THE NATURE OF MATTER 45 



Unification, the reduction of the complex to the simple, is 

 the scientific ideal. The last advance of physics brings us 

 at a bound much nearer to its realisation. 



Ill-informed writers have frequently assured worse-informed 

 readers of late that this new analysis of matter has made an 

 end of that precious fiction of the religious controversialist, 

 the Materialist. I will say a few words on Materialism later, 

 but it must be stated once for all that the new conception of 

 matter is most welcome and helpful to the writers who are 

 dubbed (though they disclaim the name) Materialists. No 

 writer of the Naturalist school for many decades has talked 

 of the "solid atom," or built on it in any way. It is true 

 that you will find occasional phrases such as : "A simple 

 elemental atom is really an immortal being." But the 

 quotation is from a religious physicist, Balfour Stewart; 

 and the " Materialist " who quotes it, L. Biichner (Force and 

 Matter)^ goes on to point out that the atom is not really 

 indivisible, and that " the so-called atoms therefore consist 

 of units of a higher grade, as the molecule does of atoms " 

 (p. 49). So wrote the arch-Materialist twenty years ago. 

 Haeckel, writing ten years later, was not less explicit. " The 

 empirical elements we now know are not really simple, 

 ultimate, and unchangeable forms," and ether is probably 

 the materia prima (Riddle, p. 79). 



How it comes about that religious writers have so loudly 

 proclaimed the new discoveries to be fatal to "Materialism," 

 when these discoveries were confidently anticipated by the 

 very men to whom they apply the epithet, I leave it to the 

 reader to conjecture. No doubt Sir Oliver Lodge was 



