Note 42 — Chapter VIII · EXPERIMENT

To the ordinary, untrained imagination. Philosophers and scientists, however, have continued to boggle at this notion of action at a distance. Thus Leibnitz, shortly after Newton published his discovery: “’Tis also a supernatural thing that bodies should attract one another at a distance without any intermediate means.” And Huxley in 1886, on the terms atom and force: “As real entities, having an objective existence, an indivisible particle which nevertheless occupies space is surely inconceivable; And with respect to the operation of that atom, where it is not, by the aid of a ‘force’ resident in nothingness, I am as little able to imagine it as I fancy anyone else is.” Hence the invention of a hypothetical ether, in order that space might be supposed filled with a continuum of infinitely attenuated matter (p. 148). In the world of scientific theory the question of action at a distance is still, so it seems, an appetizing bone of contention.