Does not so evident a brotherhood among the atoms point to a common parentage? Does not a sympathy so omniprevalent, so ineradicable, and so thoroughly irrespective, suggest a common paternity as its source? Does not one extreme impel the reason to the other? Does not the infinitude of division refer to the utterness of individuality? Does not the entireness of the complex hint at the perfection of the simple? It is _not_ that the atoms, as we see them, are divided or that they are complex in their relations—but that they are inconceivably divided and unutterably complex:—it is the extremeness of the conditions to which I now allude, rather than to the conditions themselves. In a word, is it not because the atoms were, at some remote epoch of time, even _more than together_—is it not because originally, and therefore normally, they were _One_—that now, in all circumstances—at all points—in all directions—by all modes of approach—in all relations and through all conditions—they struggle _back_ to this absolutely, this irrelatively, this unconditionally _one_? Some person may here demand:—“Why—since it is to the _One_ that the atoms struggle back—do we not find and define Attraction ‘a merely general tendency to a centre?’—why, in especial, do not _your_ atoms—the atoms which you describe as having been irradiated from a centre—proceed at once, rectilinearly, back to the central point of their origin?” I reply that _they do_; as will be distinctly shown; but that the cause of their so doing is quite irrespective of the centre _as such_. They all tend rectilinearly towards a centre, because of the sphereicity with which they have been irradiated into space. Each atom, forming one of a generally uniform globe of atoms, finds more atoms in the direction of the centre, of course, than in any other, and in that direction, therefore, is impelled—but is _not_ thus impelled because the centre is _the point of its origin_. It is not to any _point_ that the atoms are allied. It is not any _locality_, either in the concrete or in the abstract, to which I suppose them bound. Nothing like _location_ was conceived as their origin. Their source lies in the principle, _Unity_. _This_ is their lost parent. _This_ they seek always—immediately—in all directions—wherever it is even partially to be found; thus appeasing, in some measure, the ineradicable tendency, while on the way to its absolute satisfaction in the end. It follows from all this, that any principle which shall be adequate to account for the _law_, or _modus operandi_, of the attractive force in general, will account for this law in particular:—that is to say, any principle which will show why the atoms should tend to their _general centre of irradiation_ with forces inversely proportional to the squares of the distances, will be admitted as satisfactorily accounting, at the same time, for the tendency, according to the same law, of these atoms each to each:—_for_ the