The Life and Letters of Faraday, Volume 2

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J.B. Lippincott, 1870
 

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Page 78 - That gravity should be innate, inherent and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.
Page 278 - In that view matter is not merely mutually penetrable ;* but each atom extends, so to say, throughout the whole of the solar system, yet always retaining its own centre of force.
Page 103 - ... other takes place. So we can change chemical force into the electric current, or the current into chemical force. The beautiful experiments of Seebeck and Peltier show the convertibility of heat and electricity ; and others by Oersted and myself show the convertibility of electricity and magnetism. But i/n, no case, not even in those of the Gymnotus and Torpedo, is there a pure creation or a production of power without a corresponding exhaustion of something to supply it.
Page 2 - By trials with a trough each was insulated from the other. Will call this side of the ring A. On the other side, but separated by an interval, was wound wire in two pieces, together amounting to about sixty feet in length, the direction being as with the former coils.
Page 401 - Do not suppose that I was a very deep thinker, or was marked as a precocious person. I was a very lively, imaginative person, and could believe in the " Arabian Nights " as easily as in the " Encyclopaedia ; " but facts were important to me, and saved me.
Page 483 - I was a very lively imaginative person, and could believe in the 'Arabian Nights,' as easily as in the 'Encyclopaedia.' But facts were important to me, and saved me. I could trust a fact, and always cross-examined an assertion. So when I questioned Mrs.
Page 240 - A few years ago magnetism was to us an occult power, affecting only a few bodies, now it is found to influence all bodies, and to possess the most intimate relations with electricity, heat, chemical action, light, crystallization, and through it, with the forces concerned in cohesion; and we may, in the present state of things, well feel urged to continue in our labours, encouraged by the hope of bringing it into a bond of union with gravity itself.
Page 308 - ... ridiculous world ours is as far as concerns the mind of man ! How full of inconsistencies, contradictions, and absurdities it is! I declare that, taking the average of many minds that have recently come before me (and apart from that spirit which God has placed in each), and accepting for a moment that average as a standard, I should far prefer the obedience, affections, and instinct of a dog before it.
Page 199 - held an opinion, almost amounting to conviction, in common, I believe,. with many other lovers of natural knowledge, that the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest have one common origin; in other words, are so directly related and mutually dependent, that they are convertible, as it were, into one another, and possess equivalents of power in their action.
Page 82 - In the researches now under review the ratio of speculation and reasoning to experiment is far higher than in any of Faraday's previous works. Amid much that is entangled and dark we have flashes of wondrous insight and utterances which seem less the product of reasoning than of revelation.

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