Universal Attraction: Its Relation to the Chemical Elements; The Key to a Consistent Philosophy

Excerpt from Universal Attraction: Its Relation to the Chemical Elements; The Key to a Consistent Philosophy

If Nature had told Newton as much as she has since told those who regard him as her infallible interpreter, he would, I believe, have declared even more forcibly than he did that her first law is order.

It is about 200 years since his "Principia" appeared, and chemistry and electricity have since then as sciences been born into the world.

Newton was concerned with the study of material bodies and their attractive force - gravitation. Chemistry is concerned with the minute atoms into which those material bodies are supposed to be capable of being divided, and their attractive force - affinity.

I shall try to explain what the distinction is between these forces, but in the meantime let me say that, though we might have expected Nature's law of attraction would be universal in its principle, Newton's law of so-called universal attraction is not universal in principle, inasmuch as it requires to be replaced or supplemented by other laws devised to suit the phenomena of sciences not known in his time. And although chemistry and physical science declare the beautiful order of all the arrangements they make of the elementary atoms, yet, strange as it may appear, gravitation, chemistry, and the physical sciences all purchase their order at the terrible cost of assuming elementary disorder as regards the atoms which Nature gives them to work with.

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