HOW PHENOMENA ARE INTERPRETED. 77 



to be moved, others have to do it, but -no one would think of 

 calling a sleeping man inert. For the time being he is unable 

 to use his energy in that particular way, and energy may exist 

 in many different ways. The smallest particle of coal we can 

 see in a microscope possesses its proportional part of energy of 

 that kind, and one must perforce assume the same things true 

 of the atoms of carbon ; but that is the same thing as saying that 

 carbon atoms are not inert things, and the same thing is to be 

 said of oxygen, hydrogen, and the rest. And there is no evi- 

 dence that any kind of a physical process could ever extract all 

 its energy, for there is the best of physical evidence that atoms 

 of all sorts are not only indestructible by physical processes, 

 but that they possess inherent energy, and are also able to 

 absorb other energy to a perfectly unlimited extent from the 

 medium in which they exist, namely, the ether ; also that they 

 react upon the ether because of their own inherent energy. 

 Observe in all this that I am talking about matter in its atomic 

 forms, not as foreign bodies acted upon by this or that kind of 

 energy, but as being themselves the very embodiment of energy 

 and reacting in every case in accordance with the law of 

 energy. 



Physical philosophers had sufficient data for all this long ago, 

 but their philosophical preconceptions prevented its significance 

 from being seen until Joule, Faraday, Helmholtz, and a few 

 others developed what is called the doctrine of the Conser- 

 vation of Energy. Even with all the evidence we have to-day, 

 there are many physicists and chemists who follow afar off. 

 Some are afraid from religious convictions, others are not 

 interested in fundamental questions at all, and so pay no at- 

 tention to them ; still others are muddled with terminology, 

 which is frequently misleading, and such try to convince them- 

 selves and others that not so much is known as is known. 

 The outlook is not such as they expected, and the interpreta- 

 tion is so far from their hazy ideals that the new knowledge 

 and all its implications are repudiated without being appre- 

 hended. If matter and its relations are not what they have 

 been believed to be, and if the growth of knowledge has been 

 steadily away from the older conceptions, so that not a single 



