We are therefore led to enquire whether there may not be some motion going on in the space outside the wire, which is not occupied by the electric current, but in which the electromagnetic effects of the current are manifested.
I shall not at present enter on the reasons for looking in one place rather than another for such motions, or for regarding these motions as of one kind rather than another.
What I propose now to do is to examine the consequences of the assumption that the phenomena of the electric current are those of a moving system, the motion being communicated from one part of the system to another by forces, the nature and laws of which we do not yet even attempt to define, because we can eliminate these forces from the equations of motion by the method given by Lagrange for any connected system.
In the next five chapters of this treatise I propose to deduce the main structure of the theory of electricity from a dynamical hypothesis of this kind, instead of following the path which has led Weber and other investigators to many remarkable discoveries and experiments, and to conceptions, some of which are as beautiful as they are bold. I have chosen this method because I wish to shew that there are other ways of viewing the phenomena which appear to me more satisfactory, and at the same time are more consistent with the methods followed in the preceding parts of this book than those which proceed on the hypothesis of direct action at a distance.
