So that that hypothesis, how ingeniously soever explained, by
showing that the parts of sensible bodies are held together by the
pressure of other external insensible bodies, reaches not the parts of
the aether itself; and by how much the more evident it proves, that
the parts of other bodies are held together by the external pressure
of the aether, and can have no other conceivable cause of their
cohesion and union, by so much the more it leaves us in the dark
concerning the cohesion of the parts of the corpuscles of the aether
itself: which we can neither conceive without parts, they being
bodies, and divisible, nor yet how their parts cohere, they wanting
that cause of cohesion which is given of the cohesion of the parts
of all other bodies.
24. Not explained by an ambient fluid. But, in truth, the pressure
of any ambient fluid, how great soever, can be no intelligible cause
of the cohesion of the solid parts of matter. For, though such a
pressure may hinder the avulsion of two polished superficies, one from
another, in a line perpendicular to them, as in the experiment of
two polished marbles; yet it can never in the least hinder the
separation by a motion, in a line parallel to those surfaces.
Because the ambient fluid, having a full liberty to succeed in each
point of space, deserted by a lateral motion, resists such a motion of
bodies, so joined, no more than it would resist the motion of that
body were it on all sides environed by that fluid, and touched no
other body; and therefore, if there were no other cause of cohesion,
all parts of bodies must be easily separable by such a lateral sliding
motion.
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