SPECULATIVE SCIENCE. i +9 



so on. All this is certainly strange news to an author who has de- 

 voted several chapters of his book to the task of showing that the 

 great fundamental vice of the mechanical theory is the confusion of 

 concepts with things, and particularly of the connotations of the con- 

 cept mass with the complement of the properties of matter who, in 

 a word, is guilty of the great offense of expressing, in the precise terms 

 of the science of logic, what Professor Xewcomb is staggering at with 

 a phrase borrowed from some elementary treatise on grammar ! 



And here I am tempted to do a little Gerundian preaching myself, 

 Professor Xewcomb being, of course, my congregation of " familiars." 

 Here is my sermon : Sombre sabio y admirado, scattering supernal 

 wisdom, like hurling thunder-bolts, is a prerogative of the dwellers on 

 Olympus, not to be usurped by a drag-footed philosopher bellowing at 

 its base. Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi. I do not mean to question 

 your general ruminant powers ; but you have delivered yourself of 

 some things " that have not been well digested," and had better be 

 chewed again. Let me see how I can help you. Listen: When we 

 speak of matter, we mean something which not only has weight, pro- 

 portional to its mass, but which has all manner of properties optic, 

 thermic, electric, magnetic, chemical, and so on. Now, in the light of 

 modern science, all these " properties " are regarded as modes of mo- 

 tion, if I may be permitted to use the expression of Professor Tyndall. 

 And when we strip matter (in thought, you understand) of all these 

 modes of motion, we have nothing left but inertia, which is but 

 another name for mass. This mass is not a concrete thing, but a con- 

 cept or a part of a concept ; it is, as you say, " an abstract noun like 

 length." And the trouble with the atomo-mechanical theorists is their 

 fancy that this abstraction is a thing in itself, something you could 

 look at if you had a telescope with sufficient magnifying power, or 

 which you could weigh and measure if you had a pair of scales or a 

 chemical reagent sufficiently delicate. They labor, as you see, under 

 a huge mistake, which, in charity, ought to be corrected. Whenever 

 you find real matter, you have mass and the modes of motion in indis- 

 soluble synthesis and conjunction. But when this synthesis is broken 

 by the destructive analysis of the mechanical theorist who persists in 

 saying that things consist of matter and motion, you are bound to tell 

 him that what he calls matter is not matter at all, but only something 

 which, by a. curious law of our thought, we are bound to conceive or 

 imagine as a substratum of motion the word substratum being a bar- 

 barous Latin term which in a rough way signifies what is supposed to 

 underlie motion. The term matter, as used by those deluded people 

 who think that all the facts of this world can be explained by a reso- 

 lution of them into matter and energy, or matter and motion, denotes 

 simply what the physicist who knows what he is talking about calls 

 mass. 



And now, mind, what I have just told you is not some shallow con- 



