SPECULATIONS ON THE NATURE OF MATTER. 789 



cate such facts as we gain ; while, without facts, we can not improve 

 our hypothesis. 



The great trouble about matter is to find out how much of it and 

 what in it is material. Strange to say, there is nothing on which 

 philosophers are less agreed. Unfortunately, our notions of matter 

 are derived solely from sense impressions ; and that form of it which 

 most impresses the senses is the most encumbered with fugitive and 

 non-essential properties. We can not say with certainty whether 

 these properties are positive or negative. 



When upon a clear summer's day we gaze outward into a cloudless 

 sky, we look apparently into clear and void space, except for the deep- 

 blue diffused light. We recognize vacuity. Even while we gaze, 

 perhaps a light, fleecy cloud forms itself before our eyes, and we form 

 the concept of the creation of a material object. We know that it is 

 not a mere apparition it is a form of substance. Properties begin to 

 be recognizable in it. It reflects light it displays color it moves. 

 Should its development progress, we shall have still further evidence 

 of its substantiality. It will grow darker and more dense. It will 

 exhibit gravity, and descend in liquid drops or solid flakes, and these 

 portions in turn will exhibit the typical properties, qualities, and re- 

 actions of matter. 



Now, what elicited this bundle of realities out of apparent nothing ? 

 A mere local refrigeration a flaw of nothing tangible abstracted 

 something from the invisible potential occupant of the space, reduced 

 its volume, sapped its mobility, its power of holding its own, and prop- 

 erties began to appear. Death began its work, and, as the animus fled, 

 the skeleton framework came within our ken. 



We might rise by analogy from the nimbus to the nebula from 

 the terrestrial to the cosmical and see with imagination's eye a simi- 

 lar inverse evolution producing the apparition of things substantial, 

 which may be really but the intaglio of the realities. For that which 

 consists merely in the negation of something can not be the truest 

 substance. An ulcer is not more material or real than the healthy 

 tissue before the latter gives urgent call for recognition of its actuality 

 by inflammation, incipient degradation, and advancing dissolution. 



It may be possible, however, to corner a reality by the reverse 

 process. A fair type of matter is our block of ice. It is sufficiently 

 substantial, and loaded down with properties. A simple exposure to 

 different temperature conditions causes its sensational properties to 

 drop off like old clothes. We soon come to a pair of invisible and 

 intangible existences, investigable by indirect means only, of which 

 sufficient knowledge has been gained to establish their discontinuous 

 or corpuscular character, as imagined by Democritus. 



This molecule we must take as the representative of matter ; for 

 all masses of it, whether gaseous, liquid, or solid, are but aggregations 

 of similar corpuscles. We can only pursue it with the eye of the 



