THE JOURNEYING ATOMS 



We have a good illustration of the power of 

 chemistry, and how closely it is dogging the foot- 

 steps of life, in the many organic compounds it has 

 built up out of the elements, such as sugar, starch, 

 indigo, camphor, rubber, and so forth, all of which 

 used to be looked upon as impossible aside from life- 

 processes. It is such progress as this that leads 

 some men of science to believe that the creation of 

 life itself is within the reach of chemistry. I do not 

 believe that any occult or transcendental principle 

 bars the way, but that some unknown and perhaps 

 unknowable condition does, as mysterious and un- 

 repeatable as that which separates our mental life 

 from our physical. The transmutation of the phys- 

 ical into the psychical takes place, but the secret of it 

 we do not know. It does not seem to fall within the 

 law of the correlation and the conservation of energy. 



Free or single atoms are very rare; they all 

 quickly find their mates or partners. This eagerness 

 of the elements to combine is one of the mysteries. 

 If the world of visible matter were at one stroke 

 resolved into its constituent atoms, it would practi- 

 cally disappear; we might smell it, or taste it, if we 

 were left, but we could not see it, or feel it; the 

 water would vanish, the solid ground would vanish 

 — more than half of it into oxygen atoms, and the 

 rest mainly into silicon atoms. 



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