Note 41 — ÉTUDE SUR STUART MILL

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 of different kinds of bodies were ascertained by resolving, into more generai laws, the uniformities observed in the proportions in which substances combine with one another; and so forth. Thus although every resolution of a complex uniformity into simpler and more elementary laws has an apparent tendency to diminish the number of the ultimate properties, and really does remove many properties from the list; yet (since the result of this simplifying process is to trace up an ever greater variety of differents effects to the same agents), the further we advance in this direction, the greater number of distinct properties we are forced to recognise in one and the same object: the coexistences of which properties must accordingly be ranked among the ultimate generalities of nature.