248 POINTER READINGS 



at first its aloofness was not accepted as final. It was 

 taken to be one of the main aims of research to discover 

 how to reduce these agencies to something describable 

 in terms of familiar conceptions — in short to "explain" 

 them. For example, the true nature of electric force 

 might be some kind of displacement of the aether. 

 (Aether was at that time a familiar conception — like 

 some extreme kind of matter only more so.) Thus 

 there grew up a waiting-list of entities which should 

 one day take on their rightful relation to conceptions 

 of the familiar world. Meanwhile physics had to 

 treat them as best it could without knowledge of their 

 nature. 



It managed surprisingly well. Ignorance of the nature 

 of these entities was no bar to successful prediction of 

 behaviour. We gradually awoke to the fact that the 

 scheme of treatment of quantities on the waiting-list 

 was becoming more precise and more satisfying than 

 our knowledge of familiar things. Familiar conceptions 

 did not absorb the waiting-list, but the waiting-list 

 began to absorb familiar conceptions. Aether, after 

 being in turn an elastic solid, a jelly, a froth, a con- 

 glomeration of gyrostats, was denied a material and 

 substantial nature and put back on the waiting-list. It 

 was found that science could accomplish so much with 

 entities whose nature was left in suspense that it began 

 to be questioned whether there was any advantage in 

 removing the suspense. The crisis came when we began 

 to construct familiar entities such as matter and light 

 out of things on the waiting-list. Then at last it was seen 

 that the linkage to familiar concepts should be through 

 the advanced constructs of physics and not at the be- 

 ginning of the alphabet. We have suffered, and we still 

 suffer, from expectations that electrons and quanta must 



