That in estimating moral causation, the progress of time is necessarily estimated by moral changes, and not by machinery,—by the progress of events, and not by the going of the clock,—is a truth familiar as a practical maxim to all who give their thoughts to dramatic or narrative fictions. Who feels any thing incongruous or extravagantly hurried in the progress of events in that great exhibition of moral causation, the tragedy of Othello? If we were asked what time those vast and terrible [204] and complex changes of the being and feelings of the characters occupy, we should say, that, measured on its own scale, the event is of great extent;—that the transaction is of considerable magnitude in all ways. But if, with previous critics, we look into the progress of time by the day and the hour—what is the measure of this history? Forty-eight hours.
CHAPTER V.
Of the Origin of our Conceptions of Force and Matter.
1. Force.—When the faculties of observation and thought are developed in man, the idea of causation is applied to those changes which we see and feel in the state of rest and motion of bodies around us. And when our abstract conceptions are thus formed and named, we adopt the term Force, and use it to denote that property which is the cause of motion produced, changed, or prevented. This conception is, it would seem, mainly and primarily suggested by our consciousness of the exertions by which we put bodies in motion. The Latin and Greek words for Force, Vis, Ϝὶς, were probably, like all abstract terms, derived at first from some sensible object. The original meaning of the Greek word was a muscle or tendon. Its first application as an abstract term is accordingly to muscular force:
Δεύτερος αὖτ’ Αἴας πολὺ μείζονα λᾶαν ἀείρας
ἦκ’ ἐπιδινήσας, ἐπέρεισε δὲ ϜÎ͂Ν’ ἀπέλεθρον.
Then Ajax a far heavier stone upheaved,
He whirled it, and impressing Force intense
Upon the mass, dismist it.
The property by which bodies affect each other’s motions, was naturally likened to that energy which we exert upon them with similar effect: and thus the labouring horse, the rushing torrent, the descending weight, the elastic bow, were said to exert force. [206] Homer[8] speaks of the force of the river, Ϝὶς ποταμοῖο; and Hesiod[9] of the force of the north wind, Ϝὶς ἀνέμου βορέαο.
[8] Il. xxi.
[9] Op. et D.