TEE NEW THEORY OF MATTER. 503 



yet solved. In the course of them the very possibility of an independ- 

 ent physical universe has seemed to melt away under the solvent pow- 

 ers of critical analysis. But with all this I am not now concerned. I 

 do not propose to ask what proof we have that an external world ex- 

 ists, or how, if it does exist, we are able to obtain cognizance of it. 

 These may be questions very proper to be asked by philosophy ; but they 

 are not proper questions to be asked by science. For, logically, they 

 are antecedent to science, and we must reject the sceptical answers to 

 both of them before physical science becomes possible at all. My pres- 

 ent purpose requires me to do no more than observe that, be this theory 

 of the primary and secondary qualities of matter good or bad, it is the 

 one on which science has in the main proceeded. It was with matter 

 thus conceived that Newton experimented. To it he applied his laws 

 of motion; of it he predicated universal gravitation. Nor was the case 

 greatly altered when science became as much preoccupied with the 

 movements of molecules as it was with those of planets. For mole- 

 cules and atoms, whatever else might be said of them, were at least 

 pieces of matter, and, like other pieces of matter, possessed those c pri- 

 mary' qualities supposed to be characteristic of all matter, whether 

 found in large masses or in small. 



But the electric theory which we have been considering carries us 

 into a new region altogether. It does not confine itself to accounting 

 for the secondary qualities by the primary, or the behavior of matter 

 in bulk by the behavior of matter in atoms ; it analyzes matter, whether 

 molar or molecular, into something which is not matter at all. The 

 atom is now no more than the relatively vast theater of operations in 

 which minute monads perform their orderly evolutions; while the 

 monads themselves are not regarded as units of matter, but as units 

 of electricity; so that matter is not merely explained, but is explained 

 away. 



Now the point to which I desire to call attention is not to be sought 

 in the great divergence between matter as thus conceived by the physi- 

 cist and matter as the ordinary man supposes himself to know it, be- 

 tween matter as it is perceived and matter as it really is, but to the 

 fact that the first of these two quite inconsistent views is wholly based 

 on the second. 



This is surely something of a paradox. We claim to found all our 

 scientific opinions on experience; and the experience on which we 

 found our theories of the physical universe is our sense perception of 

 that universe. That is experience; and in this region of belief there 

 is no other. Yet the conclusions which thus profess to be entirely 

 founded upon experience are to all appearance fundamentally opposed 

 to it; our knowledge of reality is based upon illusion; and the very 

 conceptions we use in describing it to others, or in thinking of it our- 



