Without this reaction of the walls upon the 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 [1] Newton's third letter to Bentley.
[2] Had Sir Charles Wheatstone been induced to resume his measurements, varying the substances through which, and the conditions under which, the current is propagated, he might have rendered great service to science, both theoretic and experimental..