PREFACE.

Whether potential or force, from one particle to the other. The great success which these eminent men have attained in the application of mathematics to electrical phenomena gives, as is natural, additional weight to their theoretical speculations. Consequently, students of electricity who turn to them as the leading authorities in mathematical electricity would likely absorb their physical hypotheses along with their mathematical methods.

These physical hypotheses, however, are entirely foreign to the way of looking at things which I adopt. One object I have in view is that those who wish to study electricity may, by reading this treatise, see that there is another way of treating the subject. This alternative method is no less capable of explaining the phenomena; and while it may appear less definite in some parts, I believe it corresponds more faithfully with our actual knowledge—both in what it affirms and in what it leaves undecided.

From a philosophical point of view, moreover, it is exceedingly important to compare two methods that have both succeeded in explaining the principal electromagnetic phenomena. Both have attempted to explain the propagation of light as an electromagnetic phenomenon and have actually calculated its velocity. At the same time, however, the fundamental conceptions of what actually takes place, as well as most of the secondary conceptions of the quantities involved, are radically different.

I have therefore taken the role of an advocate rather than that of a judge. I have chosen to exemplify one The author is James Clerk Maxwell, explaining his preference for Michael Faraday’s "field" approach over the "action-at-a-distance" theories favored by continental mathematicians.