Intellectual Pleasure Research Articles

Sartre's Second Critique (review)

634 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 27:4 OCTOBER 198 9 Given this discussion of egoism, are we to infer that no actions have any moral worth? Just as in aesthetic consciousness transformations of subject and object occur, a transformation of egoism occurs in moral consciousness. A person will act virtuously (i.e., altruistically) towards a second person only if the first identifies himself with the second. Young claims that this identity is insured by the thesis of transcendental solipsism, which is the view that the distinction between one person and another is phenonmenal and illusory. We are all identical with a transcendental self which apparently is the pure subject of knowing that one becomes in aesthetic consciousness. In moral consciousness one is to some extent aware that another's suffering is identical to one's own suffering and acts to alleviate it. Thus, in moral consciousness, egoism is transformed into altruism. Young believes that there is more substance to Schopenhauer's arguments for pessimism than their being merely reflections of his peculiar temperament. The arguments from the negativity of happiness, people's frantic oscillation between desire and boredom, their incapacity to enjoy the moment, and that "nearly all great minds have had a pessimistic view of life" (146), Young finds quite formidable. Young presents two solutions to pessimism, both of which are found in Schopenhauer 's thought. The first solution is the otherworldly path of salvation through denial of the will (turning away from this world) and utilizing mystical consciousness. Young maintains that Schopenhauer believed that the statements of the mystics of various cultures and religions seem to say the same thing, i.e., that there is another world of boundless bliss in which there is neither plurality nor suffering. Young notes that Schopenhauer has most likely overstated the case for the similarities between the mystics' claims, but this mystical salvation is far from Hamlyn's claim that the only salvation Schopenhauer offers is the annihilation of consciousness.6 Young offers an alternative, this-worldly solution to pessimism which he has extracted from Schopenhauer's thought. In order to avoid the misery of egoism, one should act altruistically. In order to avoid the frantic oscillation between desire and boredom, one should have aesthetic communion with nature or art, and develop intellectual pleasures through creative hobbies. And finally one should cultivate a nonascetic form of stoicism in which, with detached self-sufficiency, one considers the amenities of life merely the gifts of fortune. Such a life-form represents obvious compromises and is a recipe for a good but not perfect life. RONALD HOUGH Wright State University Ronald Aronson. Sartre's Second Critique. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987. Pp. xvii + ~53- Cloth, $32.5o. Paper, $13.95. The appearance of the second volume of the Critique de la raison dialectique in 1985 was an important philosophical event for those who were anxious to see how Sartre's 6 Hamlyn, Schopenhauer, 155. BOOK REVIEWS 635 ambitious socio-historical theoretical project worked out the complex issues that were discussed, at considerable length, in the first volume. Despite a manuscript of 781 pages, Critique H is, as Aronson points out, incomplete and does not fulfll the rash promise of a justification of historical materialism in terms of Sartre's assumption of the primacy of individual praxis. Even an incomplete and occasionally meandering work by Jean-Paul Sartre has great interest, despite the fact that so much of recent French thought--post-Marxism, structuralism, post-structuralism, post-modernism--is anti-Sartrean. Although Aronson refers to a Sartre revival, there seems to be a stronger movement that seeks to surpass him or ignore him. Sartre has either been attacked with a severity that is reserved for passionate and serious thinkers or subjected to a conspiracy of silence. And, as Aronson shows in this detailed, patient, lively, and occasionally critical study of Critique II, he grapples with important questions concerning meaning in history and the counterdialectical forces and counterfinalities that are unintentionally generated by the acts of millions of individuals. Despite his abstract and technical terminology (which was introduced in the first Critique), what Sartre describes and interprets are social and historical phenomena that...

