same identical planet, without the loss or gain of a single particle
of substance. But the state of this planet, as a whole, and of every
atom of this planet, would be instantly altered, in many most important
respects,--so completely altered, indeed, that not an atom of the
mass would tend to the other atoms of the mass, in the same manner
as before. In like manner, if the _light_,--which now, operating on
one of my organs of sense, causes my mind to exist in the state that
constitutes the sensation of a particular colour,--were suddenly to
vanish, the state of my mind would be instantly changed, though my mind
itself, considered as a substance, would still continue unaltered.
In both cases,--the spiritual, and the material,--and in both cases,
alike,--_absolute identity_, in the strictest sense of the term, is
_consistent_ with innumerable _diversities_.
In the discussion of this supposed difficulty, I have chosen,
for illustration, in the first place, to consider the _planetary
attractions_, in preference to those which occur, in the minuter
changes, that are simply terrestrial; because in the case of
operations at a distance, it is impossible for us, not to perceive,
that, even in matter, a change of state is not inconsistent with
complete permanence of absolute corpuscular identity; while, in the
compositions or decompositions, that occur spontaneously, or by
artificial experiment, in the physical changes on the surface of our
earth, the additions or subtractions of matter, that appear to us to
constitute these phenomena, truly destroy the corpuscular identity of
the substances, in which the change takes place; and the change of
state is thus considered by us, as implying a positive substantial
change. But when we examine even these phenomena a little more deeply,
we shall find, that, like the great operations of gravitation on the
masses of the universe,--the change, in these also, is not a positive
change of substance, but is simply a change of state in a congeries of
independent substances, which we term _one_ substance, merely because
the spaces, that are really between them, are imperceptible to our very
imperfect organs; the addition or subtraction of matter being not that
which constitutes the new states or tendencies of the particles which
continue present, but merely that which gives occasion to those changes
of state or tendency;--as the positions of the heavenly bodies do not
constitute the phenomena of our tides, but merely give occasion to
that difference of state in the particles of the ocean, in consequence
of which they assume of themselves a different configuration. Man
is placed, as it has been truly said, on a point, between two
infinities,--the infinitely _great_, and the infinitely _little_. It
may be an extravagant speculation, to which I have before alluded,--but
it is not absolutely absurd, to suppose, that in the unbounded system
of nature, there may be beings, to whose vision the whole planetary
attendants of each separate sun, which to us appear to revolve at
distances so immense, may yet seem but one small cohesive mass, in the
same manner, as to those animalculæ, whose existence and successive
generations had been altogether unknown to man, till the microscope
created them, as it were to his feeble sight,--and which, perhaps, are
mighty animals compared with races of beings still more minute, that
are constantly living in our very presence, and yet destined never to
be known to us,--those bodies, which to us seem one small cohesive
mass, may appear separated by distances, relatively as great, as to
us are those of the planets. That light, itself a _body_, should pass
freely through a mass of solid crystal, is regarded by us as a sort of
physical wonder; and yet it is far from impossible, that, between the
atoms which compose this apparently solid mass, whole nations of living
beings maybe dwelling, and exercising their mutual works of peace or
hostility; while perhaps, if philosophy can be exercised, in brains of
such infinitesimal dimensions, in the same manner as in our coarser
organs, the nature of the atoms, or distant worlds around them, may be
dividing with endless absurdities, the Ptolemies and Aristotles of the
little republics. We have all so much of the nature of the inhabitants
of Brobdignag, that a supposition of this kind,--which is perhaps
truly in itself not a very probable one,--yet appears to us much more
improbable, than it really is. We smile, as recognizing our own nature,
when the sovereign of that country of giants is represented by the most
unfortunate, or rather the most fortunate of all voyagers, as “turning
to his first minister, who waited behind him with a white staff, near
as tall as the mainmast of the Royal Sovereign, and observing how
contemptible a thing was human grandeur, which could be mimicked by
such diminutive insects.” “And yet,” said he, “I dare engage, those
creatures have their titles and distinctions of honour; they contrive
their nests and burrows, that they call houses and cities; they make
a figure in dress and equipage; they love, they fight, they dispute,
they cheat, they betray.” And we fully enter into the difficulty which
the _savans_ of the country, who had all agreed that the new-discovered
animal could not have been produced according to the regular laws of
nature, must have found, in giving him a name. “One of them seemed to
think that I might be an embryo, or abortive birth. But this opinion
was rejected by the other two, who observed my limbs to be perfect
and finished; and that I had lived several years, as it was manifest
from my beard, the stumps whereof they plainly discovered through
a magnifying-glass. They would not allow me to be a dwarf, because
my littleness was beyond all degrees of comparison; for the queen's
favourite dwarf, the smallest ever known in that kingdom, was near
