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These ideas will prevail
must be the probability that there should be another structure for the universe which would satisfy the same evidence.
And thus we may have the fullest confidence that the structure is purely mechanical, and that ideas, such as I have endeavoured to sketch, will ultimately prevail, displacing for ever such metaphysical conceptions as that of action at a distance, and accomplishing that ideal which, from the time of Thales and Plato, has excited the highest philosophical interest.
CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY J. AND C. F. CLAY, AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.