60. It is admitted by Comte that we know nothing of the sources or causes of nature’s laws; that their origination is so perfectly inscrutable, as to make it idle to take up time in any scrutiny for that purpose. He treats the resort to the Deity as the cause, as a mere abstraction tending to comfort the human mind before it has become acquainted with true science, and doomed to be laid aside with the advance of positive science.
61. Of course his doctrine makes him avowedly a thorough ignoramus as to the causes of laws, or the means by which they were established, and can have no other basis but the negative argument above stated, in objecting to the facts ascertained in relation to the spiritual creation. Hence when the spirits allege that by their volition they can neutralize gravity, or vis inertiæ,[4] there is nothing in positive science to confute this. The inability of material beings to neutralize gravitation by their powers is no proof that spiritual beings cannot effect this change.
62. Thus while allowing the atheist his material dominion, Spiritualism will erect within and above the same space a dominion of an importance as much greater as eternity is to the average duration of human life, and as the boundless regions of the fixed stars are to the habitable area of this globe.
63. But although Comte be a man of great learning, his fundamental opinions appear to be faulty, and his distribution of the operations of the mind imaginary.
64. In treating of gravitation as the primary law, does he not commit a blunder? Is not vis inertiæ above indispensable to gravitation, since it may be conceived to exist without gravitation, while gravitation cannot exist without vis inertiæ?
65. The power of a body A to draw B toward it can never exceed that which is necessary to put it into motion, which must be directly as its vis inertiæ; and where the one is null, the other must be null.
66. I cannot imagine how any philosopher so learned as Comte should not perceive the reduction of the phenomena of the universe to “different aspects” of the one faculty of gravitation to be utterly impossible. In the first place, it has been shown that gravitation could not be the basis of vis inertiæ, without which it cannot exist; and in the next place, gravitation has always, at any given point of time, its possible influence limited to the power of making a body move toward an appropriate centre of gravity, and afterward remain forever at rest, unless affected by some extraneous cause.
67. It is alleged also that the phenomena of the universe are explained by gravitation. I here quote his own words:
68. “Our business is—seeing how vain is any research into what are called causes, whether first or final—to pursue an accurate discovery of these laws, with a view to reducing them to the smallest possible number.”
69. How is it possible, I demand, to reduce the orbitual motion of a planet to fewer causes than vis inertiæ, motion, and gravitation? Vis inertiæ and motion are necessary to momentum; and momentum thus arising, acting in a tangential direction to that of gravitation, is indispensable to form, with the force of gravity, the resultant which constitutes the orbitual curve.