Henry Bence Jones to Faraday   25 December 1857

Dear Dr Faraday I send you a bad translation of a few lines from a German physicians Medical Journal. He¹ is the best physician at Berlin[.]

Yours most truly | H. Bence Jones

Decr 25. 1857

The cause of the violence of the attack on Faraday is because he says “Altho no mathematician & ultimately the appeal is to experiment”[.] This remark uttered as an aphorism says too much but certainly it does not say that Faraday thinks the mathematician useless & unnecessary & his opponents might well spare their advice & try to penetrate a little deeper into the meaning of the author[.]

In the knowledge of nature the mathematician can do no more than collect the conclusions of the experimental enquiry and thence abstract certain formulae which may lead to further research; but he is perfectly powerless when gaps exist in empirical knowledge. One such gap Faraday has perceived and it is not an assumption as his opponents say but simply logical that he purposes to fill up this gap by the usual course of empirical knowledge[.]

On the contrary it is illogical as some of his opponents do, to deny the existence of the gap & it is an assumption to assert that it cannot be filled up. I have clearly stated in opposition to Fechner² that our view is not closed by the simple knowledge of the laws of gravitation & by the phenomena of gravitation. We are compelled whilst we are without more perfect knowledge to assume a special force of gravitation as the cause of the phenomena & as a foundation of that law.

Such a force is only an empty formula so long as we do not know what it is, what relation it bears to other forces; whether it is adherent in matter or is communicated to it from without. The questions which Faraday throws out have the advantage of marking out a distant path of enquiry to be followed for the solution of this problem & I hold that empirically logically philosophically it is perfectly right.

Is the force of gravitation only one of the possible forms of appearance of a universal natural force?

Can any of the known forces of nature also make themselves evident in the phenomena of Gravitation[.]³

Virchow