NATURAL SCIENCE ON MATTER

It is interesting to see how natural science in its last analysis of matter, in its answer to the question what is matter?— lends its aid to elucidating the statements of Christian Science regarding matter. Such passages from the Scriptures as "God is all and there is none beside Him; in Him we live and move and have our being"; and from Christian Science as There is no life, substance or intelligence in matter," are confirmed in natural science by the atomic theory: "Matter is divided into infinitely minute particles, each being separated from all others by surrounding space." This theory is still a result of the last made analyses of matter, and is simply another way of saying that when human intelligence pursues matter, to learn what it is since it seems to be something, it flees away forever before that intelligence and disappears always in a vanishing point. It would seem that the experiments for discovering "the ultimate atom" could scarcely be improved and that from the results of experiment alone it would long ago have been seriously suspected that matter really had no entity,— as well by students of natural science as by the "Idealists" among metaphysicians. But the Marquis of Salisbury in his recent presidential address to the British Association reiterates the fact that "the ultimate atom" has not been discovered; the assertion was not questioned by the scientists to whom it was made and the search still goes on.