We have now done with the anatomy of the author's mind, and our estimate of his powers as a reformer of philosophy, material and immaterial; and having thus cleared the way for ourselves and for the reader, we proceed to the facts on which he professes to build his systein, and as far as may be, we shall follow them in the order of the Vestiges.' lowed to rise above them-if we are only to know the highest functions of the mind through an insufferable jargon, which cannot go one step with us beyond the dull material instruments subservient to thought. Our author is one of the worst offenders of this school. While speculating on the phenomena of the earth, he can rise to the heaven of heavens, by the very powers which he, in theory, denies. But if his Before we speak of 'celestial mechanics' speculations lead him towards any concep- and the nebular hypothesis,' let us not, tion of a mind superior to the common however, so far sink ourselves in dead matfunctions of gross matter, his senses are ter as to forget the mind of man, and how paralyzed; he stops short with a strange it rose gradually to the conception of this inconsistency, and sinks down into the great body of physical truth. worst absurdities of a dismal and irrational reason an instant without language; for materialism. He tells us that material or- language embodies our first abstractions, gans are all in all-that man's mode of without which we could not advance to any action depends solely on his organization' new proposition capable of being apprehend-'that grades of mind, like forms of body, ed or expressed in words. This remark are mere stages of development '-and that applies to the very rudiments of our advancthere is no essential difference between ing knowledge, however feeble they may man and beast. It follows, from his sys- be. Our knowledge of the simplest kind, tem, that the buzzing of bees, the gab- as it is first apprehended by sense, may rebling of turkeys, and the jabbering of apes, are phenomena of the same order-differing only in degree with the highest symbolical representations of human thought, and the highest recorded abstractions of pure intellect. He tells us that the difference between instinct and reason is all a foolish dream-that they are both organic. That the instinct of a bee, which leads it, in the construction of its cell, to solve a difficult problem in solid geometry, is only a primitive exercise of constructiveness: That we may be unfortunate in inheriting bad organs from nature-grind on we must; and, if we make sad discord, it is the fault of the organs we inherit, and not of the hand that turns the handle: That if ill befall a man for his grating music, he has no right to grumble; for the system of nature has the fairness of a lottery, in which every man has a like chance of drawing a prize,' (p. 360.) Lastly, we are told, that free will in man is nothing more than a vicissitude of the supremacy of the faculties (i. e. the organs) over each other,' (p. 332.) 6 semble the knowledge of the lower animals; and while we are fettered among things of sense, such as pain and pleasure, and our wills act instinctively in obedience to our emotions, we are on a parallel with them. We have our natural language as well as they; and we come wailing into the world feebler and more helpless than any of them. It is from no want of vocal organs that they use not an artificial language like our own; but from a want of something within themselves, demanding such symbols as expressions of their will and meaning. Some of them, as we know, can learn articulate sounds by imitation; but they understand not the words they use as expressions of thought, (except, perhaps, so far as they may become to them new symbols of some physical emotion or mere physical want,) any more than the clever puppets of Professor Wheatstone, when they give us, mechanically, some rudimentary sounds of speech, like the half-articulate babblings of a little child. The chattering of a parrot and the whistling tunes of a bulfinch are beautiful We think all we have just quoted or re-instances of animal imitation; but the one ferred to, one mass of mischievous absurdity. The absurdity of the last definition is perhaps the worst of all. Even allowing the absurd organ theory, volition and choice imply some control over the activity of such organs. Whence this controlling power which makes the essence of the will? Certainly not in the organs which by the hypothesis are controlled. bird no more comprehends the abstractions of language than the other does the principles of music. Our first essays in language are connected with material things; and we soon learn such a power of abstraction as to call many similar things by a common name. Feeble as such an advance in language may be, we believe it is beyond the capacity of a brute. The highest general truths, on any subject within the grasp of our thoughts, dividual duties subordinate to general rules, are only verbal propositions, expressing the and our moral sentiments triumphing over highest conceptions we have yet formed all material nature, and exalted into reliwithin our minds. But there are many gion. And, just as in the former case, we truths, the investigation of which our com- might come down from our abstractions, mon language can never reach; partly from bring them to the business of vulgar life, its inevitable association with the things and show that they exalt man's nature (as around us, and with the common actions far as may be here) and insure his happiBut these high subjects are forbidand passions of our nature; and partly from ness. its unmanageable complexity. Hence men den. We therefore come to our conclusion, have been driven to invent a new language, and contend