EVOLUTION THE MASTER-KEY 



was once thought to be the only reality worth 

 mentioning. There is more to be said of this 

 view, which upsets all our notions of every-day 

 things, and which describes the attributes of a 

 chair or a mountain in terms of electricity; but 

 here we will simply accept it. This reduces us to 

 a category of three energy, the ether, and mind ; 

 but obviously we cannot rest here. The human 

 intellect has an irresistible tendency to unify. 

 All thinking people are convinced of the truth of 

 some form of monism. Monotheism is evidently 

 an ancient expression of this tendency a tenden- 

 cy which every day's new light further justifies. 

 At present physical theory seems to suggest that 

 this ether, originally "invented" to account for the 

 phenomena of light, and called the " luminiferous 

 ether," is really the prima materia of the ancients, 

 the Urstoff of the Germans, the protyle of Sir William 

 Crookes; and all forms of energy may be referred 

 to vibratory and other movements of the ether. 

 Let us, then, provisionally reduce our category of 

 the Cosmos to a dualism the ether and its energy 

 on the one hand, and mind on the other. 



Such a dualism, as a final statement, will satisfy 

 nobody ; indeed, has satisfied nobody, for the prob- 

 lem is old though the terms and the details are 

 new. The reader is familiar with the two extremes 

 which thought has taken in time past; and they 

 are the same to-day. The idealists maintain that 

 mind is the only reality, and that the ether and its 

 energy exist only in mind : as Berkeley would say, 

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