Inorganic Matter. 149 



masses are moved. But our knowledge of the law 

 of these hidden forces must be arrived at by observa- 

 tion so far removed from the original activities as 

 to be of very doubtful validity. The action of the 

 forces through the atoms may be controlled by higher 

 laws that are undiscoverable ; or the force acting 

 through an atom may cease to act through it and 

 pass into some other mode of activity, wholly out of 

 relation to man's sensibility, and therefore according 

 to Mr. Spencer's theory, out of the knowable. Even 

 the atom itself may disappear, if we may speak of the 

 disappearance of what is for ever invisible : for its re- 

 sistance is a manifestation of force ; if that force cease 

 to act through it in resistance, the atom, according to 

 Mr. Spencer, " ceases to be something and becomes no- 

 thing." If, then, each atom is not the embodiment 

 of a quantum of force remaining unchanged, but, on 

 the contrary, is the bearer or instrument of force, not 

 immanent in it but exterior to it, the law of "the 

 redistribution of matter and motion" has no rational 

 basis : it cannot be maintained as the law of the 

 successive changes of all concrete existence, and the 

 evolution hypothesis is not tenable. The atom being- 

 enthroned as king in the realm of knowledge, it is not 

 satisfactory, when we would ascertain clearly and 

 without ambiguity what this is which is to be to us in 

 the place of God, to be left without a fully reasoned 

 account of it. 



But, leaving this pflint undetermined, we may ad- 



