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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Faraday as a Discoverer by John Tyndall: own safe progress and that of others, to distinguish the knowledge
which consists of assumption, by which I mean theory and hypothesis,
from that which is the knowledge of facts and laws.' Faraday
himself, in fact, was always 'guessing by hypothesis,' and making
theoretic divination the stepping-stone to his experimental results.
I have already more than once dwelt on the vividness with which he
realised molecular conditions; we have a fine example of this
strength and brightness of imagination in the present 'speculation.'
He grapples with the notion that matter is made up of particles, not
in absolute contact, but surrounded by interatomic space. 'Space,'
he observes, 'must be taken as the only continuous part of a body so
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