This passage, severely criticised, if I remember rightly, when the address was originally published, it would be scarcely fair to quote, were it not that Canon Kingsley has repeated it at a later date in his work, "The Roman and the Teuton." The very unusual renderings of scientific ideas which it contains need here be only enumerated. Mr. Kingsley differs profoundly from philosophers and men of science, in regarding a law as itself a power or force, and so in thinking of one law as "conquered by other laws;" whereas the accepted conception of law is that of an established order, to which the manifestations of a power or force conform. He enunciates, too, a quite exceptional view of gravitation. As conceived by astronomers and physicists, gravitation is a universal and ever-acting force, which portions of matter exercise on one another when at sensible distances; and the law of this force is that it varies inversely as the square of the distance. Mr. Kingsley's view, however, appears to be that the law of gravitation is "defeated" if a stone is prevented from falling to the ground—that the law "struggles" (not the force), and that because it no longer produces motion, the "inevitable action of the laws of gravity" (not of gravity) is suspended: the truth being that neither the force nor its law is in the slightest degree modified. Further, the theory of natural processes which Mr. Kingsley has arrived at seems to be, that when two or more forces (or laws, if he prefers it) come into play, there is a partial or complete suspension of one by another. Whereas, the doctrine held by men of science is, that the forces are all in full operation, and the effect is their resultant; so that, for example, when a shot is fired horizontally from a cannon, the force impressed on it produces in a given time just the same amount of horizontal motion as though gravity were absent, while gravity produces in that same time a fall just equal to that which it would have produced had the shot been dropped from the mouth of the cannon. Of course, holding these peculiar views of causation as displayed among simple physical phenomena, Canon Kingsley is consistent in denying historical sequence; and in saying that, "as long as man has the mysterious power of breaking the laws of his own being, such a sequence not only cannot be discovered, but it cannot exist."[1] At the same time it is manifest that, until he comes to some agreement with men of science respecting conceptions of forces, of their laws, and of the modes in which phenomena produced by compositions of forces are interpretable in terms of compound laws, no discussion of the question at issue can be carried on with profit.
Without waiting for such an agreement, however, which is probably somewhat remote, Canon Kingsley's argument may be met by putting side by side with it some of his own conclusions set forth elsewhere. In an edition of "Alton Locke" published since the delivery of the address above quoted from, there is a new preface, containing, among others, the following passages:
- ↑ Page 22.