thirty feet high. After much debate, they concluded unanimously, that
I was only _relplum scalcath_, which is interpreted literally _lusus
naturæ_; a determination exactly agreeable to the modern philosophy
of Europe, whose professors, disdaining the old evasion of occult
causes, whereby the followers of Aristotle endeavoured in vain to
disguise their ignorance, have invented this wonderful solution of all
difficulties, to the unspeakable advancement of human knowledge.”[50]
Whatever may be thought of speculations of this kind, however, with
respect to the relative distance of the atoms of bodies, it is not the
less certain, that these atoms are separate substances, independent
of the other similar or different substances that apparently adhere
to them in continuity,--that they are, in truth, the only material
substances which really exist, since the bodies which we term masses
are only those very atoms under another name,--that they remain,
and cannot but remain, identical, amid all the changes of chemical
composition or decomposition,--and that the change which they suffer,
therefore, however strikingly their physical character may be altered
for the time, is a change not of _substance_ but of _state_ only. In
the case of the formation of _ice_, for example, the elementary atoms
themselves, which are all that truly exist in nature, are not, and
cannot be, changed; but particles, which were formerly easily separable
from adjacent particles, now resist this separation by a considerable
force. There is a change in their _state_, therefore, since they now
exist with a different degree of tendency toward each other,--a change,
to which the separation of a quantity of caloric may, indeed, have
given occasion, but which is to be distinguished from that momentary
separation itself, since the solidity, which is only another name for
the corpuscular resistance, continues after the separation is complete,
and would continue forever, unless a change of temperature were again
to restore that former state or tendency of the particles, in which
they were easily separable. To him who has learned to consider bodies
as, what they truly are, a multitude of separate and independent
corpuscles, there is no change of identity, and cannot be any change of
identity, in all the phenomena or changes of the universe. The atoms,
which alone existed, continue as before; and all which constitutes the
phenomenon, or varieties of successive phenomena, is a change of their
place or tendency.
This _corpuscular_ view of the material universe,--which, of course,
admits an infinite variety of applications, corresponding with the
infinite variety of its phenomena,--has many most striking analogies
in that moral universe, with the phenomena of which we are chiefly
concerned. Indeed, when we consider any of the masses before us, as
deriving all its apparent magnitude from a number of separate bodies,
of which it is composed,--any one of which, _individually_, would be
too minute to be distinguishable by us,--it is scarcely possible not to
think of the similarity which it presents to the multitudes of human
beings that are as it were, massed together in the great nations of
the earth; and in which any single individual, if he could be supposed
to have exercised his powers separately, would have been truly as
insignificant as a single atom separated from the mass of which it is
a part. What we call the greatness of a nation, is nothing more than
the union of a number of little interests and little passions joined
in one common object; to which insignificant elements, so wonderful
when combined, if we could distinctly reduce, by analysis, the most
unrivalled power that has ever commanded the admiration and envy of
the world, it would, at first view, run some little risk of appearing
contemptible. The advantages of this social union of mankind, as
silently felt at every moment, are unquestionably so infinite in
comparison, as almost to sink into nothing the occasional evils to
which the aggregation and massing of so many powers, when ill directed,
may give rise,--though these terrific evils, when they occur, may dwell
more permanently in the mind;--like the visitations of storms and
earthquakes, which we remember forever, while, with a sort of thankless
forgetfulness, we scarcely think of the calm beauty and regularity
which, season after season, passes over us. The rock which, descending
from the top of a mountain, lays waste whatever it meets in its
progress,--and to attempt to stop which, while its short career lasts,
would be almost like instant annihilation,--derives this overwhelming
force from an infinite number of independent corpuscles, any one of
which, if it had fallen singly, would have been far less destructive
than the flutter of an insect's wing; and that tyrannical power of a
single man, before which, in unhappy ages of successful oppression, the
earth has so often trembled,--as before some power of darkness, endowed
with more than human sway,--has derived its irresistible might, not
from powers included in itself,--which, in reference to the objects
achieved by it, would have been feeble indeed,--but from the united
powers of beings still feebler, who were trembling while they executed
commands to which themselves alone gave omnipotence.
To this corpuscular view, however, though it is unquestionably the
sort of view to which, in our ultimate physical inquiries into
the phenomena of matter, we must come, you may, perhaps, not be
sufficiently accustomed, to enter fully into the reasoning on the
subject. It will probably be less difficult for you, if we take rather,
as an illustration, the simpler case of _impulse_; in which the bodies
affecting each other are not, as in chemistry, indistinguishable
corpuscles, but _masses_, clearly defined, and easily perceptible.
