UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 



can be so small that it might not be smaller, or so 

 large that it might not be larger; that space is with- 

 out limits, creation without beginning; that at the 

 centre of the earth there is no up and no down, on 

 its surface no under and no over. Two waves of 

 sound may interfere with each other and produce a 

 silence, and two waves of light produce a darkness. 

 Molecular physics has made great strides since 

 Huxley's time. With all the phenomena of electric- 

 ity before him, he could not conceive of electricity 

 as a positive entity; he seems to have regarded it 

 as 'only a mode of motion, like heat. How shall we 

 think of dematerialized substance, of disembodied 

 energy, of a fluid as elusive and ubiquitous as 

 thought itself, or of the transformation of one form 

 of energy into another, as of electrical energy into 

 mechanical.? Electricity disappears in matter be- 

 yond the reach of any analysis to reveal; it is sum- 

 moned again from matter as by the wave of a wand. 

 In a thunderstorm we see it rend the heavens and 

 disappear again into its impossible lair as quick as 

 thought — energy which is not energy. Yet we 

 know the reality of all these things, and the atomic 

 theory of electricity is securely established. This 

 gross matter with which life struggles, and which we 

 conceive of as at enmity with spirit, is far more 

 wonderful stuff than we have ever dreamed of, and 

 the step from the clod to the brain of man is not so 

 impossible as it seems. There is deep beneath deep 



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