WE discourse with great glibness upon the achievements of physical science in modern times, and by taking pretty much everything for granted we manage to make ourselves comfortable and avoid many troublesome questions which might otherwise obtrude themselves on our attention in a manner that is neither very soothing to our vanity nor, indeed, very reassuring to our intelligence. To be sure, these questions, or many of them, are as old as reflective thought itself. Ever since men began to reflect, these questions have presented themselves for their solution; but to the average modern thinker, absorbed in his own self-complacency and other alluring illusions of material existence, many of them are quite new, new even to the verge of being ridiculous. And yet it is the awakening intelligence of the people, more than anything else, — the moving up of the great serried columns of the rank and file, — which is now pressing these questions to the forefront. During the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century the physical sciences appeared to exert an almost undisputed sway over the minds of the educated and partially educated masses, until the people seemed to revel in the new freedom which they offered from the unwholesome atmosphere and the cramping and unnatural methods of medieval thought; and if people went to some excess in the enjoyment of their new sense of freedom, there was at least the comforting reflection that they were well rid of this medieval blight, the most blighting incubus that ever cast its shadow upon the human intellect. It is, therefore, a priceless heritage of the not very remote past, that the people learned to think for themselves, and to think with some consecutiveness; to reason; in short, to employ the scientific method as against the dogmatic method of the past, with its senseless curses and its cruel persecutions. The people had learned to think, and to think logically, but the people first of all are religious; scientific they may be taught to be, but religious they essentially are. So, when their new leaders, as if intoxicated by their scientific discoveries, and not being careful to confine themselves within the just limits of scientific research, left this limit and began to invade the domain of religion, without first disentangling themselves from certain incapacitating incumbrances, the people began to distrust the representatives of physical science, and then to turn on them the weapons which they had been taught to use against their adversaries. The sphere of the physical sciences is the physical universe. Whatever service, therefore, these sciences have rendered or may be able to render mankind, must have to do with strictly material things. Within this sphere the physical sciences, so named, may be. and certainly have been, very useful to mankind; but whenever they have left this sphere and made incursions into the territory of either philosophy or religion, they have succeeded merely in causing confusion without accomplishing any adequate good.
If, now, we ask our physical scientist to tell us of what his universe is made, he will say, ''Why, of matter. All real objects—trees, rocks, mountains, men, etc.—are made of matter, which is a material substance composed of little, hard particles of matter called atoms, so small indeed that it is quite impossible for anybody ever to see one or to have any experience of it. Each of these atoms is encased in a thin film of ether, which is a colorless, odorless, tasteless fluid of such extreme attenuation as to be quite imperceptible to any of our senses." If one ventures to ask whether this atom is extended, the most embarrassing complications immediately arise; for if it is extended, it must be infinitely divisible, which, according to Mr. Spencer, is unthinkable, and if it is unextended we have the impossible task of getting an extended body by adding together a great many unextended bodies.
It does not help matters to substitute an electron or center of force for the atom, because it is just as unthinkable that "force," as this word is used by the physical scientist, should be exerted from an unextended point or center, as that there should be a particle of hard matter so small as to be unextended and incapable of further division in thought. Or, in the language of Mr. Spencer, "To suppose that central forces can reside in points, not infinitesimally small, but occupying no space whatever—points having position only, with nothing to mark their position—points in no respect distinguishable from the surrounding points that are not centers of force—to suppose this, is utterly beyond human power.
