And then again occur, I confess, dark sayings,
difficult to be understood, which disturb my confidence in this
conclusion. It must, however, always be remembered that he works at
the very boundaries of our knowledge, and that his mind habitually
dwells in the 'boundless contiguity of shade' by which that
knowledge is surrounded.
In the researches now under review the ratio of speculation and
reasoning to experiment is far higher than in any of Faraday's
previous works. Amid much that is entangled and dark we have
flashes of wondrous insight and utterances which seem less the
product of reasoning than of revelation. I will confine myself here
to one example of this divining power. By his most ingenious device
of a rapidly rotating mirror, Wheatstone had proved that electricity
required time to pass through a wire, the current reaching the
middle of the wire later than its two ends. 'If,' says Faraday,
'the two ends of the wire in Professor Wheatstone's experiments were
immediately connected with two large insulated metallic surfaces
exposed to the air, so that the primary act of induction, after
making the contact for discharge, might be in part removed from the
internal portion of the wire at the first instance, and disposed for
the moment on its surface jointly with the air and surrounding
conductors, then I venture to anticipate that the middle spark would
be more retarded than before. And if those two plates were the
inner and outer coatings of a large jar or Leyden battery, then the
retardation of the spark would be much greater.
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