Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/167

who was so far from rising to that clearness of view of the truth of his great discovery, which is expressed by the phrase, 'its negation is inconceivable,' that he actually abandoned it for a time, because (through an error in his estimate of the earth's diameter) it did not seem fully to account for the motion of the moon."

To the first clause in this sentence, I have simply to give a direct denial; and to assert that neither Newton's "observations of the movements of the planets," nor other such observations continued by all astronomers for all time, would yield "the great law of attraction." Contrariwise, I contend that when the reviewer says, by implication, that Newton had no antecedent hypothesis respecting the cause of the planetary motions, he (the reviewer) is not only going beyond his possible knowledge, but he is asserting that which even a rudimentary acquaintance with the process of discovery might have shown him was impossible. Without framing, beforehand, the supposition that there was at work an attractive force varying inversely as the square of the distance, no such comparison of observations as that which led to the establishment of the theory of gravitation could have been made. On the second clause of the sentence, in which the reviewer volunteers for my benefit the information that Newton "actually abandoned" his hypothesis for a while because it did not bring out right results, I have first to tell him that, in an early number of the very periodical containing his article,^[1] I cited this fact (using these same words) at a time when he was at school, or before he went there.^[2] I have next to assert that this fact is irrelevant; and that Newton, while probably seeing it to be a necessary implication of geometrical laws that central forces vary inversely as the squares of the distances, did not see it to be a necessary implication of any laws, geometrical or dynamical, that there exists a force by which the celestial bodies affect one another; and therefore doubtless saw that there was no a priori warrant for the doctrine of gravitation. The reviewer, however, aiming to substitute for my "confused notions" his own clear ones, wishes me to identify the proposition—Central forces vary inversely as the squares of the distances—with the proposition—There is a cosmical force which varies inversely as the squares of the distances. But I decline to identify them; and I suspect that a considerable distinction between them was recognized by Newton. Lastly, apart from all this, I have to point out that, even had Newton thought the existence of an attractive force throughout space was an a priori truth, as well as the law of variation of such a force if it existed, he would still, naturally enough, pause before asserting this law, when he found his deductions from it did not correspond with the facts. To

1. See Essay on "The Genesis of Science," in the British Quarterly Review for July, 1854, p. 127.
2. I do not say this at random. The reviewer, who has sought rather to make known than to conceal his identity, took his degree in 1868.