Page:Thoughts on art and life.djvu/183

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demned by reason and consequently by experience.

Thus, you who observe rely not on authors and who have merely by their imagination wished to be interpreters between nature and man, but on those alone who have applied their minds not to the hints of nature but to the results of their experience. And you must realize the decepti veness of experiments ;because those which often appear to be one and the same are often different, as is shown here.

14.

A spherical body which possesses a dense and resisting superficies will move as much in the bound resulting from the resistance of a smooth and solid plane as it would if you threw it freel through the air, if the force applied be equal in both cases Oh, admirable justice of thine, thou first mover! thou hast not permitted that any tone should fail to produce its necessary effecfts, either as regards order or quantity. Seeing that a force impels an objedt which it overcomes a distance of one hundred arms' length, and if in obeying this law it meets with resistance, thou hast ordained that the force of the shock will cause afresh a further movement, which in its various bounds recuperates the whole sum of the distance it should have travelled. And if you measure the distance

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