188 THE NEW KNOWLEDGE. 



We must now ask ourselves the questions: 1. Is it proved? 

 2. Are there any phenomena that the theory will not ac- 

 count for? 



With regard to the first question, we may say at once, 

 the theory is not proved. It is an hypothesis which ac- 

 counts in a beautiful way for the phenomena enumerated 

 above. It finds its chief acceptance, outside of this, in the 

 fact determined by Thomson that the whole mass of mat- 

 ter may be accounted for on the supposition that it is elec- 

 trical in origin. But between the fact that it, and all these 

 other matters, may be accounted for, and the fact that there 

 is nothing else in heaven and earth that will account for it 

 instead, there is a great gulf fixed. The acceptibility of 

 the hypothesis depends on the extent of its exclusive power 

 to account for things; the more exclusive it becomes the 

 more we shall believe it. In the meantime, while it is cer- 

 tainly extraordinary in its power to explain, the answer to 

 our second question bids us be cautious. There are phe- 

 nomena which the theory does not yet explain. For ex- 

 ample what is positive electricity, as distinguished from 

 negative which consists of these corpuscles? The answer is, 

 we do not know. We conceive of an atom as an aggrega- 

 tion of negative corpuscles arranged in a certain number in 

 a certain way, and surrounded by a sphere of positive elec- 

 tricity which balances the negative electricity of the cor- 

 puscles within it. We can account for positive electrifica- 

 tion as distinct from positive electricity on the supposition 

 that a positively electrified body is one which has lost some of 

 its corpuscles while a negatively electrified body is one which 

 has gained corpuscles. But this does not tell us what posi- 

 tive electricity actually is. If it is made up of particles, these 

 particles must either have no mass at all, or very little, for the 

 mass of the whole atom seems to be simply the sum of the 



