 1 I venture to think Sir William Thomson's attempt to weigh ether a retrograde step (see his Lectures on Molecular Dynamics, pp. 206-8, Baltimore, 1884). If the ether be a sufficiently wide-embracing conception, gravitation should flow from it, and this certainly was Sir William's view when he propounded the vortex atom. Our analysis, therefore, of the various statements made by physicists and common-sense philosophers with regard to the nature of matter shows us that they are one and all metaphysical--that is, they attempt to describe something beyond sense-impression, beyond perception, and appear, therefore, at best as dogmas, at worst as inconsistencies. If we confine ourselves to the field of logical inference, we see in the phenomenal universe, not matter in motion, but sense-impressions and changes of senseimpressions, coexistence and sequence, correlation and routine. This world of sense-impression science symbolises in conception by an infinitely extended medium, whose various types of motion correspond to diverse groups of sense-impressions, and enable...