MATERIAL scientists have been called upon from time to time to readjust their theories about matter, and now they find that through the recent discovery of radium and the investigation of its properties, they are forced to a further reconstruction of heretofore accepted dogma and premise, and to doubt even the existence of such a thing as matter as heretofore defined. Professor Ramsey's discovery that the elements can be changed one into another is the cause of the latest upheaval, and this, in connection with Professor Lodge's declaration that matter, after all, is only the weapon and vehicle of the mind, has caused the Boston Journal to ask whether Mrs. Eddy's views about matter are not now verified by science, and to declare that "this new theory seems to be a scientific interpretation of the position long taken by the Christian Scientists."
The seriousness with which our contemporary propounds its question and announces its conclusion proves that Mrs. Eddy's postulate, "All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation" (Science and Health, p. 468), is not so startling to the twentieth century as it was to the last quarter of the nineteenth. The breadth of view of this editor is in marked contrast to the attitude of those critics of Christian Science who have been much disturbed by what they have looked upon as Mrs. Eddy's unwarranted interference with the substantiality and reality of matter. We doubt whether those critics who have so persistently disapproved of Christian Science because of its Discoverer's rejection of the proposition that matter is a tangible entity, will turn thir batteries upon the eminent men who have conducted these recent investigations, but we can see no other consistent course open to them.
The following is the Journal's editorial, and in re-publishing it we congratulate its writer upon his recognition that the logic of these late discoveries is in support of Mrs. Eddy's estimate of matter.
