Galileo showed, on the contrary, that the nature of motion once impressed is to continue indefinitely in a uniform direction, and that the effect of the medium is a retarding, not an impelling one.
The impelling influences on the French settlement of the region were the love of exploration and adventure, the commercial instinct and religious zeal.
As regards the moral faculty itself, Reid's statement coincides in the main with Price's; it is both intellectual and active, not merely perceiving the " rightness " or " moral obligation " of actions (which Reid conceives as a simple unanalysable relation between act and agent), but also impelling the will to the performance of what is seen to be right.
Nor is his theory of the weight essential to atoms as being due to an inner force impelling them to motion in any way reconcilable with his general doctrine of mechanical causes.
That there are defects in the logical process as here outlined to account for the curious rite constitutes no valid objection to the theory advanced, for, in the first place, primitive logic in matters of belief is inherently defective and even contradictory, and, secondly, the strong desire to pierce the mysterious future, forming an impelling factor in all religions - even in the most advanced of our own day - would tend to obscure the weakness of any theory developed to explain a rite which represents merely one endeavour among many to divine the intention and plans of the gods, upon the knowledge of which so much of man's happiness and welfare depended.
