My Budget has been arranged by authors. This is the only plan, for much of
the remark is personal: the peculiarities of the paradoxer are a large part
of the interest of the paradox. As to subject-matter, there are points
which stand strongly out; the quadrature of the circle, for instance. But
there are others which cannot be drawn out so as to be conspicuous in a
review of writers: as one instance, I may take the _centrifugal force_.
When I was about nine years old I was taken to hear a course of lectures,
given by an itinerant lecturer in a country town, to get as much as I could
of the second half of a good, sound, philosophical omniscience. The first
half (and sometimes more) comes by nature. To this end I smelt chemicals,
learned that they were different kinds of _gin_, saw young wags try to kiss
the girls under the excuse of what was called _laughing gas_--which I was
sure {269} was not to blame for more than five per cent of the requisite
assurance--and so forth. This was all well so far as it went; but there was
also the excessive notion of creative power exhibited in the millions of
miles of the solar system, of which power I wondered they did not give a
still grander idea by expressing the distances in inches. But even this was
nothing to the ingenious contrivance of the centrifugal force. "You have
heard what I have said of the wonderful centripetal force, by which Divine
Wisdom has retained the planets in their orbits round the Sun. But, ladies
and gentlemen, it must be clear to you that if there were no other force in
action, this centripetal force would draw our earth and the other planets
into the Sun, and universal ruin would ensue. To prevent such a
catastrophe, the same wisdom has implanted a centrifugal force of the same
amount, and directly opposite," etc. I had never heard of Alfonso X of
Castile,[427] but I ventured to think that if Divine Wisdom had just let
the planets alone it would come to the same thing, with equal and opposite
troubles saved. The paradoxers deal largely in speculation conducted upon
the above explanation. They provide external agents for what they call the
centrifugal force. Some make the sun's rays keep the planets off, without a
thought about what would become of our poor eyes if the _push_ of the light
which falls on the earth were a counterpoise to all its gravitation. The
true explanation cannot be given here, for want of room.