I need not, of course, repeat the arguments formerly stated, to prove
that _attraction_, however general it may be as a law of matter at all
visible distances, does not continue, but gives place to an opposite
tendency at those smaller distances, which we are unable to perceive
with our weak organs, and which we learn to estimate only by effects
that are inconsistent with absolute contact;--for example, by the
well-known fact of the compressibility of bodies, which could not
take place if their particles were already in contact, and which
by continually increasing resistance to the compressing force that
would bring the corpuscles nearer, shews, that there is, at different
degrees of nearness, a tendency continuing to operate, which is the
very reverse of attraction. There is, therefore, every reason to
believe,--since repulsion, as the fact of forcible compression shews,
takes place while the particles of bodies are still at a certain
distance,--that the motion produced in one body by another, and
ascribed to immediate impulse, is produced, without actual contact,
by this mutual repulsion, as it is called, of the bodies when brought
within a certain invisible degree of vicinity to each other; or,
in other words,--for repulsion means nothing more mysterious than
this simple fact,--the tendency which bodies, in certain relative
positions of apparent but not actual contact, have to fly off from
each other with certain degrees of velocity, as in certain other
relative positions, of distinguishable distance, they have a tendency
to approach each other. This repulsion, or tendency from each other
at one point of nearness, is of itself as easy to be conceived, as
that _attraction_, or tendency toward each other at other points of
distance, to which we give the name of _gravitation_; and it is only
from our greater familiarity with the one, as operating at distances
which are visible, while the other,--except in a few cases, such as
those of magnetism and electricity,--operates only at distances which
are imperceptible to us, that we feel a little more difficulty in
admitting the _repulsion_ than the _attraction_ of matter. There is
then,--however universal gravitation may seem, when we think only
of perceptible distances,--a certain point of near approach, before
actual contact, at which gravitation ceases; and, beyond this point,
the tendency of bodies toward each other is converted,--as the force
necessary to compress them evidently shews,--into a tendency from each
other; _both_ tendencies, indeed, being _inexplicable_, but the one in
no respect more so than the other.
For this apparent digression, on a point of general physics, I make no
apology, as it is absolutely necessary for illustrating the particular
case to which I am to proceed. The consideration of it requires, what
the whole of this discussion, indeed, has already required from you, no
small exercise of patient attention; but I trust that I sufficiently
prepared you for this, in a former Lecture, when I stated the
importance of such attention, not merely in relation to the subject
considered at the time, but as a part of your mental discipline,
and the advantage which might thus be derived to your intellectual
character, from the very difficulties which the subject presents. It
is in philosophy, as in many a fairy tale. The different obstacles
which the hero encounters, are not progressively greater and greater;
but his most difficult achievements are often at the very commencement
of his career. He begins, perhaps, with attacking the castle of some
enchanter, and has to force his way, unassisted, through the griffins
and dragons that oppose his entrance. He finishes the adventure, with
the death of the magician--and strips him of some ring, or other
talisman, which renders his subsequent adventures comparatively
easy and secure. I cannot venture to say, indeed, that a perfect
acquaintance with the difficulties of the present question, and of some
of the late questions which have engaged us, will be such a talisman to
you, in your future career of intellectual science. But I may safely
say, that the habit of attentive thought, which the consideration of
subjects, so abstract, necessarily produces, in those who are not too
indolent to give attention to them, or too indifferent to feel interest
in them, is more truly valuable than any talisman, of which accident or
force might deprive you. The _magic_ with which this endows you, is not
attached to a _ring_, or a gem, or any thing external; it lives, and
lives forever, in the very essence of your minds.
When a billiard ball, on being struck, approaches another, which is at
rest, it soon arrives at the point of seeming, but not actual contact,
at which their mutual attraction ceases, and the force which it has
acquired still carrying it on, it passes this bounding point, and
arrives at a point at which repulsion has already begun. Accordingly
the body, formerly at rest, now flies off, on a principle precisely
similar, (though the mere direction be opposite) to that by which the
same ball, if dropped from a hand that supported it, would, without the
actual impulse of any body, have quitted its state of rest, as in the
present case, and have gravitated, or, which is the same thing, have
moved of itself toward the earth.
