is
gravitation. Of course to an intermediatist, nothing can be defined
except in terms of itself--but even the orthodox, in what seems to me to
be the innate premonitions of realness, not founded upon experience,
agree that to define a thing in terms of itself is not real definition.
It is said that by gravitation is meant the attraction of all things
proportionately to mass and inversely as the square of the distance.
Mass would mean inter-attraction holding together final particles, if
there were final particles. Then, until final particles be discovered,
only one term of this expression survives, or mass is attraction. But
distance is only extent of mass, unless one holds out for absolute
vacuum among planets, a position against which we could bring a host of
data. But there is no possible means of expressing that gravitation is
anything other than attraction. So there is nothing to resist us but
such a phantom as--that gravitation is the gravitation of all
gravitations proportionately to gravitation and inversely as the square
of gravitation. In a quasi-existence, nothing more sensible than this
can be said upon any so-called subject--perhaps there are higher
approximations to ultimate sensibleness.

Nevertheless we seem to have a feeling that with the System against us
we have a kind of resistance here. We'd have felt so formerly, at any
rate: I think the Dr. Grays and Prof. Hitchcocks have modified our
trustfulness toward indistinguishability. As to the perfection of this
System that quasi-opposes us and the infallibility of its
mathematics--as if there could be real mathematics in a mode of seeming
where twice two are not four--we've been told over and over of their
vindication in the discovery of Neptune.

I'm afraid that the course we're taking will turn out like every other
development. We began humbly, admitting that we're of the damned--

But our eyebrows--

Just a faint flicker in them, or in one of them, every time we hear of
the "triumphal discovery of Neptune"--this "monumental achievement of
theoretical astronomy," as the text-books call it.

The whole trouble is that we've looked it up.

The text-books omit this:

That, instead of the orbit of Neptune agreeing with the calculations of
Adams and Leverrier, it was so different--that Leverrier said that it
was not the planet of his calculations.

Later it was thought best to say no more upon that subject.

The text-books omit this:

That, in