The Bowdlerization of McTeague

UR present impression of McTeague's impact upon Victorian America is referable to the repulsion felt and outrage expressed by individuals such as Edward and Madeline Vaughn Abbot in the Literary World: We can pardon, accept even with intellectual pleasure, loathsome details that are necessary to the artistic progress of [McTeague], but grossness for the sake of grossness is unpardonable. They did not, of course, compound the crime by specifying the offending details. The Boston Evening Transcript, too, would not identify the one bit of realism which transcends anything yet perpetrated by this school; the Outlook as well demurred when it came to material that has place in print. Candidate passages quickly come to mind, for there are many. As the Academy phrased the fact of the matter, no sordid detail is omitted, no revolting episode glossed over, in this tale of nether San Francisco.'1 While could be translated to a less offensive state, the Boy Zola in league with Doubleday & McClure had proven less manageable: the violence, malodorous squalor, overt sexuality, and worse the perversities recorded in the novel were baldly imaged in the terms Norris intended. It remains surprising, then, that of all the moments in the

Hoigne's Syndrome: Relevance of Anomalous Dominance and Prostaglandins-Reply

In Reply .—It was an intellectual pleasure to follow the erudite speculations of Dr Backon, who has been pioneering a systematic approach to the biochemistry of behavior since his early work as medical research director of the Addiction Studies Foundation of Mount Pleasant Hospital. Indeed, we also saw a connection between the sudden fear of dying, the sensation of impending doom so prevalent in patients with Hoigne's syndrome, and the panic attack syndrome. 1,2 It is quite plausible that procaine could inhibit PGE 1 , elevating levels of PGE2 and TXA 2 . In panic attacks, anxiety, depression, and seizure, the TXA2 level may be elevated. The confusional state that is a central feature of Hoigne's syndrome could indeed be understood as resulting from transient ischemia due to increased TXA 2 synthesis. The tachycardia and elevation of blood pressure seen in all of our patients may also be due to the effect

Bartok's Exercises in Composition

Investigations into the origins, or the conditions of a start are invariably exciting tasks for the historian. Apart from hopes to realize positivistic ideals of gaining established knowledge there is the intellectual pleasure of observing and scientifically revealing the germs out of which a brilliant artistic career could have evolved; to trace back and find a multitude of marks left by the genesis of virtues, means, and ideas later enumerated as determinants of an oeuvre. All this can be perceived only in our late endeavour, equipped by the knowledge of a whole, as in early moments routes leading to diverse directions had been equally open and calling. The task of investigation is to discover and document a series of choices, the process of following and completing a course; to draw a picture of a number of posibilities gradually reduced by subsequent decisions.

TANZANIA: THE DEVELOPMENT DEBATE—A COMMENT

ONE OF THE more seductive intellectual pleasures which can befall a social scientist is to be caught up within an active body of scholars who share a common sense of what is important in their field of study and a shared view of how it should be studied. Scholarship then seems less lonely. Ideas, concepts and analyses get refined by repeated paraphrasing, issues emerge for collegial debate, research topics are easily identified and can be seen to be making a real contribution. There is moreover a camaraderie that results from the sense indeed that

My Mouth Shall Praise

t the risk of being regarded as m ildly idiosyncratic, I would like to explain why time spent in the dentist’s chair during the past 30 years h as, all things con­ sidered, been enjoyable. It is not masochism or insen­ sitiv ity to pain or som e perverse oral gratification that comes from a mouth­ ful of whirling and grind­ ing instruments; rather it is the intellectual and esthetic pleasure I get from observing an accom ­ plished and dedicated expert at work. My dentist fashions a preparation with all the care of Benvenuto C ellini shaping a filigree of gold, or of M ichelangelo bringing forth a human shape out of a block of mar­ ble. Each step is done with great deliberation and at­ tention to a final product that reaches for perfection. This concern with quality is so gratifying to watch that it full well overcomes the admitted unpleasant­ ness of having one’s teeth and jaws the object of m e­ chanical m anipulation. Thus I repose in tranquility as the residuum of my upper left first molar is being shaped for a cap. It seems a good time to think about the subject of qual­ ity, for equipment in the mouth makes speech inele­ gant, if not downright sloppy. There has been a lot of talk around lately about where quality in work per­ formance has gone in the modern world. The past few months have brought personal examples: a surly waitress, a pediatrician too busy to talk to a mother about a problem child , an air freight company em­ ployee who couldn’t care less about an overdue package of frozen research m aterials, and a car salesman unable to answer the sim plest questions about his wares. Each reader can doubtless supply his own list, and the aggregate represents for all of us a way of life that is less than it m ight be. The sociologists have much to study about the reasons for this loss; industrialization and popula­ tion pressure are clearly contributing factors. Being unequipped to undertake a formal social science analysis, I must get my teeth into the subject in a dif­ ferent way. The first step in reversing the decline in quality of life is to praise that glorious attribute, quality, whenever we encounter it. To make quality a goal we must first firmly incorporate it into our ideology, and that is surely the work of poets, writ­ ers, and philosophers, as w ell as others among us. All of w hich brings me back to my dentist who can hardly be ignored, since he is now pressing down on a hardening matrix to take an im pression of the pre­ cisely shaped remains of my tooth. You see, there is a special reason for my thinking about his profes­ sional services today. After 55 years of practice he is about to retire. Although I have been a patient of his for only 30 of those years, the thought of looking for another dentist is causing great consternation. Hav­ ing been so thoroughly spoiled, I w ill have great dif­ ficulty finding anyone to meet my standards. Like Diogenes looking for an honest man I envision my-

Michelet in Germany: A Journey in Self-Discovery

You know the story of the Frenchman being asked: Who is the greatest French poet? and answering: 'Hugo, hdelas. If you were to ask me who is the greatest French historian, I might reply: he'las.In both cases, however, the helas needs to be qualified. It does not deplore a deficiency of poetical or historical talent, but rather an excess of something else: Hugo is too much of arn orator' and Michelet too much of an artist. Indeed, he describes himself as such; he claims tha t the artistic temper is his special gift, although a dangerous one. An artist a romantic artist; and, according to Flaubert, the only true one in France. When all is said, Flaubert declared, all of Lus, great and small, are nothing but abominabl e classics; Hugo himself is but a revolutionary classic. The only French romantic is Michelet: Le scul romantique frangais aura ete le pe're Michelet. If Romanticism is defined in its simplest terms, that is, ats the predominance of feeling and imagination over objective reason, what could be more romantic than the H4istoire de France? WShen we read historians like Tocqueville or Guizot, what we experience is an intellectual pleasure: history is analyzed, explained to uts. What we find in Michelet's Histoire is a sort of rhapsody, a sequence of pictures, of apostrophes, of diatribbes, or lyrLcal outbursts, of songs, of laments. We listen to a voice, by turns angry and caressing, always feverish and passionate, as we would listen to a violin; and indeed we are hearing one of the supreme :instrumnentalists ofFrench prose. Taken as a whole, his works combine the fatal ingredients listed by Mario Praz in The Romantic Agony: la carne, la marte, e il diavolo. They blend the erotic, the funereal, and the demonic. The author of the Histoire de France is also the author of La Femne, L'Amour, and LT Sorcie're. As for the Histoire itself, it originated, iwe are to believe Michelet, from. his early contacts with the dead.

Economic History, Pure and Applied

C P. Kindleberger once described economic history as “great fun” but not very useful for understanding what happens in the real world. W. N. Parker, on the other hand, doesn't regard it as at all amusing, but terribly important. Within that range, surely, each of us can locate his own ratio of practicality to enjoyment inherent in the pursuit of economic history. I myself was drawn to the study of economic history, even before I was aware of its existence—in fact, it was my youthful intention to invent the discipline—by two distinct motives. On the one hand, I wanted to enter (or create) a profession in which the work itself would yield intellectual pleasure. At the same time, having just lived through the longest depression in modern times and the most destructive war in history, I wanted to do something that would be useful to society. History, I knew, was interesting. Economics, I assumed, was important. I therefore resolved to give up the study of engineering, which had occupied me briefly before the war, and to create the new discipline of economic history. I was mildly surprised to discover upon enrolling in the Yale Studies for Returning Servicemen that the discipline did, indeed, already exist, and was, furthermore, ably represented at Yale by none other than Harold F. Williamson.

Science Fiction and the Future

FROM THE VERY BEGINNING of modern SF, enthusiasts, apparently unsatisfied with the mere popularity of the form, perceiving that at some level it does more than simply give pleasure, have asserted that SF serves an important educational purpose: by engaging us in the act of imagining the unknown (they tell us) SF prepares us for the future. William Rupp takes it as favorable sign that 48% of sampling of English professors defined SF as a type of story that . . . tries to anticipate the impact of future technological developments on society. Some recent guides to the future go so far as to insist that anyone who expects to cope with the future at all must read SF. Science fiction should be required reading for Future I, declares Alvin Toffler. Arthur C. Clarke maintains that A critical . . . reading of science fiction is essential training for anyone wishing to look more than ten years ahead.1 Though these futurologists refrain from claiming the kind of literal prophesy popular with SF apologists thirty years ago, they nevertheless agree with the earlier defenders in believing that SF trains its readers to anticipate the unexpected and helps them to encounter change and future that will certainly differ radically from the present. There is, to be sure, genuine intellectual pleasure to be derived from imagining in the fullest detail possible previously unknown or unthought-of machine, society, race, or environment, but this pleasure probably does not have the educational value that is claimed for it. Though SF often gives us sense of facing the unknown, its true insights are generally into the known, and its primary value lies not in its ability to train us for the future, but in its ability to engage particular set of problems to which science itself gives rise and which belong, not to the future, but to the present. At its core SF is powerfully conventional and deeply conservative-though not necessarily right wing-form of literature which, rather than assaulting the unknown by bold risks of the imagination, tames the threat of the future and in doing so articulates one aspect of our present human situation in way no other literary form can. In asserting that SF does not open up the future in the way its defenders wish it did, I may seem to be merely repeating what the debunkers of such literature have always claimed. The debunkers, of course, have not been entirely without truth. Where

Katharsis as Clarification: an Objection Answered

In the Introduction to her recent translation of the Poetics, Miss Hubbard astutely recognizes the intellectual orientation of Aristotle's aesthetic theory. She observes that for Aristotle the concept of mimesis is intimately connected with that of mathesis and thus that the basic pleasure of art is the intellectual pleasure involved in learning. She then correctly identifies two levels of the learning process involved in mimesis: on a lower level it signifies the way in which children learn their first lessons but on a much more sophisticated plane it denotes a process by which our understanding of ‘moral facts and moral possibilities’ is deepened. She perceptively concludes that if art is to achieve the goal set for it by Aristotle, it must have a significant relationship to ultimate truth.

Russia and the West: The Views of Pobedonostsev

Throughout history of Russia, especially since time of Peter Great, one of central problems for state and its people has been its relationship with that part of world which Russians have consistently referred to as the In nineteenth and twentieth centuries in particular, many Russian statesmen, philosophers, and men of letters have meditated and debated about nature and significance of Russia and its culture and about relationships which had existed and even ought to exist with West. It is naturally difficult, perhaps even impossible, to provide a clear definition of the as it was used by even one prominent Russian, because meaning for any one person changed from time to time. Moreover, West itself was not and is not a constant: The West of Hitler or Picasso was not that of Gladstone and Daudet or of Napoleon and Goethe. One of most important and interesting statesmen and philosophers of Russia in nineteenth century was Constantine P. Pobedonostsev, who was ober-prokuror, or director general, of Most Holy Synod of Russian Orthodox Church from 1880 until 1905, and who was tutor of last two tsars. Pobedonostsev provided basic philosophy for government of Alexander III, and he served as symbol of reaction in Russia throughout last quarter of nineteenth century. At same time, he represents in a remarkably clear way riddle West posed for Russia. Brought up as both a Muscovite and a Westerner with remarkable knowledge of Western languages, literature, and thought, at same time he revered Russia's traditions, institutions, and values, and sought to deny information concerning West to his fellow Russians, except for ruling elite or those whom he called the aristocracy of intellect. For these trusted members of ruling group, access to West, its pleasures and its ideas, was relatively open, as it is today for a similar group in Soviet Union. He resisted and opposed political ideas and institutions of West, but he mined works of Western writers for his own political philosophy, and he treasured intellectual pleasures he found in his reading and in his travels. Moreover, he advocated

