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d’où elle part et qu’elle n’explique pas[1]. Tout problème a ses données accidentelles ou arbitraires : on en déduit le reste, mais on ne les déduit de rien. Le soleil, la terre, les planètes, l’impulsion initiale des corps célestes, les propriétés primitives des substances chimiques, sont de ces données.[2] Si nous les possédions
- ↑ There exist in nature a number of permanent causes, which have subsisted ever since the human race has been in existence, and for an indefinite and probably an enormous length of time previous. The sun, the earth, and planets, with their varions constituents, air, water, and the other distinguishable substances, whether simple or compound, of which nature is made up, are such Permanent Causes. They have existed, and the effects or consequences which they were fitted to produce have taken place (as often as the other conditions of the production met), from the very beginning of our experience. But we can give no account of the origine of the Permanent Causes themselves.
- ↑ The resolution of the laws of the heavenly motions, established the previously unknown ultimate property of a mutual attraction between the bodies : the resolution, so far as it has yet proceeded, of the laws of crystallization, or chemical composition, electricity, magnetism, etc., points to various polarities, ultimately inherent in the particles of which bodies are composed ; the comparative atomic weights
