Item 69 - Richard Jones to William Whewell

RJ has had a letter from Ryan [Edward Ryan] who has asked RJ to get his bookseller to send him WW's book ['The History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Time', 3 vols., 1837] - 'and says he delayed answering a letter of yours till he was ashamed to do it'. RJ has 'been reading the pocket pistol again ['The Mechanical Euclid', 1837] and am sorry to say have come to the conclusion either that you are wrong or that I have no statical intuition - an inconvenience as small to me as most men. I agree with the substance of all you say about geometry - the views you take and enforce appear to me new and pregnant with truths widely applicable to the science of mind but I cannot join in your application of them to statics. I have no intuitive conceptions that I can discover of force and matter like those I have of space and its divisions and their boundaries. I exert force - I see forces exerted but I am so made as always to refer them to unknown causes and have no conviction that these causes may not be different and vary in power, and the mode and conditions of exerting it. So again as to material bodies I have a conviction that they all resist force but I have no conviction independent of experience that the mode in, and extent to, which different material bodies resist it have nothing to do with their organization -to me therefore the argument of the sufficient reason (on which you rest) has no force whatever independently of convention - I have no abstract notion of force and matter though I can agree to reason about such notions - in no one particular instance therefore am I sure that all the causes which may influence the phenomena are really known to me. I cannot therefore predicate in individual instances (real ones) that there is no reason why one result should not occur rather than another and till I begin to reason about force and matter in the state of arbitrary nakedness to which you reduce them I am so far from seeing intuitively that the angles which the arms of a lever make at the fulcrums do not affect the quantity of force necessary to move them that in sober truth I only believe it now because you say so - Points, lines, angles, the foundations of Geometry are conceptions nature supplies me with which I cannot even in thought get rid of material objects which oppose a like uniform resistance to given quantities of force and quantities of force which are wholly independently of causes and modes of exertion in the effects they are to produce in particular cases, are conceptions which are not forced upon me by nature - which I can shake off in thought - I can conceive a material world very differently circumstanced in these respects from what you tell me ours is. The generalities and abstractions you insist on my taking as the foundation of a line of deductive argument are to me the mere creatures of convention and my belief in their reality and truth does not accompany me to the contemplation of a single phenomenon of the external world - the forces which I exert to lift 1/2 a wt of iron and half a hundred weight of lead might for any conviction nature forces on me have been very different although their weight that is according to your definition the force they exert in obedience to the law of gravity continued equal. By this time if you have read so far you have doubtless come to the conclusion that my intuitions are defective - He'las pan moi - I hope you may meet no more instances of half made men - but I should like to be the confidential father confessor of your youths and hear what they would say if they dared - That we should be able to form imperfect conceptions which still help us to predict the phenomena of the external world that we should be furnished with an inductive principle of belief which forces us to expect like effects from like causes - that this should guide us exactly in the task of interpretation and anticipation these no doubt are to me marvels but not more so than the inner voice which guides the lamb to its mothers teat, the bee in its task and the swallow in its flight and I fall back with reverence and joy I hope when I came in right of the makers handiwork and recognise those fundamental laws of belief which we the offspring of his will, through which his purposes are effected which are to me if all the phenomena of nature the most pregnant and convincing proof of his presence[,] power and goodness. I know you get at similar views by a different path - the inductive nature of our convictions seems to me the end of all your speculations as well as mine and if you persuade the world as I hope you will to go on analysing all they arrive at the ultimate laws which regulate belief in truths of different classes you may be content with your success although we do not all agree to adopt your halting places'.