that there is an immeasurable the symbol of pure abstraction, and the fit difference between instinct and reason; and instrument of pure intellect. Such is the where the work of instinct resembles reason, language of mathematical analysis, and it (as in the geometrical solids wrought by a was by the help of such a language that bee,) we behold therein the hand of God. Newton interpreted the enigmas of the sky. And we further contend, that there is the As the mind is immaterial, though mys- same immeasurable interval between the abteriously connected with matter and its stract language of man, and the natural lanlaws, (should any one affirm that they must guage by which a brute expresses its matefor ever remain connected, we have no dis-rial wants-and that to regard, as our aupute with him, for the subject is far above our knowledge,) so the high truths of this new language are based on conceptions of our own, stripped off from matter; and express in a symbolic form, not the general relations of external and material things, but of things within ourselves, and truths arising out of creations within our own minds. And so we rise to an apprehension of general and eternal truths above all material nature, yet applicable to material nature, wherever her phenomena can be brought under the exact terms of our general propositions: and thus it is that we can come down from our abstract soarings, and sometimes test our conclusions by a comparison of them with the separate phenomena of material nature; and so the mind conceives the laws of material nature within itself, which material nature could never give the mind by a mere repetition of the same phenomena before the senses. And having done this, we can rise higher still-we can again put nature to the torture, and wring new secrets from her. We can tell, with full assurance, of material things never heard by ear or seen by eye; we can point out the coming phenomena of the heavens, and tell of material cycles (not comprehended by sense, but evolved out of our own abstractions) which began before man's creation, and are still in the progress of accomplishment. In like manner, did our subject admit of it, we might here discuss the imaginative, moral, and other faculties of our nature, (the reflections of God's image,) and the high abstractions we derive from them; we might tell of our conceptions of beauty, harmony, law, order, time, and eternity,—of our in thor does, the bleating of a sheep, and the The motions of the heavenly bodies were The the conception of regular dynamical laws; serve no movement among the stars, while and aided by a new analysis, and new in- it travelled through a circle nearly two huntellectual implements of his own invention, dred millions of miles in diameter. Newton extended these laws to the sky, and fixed stars, therefore, were so enormously so established the mechanism of the heav-distant as to have no measurable parallax. ens; and his vast work has been so perfect- This was the exact state of things till withed by the labors of La Place, and other great in a very few years. minds, that the science of 'celestial mechanics' now fills the highest and securest place of all natural knowledge. But if astronomy derive its crowning glory from the earth, so may it give back again to us a knowledge of the past history of the earth, which we could not derive from the matter on its surface. Thus the Nebular Hypothesis, which supposes our solar system to have arisen from the condensation of a Nebula, should it ever become established, (for it is now but a splendid vision,) may give us some glimmering insight into the primeval condition of our globe before it settled into its present form. Men naturally delight in such speculations; and they fall in so well with certain acknowledged facts of nature, (such as the figure of the earth, its central heat, and the distribution of its solid and gaseous parts,) that they have been received with great favor by modern geologists. The sons of the earth tried, as we are told, in old times, to climb to heaven, and had a frightful fall. The story may be poetical, yet prophetic; and should warn geologists against too great ambition. They have a good old pedigree, without any need of being helped out by an illegitimate link to a more godlike stock; and we gently hint to them for their own good, that they have enough to do on earth without attempting the sky. We cannot change our place without producing an apparent change of place in all the fixed objects around us; and if we forget our own motion, or are unconscious of it, all these objects appear to move-the nearest with greater velocity, the more remote with less. No one can have travelled by a railroad without having had his senses delighted with these flitting movements. The same kind of apparent movement must necessarily affect the bodies in the heavens, while we are carried in the earth's orbit round the sun. This movement is called parallax; and, so far as regards our planetary neighbors, can easily be measured, and is defined by the angle contained by two lines drawn from the heavenly body, to two points representing two different positions of the observer. But the eye, though aided by instruments of great power, could ob Sir William Herschel, who made the greatest of all modern discoveries among the fixed stars, failed in making out the parallax of any one of them, though he adopted methods of consummate ingenuity, followed out with unwearied labor. But the veteran Bessel, and soon afterwards, our lamented countryman Mr. Thomas Henderson,* while employed in tabulating a long series of observations, made, we believe, without any reference to sidereal parallax, found certain anomalies among their figures, only to be accounted