Since the ages of the Sun, of the planets, and of the Earth, as they are stated in the various scientific hypotheses of the Astronomers and Physicists, are given elsewhere below, we have said enough to show the disagreement between the ministers of Modern Science. Whether we accept the fifteen million years of Sir William Thomson or the thousand millions of Mr. Huxley, for the rotational evolution of our Solar System, it will always come to this; that by accepting self-generated rotation for the heavenly bodies composed of inert Matter and yet moved by their own internal motion, for millions of years, this teaching of Science amounts to:
(a) An evident denial of that fundamental physical law, which states that “a body in motion tends constantly to inertia, i.e., to continue in the same state of motion or rest, unless it is stimulated into further action by a superior active force.”
(b) An original impulse, which culminates in an unalterable motion, within a resisting Ether that Newton had declared incompatible with that motion.
(c) Universal gravity, which, we are taught, always tends to a centre in rectilinear descent—alone the cause of the revolution of the whole Solar System, which is performing an eternal double gyration, each body around its axis and orbit. Another occasional version is:
(d) A magnet in the Sun; or, that the said revolution is due to a magnetic force, which acts, just as gravitation does, in a straight line, and varies inversely as the square of the distance.[844]
(e) The whole acting under invariable and changeless laws, which are, nevertheless, often shown variable, as during some well-known freaks of planets and other bodies, as also when the comets approach or recede from the Sun.
(f) A Motor Force always proportionate to the mass it is acting upon; but independent of the specific nature of that mass, to which it is proportionate; which amounts to saying, as Le Couturier does, that:
Without that force independent from, and of quite another nature than, the said mass, the latter, were it as huge as Saturn, or as tiny as Ceres, would always fall with the same rapidity.[845]
A mass, furthermore, which derives its weight from the body on which it weighs.
Thus neither Laplace's perceptions of a solar atmospheric fluid, which would extend beyond the orbits of the planets, nor Le Couturier's electricity, nor Foucault's heat,[846] nor this, nor the other, can ever help any of the numerous hypotheses about the origin and permanency of rotation to escape from this squirrel's wheel, any more than can the theory of gravity itself. This mystery is the Procrustean bed of Physical Science. If Matter is passive, as we are now taught, the simplest movement cannot be said to be an essential property of Matter—the latter being considered simply as an inert mass. How, then, can such a complicated movement, compound and multiple, harmonious and equilibrated, lasting in the eternities for millions and millions of years, be attributed simply to its own inherent force, unless the latter is an Intelligence? A physical will is something new—a conception that the Ancients would never have entertained, indeed! For over a century all distinction between body and force has been made away with. “Force is but the property of a body in motion,” say the [pg 547] Physicists; “life—the property of our animal organs—is but the result of their molecular arrangement,” answer the Physiologists. As Littré teaches: