THE CONSTITUTION OF MATTER. H 



uniform we call matter. A single one of these energies 

 shows forth, stripped of this dress, and bare. It rules all 

 the others, because it knows them all without their know- 

 ing it. It is not power merely, but consciousness besides. 

 It is the soul. How define it otherwise than as force in its 

 purest essence, since we look upon it, as on the marble of 

 the antique, in splendid nakedness, which is radiant beauty 

 too? 



Whether we consider coarser matter which can be 

 weighed and felt, or that more subtile, lively, and active 

 matter we call ether, or again the spiritual principle, which 

 is energy simple, we have then always before us only har- 

 monious collections of forces, symmetrical activities, or- 

 dered powers, more or less conscious of the part they play 

 in the infinite concert whose glorious music the Creator 

 composed. Let us set aside for a moment the variety of 

 groupings which determine the succession and the manifold 

 aspects of these forces, and there will remain, as constitu- 

 ent principles of the web of the universe, as irreducible 

 and primordial ingredients of the world, nothing but dy- 

 namic points, nothing but monads. 



The term of the rigorous analysis of phenomena is, 

 definitely, the conception of an infinity of centres of simi- 

 lar and unextended forces, of energies without forms, sim- 

 ple and eternal. We ask what these forces are, and we 

 assert in answer that it is impossible to distinguish them 

 from motion. Force may be conceived, but not shaped to 

 the fancy. The clearest and truest thing we can say of it 

 is, that it is an energy analogous to that whose constant 

 and undeniable presence we feel dwelling in our deepest 

 selves. " The only force of which we have consciousness," 

 says Henry Sainte-Claire Deville, " is will." Our soul, 

 which gives us consciousness of force, is also the type of it, 

 in this sense that, if we wish to pierce to the elementary 

 mechanisms of the world, we are imperiously driven to 



