Büchner. Do you, then, condemn the method of induction?
Reader. Not at all. I condemn the abuse of that method. What right have modern scientists of extending the principle of the “conservation of force” beyond the boundaries marked by observation and experiment? All they have a right to say is that in the impact of bodies an equal quantity of movement [pg 645]is lost by one body and acquired by another. This is the fact. But does it follow that therefore the movement lost by the one body passes identically into the other? This is what they imagine; and this is what cannot be proved, because it is absurd. Movement is an affection of matter, and has no independent existence, as you well know. It cannot, therefore, pass identically from body to body any more than a movement of anger can pass identically from man to man. And yet it is on this absurd notion of nomadic movement that the whole theory of the conservation of force, as now held by your advanced thinkers, has been raised. They say: “The quantity of movement which is lost by one of the bodies, and that which is acquired by the other, are perfectly equal; therefore a quantity of movement passes identically from one body to another.” In other terms they say: “There is equality; therefore there is identity.” Is this legitimate induction? Good logic would lead us to argue in the following manner: The actions of the two struggling bodies, being equal and opposite, must produce equal and opposite quantities of movement; hence the quantity of movement which is destroyed in the impinging body must equal the quantity of movement produced in the body impinged upon. Such is the only logical view of the subject; it agrees both with reason and with fact, and it strikes your theory at the root. For what is destroyed is no more; and what is produced had no existence before its production.
We might allow you to talk of the “conservation” and “conversion” of forces, were you reasonable enough to consider such expressions as mere conventional technicalities suited to explain the relations of effects to effects rather than of effects to causes. But you construe the technical phrases into real and absolute principles, and try to explain causation by substituting the effect for the cause; which is as ridiculous an abuse of the word “force” as if a carpenter pretended that his iron square is the square spoken of in the treatises of geometry. But this is not all. What right have you to apply such a theory, whether right or wrong, to gravitation?
Büchner. “The pendulum of every clock shows the conversion of gravitation into motion” (p. 21).
Reader. Indeed? What do you mean by gravitation? The attractive power of the earth, or its action, or the weight of the pendulum? Surely the attractive power of the earth is not converted into movement; for it remains in the earth, and it continues its work. Neither is the weight of the pendulum converted into movement; for the pendulum does not cease, while moving, to have weight, nor does it weigh more when, at rest; and at the end of its oscillation is not found to have expended or consumed any portion of its weight. You are therefore obliged to say that it is the action of the earth that is converted into movement. But such an expression can have no meaning; because the action is the production of an act, and it is the act itself, not its production, that constitutes the formal principle of the movement. On the other hand, a production which becomes the thing produced is such an absurdity that not even a lunatic could dream of it. Thus it is quite evident that in no imaginable sense can gravitation be considered as converted into movement. It produces movement, but is not [pg 646] converted into it. You see, doctor, that your so boasted theory has no foundation either in reason or in fact.
Büchner. But we cannot deny that mechanical movement is convertible into heat, that heat may become light, and that all other such forces can be transformed.
Reader. I repeat, and, on the strength of the reasons which I have brought forward, I maintain that the term “conversion of forces” may be admitted as a conventional phrase, but not as exhibiting a philosophical notion. A real conversion of mechanical movement into heat would require that a movement of translation should be transformed into a movement of vibration by being distributed among the molecules of the body which is heated. This I have already shown to be impossible. Things follow a different course. When the hammer falls upon the anvil, its action (and not its movement) shakes the first range of molecules which it encounters. These molecules are thus constrained to approach the following set of molecules lying immediately under them, and to trouble their relative equilibrium. These latter, in their turn, trouble the equilibrium of the following set, and so on till all the molecules of the anvil partake in the movement, each molecule undergoing alternate compression and dilatation, the first through the violent action of its neighbors, and the second by the reaction due to its immanent powers. The consequence of all this is that a rapid succession of vibratory movements is originated in each molecule; and thus, as soon as the movement of translation of the falling hammer is extinguished, the movement of vibration is awakened in the molecules of both the anvil and the hammer. Now, what is this but a case of impact? For just as the hammer impinges on the surface of the anvil does each molecule of the anvil impinge on its neighbor; and therefore what you call a transformation of mechanical into vibratory movement is not a real transformation of the one into the other, but the extinction of the one and the production of the other. Thus heat is generated by percussion; and in a similar manner it would be generated by friction and by other mechanical processes. Whenever heat is produced, molecules are set into vibrations of a certain intensity, and their relative equilibrium disturbed. Evidently, such a disturbance of the molecular equilibrium is due to interaction of molecules—that is, to molecular impact. Now, I have already shown, and you have understood it, I hope, that, in the case of impact, the movement never passes identically from this matter to that, but is produced in the one at the same rate as it is extinguished in the other.
I might say a great deal more on this subject, but here I stop, as I almost regret having said so much. Your theory of the conservation of force does not bear out your “immortality of force,” and is so destitute of proof that it does not deserve the honor of a longer refutation.[154]
VI. Infinity Of Matter.
Reader. How do you account, doctor, for your assertion that “matter is infinite”?