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Updated: June 10, 2025
If we force a fluid or a gas to become suddenly solid, leaving no time for its particles to arrange themselves, and cohere in that direction in which the cohesive attraction is strongest, no crystals will be formed, but the resulting solid will have a different colour, a different degree of hardness and cohesion, and will refract light differently; in one word, will be amorphous.
One of three great Polonaises, it is just beginning to be understood, having been derided as amorphous, febrile, of little musical moment, even Liszt declaring that "such pictures possess but little real value to art. ... Deplorable visions which the artist should admit with extreme circumspection within the graceful circle of his charmed realm."
We know little of the properties of this extraordinary substance save that in its materialising form it seems extremely sensitive to the action of light. A figure built up in it and detached from the medium dissolves in light quicker than a snow image under a tropical sun, so that two successive flash-light photographs would show the one a perfect figure, and the next an amorphous mass.
They do all this believing they are making progress, and instead of training their pupils to observe for themselves without prejudice, they instil their own prejudices into the minds of the students, cramming them with definitions and descriptions of the strangest and most amorphous kind, which effectually prevent them from thinking for themselves.
These two divisions may be subdivided into, the former gaseous and liquid, the latter amorphous and crystalline; but whether one or the other of these divisions be considered, their ultimate and common division will be the ATOM. By the atom we understand that portion of matter which admits of no further division, which, though as inconceivable for minuteness as space is for extent, has still definite weight, form, and volume; which under favorable circumstances, has that power or force called cohesion, the intensity of which constitutes strength of material, which every engineer is supposed to understand, but which lies far beyond the powers of the human mind for comprehension or analysis.
We have seen, in a kind of dumb, hopeful astonishment, everybody about us piling into the fray, some fighting for the rights of labour and some for the rights of capital, and we have kept wondering if possibly a little something could not be done before long, possibly next year, in behalf of the huge, battered, helpless Public, that dear amorphous old ladylike Person doddering along the Main Street of the World, now being knocked down by one side and now by the other.
To a person torn from civilization and flung into the arms of Nature the most terrible thing is the sense of the amorphous, the feeling that there is no structure in this world where houses are not and laws are not and streets are not, no power to intervene between oneself and injury, no thread to cling to. The idea of a Providence to such a person is like brandy.
Yet this amorphous particle, devoid of everything which, in the higher animals, we call organs, is capable of feeding, growing and multiplying; of separating from the ocean the small proportion of carbonate of lime which is dissolved in sea-water; and of building up that substance into a skeleton for itself, according to a pattern which can be imitated by no other known agency.
So from the neighbourhood of their unlovely clothes, questioning glances, and under-vitalised pursuit of art and literature, she removed herself to her sitting-room up-stairs. Charles should serve her meals there in future, for to sit at table with these neuters, clothed in amorphous garments, came near upsetting her digestion.
Nothing more remarkable than the variety of forms and tints mingling in the mighty mass the amorphous, the crystallized, the hyaline, the burnt; here mottled and banded, there plain red and pink, green and brown, slaty and chocolate, purple, kaolin-white; and, rarest of all, honeycomb-yellow.
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