for by some apparent movement among their fixed elements. This directed them to new observations, and to the discovery of the parallax of two stars. That of 61 Cygni (made out by Bessel) amounts to about one-third of a second-that of a Centauri (made out by Henderson) amounts nearly to a second. Our author has done injustice in leaving out Bessel's name; but that illustrious astronomer stood in no need of any praise from such a quarter. These two stars are therefore, so far as our present knowledge reaches, the nearest of all the fixed glittering points in the sky. Yet light could not travel down from Hender son's star to the earth (though it is known to move at a rate that would carry it eight times around the earth during a single beat of a common pendulum) in three years; and starting from Bessel's star, and moving at the same rate, it could only reach an observer's eye in about ten years. These facts (for they are facts and not idle speculations) will give our readers some conception of the enormous distance of the nearest stars. But other stars are immeasurably more distant; and it is not too much to say, that some of the sparkling atoms we see in the heavens, may be so remote from us, that the light by which we now behold them may have begun its course before the creation of our species! We need not tell our readers that Sir William Herschel invented telescopes of This ingenious observer, unfortunately for Science cut off in the commencement of his promising career, had been appointed Professor of Practical Astronomy in the University of Edinburgh, and Astronomer-Royal for Scotland in 1834, died in 1844. He was born at Dundee, in 1798. great power, and by help of them saw fur- fortunes of this splendid vision; and we ther into the heavens than any one had done anxiously wait for a great work from the before him. His labors are written in the younger Herschel, who, having repeated records of our race, and cannot be blotted his father's observations in the observatory from them but by some calamity which shall of Slough, and added greatly to them, carbury in darkness all the higher monuments ried his reflectors to the southern hemof human thought. But, so far as they bear isphere; and, after years of labor, has now upon our present subject, they may be enu- swept over the whole visible heavens, and merated in a few short sentences. Beyond is preparing for the world a work which the common limits of sidereal space, he ob- will give us all that consummate skill and served a multitude of nebula-some of art can represent to the senses, combined which had been seen before, and one or two with all the great results which a knowledge of them are obvious to the naked eye. All of the highest physics can fairly draw from of them when seen with instruments of low them. We may venture to predict that this power, look like masses of luminous vapor work, whenever it shall appear, will not be some of very irregular outline, and oth- disfigured by creative hypotheses like those ers with shapes apparently indicating a rev- of this ill-balanced author: and, more than olution round a fixed axis. Many of them this, we may venture to hope, that, after the also exhibit portions of unusual brightness, lapse of as many centuries as have rolled suggesting to Sir William Herschel the idea away since the days of Hipparchus, it will of a condensation of the nebulous matter be appealed to as a record of the old condiround one or more centres. But when tion of the heavens, and brought to prove these luminous masses are examined with that condensations have been going on in instruments of higher power, many of them the nebulous matter of the sky; and that lose their cloudy forms, and are resolved the hypothesis of the older Herschel may into luminous points, 'like spangles of dia- so rise into the form of a firm and noble mond dust.' They are then called resolved theory. nebulæ; and there naturally arises a question whether all of them may not at last be thus resolved into luminous points. At all events, this is the worst moment for any rash sciolist to throw out his speculations; when Lord Rosse has just pointed his gigantic reflector to the heavens, and has already resolved several nebulæ that had not been resolved before. Should all of them be thus resolved, then all the conditions of equilibrium are changed, and there is, at once, an end of the nebular hypothesis.* But we have better hopes for the coming * While waiting for Sir John Herschel's work on the nebula and double stars of the southern hemisphere, we can, at present, do no better than refer to his admirable Memoirs on double stars and their orbits, published by the Astronomical Society in their fifth volume; and especially to his great memoir on Nebula and Clusters of Stars, published in the Philosophical Transactions, (London, 1833.) We have used in our text the language of the nebular hypothesis; but Sir John Herschel does not once adopt it. If, he says, 'a nebula be nothing more than a cluster of stars, (as we have every reason to believe, at least in the generality of cases,) no pressure can be propagated through it; and its equilibrium, or, to speak more correctly, the permanency of its form, must be maintained in a way totally different! We recommend his notes to the great Memoir, last named, as models of philosophic caution; and, at every turn of thought, in contrast with the unbridled speculations of the present au thor. We As applied to the solar system, the nebular hypothesis assumes that the sun and planets were once in a nebulous condition, and have been elaborated out of it, in subordination to the laws of gravity, by a longcontinued progress of condensation. must start with some definite conception or other; but no