AND ITS SELF-CONSERVATION. 77 



What shall we say, then, of the claim that all matter 

 is permanently divided into seventy or more elements, all 

 differing essentially from one another ? It is true that 

 chemists themselves are beginning to doubt the finality of 

 their analyses ; and while the tendency still is in the main 

 to look to a further increase in the number of elements, 

 there is already arising here and there a guarded query as 

 to whether, after all, the elements may not prove to be only 

 specialized conditions of a <( matter" that, theoretically 

 at least, is primarily homogeneous.* 



I say "theoretically," because it is evident that there 

 can be no actual case of concrete matter which can be 

 strictly homogeneous. This we have already seen in the 

 attempt to form a conception of matter as consisting 

 solely of repulsion. It was found that such conception 

 cannot be formed, because no sooner has the representa- 

 tion of such assumption been made than it becomes evi- 

 dent that any real repulsion must develop attraction as a 

 necessary aspect of such real repulsion; just as any real 

 attraction must include, as a necessary phase of itself, 

 repulsion also. 



In this connection the following significant paragraph 

 from Lockyer (" Spectrum Analysis," N. Y. Ed., p. 190) 

 may be cited. "It is," he says, "abundantly clear that 

 if the so-called elements, or, more properly speaking, 

 their finest atoms those that give us line spectra are 



* It was not until after the foregoing was written that I read Mr. Spen 

 cer's " Principles of Psychology" and found therein (N. Y. Ed., Vol. I., p. 155) 

 the following statement: "Moreover, there- is reason to suspect that the 

 so-called simple substances are themselves compound, and that there is but 

 one ultimate form of matter, out of which the successively more complex 

 forms of matter are built up." Other suggestions of a similar nature had 

 been previously made as that hydrogen is the ultimate form of matter; 

 though this has the obvious fault of regarding one of the various differen- 

 tiated phases of matter as itself the primal undifferentiated aspect of matter. 



