It is true that even in everyday experience weight, which is in a sense action at a distance, plays a very important part. the communication of motion by impact, push and pull, heating or inducing combustion by means of a flame, etc. When we try to connect cause and effect in the experiences which natural objects afford us, it seems at first as if there were no other mutual actions than those of immediate contact, e.g. Outside of physics we know nothing of action at a distance. Let us devote a little while to the consideration of these two subjects. How does it come about that alongside of the idea of ponderable matter, which is derived by abstraction from everyday life, the physicists set the idea of the existence of another kind of matter, the ether? The explanation is probably to be sought in those phenomena which have given rise to the theory of action at a distance, and in the properties of light which have led to the undulatory theory.
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