Structure, Symbol, and Theme in “Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills”

Over forty years ago Oliver Elton wrote of “Lines written among the Euganean Hills”: “This poem is perfectly put together, and it is an intellectual pleasure to see its firm development, even apart from the rapid, impassioned, shimmering brilliancy of the imagery, which resolves itself into the emotions of the poet.” One need not assent to the unqualified absolute of this declaration to recognize the poem as one worthy of serious study, yet during the last half century of intensive Shelley scholarship and criticism there has appeared little to advance our understanding of “Lines written among the Euganean Hills” beyond Professor Elton's own perceptive, but necessarily brief appreciation. An examination of Shelleyana will suggest a number of reasons for this neglect by scholars of a poem that is often anthologized and frequently taught. First, Shelley criticism is a literature filled with polemicism, and “Lines written among the Euganean Hills” has never been controversial: critics and admirers of Shelley alike have conceded or declared, when they mentioned it at all, that it is a good poem. Second, its tetrameter couplets appear “uncharacteristic” of Shelley under the generalizations which govern most discussions of his poetry, thus making the poem “peripheral” to both attackers and defenders of Shelley's poetic achievement. Closely related to the problem of metrics are those of the poem's length and its date of composition: it is too long to be discussed with the lyrics, too short to qualify as a major effort, and written too early for intensive study with Shelley's late poetry. Finally, biographers have been less successful than usual in casting light on those passages—especially lines 45–65—that seem to require additional illumination before a critic can integrate the whole composition.

Presidential address: Society for Pediatric Research.

Last year the special circumstance of holding our meeting jointly with the other pediatric societies prevented us from hearing my predecessor give his presidential address. Undoubtedly we were thus deprived of a great intellectual pleasure, but not only the members but also Dr. Janeway himself must have regretted this momentary lapse in our tradition. The presidential address affords the speaker the opportunity, and indeed serves him chiefly for the purpose, of acknowledging his debt of gratitude to the society. This is the one pleasure connected with the office which I for one should not like to forego. My predecessor, like all those before him, must have felt the desire to thank you for an honor which to my way of thinking is the highest form of recognition our endeavors can receive. This urge for presidential self-expression is all the greater because by tradition the office is likely to be given

Chemical Society: New President

Dr. W. H. Mills, recently elected president of the Chemical Society, has for a long time been one of the outstanding figures in the scientific world: his influence on chemistry at Cambridge has been profound. An independent thinker, his researches bear no resemblance to those of his teachers: he founded a ‘school’, but he never had a ‘team’. A paper by Mills is something to be read not only for instruction, but also for the intellectual pleasure it gives. His work on the cyanines, the photographic sensitizing dyes, was largely responsible for settling their chemistry, to which his former student, Dr. Hamer, has added so much. But it is for his stereochemical work that Mills is best known. In 1910 and 1914, with Miss Bain, he demonstrated the configuration of the doubly linked nitrogen atom, adding compelling evidence in 1923, with Schindler, and in 1931 with Saunders. The proof, with Warren, of the tetrahedral configuration of the ammonium ion compares for elegance with the proof, with Quibell and Lidstone, of the planar configuration of the 4–co–ordinated platinous and palladous atoms. The resolution of an allene, with Maitland, was also a remarkable achievement.