conception gives us any grasp of a true creative law. We may ask, how comes any nebula where we find it? Whence came its laws? Did it begin as it is, or does it show us only one among countless cycles of changes? May it not have been a solid system once, and then have 'been melted by fervent heat,' and passed into a nebula? What is there beyond all nebule-for all we see, or ever can see, is but an atom of space infinite? These questions are natural, and no one can answer them. As to creation, the hypothesis leaves us exactly as it found us. We must start with some definite supposition; but we cannot adopt that of our author, and suppose that an irregular collapse of the primeval nebula of our system could account for its rotation about one centre. which is obviously impossible. La Place made no such vain attempt; he knew his materials far too well. All we have to suppose is this-that the revolving mass, during the progress of its various changes, may several times over have reached the critical condition we have pointed out; in which case several rings might be thrown off; and if such rings were thrown off, then Kepler's law must follow of physical necessity, for it is virtually implied in the critical condition. would be to mistake the nature of heat, so When any revolving mass contracts its far as we have any experimental knowledge limensions, it must, by a well-known meof it. A progress in condensation implies chanical law, continue to move faster and a loss of heat by radiation into sidereal faster round its axis. Each nebular ring space; but as condensation produces a must therefore have moved faster than the change of capacity for latent heat, the more one thrown off before it. The experiment condensed portions of a nebula might be of a revolving ball, held by a string which come immeasurably raised in temperature wraps round the finger during each revoluby the very subduction of heat from the ge- tion, is a happy illustration of this principle; neral mass. Here, then, we point out a but it has nothing whatsoever to do with second great physical blunder of our author. Kepler's law; and the use made of it by our He seems to hate a definite physical start-author only serves to show that he is unacing-point; but such a definite starting-point quainted with the fundamental laws of mowe must have, if we mean to have any defi- tion. It is impossible to deduce Kepler's nite physical reasoning. Let us then sup-law, (as M. Comte has most vainly attemptpose, on analogy, that the solar system was ed) from the condensation of a nebula, and once in the simplest condition of a nebula, to show that planetary rings must be thrown with a slight rotation round an axis, and off exactly where we now find our planets; with a condensation beginning towards its for to do this, we must know the law of nebular density during all its successive conLa Place, starting from this simple sup-ditions, whether gaseous, fluid, or solid, position, gave a consistency and meaning to the speculations of the older Herschel, by showing that a nebulous mass, so contracting and consolidating, might, several times over, reach such a critical condition, that the centrifugal force of the outer and equatorial positions of the revolving matter would just equal the attraction of the whole mass within it. In such a case, by a further contraction, a nebular ring might be thrown off; and if several rings were thus thrown off, they must, by a physical necessity implied in the very condition of their existence, revolve in obedience to Kepler's law. The further condensation and break-stows very unmerited praise upon the someing up of these successive rings, might in like manner produce a secondary set of nebula; which, by a like law of gradual condensation, might pass into the condition of simple secondary planets; or of planets with satellites or rings. So far, all advances at an orderly pace. The successive rings could only be thrown off from the equator of the revolving nebula, and therefore must have been nearly in one plane; and we thus, in imagination, elaborate a system in which we naturally have a great incandescent body in the centre, and all the bodies revolving, nearly in one plane, round their axes and ceuil in these words:" M. Herschel, ces idées de round their orbits, in the same direction. M. votre père sur la condensation des nébuleuses, All that La Place did was to show the dy-m'ont toujours paru très philosophiques et très namical possibility of the formation of a solar system like our own from a revolving nebula; and this is, we think, the exact condition in which he left the hypothesis.* But has any thing been done for the hypothesis since the time of La Place? We reply, absolutely nothing. Our author be what ostentatious calculations of M. Comte. As far as they are good for any thing, they only tend to prove a proposition demonstrated with beautiful simplicity by Newtonthat the motions of a planet revolving in an orbit nearly circular, are not affected by the magnitude of the central spherical body, while its whole mass remains the same. Hence if the sun were suddenly expanded to the limits of our atmosphere, the earth would go on (for we will suppose her not to be dissipated by heat) just as she did before. vraies The dynamical possibility of the hypothesis has been illustrated by some very remarkable experiments of Professor Plateau, whose translated Memor was published by Mr. R. Taylor in his Scientific Memoirs,' November 1844. *Principia, Book I, Section XII We think it a misfortune that a use of the higher analysis often *When the younger Herschel first visited France, prevents our modern students from reading the he was addressed by the old philosopher of Ar-beautiful geometry of this section. |