Had Kant been better acquainted with mechanical principles, he might then have safely trusted to the minute beginnings supplied by aboriginal inequalities of movement and dissymmetry of arrangement for the development in his colossal dust-cloud of the wheeling movement necessary for his purpose; and he would thus have escaped stumbling at the threshold of his daring inquiry. Rightly averse to employing arbitrary expedients, he piqued himself on the simplicity of his postulates, and was thus misled into substituting an imaginary for a real cause. The hypothesis adopted by him was that the particles forming the initial inchoate mass fell together by gravity, but were deviated from rectilinear courses through the effects of unequal resistance. And he derived from the combination of these multitudinous encounters a common axial rotation for the entire agglomeration. The futility of this mode of procedure was adverted to by M. Faye in 1885.[4] The deviations in question would, in fact, exactly balance one another, there being no reason why movement in one sense should prevail over movement in the opposite; consequently a general rotatory movement could not even begin to affect the seething mass, which would condense in sterile rigidity. Kant should then, as Laplace did when his turn came, have assumed the gyration indispensable to his purpose. He asked too little from Nature on one side, and too much on the other, with the result of arresting the machinery he designed to set going. Kant made the germ of the future sun to consist in an aggregation of atoms at the core of the nebula, which, growing by successive innumerable accessions, provided the motive power for the machinery of planetary construction. For it was, as we have seen, the jostling of the particles drawn towards the gradually preponderating centre of attraction which set on foot, it was supposed, the whirl eventually transformed into the tangential velocities of the sun's attendant bodies. They were formed, like the sun, by the perpetuation and increase of subordinate nuclei sure to arise in the elemental tumult. They were formed, not under the guidance of a definite law, but just where chance--or what seemed like chance--favoured an accretion.