IV

Science has developed methods and implements of incredible delicacy. Its

"microbalance" can estimate "the difference of weight of the order of

the millionth of a milligram." Light travels at the speed of 186,000

miles a second, yet science can follow it with its methods, and finds

that it travels faster with the current of running water than against

it. Science has perfected a thermal instrument by which it can detect

the heat of a lighted candle six miles away, and the warmth of the human

face several miles distant. It has devised a method by which it can

count the particles in the alpha rays of radium that move at a velocity

of twenty thousand kilometers a second, and a method by which, through

the use of a screen of zinc-sulphide, it can see the flashes produced by

the alpha atoms when they strike this screen. It weighs and counts and

calculates the motions of particles of matter so infinitely small that

only the imagination can grasp them. Its theories require it to treat

the ultimate particles into which it resolves matter, and which are so

small that they are no longer divisible, as if they were solid bodies

with weight and form, with centre and circumference, colliding with one

another like billiard-balls, or like cosmic bodies in the depths of

space, striking one another squarely, and, for aught I know, each going

through another, or else grazing one another and glancing off. To

particles of matter so small that they can no longer be divided or made

smaller, the impossible feat of each going through the centre of

another, or of each enveloping the other, might be affirmed of them

without adding to their unthinkableness. The theory is that if we divide

a molecule of water the parts are no longer water, but atoms of hydrogen

and oxygen--real bodies with weight and form, and storehouses of energy,

but no longer divisible.

Indeed, the atomic theory of matter leads us into a non-material world,

or a world the inverse of the solid, three-dimensioned world that our

senses reveal to us, or to matter in a fourth estate. We know solids and

fluids and gases; but emanations which are neither we know only as we

know spirits and ghosts--by dreams or hearsay. Yet this fourth or

ethereal estate of matter seems to be the final, real, and fundamental

condition.

How it differs from spirit is not easy to define. The beta ray of radium

will penetrate solid iron a foot thick, a feat that would give a spirit

pause. The ether of space, which science is coming more and more to look

upon as the mother-stuff of all things, has many of the attributes of

Deity. It is omnipresent and all-powerful. Neither time nor space has

dominion over it. It is the one immutable and immeasurable thing in the

universe. From it all things arise and to it they return. It is

everywhere and nowhere. It has none of the finite properties of

matter--neither parts, form, nor dimension; neither density nor tenuity;

it cannot be compressed nor expanded nor moved; it has no inertia nor

mass, and offers no resistance; it is subject to no mechanical laws, and

no instrument or experiment that science has yet devised can detect its

presence; it has neither centre nor circumference, neither extension nor

boundary. And yet science is as convinced of its existence as of the

solid ground beneath our feet. It is the one final reality in the

universe, if we may not say that it is the universe. Tremors or

vibrations in it reach the eye and make an impression that we call

light; electrical oscillations in it are the source of other phenomena.

It is the fountain-head of all potential energy. The ether is an

invention of the scientific imagination. We had to have it to account

for light, gravity, and the action of one body upon another at a

distance, as well as to account for other phenomena. The ether is not a

body, it is a medium. All bodies are in motion; matter moves; the ether

is in a state of absolute rest. Says Sir Oliver Lodge, "The ether is

strained, and has the property of exerting strain and recoil." An

electron is like a knot in the ether. The ether is the fluid of fluids,

yet its tension or strain is so great that it is immeasurably more dense

than anything else--a phenomenon that may be paralleled by a jet of

water at such speed that it cannot be cut with a sword or severed by a

hammer. It is so subtle or imponderable that solid bodies are as vacuums

to it, and so pervasive that all conceivable space is filled with it;

"so full," says Clerk Maxwell, "that no human power can remove it from

the smallest portion of space, or produce the slightest flaw in its

infinite continuity."

The scientific imagination, in its attempts to master the workings of

the material universe, has thus given us a creation which in many of its

attributes rivals Omnipotence. It is the sum of all contradictions, and

the source of all reality. The gross matter which we see and feel is one

state of it; electricity, which is without form and void, is another

state of it; and our minds and souls, Sir Oliver Lodge intimates, may be

still another state of it. But all these theories of physical science

are justified by their fruits. The atomic theory of matter, and the

kinetic theory of gases, are mathematically demonstrated. However unreal

and fantastic they may appear to our practical faculties, conversant

only with ponderable bodies, they bear the test of the most rigid and

exact experimentation.

V

After we have marveled over all these hidden things, and been impressed

by the world within world of the material universe, do we get any nearer

to the mystery of life? Can we see where the tremendous change from the

non-living to the living takes place? Can we evoke life from the

omnipotent ether, or see it arise in the whirling stream of atoms and

electrons? Molecular science opens up to us a world where the infinitely

little matches the infinitely great, where matter is dematerialized and

answers to many of the conceptions of spirit; but does it bring us any

nearer the origin of life? Is radio-active matter any nearer living

matter than is the clod under foot? Are the darting electrons any more

vital than the shooting-stars? Can a flash of radium emanations on a

zinc-sulphide plate kindle the precious spark? It is probably just as

possible to evoke vitality out of the clash of billiard-balls as out of

the clash of atoms and electrons. This allusion to billiard-balls

recalls to my mind a striking passage from Tyndall's famous Belfast

Address which he puts in the mouth of Bishop Butler in his imaginary

argument with Lucretius, and which shows how thoroughly Tyndall

appreciated the difficulties of his own position in advocating the

theory of the physico-chemical origin of life.

The atomic and electronic theory of matter admits one to a world that

does indeed seem unreal and fantastic. "If my bark sinks," says the

poet, "'t is to another sea." If the mind breaks through what we call

gross matter, and explores its interior, it finds itself indeed in a

vast under or hidden world--a world almost as much a creation of the

imagination as that visited by Alice in Wonderland, except that the

existence of this world is capable of demonstration. It is a world of

the infinitely little which science interprets in terms of the

infinitely large. Sir Oliver Lodge sees the molecular spaces that

separate the particles of any material body relatively like the

interstellar spaces that separate the heavenly bodies. Just as all the

so-called solid matter revealed by our astronomy is almost infinitesimal

compared with the space through which it is distributed, so the

electrons which compose the matter with which we deal are comparable to

the bodies of the solar system moving in vast spaces. It is indeed a

fantastic world where science conceives of bodies a thousand times

smaller than the hydrogen atom--the smallest body known to science;

where it conceives of vibrations in the ether millions of millions times

a second; where we are bombarded by a shower of corpuscles from a

burning candle, or a gas-jet, or a red-hot iron surface, moving at the

speed of one hundred thousand miles a second! But this almost omnipotent

ether has, after all, some of the limitations of the finite. It takes

time to transmit the waves of light from the sun and the stars. This

measurable speed, says Sir Oliver Lodge, gives the ether away, and shows

its finite character.

It seems as if the theory of the ether must be true, because it fits in

so well with the enigmatic, contradictory, incomprehensible character of

the universe as revealed to our minds. We can affirm and deny almost

anything of the ether--that it is immaterial, and yet the source of all

material; that it is absolutely motionless, yet the cause of all motion;

that it is the densest body in nature, and yet the most rarified; that

it is everywhere, but defies detection; that it is as undiscoverable as

the Infinite itself; that our physics cannot prove it, though they

cannot get along without it. The ether inside a mass of iron or of lead

is just as dense as the ether outside of it--which means that it is not

dense at all, in our ordinary use of the term.