in true accordance with that law, as easily as a lady picks
her way across the street; what have you to say against it?--Newton must
have replied, Sir! if you really undertake to maintain this as
_demonstrable_, your soul had better borrow a little power {155} from the
particles of which your body is made: if you merely ask me to refute it, I
tell you that I neither can nor need do it; for whether attraction comes in
this way or in any other, _it comes_, and that is all I have to do with it.

The reader should remember that the word attraction, as used by Newton and
the best of his followers, only meant a _drawing towards_, without any
implication as to the cause. Thus whether they said that matter attracts
matter, or that young lady attracts young gentleman, they were using one
word in one sense. Newton found that the law of the first is the inverse
square of the distance: I am not aware that the law of the second has been
discovered; if there be any chance, we shall see it at the year 1856 in
this list.

In this point young Horne made a hit. He justly censures those who fixed
upon Newton a more positive knowledge of what attraction is than he
pretended to have. "He has owned over and over he did not know what he
meant by it--it might be this, or it might be that, or it might be
anything, or it might be nothing." With the exception of the _nothing_
clause, this is true, though Newton might have answered Horne by "Thou hast
said it."

(I thought everybody knew the meaning of "Thou hast said it": but I was
mistaken. In three of the evangelists [Greek: Su legeis] is the answer to
"Art thou a king?" The force of this answer, as always understood, is "That
is your way of putting it." The Puritans, who lived in Bible phrases, so
understood it: and Walter Scott, who caught all peculiarities of language
with great effect, makes a marked instance, "Were you armed?--I was not--I
went in my calling, as a preacher of God's word, to encourage them that
drew the sword in His cause. In other words, to aid and abet the rebels,
said the Duke. _Thou hast spoken it_, replied the prisoner.")

Again, Horne quotes Rowning[340] as follows:

{156}

"Mr. Rowning, pt. 2, p. 5 in a note, has a very pretty conceit upon this
same subject of attraction, about every particle of a fluid being
intrenched in three spheres of attraction and repulsion, one within
another, 'the innermost of which (he says) is a sphere of repulsion, which
keeps them