Value of Criticism

PROF. EBWIN SCHRODINGER, in an article entitled “Science, Art and Play” (Philosopher, 13, No. 1), maintains that the present-day spirit which challenges all authority and allows nothing to be immune from criticism, manifests itself in the ‘crisis' now existing in most of the sciences. Science, at any rate research work, together with art and play, provides an outlet for that surplus store of energy which men usually have to spare after satisfying their primary needs. It might be argued that science gives far greater practical benefits than art or play, or that the intellectual joy of the research worker is as nothing to the material value of the results obtained. But the advances of applied science, as exemplified in greater facilities for travel and communication, give not only material benefits but also pleasure for their own sake. Prof. Schrodinger admits that science can rarely give direct joy to the community, but what matters is that the greatest possible number of people should have the opportunity of approach to intellectual pleasures. It is not accidental that at the present moment the sciences are being forced to a complete reassessment of values, for the ideas forming the background of the individual sciences are connected with the ideas of the age, and the dominant spirit will accept nothing on authority. This should not be feared, for what is worth preserving preserves itself, and requires no protection.

Sir William Hardy, F.R.S

THOSE who enjoyed Hardy's friendship, and even those who could hope for no more than occasional contact with him, will deeply feel the loss of a strong and vital personality radiating an influence which stimulated effort, cured discouragement and could reawaken flagging enthusiasms. Hardy entered into everything he did with zest, and this seems to be the word which adequately describes his own attitude to life. He met each successive experience with fresh interest, and brought his whole nature to the appreciation of whatever it offered of value. His enjoyment of intellectual pleasures was itself almost sensuous, while his delight in the beauties of Nature, or in the appeal of fine pictures and music, was always mingled with—and, for him, intensified by—the intellectual reactions they evoked. Life's minor pleasures appealed to him and he loved a good wine, and a good story, in the telling or the hear-ing, and he enjoyed both best in good company.

A Comparison of the Ocular Characteristics of Unselected and Reading Disability Groups

Reading disability is one of the foremost problems of elementary edu cation. It consists of the inability to learn to read normally, even when the pupil is of average or superior intelligence. This disability has often been mistaken for dullness and the pupil has been side-tracked into some occupation not requiring much intelligence. This frequently has resulted in a loss of service to the community, while the individual has been de prived of certain intellectual pleasures and associations which might have meant much to him. Too little is known of the etiology and treat ment of reading difficulties, and definite information of this kind is urgently needed. Reading is presented through visual channels, and a very natural in ference is that if the visual system is defective reading must be impeded. Accordingly a study of the ocular characteristics of two groups of chil dren has been made. One group was composed of one hundred fourteen reading disability cases, and the other consisted of one hundred forty three unselected school children. Included in these totals are fifty-six unselected cases which were obtained through the cooperation of Super intendent Frank A. Scott and Miss Eleanor Hayes of the Belmont, Massachusetts, School Department. Most of the one hundred fourteen reading disability cases were taken from my private practice and I exam ined the others at the Harvard Psycho-Educational Clinic. Sixty-four of the reading disability, and eighty-seven of the unselected cases were studied separately and were reported in the Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Monthly of April, 1931. Visual acuity was measured monocularly with a standard Snellen chart at twenty feet. Coordination was investigated by means of a num ber of ophthalmic instruments, among which were the Stevens phorometer, Risley rotary prisms, Maddox rods, and double prisms. Adduction and abduction were measured by means of the rotary prisms. The use of a Wells-DeZeng phoroptor increased the accuracy of the measurements. In a previous study the median refractive errors exhibited by both the reading disability and unselected groups differed so slightly that no actual measurements of the degree of refractive defect were employed in this 211

An Earlier Place for the Calculus in the Curriculum

The history of the mathematical curriculum is an interesting study. In colonial Harvard and Yale, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry were college disciplines; Latin and Greek were required for entrance; science had little place. At present, algebra and geometry are high school studies; Latin and Greek are often begun in college; the natural and social sciences are taken from high school freshman to college senior classes. A hundred years ago secondary school mathematics meant chiefly arithmetic, including such difficult topics as alligation, continued fractions, and circulating decimals. It was later realized that the student would gain more practical values and experience greater intellectual pleasure by omitting the more difficult portions of arithmetic, and in their place take the simpler parts of algebra and geometry; the new curriculum harmonized better with the student's capacity, adapted itself better to his experience, and formed a better basis for the courses in science that began to make their appearance in the college curriculum.

