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One hesitates to make such a statement lest he do violence to that oneness, that sameness, that pervades the universe. All trees go to the same soil for their ponderable elements, their ashes, and to the air and the light for their imponderable, their carbon and their energy, but what makes the tree, and makes one tree differ from another?
Without exception, the authoritative physicists of our time accept this plenum as a verity, and reason about it with something of the same confidence they manifest in speaking of "ponderable" matter or of, energy. It is true there are those among them who are disposed to deny that this all-pervading plenum merits the name of matter.
As a rule, they were stuffed with fear and with a fear so strange and alien that it had no ponderable quality. No fear that I experienced in my waking life resembled the fear that possessed me in my sleep. It was of a quality and kind that transcended all my experiences. For instance, I was a city boy, a city child, rather, to whom the country was an unexplored domain.
"Take it," we said, "take it." "Amounts to the resolution of the ultimate atom." "Ha!" we exclaimed. "I must ask you first to clear your mind," the Professor continued, "of all conception of ponderable magnitude." We nodded. We had already cleared our mind of this.
But he does, for he begins by assuming infinite space filled to the farthest with matter ponderable and imponderable, and forthwith proceeds to weigh, measure, and divide the latter as though it were finite! Here are two terms of the doctrine of the Trinity at once.
On the contrary, the ponderable and tangible realities of the immediate situation counselled neutrality. They were revolted by the hideous brutality of the war and its colossal waste. Participation must be purchased with a similarly colossal diversion of American energy from constructive to destructive work, the imposition of a similarly heavy burden upon the future production of American labour.
If we keep firmly in mind the preceding conclusion a conclusion which is neither exclusively my own, nor very new we shall find a certain satisfaction in watching the discussions of physicists on the essence of matter, on the nature of force and of energy, and on the relations of ponderable and imponderable matter. We all know how hot is the fight raging on this question.
The space through which the planets move is filled with a kind of matter which serves as a medium for the transmission of heat and light, and this kind of matter, though different in some respects from ordinary ponderable matter, is yet like it in exerting friction.
The cry of "discontent" has become a fetich among unthinking politicians. We are all, thank God, discontented, and a poor lot we should be if we were not. The workingman's discontent has been over-emphasized, for the reason that what he demands is material, ponderable, for sale, easy to see, and not far out of the reach of one's hand.
And the idea steadily gains ground that no such thing as empty space exists, and that everywhere the primitive atoms of ponderable matter or heavy "mass" are separated from each other by the homogeneous ether which extends throughout all space.
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