Note 37 — REPLIES TO CRITICISMS. (continued 2)

Other examples of these amenities of controversy, in which I decline to imitate my reviewer, have already been given. What occasions he supplies me for imitation, were I minded to take advantage of them, an instance will show. Pointing out an implication of certain reasonings of mine, he suggests that it is too absurd even for me to avow explicitly; saying:—“We scarcely think that even Mr. Spencer will venture to claim as a datum of con­scious­ness the Second Law of Motion, with its attendant complexities of component velocities, &c.” Now any one who turns to Newton’s Principia, will find that to the enunciation of the Second Law of Motion, nothing whatever is appended but an amplified re-statement—there is not even an illustration, much less a proof. And from this law, this axiom, this immediate intuition or “datum of con­scious­ness,” Newton proceeds forthwith to draw those corollaries respecting the composition of forces which underlie all dynamics. What, then, must be thought of Newton, who explicitly assumes that which the reviewer thinks it absurd to assume implicitly?