A CRITICISM. 19 



which we thus assume to exist in all bodies. The atom has neither color, 

 smell, warmth, taste, life or intelligence ; it has only mass and motion ; 

 for it came by the method of divesting our thoughts of everything but 

 mass and motion. It is a projection of a " think " upon the background 

 of nature. And it is an absurdity. No such thing exists in all the wide 

 universe as mass and motion divested from color, smell, warmth, life and 

 intelligence. The atom is unthinkable. It is perfectly hard and it is 

 perfectly elastic which is the same as saying that it bends and it doesn't 

 bend at the same at time ; it has form, and it hasn't form ; it has affinities 

 and yet is perfectly indifferent. To justify to men the ways of their 

 Mumbo Jumbo has sorely exercised the votaries of the Atom. One phi- 

 losopher says that it is mere matter, passive, exercising no force but resist- 

 ance ; another says that is is a centre of force, without matter ; a third 

 suggests that it is not itself matter, but only a vortex in other matter ! 

 All agree that it is not an object of sense, and there remains no conclusion 

 but that it is nonsense ! 



And so on in all directions. Human thought flying off at its tangents 

 from Nature lands itself in infinite nothings afar off, poor ghostly skeletons 

 and abstractions from nature which indeed is all right, for human 

 thought as yet can only see ghosts and not realities ; but let there be no 

 mistake, let these ghosts not be mistaken for realities for they are not 

 even compatible with each other. The Atom that suits the physicist does 

 not suit the chemist. The Ether that does for the vehicle of Light will 

 not do for the vehicle of Gravitation, and the Medium that might do for 

 universal Electricity would not be available for either of the other two 

 purposes. 



It would be hardly worth while entering into these criticisms, were it 

 not evident that Science in modern times, either tacitly or explicitly, has 

 been seeking, as I said at the beginning, to enounce facts independent of 

 Man, the observer. Seeing that the ordinary statements of daily life are 

 obviously inexact and relative to the observer charged with human sen- 

 sation in fact Science has naturally tried to produce something which 

 should be exact and independent of human sensation ; but here it has of 

 course condemned itself beforehand to failure ; for no statement of isolated 

 phenomena or groups of phenomena can be exact except by the method 

 of ignorance aforesaid, and no statement obviously can be really independ- 

 ent of human sensation. When a man says // if cold, his statement, it 

 must be confessed, is deplorably human and vague. // what is that ? 



i See, for instance, the last new thing in this style the Helmholtz molecule as im- 

 proved upon by Sir William Thomson ; it is described as follows "A heavy mass con- 

 nected by massless springs with a massless enclosing shell ; or there may be several shells 

 enclosing each other connected by springs with a dense mass in the centre (far more 

 dense than the ether)." It is not, of course, seriously maintained that this nonsensical 

 creation exists but that if it did exist it would account for certain unexplained phenom- 

 ena in the dispersion of light, &c. 



