Instability

“ The gradual development of stability from instability, harmony from disharmony, a state where collision is at a minimum from one where it was at a maximum, may be regarded as furnishing the best phase possible of a teleological argument. Even the dissolution of any system is part, according to the theory, of the evolution of some higher system of stability, that is, of one including more elements. ”

“ If the molecules have been so aggregated that the oscillations of some are more restrained than the oscillations of others, there is a proportionate instability. If the number of them thus unduly restrained is considerable, the instability is such that the cohesion in some part is liable to fail, and a crack results. If the excesses of restraint are great and multitudinous, a trifling disturbance causes the mass to break up into small fragments. ”

“ Somewhat less familiar, but not unimportant, is a consideration which I may express by calling it the necessary instability of mind, its variability from moment to moment. Your mind, my mind, every mind, is continually sustaining modifications, disintegrations, reconstructions, by all that acts upon it, by all it comes to know. ”

“ We are all aware, says our author, that the principle of instability pervades all that exists in hell, on earth, and in the superior seats. But this important science is with many too superficially and but imperfectly understood. Our great object is to root it deeply in our mind, so that we might ever be preserved from those false impressions which too often tempt us to believe that mutability and changes are not affecting all beings. What are the obstacles that oppose in us the progress to true science? There are three. The first is Santi, or duration of existence. ”

“ When that which clings falls off, severed is being's tie;
All else will then be seen as instability.
At the moment in which desire has been abandoned, (other) births will be cut off; when that has not been done, instability will be seen. ”

“ We may apply similar principles to the consideration of the earth-moon system. It is true that we have here a series of dynamical phenomena, while the illustrations I have given of stable and unstable equilibrium relate only to statical problems; but we can have dynamical stability and dynamical instability, just as we can have stable and unstable equilibrium. Dynamical instability corresponds with the maximum of energy, and dynamical stability to the minimum of energy. ”

“ This instability of the vital powers, this disposition, which they continually have to change, impress upon all the physiological phenomena a character of irregularity which particularly distinguishes them from those of physics. ”

“ Now that the struggle is over, I believe that we may look to this instability as the source of energy from which we may expect great accomplishments in art and science. It may be also that, through this instability, new strength will be given to those movements which under the most varied guise express the deep craving for religion which seems to be universal among Mankind. ”

“ The instability is caused by the conjoint action of an attraction towards some state represented as desirable, and a repulsion from the existing state which is relatively undesirable. In some cases the attraction, and in others the repulsion, is predominant. When we are in an uncomfortable position, the discomfort is predominant, and we seek relief by changing our attitude. When the bright sunshine tempts us to go out for a walk, the attraction is predominant. ”

“ The instability thus variously illustrated is obviously consequent on the fact, that the several parts of any homogeneous aggregation are necessarily exposed to different forces—forces that differ either in kind or amount; and being exposed to different forces they are of necessity differently modified. ”

“ "It is the first changes among familiar things that make such a mystery of time to the young, afterwards we lose the sense of the mysterious. I take changes in all I see as a matter of course. The instability of all human things is familiar to me, to you it is new and oppressive." ”

“ It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilisation. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages. ”

“ The opposite of this is instability—the defect of the person who shifts too often, who cannot stay in one field long enough. In the physical field this [Pg 90] applies to people with motor nervousness, people who never can keep still. ”

“ When, therefore, we suddenly feel the ground move beneath us, a mysterious force, with which we were previously unacquainted, is revealed to us as an active disturber of stability. A moment destroys the illusion of a whole life; our deceptive faith in the repose of nature vanishes ”

“ To my clairvoyant vision, as I now at this moment look at you, every minute atom of your physical organism is in the subtle process of depolarization from unity toward chaos and disintegration. You are not yourself conscious of this condition only as it has been revealed to you, for your soul is so alive that it has become almost unconscious of its physical expression and for this very reason the shock of dissolution would be all the greater when it did come ”

“ Something tells us that all this is provisional; that the weakened reasons will wax strong again, and the stronger weaken; that equilibrium is unreached; that testing our reasons, not obeying them, is still the order of the day, and that we must wait awhile, patient or impatiently, until our mind is made up 'for good and all.' This inclining, first to one then to another future, both of which we represent as possible, resembles the oscillations to and fro of a material body within the limits of its elasticity. ”

“ In the second part of the work, in chapters treating of "The Indestructibility of Matter," "The Continuity of Motion," and "The Persistence of Force," I have at some length elaborated the view that force is the ultimate component of thought into which our conceptions of external existences are resolvable. Summing up the first of these chapters, I have said, "Thus, then, by the indestructibility of matter, we really mean the indestructibility of the force with which matter affects us." ”

“ As if that weren't bad enough, it could also happen that even a stuff previously proven to be stable in both universes could become unstable, if there was even the trace of a potentially unstable element, or if something that, stable in itself, combined with it in unstable fashion. ”

“ Therefore, in a system satisfying the conditions of practical stability with respect to the possible formation of all kinds of homogeneous masses, negative tensions of the surfaces of discontinuity are necessarily excluded. ”

“ Every moving body, however, encounters various obstacles, as friction, the resistance of the atmosphere, &c., which we know by daily experience to be causes capable of destroying motion. It was suggested that the whole of the retardation might be owing to these causes. ”

“ All existence or all effect is produced in equilibrium, that is, by one force acting and another suffering itself to be acted upon, or when one force by acting flows in, the other receives and harmoniously submits. ”

