The Matter of Space

Abstract

IN his paper on “The Matter of Space,” in NATURE, vol. xxvii. p. 349, Mr. Charles Morris has given us an excellent exposition, and, as I believe, in general a perfectly correct one, of the fundamental laws and properties of matter and motion. But as I have for some time been investigating the views which he describes with exactly the results and consequences at which he has arrived (excepting only in one material difference to which I will presently return), a little outline of the mathematical form which I found that the discussion of the subject could receive, and to which it was accordingly submitted in my examinations of its scope and contours, will aid readers of Mr. Morris's paper, perhaps, in attaching clear ideas to some of the expressions which he uses, and in there by discussing and estimating very easily and fairly the positive truth, in general, or in a few points, of the paper's considerations, the just degree of reliability at all events, which the marvellous maze of internetted motions possesses, which he has most tersely and graphically, and at least in the main, as it appears to me, correctly and truthfully described.