I
therefore determined on throwing my supplementary essay, which I had
previously intended to write, into the form of a criticism on Professor
Flint's treatise, and I adopted this course the more willingly because
there are several other points dwelt upon in that treatise which it seems
desirable for me to consider in the present one, although, for the sake of
conciseness, I abstained from discussing them in my previous essay. With
these two objects in view, therefore, I undertook the following
criticism.[45]
In the first place, it is needful to protest against an argument which our
author adopts on the authority of Professor Clark Maxwell. The argument is
now a well-known one, and is thus stated by Professor Maxwell in his
presidential address before the British Association for the Advancement of
Science, 1870:--"None of the processes of nature, since the time when
nature began, have produced the slightest difference in the properties of
any molecule. We are therefore unable to ascribe either the existence of
the molecules or the identity of their properties to the operation of any
of the causes which we call natural. On the other hand, the exact quality
of each molecule to all others of the same kind gives it, as Sir John
Herschel has well said, the essential character of a manufactured article,
and precludes the idea of its being eternal and self-existent. Thus we have
been led along a strictly scientific path, very near to the point at which
science must stop.
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