The letting light alone, as self-evident, and making heat self-demonstrating, because felt--i.e., perceptible now and then--has the character of the Irishman's astronomy:
"Long life to the moon, for a dear noble cratur, Which serves us for lamplight all night in the dark, While the sun only shines in the day, which by natur, Wants no light at all, as ye all may remark."
_Sir Richard Phillips_[555] (born 1768) was conspicuous in 1793, when he was sentenced to a year's imprisonment[556] for selling Paine's _Rights of Man_; and again when, in 1807[557], he was knighted as Sheriff of London. As a bookseller, he was able to enforce his opinions in more ways than others. For instance, in James Mitchell's[558] _Dictionary of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences_, 1823, 12mo, which, though he was not technically a publisher, was printed for him--a book I should recommend to the collector of works of reference--there is a temperate description of his doctrines, which one may almost swear was one of his conditions previous to undertaking the work. Phillips himself was not only an anti-Newtonian, but carried to a fearful excess the notion that statesmen and Newtonians were in league to deceive the world. He saw this plot in Mrs. Airy's[559] pension, and in Mrs. Somerville's[560]. In 1836, he { 243} did me the honor to attempt my conversion. In his first letter he says:
"Sir Richard Phillips has an inveterate abhorrence of all the pretended wisdom of philosophy derived from the monks and doctors of the middle ages, and not less of those of higher name who merely sought to make the monkish philosophy more plausible, or so to disguise it as to mystify the mob of small thinkers."
So little did his writings show any knowledge of antiquity, that I strongly suspect, if required to name one of the monkish doctors, he would have answered--Aristotle. These schoolmen, and the "philosophical trinity of gravitating force, projectile force, and void space," were the bogies of his life.
I think he began to publish speculations in the _Monthly Magazine_ (of which he was editor) in July 1817: these he republished separately in 1818. In the Preface, perhaps judging the feelings of others by his own, he says that he "fully expects to be vilified, reviled, and anathematized, for many years to come." Poor man! he was let alone. He appeals with confidence to the "impartial decision of posterity"; but posterity does not appoint a hearing for one per cent. of the appeals which are made; and it is much to be feared that an article in such a work of reference as this will furnish nearly all her materials fifty years hence. The following, addressed to M. Arago,[561] in 1835, will give posterity as good a notion as she will probably need: