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.

  • William Robert Grove
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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    rated, from its first fluid matter or rudiments, up to a perfect mineral,” is to be perceived by what Bacon calls the latent process, or a search for “ what in every generation or trans- formation of bodies, flies off, what remains behind, what is added, what separated, etc., also, in other alterations and motions, what gives motion, what governs it, and the like.” Bacon appears to have thought that qualities separate from the substances themselves were attainable, and if not capable of physical isolation, were at all events capable of physical transference and superinduction. Subsequently to Bacon a belief has generally existed, and now to a great extent exists, in what are called secondary causes, or consequential steps, by which view one phenomenon is supposed necessarily to hang on another, and that on another, until at last we arrive at an essential cause, subject immediately to the GreatBirst Cause. This notion is generally prevalent both on the Continent and in this country : nothing is more familiar to you than the expression, “ study the effects in order to arrive at the causes.” Instead of regarding the proper object of physical science as a search after essential causes, I believe it ought to be, and must be, a search after facts and relations,—that although the word Cause may be used in a secondary and concrete sense, as meaning antecedent forces, yet in an abstract sense it is totally inapplicable ; we cannot predicate of any physical agency that it is abstractedly the cause of another, and if, for the sake of convenience, the language of secondary causation be permissible, it should be only with reference to the special phenomena referred to, as it can never be generalised. The misuse, or, rather, varied use, of the term Cause, has been a source of great confusion in physical theories, and philosophers are now by no means agreed as to their con- ception of causation. The most received view of causation,