A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume IIDe Morgan, Augustus
Philosophy
A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II
De Morgan, Augustus
Circle-squaring; Perpetual motion; Science -- Miscellanea; Trisection of angle
Mr. Reddie represents me as dreaming over paltry paradoxes. He is right;
many of my paradoxes are paltry: he is wrong; I am wide awake to them. A
single moth, beetle, or butterfly, may be a paltry thing; but when a
cabinet is arranged by genus and species, we then begin to admire the {352}
infinite variety of a system constructed on a wonderful sameness of leading
characteristics. And why should paradoxes be denied that collective
importance, paltry as many of them may individually be, which is accorded
to moths, beetles, or butterflies? Mr. Reddie himself sees that "there is a
method in" my "mode of dealing with paradoxes." I hope I have atoned for
the scantiness of my former article, and put the demonstrated impossibility
of gravitation on that level with Hubongramillposanfy arithmetic and
inhabited atoms which the demonstrator--not quite without reason--claims
for it.
In the Introduction to a collected edition of the three works, Mr. Reddie
describes his _Mechanism of the Heavens_, from which I have just quoted,
as--
"a public challenge offered to the British Association and the
mathematicians at Cambridge, in August, 1862, calling upon them to point to
a single demonstration in the _Principia_ or elsewhere, which even attempts
to prove that Universal Gravitation is possible, or to show that a
gravitating body could possibly revolve about a center of attraction. The
challenge was not accepted, and never will be. No such demonstration
exists. And the public must judge for themselves as to the character of a
so-called "certain science," which thus shrinks from rigid examination, and
dares not defend itself when publicly attacked: also of the character of
its teachers, who can be content to remain dumb under such circumstances."
ON PARADOXERS IN GENERAL.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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