L'Hérédité musicale.

This book, after a brief prelude on heredity, proceeds to a series of summaries on the nature of memory, intelligence, reason, will and conscience. The theme then passes to the "laws of heredity," discussing and quoting many writers, including Galton, Weisman, Lamarck, DeVries, Mendel, Ribot and Fabre. The author agrees with Spencer that acquired musical characteristics can be transmitted. The second chapter begins with a eulogy of music and discusses various topics, such as formalism, intellectual pleasure, passion, musical therapeutics, the musical ear and cerebral localization. Chapter III contains the experimental material; namely, an abridged account of the investigations of Seashore and Davenport. The author agrees with their conclusions that "fundamental musical qualities" are inheritable. Apart from the discussions, the author's contribution evidently consists in presenting brief accounts of the family trees of famous musicians, as well as of a few painters, poets and other types of celebrities, which are

XV. On a general method in dynamics; by which the study of the motions of all free systems of attracting or repelling points is reduced to the search and differentiation of one central relation, or characteristic function

The theoretical development of the laws of motion of bodies is a problem of such interest and importance, that it has engaged the attention of all the most eminent mathematicians, since the invention of dynamics as a mathematical science by Galileo, and especially since the wonderful extension which was given to that science by Newton. Among the successors of those illustrious men, Lagrange has perhaps done more than any other analyst, to give extent and harmony to such deductive researches, by showing that the most varied consequences respecting the motions of systems of bodies may be derived from one radical formula; the beauty of the method so suiting the dignity of the results, as to make of his great work a kind of scientific poem. But the science of force, or of power acting by law in space and time, has undergone already another revolution, and has become already more dynamic, by having almost dismissed the conceptions of solidity and cohesion, and those other material ties, or geometrically imaginable conditions, which Lagrange so happily reasoned on, and by tending more and more to resolve all connexions and actions of bodies into attractions and repulsions of points: and while the science is advancing thus in one direction by the improvement of physical views, it may advance in another direction also by the invention of mathematical methods. And the method proposed in the present essay, for the deductive study of the motions of attracting or repelling systems, will perhaps be received with indulgence, as an attempt to assist in carrying forward so high an inquiry. In the methods commonly employed, the determination of the motion of a free point in space, under the influence of accelerating forces, depends on the integration of three equations in ordinary differentials of the second order; and the determination of the motions of a system of free points, attracting or repelling one another, depends on the integration of a system of such equations, in number threefold the number of the attracting or repelling points, unless we previously diminish by unity this latter number, by considering only relative motions. Thus, in the solar system, when we consider only the mutual attractions of the sun and of the ten known planets, the determination of the motions of the latter about the former is reduced, by the usual methods, to the integration of a system of thirty ordinary differential equations of the second order, between the coordinates and the time; or, by a transformation of Lagrange, to the integration of a system of sixty ordinary differential equations of the first order, between the time and the elliptic elements: by which integrations, the thirty varying coordinates, or the sixty varying elements, are to be found as functions of the time. In the method of the present essay, this problem is reduced to the search and differentiation of a single function, which satisfies two partial differential equations of the first order and of the second degree: and every other dynamical problem, respecting the motions of any system, however numerous, of attracting or repelling points, (even if we suppose those points restricted by any conditions of connexion consistent with the law of living force,) is reduced, in like manner, to the study of one central function, of which the form marks out and characterizes the properties of the moving system, and is to be determined by a pair of partial differential equations of the first order, combined with some simple considerations. The difficulty is therefore at least transferred from the integration of many equations of one class to the integration of two of another: and even if it should be thought that no practical facility is gained, yet an intellectual pleasure may result from the reduction of the most complex and, probably., of all researches respecting the forces and motions of body, to the study of one characteristic function, the unfolding of one central relation.