24 THE LIMITATIONS OF SCIENCE 



or of Sir Oliver Lodge, who bestows on the ether the 

 ability to carry ghostly messages as well as light. 



As a critical attempt, the school of energetics has 

 done good work by calling attention to the inadequacies 

 of atomic theories, yet as a positive method it has had 

 comparatively little effect until very recently, when it 

 has been pushed by a school of German physicists into 

 what can only be called an abyss of confusion where, 

 as in a sort of looking-glass world, all things tan- 

 gible become intangible and the abstract replaces 

 the concrete. But the majority of men of science still 

 rely absolutely on atomic hypotheses. Indeed, a fresh 

 stimulus has been given them by the efforts to explain 

 the experimental facts, recently discovered, concerning 

 Roentgen rays, the passage of electricity through gases, 

 and the properties of radium ; facts which will probably 

 do more, in the end, to discountenance mechanical 

 models of phenomena, by making them practically un- 

 manageable, than the theoretical criticisms of the fol- 

 lowers of the school of energetics. 



So long as the hypothesis of an invariable and in- 

 divisible atom gave a reasonably simple and satisfac- 

 tory method of attacking the problems of physics, 

 even those men of science who were ready to acknowl- 

 edge the tentative character of the hypothesis and the 

 contradictory nature of its postulates were unwilling 

 to try other methods. But the phenomena mentioned 

 above do not fit into the general scheme, because the 



