Experimental investigation of the spirit manifestations, [electronic ...

26 INTRODUCTION.60. It is admitted by Comte that we know nothing of the sources orcauses of nature's laws ; that their origination is so perfectly inscrutable,as to make it idle to take up time in any scrutiny for that purpose. lietreats the resort to the Deity as the cause, as a mere abstraction tendingto comfort the human mind before it has become acquainted with truescience, and doomed to be laid aside with the advance of positive science.61. Of course his doctrine makes him avowedly a thorough ignoramusas to the causes of laws, or the means by which they were established,and can have no other basis but the negative argument above stated, inobjecting to the facts ascertained in relation to the spiritual creation.Hence when the spirits allege that by their volition they can neutralizegravity, or vis inert ice,^ there is nothing in positive science to confute this.The inability of material beings to neutralize gravitation by their powersisno proof that spiritual beings cannot effect this change.62. Thus while allowing the atheist his material dominion, Spiritualismwill erect within and above the same space a dominion of an importanceas much greater as eternity is to the avarage duration of human life, andas the boundless regions of the fixed stars are to the habitable area of thisglobe.63. But although Comte be a man of great learning, his fundamentalopinions appear to be faulty, and his distribution of tbe operations of themind imaginary.64. In treating of gravitation as the 'primary law, docs he not commita blunder? Is not vis inertias indispensable to gravitation, since it maybeconceived to exist without gravitation, while gravitation cannot exist withoutvis inertias ?65. The power of a body A to draw B toward it can never exceed thatwhich is necessary to put it into motion, which must be directly as its viainertias ;and where the one is null, the other must be null.66. I cannot imagine how any philosopher so learned as Comte shouldnot perceive the reduction of the phenomena of the universe to '•'•diiFerentaspects'' of the one faculty of gravitation to be utterly impossible. In* Yia inertice, or force of inertness, is the force by which a body, -when at rest, resistsbeing put into motion, or, when in motion, resists arrestation. Tho force, in this lattercase, is called momentum, being directly as the weight multiplied by the velocity. Thus,two pounds, moving at the rate of one foot per second, exercise exactly the same momentumas one pound moving at the rate of two feet per second.The force of a spring, or of explosive compounds, cannot be called momentum; neithervelocity nor weight enter into its constitution; though, when transferred to a projectile,it produces momentum proportional to the force with which it acts, the weight moved, andvelocity imparted.Muscular force does not come withinthe definition of momentum, although it producejthis propertj' in a hammer, proportionably to its weight and the resulting velocity.Isor is the force of gravity momentum, though momentum be generated by it in fallingbodies.