History of scientific ideas

Chapter 76: BOOK VII.

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About This Book

The work surveys the historical development and philosophical foundations of central scientific concepts—space, time, number, motion, cause, force, matter, organismal notions, and methods—showing how they function as necessary ideas rather than empirical derivations. It examines perception and mathematical reasoning, the axioms underlying geometry and arithmetic, controversies over causation and force, and the establishment of statics, dynamics, and gravitational law. Emphasizing the interplay of induction, deduction, and metaphysical reflection, it maps debates and proposes resolutions that aim to reconcile observed facts with the conceptual conditions that make scientific knowledge possible.

BOOK VII.

THE

PHILOSOPHY

OF

MORPHOLOGY,

INCLUDING

CRYSTALLOGRAPHY.

Crystallization exhibits to us the effects of the natural arrangement of the ultimate particles of various compound bodies; but we are scarcely yet sufficiently acquainted with chemical synthesis and analysis to understand the rationale of this process. The rhomboidal form may arise from the proper position of 4, 6, 8 or 9 globular particles, the cubic form from 8 particles, the triangular form from 3, 6 or 10 particles, the hexahedral prism from 7 particles, &c. Perhaps, in due time we may be enabled to ascertain the number and order of elementary particles, constituting any given compound element, and from that determine the figure which it will prefer on crystallization, and vice versâ.

John Dalton, Chemical Philosophy (1808), p. 210.