200 SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 



This is nothing new. Long ago the great 

 thinkers concluded that the properties of matter, 

 weight, colour, temperature, etc. had no existence 

 apart from the thinking mind, and all that new 

 scientific discovery has done is to give scientific 

 proof of this philosophic thesis, and to show that 

 the hypothetical " substance " of matter has no 

 existence. It has shown this by analysing matter 

 into ether waves, i.e. into imponderable forces. 

 It has shown this by showing that all the qualities 

 of so-called matter are the product, in the mind, 

 of forms of immaterial force — that matter is 

 nothing apart from force, and changes in all its 

 characters as the force changes its form. Water, 

 steam, ice are not different forms of one substance, 

 but interchangeable forms of energy. Every 

 quality of every kind of matter — its colour, its 

 temperature, even its weight — may be removed by 

 varying, by ordinary physical processes, the direc- 

 tions, and velocity, and quantity of so-called inter- 

 atomic and intra-atomic energy. When the metal 

 gold combines with the metal chlorine to form a 

 colourless liquid, where are the substances ? It is 

 nonsense to say that the gold is still there, that 

 the chlorine is still there ; they are not there ; 

 they vanished when the forces which constituted 

 them — which produced their mental apparition — 

 were altered and dissociated, and a quite new 



