Note 50 — Chapter IV · MATTER AND ETHER.
Reading edition
In Art. 148 we made a suggestion that gravitation might be the visible result of a tendency to a minimum of some affection of the fluid in which atoms are immersed. The exertion of gravitating force might thus be associated with a change in the constitution of visible things, and might perhaps point to an ultimate dying out, just as the radiation from the sun, which obeys the same formal law as that of gravity, points to a dying out of our luminary.
If this be conceivable, the really trivial nature of gravitating force (Art. 139) might come to be associated with the extraordinary persistence of the present state of things.