'This notion,' he says, 'as far
as it is admitted, will dispense with the ether, which, in another view
is supposed to be the medium in which these vibrations take place.' And
he adds further on, that his view 'endeavours to dismiss the ether but
not the vibrations.' The idea here set forth is the natural supplement
of his previous notion, that it is gravitating force which constitutes
matter, each atom extending, so to say, throughout the whole of the
solar system.

The letter to Mr. Phillips winds up with this beautiful conclusion:--

'I think it likely that I have made many mistakes in the preceding
pages, for even to myself my ideas on this point appear only as the
shadow of a speculation, or as one of those impressions upon the mind
which are allowable for a time as guides to thought and research. He who
labours in experimental inquiries, knows how numerous these are, and how
often their apparent fitness and beauty vanish before the progress and
development of real natural truth.'

Let it then be remembered that Faraday entertained notions regarding
matter and force altogether distinct from the views generally held by
scientific men. Force seemed to him an entity dwelling along the line in
which it is exerted. The lines along which gravity acts between the sun
and earth seem figured in his mind as so many elastic strings; indeed
he accepts the assumed instantaneity of gravity as the expression of the
enormous elasticity of the 'lines of weight.' Such views, fruitful in
the case of magnetism, barren, as yet, in the case of gravity, explain
his efforts to transform this latter force. When he goes into the open
air and permits his helices to fall, to his mind's eye they are
tearing through the lines of gravitating power, and hence his hope and
conviction that an effect would and ought to be produced. It must
ever be borne in mind that Faraday's difficulty in dealing with these
conceptions was at bottom the same as that of Newton; that he is in
fact trying to overleap this difficulty, and with it probably the limits
prescribed to the intellect itself.

The idea of lines of magnetic force was suggested to Faraday by the
linear arrangement of iron filings when scattered over a magnet. He
speaks of and illustrates by sketches, the deflection, both convergent
and divergent, of the lines of force, when they pass respectively
through magnetic and diamagnetic bodies. These notions of concentration
and divergence are also