have been made to account for the order of facts we call gravitation, without recourse to the notion of attractive force; that, if such a force exists, it is utterly incompetent to account for Kepler’s laws, without taking into the reckoning a great number of other considerations; and, finally, that all we know about the “force” of gravitation, or any other so-called “force,” is that it is a name for the hypothetical cause of an observed order of facts.

Thus, when the Duke of Argyll says:  “Force, ascertained according to some measure of its operation—­this is indeed one of the definitions, but only one, of a scientific law” (p. 71) I reply that it is a definition which must be repudiated by every one who possesses an adequate acquaintance with either the facts, or the philosophy, of science, and be relegated to the limbo of pseudo-scientific fallacies.  If the human mind has never entertained this notion of “force,” nay, if it substituted bare invariable succession for the ordinary notion of causation, the idea of law, as the expression of a constantly-observed order, which generates a corresponding intensity of expectation in our minds, would have exactly the same value, and play its part in real science, exactly as it does now.

It is needless to extend further the present excursus on the origin and history of modern pseudo-science.  Under such high patronage as it has enjoyed, it has grown and flourished until, nowadays, it is becoming somewhat rampant.  It has its weekly “Ephemerides,” in which every new pseudo-scientific mare’s-nest is hailed and belauded with the unconscious unfairness of ignorance; and an army of “reconcilers,” enlisted in its service, whose business seems to be to mix the black of dogma and the white of science into the neutral tint of what they call liberal theology.

I remember that, not long after the publication of the “Vestiges,” a shrewd and sarcastic countryman of the author defined it as “cauld kail made het again.”  A cynic might find amusement in the reflection that, at the present time, the principles and the methods of the much-vilified Vestigiarian are being “made het again”; and are not only “echoed by the dome of St. Paul’s,” but thundered from the castle of Inverary.  But my turn of mind is not cynical, and I can but regret the waste of time and energy bestowed on the endeavour to deal with the most difficult problems of science, by those who have neither undergone the discipline, nor possess the information, which are indispensable to the successful issue of such an enterprise.

I have already had occasion to remark that the Duke of Argyll’s views of the conduct of controversy are different from mine; and this much-to-be lamented discrepancy becomes yet more accentuated when the Duke reaches biological topics.  Anything that was good enough for Sir Charles Lyell, in his department of study, is certainly good enough for me in mine; and I by no means demur to being pedagogically instructed