Before the first ball, which you will, perhaps more easily remember
by the name, A, arrived so very near to the second ball B, as to
have come within the sphere of their mutual repulsion, this second
ball was at rest, that is to say, it had no tendency to move in any
direction. This state of rest, however, is only one of the many states,
in which a body may exist; and if, which must surely be allowed, a
body having a tendency to continued motion, be in a different state,
from one which has no such tendency, this change of state implying,
it must be remarked, not even the slightest loss of identity, has
been produced in the body B, by the mere vicinity of the body A. For
the sake of illustration, let us now suppose this body A to be hot or
luminous. It will still, as before, produce the new state of tendency
to motion, in B, when it arrives within the limits of their sphere of
repulsion. Is it less conceivable, then, that the mere presence of
this hot or luminous body should produce the new sensation of warmth,
or of colour, which are different states of the sentient mind, without
affecting in the slightest degree the identity of the mind itself,
than that it should produce, without any loss of absolute identity, in
the body B, an immediate tendency, in that body, to move along with a
certain velocity, a state as different from that in which it remains
at rest, as the sensation of warmth, which is one state of the mind,
is different from the sensation of colour, which is another state of
the mind? Nor does the parallel end here; for, since a body at rest,
acquiring a tendency to begin motion in one particular direction, as,
for example, to move _north_, must be in a different state from that
in which it would have been, if it had acquired an instant tendency
to move _east_, or in any other direction; and, the direction once
begun, being the same, since a body having a tendency to move with one
velocity, must, at every moment of its progress, be in a different
state from that in which it has a tendency to move with a different
velocity, it is evident, that the mere presence of a body may produce,
in a second body, according to the difference of their positions and
relative magnitudes, a variety of states, that, when all the varieties
of direction, and all the varieties of velocity are estimated together,
may be considered as infinite,--equal at least in number, to the
different states of which the mind is susceptible, in its almost
infinite variety of feelings; and all this without any essential
change, that can affect the identity of the quiescent or moving body,
or any essential change, that can affect the identity of the mind.
I am aware, that, when you consider, for the first time, this assertion
of an infinite variety of _states_, corresponding with all the
innumerable varieties of direction and velocity, in the tendencies of
a simple billiard-ball, which, in the various circumstances supposed,
appears to us precisely the same, in all its sensible qualities,
you may be apt to conceive, that the assertion must be founded on a
mistake, and, from the influence of former prejudice may be inclined
to think, that, when it exhibits a tendency to begin to move east,
at one time, and, at another time, a beginning tendency to move
north, this does not arise from any difference of state in itself,
but from its being merely carried along by the first ball, which
was itself previously moving in one or other of these particular
lines of direction. When the elastic billiard-ball, however, bounds
away from the ball which strikes it, this supposition is manifestly
inapplicable;--and, in all cases, it is the influence only of former
prejudice which can lead you to this opinion,--the influence of that
prejudice, by which you may have been accustomed to consider impulse,
not as inducing a tendency to motion at some little distance, but as
involving the necessity of actual contact. To destroy this prejudice,
a very little reflection on the phenomena of elastic bodies, in their
shocks and mutual retrocessions, is surely all that can be requisite;
and if the motion of B, and consequently its tendency to motion, have
begun, without contact of A, as it afterwards continues while A, the
elastic body which struck it, is moving back in an opposite direction,
it could not be by mechanical trusion, as carried along by A, which
is still at some points of distance from it when its motion begins,
and at still greater distance the longer the motion continues, that
B has assumed any one of its variety of states,--that, for example,
in which, in one case, it tends to move east, in another case to move
north, in one case to move rapidly, in another slowly. To say that the
body acquires this new tendency because it is impelled, is only to
say that it is impelled because it is impelled. It is an equally idle
use of language, to affirm, as if a word could obviate the difficulty
instead of merely stating it,--that A, in communicating a different
tendency to B, which was before at rest, does this by a principle, or
power of repulsion; for this, as I have said, is merely to state in
a single word, the regularity in certain circumstances of the very
fact asserted. The different tendencies of B, and consequently the
different states in which B exists,--are not the less different, in
whatever manner the difference may have been produced, or by whatever
word, or combination of words, the difference may be expressed. There
is no magic, in the phrase, _principle_ of repulsion, or _power_ of
repulsion, which can render the _same_, states or tendencies that are
in themselves opposite;--for, as far as we understand the phrase, it
expresses nothing more than the invariableness of the simple fact,
that in certain circumstances of relative position, bodies have a
tendency to fly off from each other, as in certain other circumstances
of relative position, which constitute the phenomena of gravitation,
they have a tendency to approach. Whatever term we may employ to denote
it, it is still a physical fact, that at a certain point of near and
seemingly close approach of another mass, a body which was before in a
state of rest, acquires immediately a tendency to fly off in different
directions, and with different velocities at different times, and
consequently, that, if the tendency to begin or to continue motion,
in one direction, and with one velocity, be a state different from
that which constitutes the tendency to begin or to continue motion in
another direction, and with another velocity, the ball B, in these
different circumstances, however identical it may be in substance,
exists in two different states;--or all states, however different, may
be said to be the same.
It may be admitted, then, that the _feeling of rapture_ is a state of
mind, completely different from that which constitutes the _feeling
of agony_,--that the sensation of the fragrance of a rose, has no
resemblance to our conception of a sphere or of an equilateral
triangle,--and that, in general, all those thoughts and emotions,
which,--more truly than the mere union of the immortal spirit within us
with the body which it animates,--may be said to constitute _life_,
“Love, Hope, and Joy, fair Pleasure's smiling train,--
Hate, Fear, and Grief, the family of Pain;”