204 SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 



This may seem mysticism, but every scientific 

 thinker must become a mystic. As the great 

 spiritual teacher Huxley averred : " The honest 

 and rigorous following up of the argument which 

 leads us to materialism inevitably carries us beyond it^ 



The ultimates of science must be interpreted in 

 terms of philosophy, and the whole revelation 

 and gospel of matter may be summed up thus : 

 All the phenomena of matter are ideas, and the 

 ideas in aggregate produce the idea " Causal Force,'' 

 which, again, gives rise both to the idea and 

 emotion, God, even as sensation heat in excess 

 gives rise to the sensation pain. 



But it may be said, this force is not eternal. 

 The grip of God relaxes ; the atom decays ; the 

 force becomes ripples ; the ripples die away into 

 motionless ether, which is cosmic death. ^ 



" The vibrations of ether," according to Le Bon, 

 " represent the last stage of the dematerialisation 

 of matter, the one preceding its final disappearance. 

 After these ephemeral vibrations the ether returns 

 to its repose, and matter has definitely disappeared. 

 It has returned to the primitive ether .... as it 

 emerged in the far-ofF ages when the first traces 

 of our universe were outlined on the chaos." 



To return to the primitive ether is just, as we 

 have seen, a way of saying the force ceases. But 

 does force ever cease ? We have no reason to 



