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Much as conception may tell us about such invisible objects, it sheds no ray of light into their interior. The completer, indeed, our definitions of ether-waves, atoms, Gods, or souls become, the less instead of the more intelligible do they appear to us. The learned in such things are consequently beginning more and more to ascribe a solely instrumental value to our concepts of them.
It never is completed or nailed down. I speak not merely of our ideas of imperceptibles like ether-waves or dissociated 'ions, or of 'ejects' like the contents of our neighbors' minds; I speak also of ideas which we might verify if we would take the trouble, but which we hold for true altho unterminated perceptually, because nothing says 'no' to us, and there is no contradicting truth in sight.
For twenty years after that it was common to hear the expressions heat, and radiant heat, to distinguish between phenomena in matter and what is now called radiant energy radiations, or simply ether-waves.
If radiant energy, so-called, falls upon a mass of matter, what is absorbed is at once transformed into heat or into electric or magnetic effects; which one of these depends upon the character of the mechanism upon which the radiant energy acts, but the radiant energy itself, which consists of ether-waves, is traceable back in every case to a mass of matter having definite characteristic motions.
It would not require a great man to say calmly: Men, birds, even ether-waves, if you will, feel after this and this fashion. The greatness and the excitement begin when he says: Your common sense, your practical intellect, your boasted science have entirely deceived you; see what the real truth is instead!
That atoms really vibrate at the above rate per second is very certain, for their vibrations produce ether-waves the length of which may be accurately measured. When a tuning-fork vibrates 500 times a second, and the sound travels 1100 feet in the same interval, the length of each wave will be found by dividing the velocity in the air by the number of vibrations, or 1100 ÷ 500 = 2.2 feet.
Ether-waves they were, it is true, but vibrations driven with such fierce intensity that the screens of deflection surrounding the pirate vessels could not handle even a fraction of their awful power.
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