The poetry of science, or, Studies of the physical phenomena of nature / by Robert Hunt.

  • Robert Hunt
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The poetry of science, or, Studies of the physical phenomena of nature / by Robert Hunt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    material world as a metaphysical bundle of essential properties, and nothing more—has led some eminent philosophers to struggle with the task of proving that all the wonderful manifestations of the great physical powers of the universe are but modifications of motion, without the evidence of any antecedent force.* The views of metaphyscians regarding motion involve many subtle considerations which need not at present detain us. We can only consider motion as a change of place in a given mass of matter. Now matter cannot effect this of itself, no change of place being possible without a mover; and, consequently, motion cannot be a property of matter, in the strict sense in which that term should be accepted.f even as motionless with regard to each other; since the continual variation of temperature to which all bodies are liable, and the minute agitations arising from the motion of other bodies with which they are connected, will always tend to produce some im- perceptible changes in their distances.—Lectures on Natural Philosophy, fyc., by Thomas Young, M.D. Edited by the Rev. P. Kelland. 1845. * The position which I seek to establish in this essay is, that the various imponderable agencies, or the affections of matter which constitute the main objects of experimental physics, viz., heat, light, electricity, magnetism, chemical affinity, and motion, are all correlative, or have a reciprocal dependence ;—that neither, taken abstractedly, can be said to be the essential or proximate cause of the others ; but that either may, as a force, produce, or be convertible into, the other:—thus heat may mediately or imme- diately produce electricity, electricity may produce heat, and so of the rest. . . . Although strongly inclined to believe that the five other affections of matter, which I have above named, are, and will ultimately be, resolved into modes of motion, it would be going too far at present to assume their identity with it: I, there- fore ase the term force, in reference to them, as meaning that active force inseparable from matter, which induces its various fhanges.—On the Correlation of Physical Forces, by W. B. Grove, Esq., M.A., F.E.S. f When discussing the hypothesis of Hobbes—that no body can possibly be moved but by a body contiguous and moved—Boyle asks :—
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