The correlation of physical forces: being the substance of a course of lectures delivered in the London Institution, in the year 1843 / by W.R. Grove.

  • Grove, W. R. (William Robert), 1811-1896.
Date:
1846
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The correlation of physical forces: being the substance of a course of lectures delivered in the London Institution, in the year 1843 / by W.R. Grove. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    I have had the honor to expose to you in the Course of Lec- tures alluded to in the Preface. Not to waste your time with the a priori speculations of the early philosophers, who, instead of examining phe- nomena, and collating instances, until they arrived at general analogies and differences, assumed certain axioms or asserted truisms, and then, by syllogistic deductions, carried them out into complex, and, to us, somewhat unintelligible,conclusions; I will pass to Bacon, the great remodeller of science, who entertained the notion that, by experimentally testing natural phenomena, we should be enabled to trace them to certain primary essences or causes, whence the various phenomena flow. These he speaks of under the scholastic name of forms, a term derived from the Platonic philosophy, but differently applied. He appears to have understood by form—the essence of quality, that in which, abstracting every thing extraneous, a given quality consists, or that which superin- duced on any body would give it its peculiar quality; thus the form of transparency is that which constitutes transpa- rency, or that by which, when discovered, transparency could be produced or superinduced. To take a specific ex- ample of what I may term the synthetic application of his philosophy. “ In gold there meet together yellowness, gravity, malleability, fixedness in the fire, a particular manner of flowing in the fire, a determinate way of solution, which are the simple natures in gold; for he who under- stands form, and the manner of superinducing this yellow- ness, gravity, ductility, fixedness, faculty of fusion, solution, etc., with then particular degrees and proportions, will con- sider how to join them together in some body, so that a transmutation into gold shall follow.” On the other hand, the analytic method, or “ the enquiry from what origin gold or any other metal or stone is gene-