'
It appears to me that these words might with justice be applied to
Faraday's own researches at this time. They furnish us with results
of permanent value; but little help can be found in the theory
advanced to account for them. It would, perhaps, be more correct to
say that the theory itself is hardly presentable in any tangible
form to the intellect. Faraday looks, and rightly looks, into the
heart of the decomposing body itself; he sees, and rightly sees,
active within it the forces which produce the decomposition, and he
rejects, and rightly rejects, the notion of external attraction;
but beyond the hypothesis of decompositions and recompositions,
enunciated and developed by Grothuss and Davy, he does not, I think,
help us to any definite conception as to how the force reaches the
decomposing mass and acts within it. Nor, indeed, can this be done,
until we know the true physical process which underlies what we call
an electric current.
Faraday conceives of that current as 'an axis of power having
contrary forces exactly equal in amount in opposite directions';
but this definition, though much quoted and circulated, teaches us
nothing regarding the current. An 'axis' here can only mean a
direction; and what we want to be able to conceive of is, not the
axis along which the power acts, but the nature and mode of action
of the power itself. He objects to the vagueness of De la Rive;
but the fact is, that both he and De la Rive labour under the same
difficulty.
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