But 'the mode of action by which the effects take place is stated very generally; so generally, indeed, that probably a dozen precise schemes of electrochemical action might be drawn up, differing essentially from each other, yet all agreeing with the statement there given.' It appears to me that these words might with justice be applied to Faraday's own researches at this time.

They furnish us with results of permanent value; but little help can be found in the theory advanced to account for them.

It would, perhaps, be more correct to say that the theory itself is hardly presentable in any tangible form to the intellect.

Faraday looks, and rightly looks, into the heart of the decomposing body itself; he sees, and rightly sees, active within it the forces which produce the decomposition, and he rejects, and rightly rejects, the notion of external attraction; but beyond the hypothesis of decompositions and recompositions, enunciated and developed by Grothuss and Davy, he does not, I think, help us to any definite conception as to how the force reaches the decomposing mass and acts within it.

Nor, indeed, can this be done, until we know the true physical process which underlies what we call an electric current.
Faraday conceives of that current as 'an axis of power having contrary forces exactly equal in amount in opposite directions'; but this definition, though much quoted and circulated, teaches us nothing regarding the current.