Nos. 7 and 8. In these paragraphs, the main features are repetitions of the simple assertions made in all the others, that certain movements possessed by matter in one state would produce other movements in another state, without attempting to show how they all came to so far coincide with each other and form one harmonious whole, with movements in almost one single direction. It is clear that one side of the separated chaos might have acquired motion in one direction from the universal chaos with which it had been in contact, and that the opposite side might have acquired motion in exactly the opposite direction from the original chaos with which it had been in contact; and we are left to find out how these came to agree with each other in the end. And, going back to the beginning, we are left to find out where the mass, out of which he constructs his solar system, was stowed away, after it was separated from the original universal chaos. We can conceive of its being separated by condensation, in obedience to the law of attraction, from the surrounding chaos, in which case it might fall towards a centre, or that some parts of it might come to revolve round each other, and that finally the whole of these parts might come to rotate about a common centre; but that is evidently very different from the mode of formation of the solar system which M. Faye has advocated. It comes to be by far too like the nebula which Laplace supposed to be endowed with rotary motion from the beginning, probably because he did not see, or did not take the trouble to see, how such a motion could be produced. In any case, Laplace did not consider that the primary motion of rotation was the most important part of his hypothesis; neither was it, as it seems to have been in the case we have been considering. And he did not go much further than M. Faye in postulating primary motion, only he did it in a more effectual and business-like manner. He drew on the bank at once for all the funds he required, instead of having to draw afresh every time he found himself in difficulties, as has been the lot of his critic and successor.
Finally, M. Faye tries to show that after all his rings, flat or otherwise, converted or not converted into globes, had been formed according to his ideas, the greater mass by far of the chaos had fallen into the centre, and had formed the sun there last of all. Now, if the preponderating mass of the chaos had been outside of the field of his operations, up to the period when all his planets, satellites, etc. were formed, or at least laid out, it is more natural to suppose that the matter inside of his structure, if there was any, would be drawn outwards by the attraction of the greatly preponderating mass outside, than that any portion of it should have fallen in, in elongated ellipses, towards the insignificant mass that he supposes to have been inside his structure. This, of course, would be nearly exactly the reverse of the mode of formation he was trying to demonstrate, and clearly shows that he was working on unsound principles from the beginning to the end of his cosmogony. It had never occurred to him that matter could be attracted outwards as well as inwards, most probably because it would seem to him ridiculous to imagine that anything in the universe could _gravitate_ upwards.