“Some Unrecognised Laws of Nature”

Abstract

PRESSURE of important business has prevented me from writing ere this to claim space in your columns to enter a protest against the misrepresentations, as well as the whole tone, of the review—which appeared in your columns of the 9th ult.—of the above work, in which I have had the privilege of assisting during the past six years. Heretics have long learned not to expect mercy, or even to look for justice, at the hands of the orthodox. But from a reviewer who, oblivious of the proverb Qui s'excuse s'accuse, warned his readers that he at least was “not one to regard lightly the danger of summarily rejecting a germ of new discovery because it happens to conflict with orthodox opinions,” we have a right to expect something very different from the venomous outpourings and direful warnings and threats that might flow quite naturally from an irate theologian when reviewing a work which strikes a blow at the very foundations of his dogmas and doxies. And this is the very head and front of our offending, that, heedless of authority, we regard “the whole doctrine of ‘energy’, with all its astounding and contradictory corollaries,” as absurd; as the product of the infantile, and necessarily anthropomorphic, imagination of primitive man; and that we have attempted to show how phenomena may be accounted for without having recourse to such figments of the imagination. In this we may have succeeded or not; the immediate verdict will largely, if not entirely, depend on the mental attitude of the judge, and for the ultimate verdict we must be content to wait. But your reviewer may find some comfort in the assurance that the facts of science, slowly accumulated through long ages, would not be affected, nor need the human race necessarily be plunged “once more into pre-Galilean ignorance,” even if all the assumptions, the metaphysical conceptions—of ethers, “dead” matter, “animating” energy, &c.—on which current explanations of these same facts are based, were summarily consigned to the limbo of similar long-forgotten “working hypotheses.” And it is these hypotheses we assail, not the facts.