Download (PDF, 23.58MB) - Plurality Press

314 THE WILL IN NATURE.
they differ as to quantity, as in the lever, mere Space ancl
Time relations suffice to make the thing clear. But as
soon as weights come also into play, a second mysterious
element supervenes, gravity : and, where elastic bodies are
concerned, elasticity also. Things change as soon as we
begin to ascend in the scale of phenomena. Heat, con
sidered as cause, and expansion, liquefaction, volatilization
or crystallization, as effects, are not homogeneous ;
there
fore their causal connection is not intelligible. The com-
has diminished : what a lower
prehensibility of causality
degree of heat caused to liquefy, a higher degree makes
evaporate : that which crystallizes with less heat, melts
when the heat is augmented. Warmth softens wax and
hardens clay ; light whitens wax and blackens chloride of
silver. And, to go still further, when two salts are seen to
decompose each other mutually and to form two new ones,
elective affinity presents itself to us as an impenetrable
of the two new bodies are not
mystery, and the properties
a combination of the properties of their separate elements.
Nevertheless we are still able to follow the process and
to indicate the elements out of which the new bodies are
we can even separate what has been united and
formed ;
restore the original quantities. Thus noticeable heterogeneousness
and incommensurability between cause and
effect have here made their appearance: causality has
become more mysterious. And this becomes still more
apparent when we compare the effects of electricity or of
the Voltaic pile with their causes, i.e. with the friction of
glass, or the piling and oxidation of the plates. Here all
similarity between cause and effect at once vanishes ;
causality becomes shrouded in a thick veil, which men like
Davy, Faraday and Ampere have strenuously endeavoured
to lift. The only thing now discernible through that veil,
are the laws ruling its mode of action, which may bo
brought into a schema such as + E E, communica-