HACKET'S LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP WILLIAMS.—CHARLES I.—MANNERS UNDER EDWARD III., RICHARD II., AND HENRY VIII.
What a delightful and instructive hook Bishop Hacket's Life of Archbishop Williams is! You learn more from it of that which is valuable towards an insight into the times preceding the Civil War than from all the ponderous histories and memoirs now composed about that period.
* * * * *
Charles seems to have been a very disagreeable personage during James's life. There is nothing dutiful in his demeanour.
* * * * *
I think the spirit of the court and nobility of Edward III. and Richard II. was less gross than that in the time of Henry VIII.; for in this latter period the chivalry had evaporated, and the whole coarseness was left by itself. Chaucer represents a very high and romantic style of society amongst the gentry.
June 29. 1833.
HYPOTHESIS.—SUFFICTION.—THEORY.—LYELL'S GEOLOGY.—GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE.
—GERARD DOUW's "SCHOOLMASTER" AND TITIAN'S "VENUS."—SIR J. SCARLETT.
It seems to me a great delusion to call or suppose the imagination of a subtle fluid, or molecules penetrable with the same, a legitimate hypothesis. It is a mere suffiction. Newton took the fact of bodies falling to the centre, and upon that built up a legitimate hypothesis. It was a subposition of something certain. But Descartes' vortices were not an hypothesis; they rested on no fact at all; and yet they did, in a clumsy way, explain the motions of the heavenly bodies. But your subtle fluid is pure gratuitous assumption; and for what use? It explains nothing.
Besides, you are endeavouring to deduce power from mass, in which you expressly say there is no power but the vis inertiae: whereas, the whole analogy of chemistry proves that power produces mass.