“ But we may have a substance, or system, in which the force at work is not gravity, but chemical affinity, and the substance, or system, may, under certain peculiar conditions, become chemically unstable. ”

“ Casting the term 'vital force' from our vocabulary, let us reduce, if we can, the visible phenomena of life to mechanical attractions and repulsions. Having thus exhausted physics, and reached its very rim, a mighty mystery still looms beyond us. ”

“ The other properties of matter, such as mobility, impenetrability, and divisibility, relate to extension, or to a particular impression caused on our senses. The difficulties that may be raised on these points are solved by the preceding paragraphs.
Inertness, or indifference to rest or motion, is a purely negative property. It is the incapacity of all action, the absence of an internal principle productive of change, the purely passive disposition to receive all that is communicated to it. ”

“ Similarly, you may sometimes find on a mountain-side a large rock poised so delicately that a touch will set it crashing down into the valley, while the rocks all round are so firm that only a considerable force can dislodge them What is analogous in these two cases is the existence of a great store of energy in unstable equilibrium ready to burst into violent motion by the addition of a very slight disturbance. ”

“ The small oscillations of a conservative system about a configuration of equilibrium, and the criterion of stability, are discussed in Mechanics, § 23. The question of the stability of given types of motion is more difficult, owing to the want of a sufficiently general, and at the same time precise, definition of what we mean by “stability.” ”

“ This structure of exceeding tenuity and nimbleness was the source of the motion characteristic of living creatures, and provided that elastic counteracting force to the inward-pressing nimble air, whereby were produced the phenomena of respiration. Every object, in fact, whether living or not, kept its form and distinctive existence by its possession in degree of a kind of soul or spirit of resistance in its structure, adequate to counteract the pressure of external forces upon its particles. ”

“ First, because, banishing the void from things, They yet assign them motion, and allow Things soft and loosely textured to exist, As air, dew, fire, earth, animals, and grains, Without admixture of void amid their frame. Next, because, thinking there can be no end In cutting bodies down to less and less Nor pause established to their breaking up, They hold there is no minimum in things ”

“ And to each is appointed a fixed term of existence. Sooner or later, the balance of equilibrium is tilted, disturbance eventuates in overthrow; the tiny exquisite system finally breaks up. Of atoms, as of men, it may be said with truth, "Quisque suos patitur manes." ”

“ It is necessary for the stability of a surface of discontinuity that its tension shall be as small as that of any other surface which can exist between the same homogeneous masses with the same temperature and potentials. ”

“ Under the light of this principle of dissipation, we shift from a primal energy immanent but not transcendent to one immanent in the sum of the correlated actual motions and also transcendent of them. Very impressive is the view that here arises of a dread Source of Being that engulfs all beings. ”

“ Again, the mechanical actions which produce heat—friction, and the collision of bodies—must from the nature of the case produce a shock, that is, an internal motion of particles, which indeed, we find, is often so violent as to break them permanently asunder. ”

“ Leaving out of consideration the problem in its metaphysical form, which concerns the possibility of conceiving inter-material space, it may be said that it is not now supposed that the heavenly bodies move through an absolute void; and the existence of any medium opposing resistance, however slight, is a condition rendering impossible the attainment of absolute stability of motion or a full stability which suffers no diminution and is, therefore, in effect, an absolute stability. ”

“ The changes of which science has at length caught a glimpse can be nothing more than the regular and cyclical or fitful and spasmodic disturbances of a deeper and universal state of forced equilibrium, which pervades the vital as it is known to pervade the mechanical world. ”

“ What baffles me, what I find unimaginable, transcending every faculty I possess—transcending, I humbly submit, every faculty you possess—is the notion that out of those physical tremors you can extract things so utterly incongruous with them as sensation, thought, and emotion. You may say, or think, that this issue of consciousness from the clash of atoms is not more incongruous than the flash of light from the union of oxygen and hydrogen. ”

“ One tendency is exemplified in the slow decay of physical nature. With stealthy inevitableness, there is degradation of energy. The sources of activity sink downward and downward. Their very matter wastes. ”

“ If it is a mechanical force, then the immediate effect is some distortion of the part—a distortion having for its limit that attitude in which the resistance of the structures to further change of position, balances the force tending to produce the further change; and the ultimate effect, supposing the force to be continuous or recurrent, is such a permanent alteration of form, or alteration of structure, or both, as establishes a permanent balance. ”

“ As the resistance to deformation characteristic of solids evidently tends to prevent a discontinuous change of state from commencing within them, substances can doubtless exist in solid states very far beyond the limit of absolute stability. ”

“ If you imagine a body at rest, in an intangible medium, and not in contact with a gas or any substance capable of creating friction, that body by the prevailing theory of matter and motion, unless disturbed by an impulse from without, would remain forever at absolute rest. ”

“ A system is called practically unstable when a very small (not necessarily indefinitely small) disturbance or variation in its condition will produce a considerable change. In the former part of this paper, in which the influence of surfaces of discontinuity was neglected, a system was regarded as practically unstable when such a result would be produced by a disturbance of the same order of magnitude as the quantities relating to surfaces of discontinuity which were neglected. ”

“ The notion we have of the stability of bodies and of the persistence of their identity, notwithstanding certain superficial changes, is the reason for which I thought proper to attribute a substance to them, that is to say, an invariable element. ”

“ Tendency to equilibrium of force and to permanency of form then, are the characters of that portion of the universe which does not live—the domain of the chemist and physicist.
Tendency to disturb existing equilibrium,—to take on forms which succeed one another in definite cycles, is the character of the living world. ”