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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Faraday as a Discoverer by John Tyndall: sphere you could no more, according to Faraday, charge it with
electricity than you could charge a Leyden jar, if its outer coating
were removed. Distance with him is immaterial. His strength as a
generalizer enables him to dissolve the idea of magnitude; and if
you abolish the walls of the room--even the earth itself--he would
make the sun and planets the outer coating of his jar. I dare not
contend that Faraday in these memoirs made all his theoretic
positions good. But a pure vein of philosophy runs through these
writings; while his experiments and reasonings on the forms and
phenomena of electrical discharge are of imperishable importance.
Footnotes to Chapter 8
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