128 TRANSACTIONS OF THE Hagin i 
MATTER FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF A 
PERSONALISTIC PHILOSOPHY. 
BY W. H. CHAMBERLAIN.* 
I do not see how anyone acquainted with the facts can 
longer doubt the existence of insensible realties called 
electrons, atoms, and molecules. Electrons are points 
of electrical power, and the atoms and molecules which 
they constitute are definite complexes of points of elec- 
trical power, and so, with the physicist Whetham, we may 
refer to the sensible masses of matter which these mole- 
cules constitute and into which material nature differ- 
entiates itself as complexes of energy. 
Philosophy for its purpose of understanding mater- 
ial nature most concretely can accept an energy complex 
as the unit in terms of which it would explain the nature 
of matter if such an energy complex can be supplemented 
and made to include the correlative perceptual powers 
of persons stimulated and sustained by such energy com- 
plexes in any actual experience of matter. Philosophy 
would also call emphatic attention to the invariable 
presence, as a dependent aspect of any such interaction 
of energy complexes and personal powers, of sensations 
in spatial and temporal forms of.arrangements, The 
simpiest and yet the best understood case of such inter- 
action of which we know is perhaps that of the inter- 
action of persons in mutual knowing or conversation in 
which the powers of each person in confluence with cer- 
tain of the energy complexes in material nature stimulate 
the perceptual powers of others together with their 
dependent sensory aspects. 
In inorganic matter, whether this matter is in the 
solid, liquid or gaseous state, the motions or changes 
dictated by any energy complex are commonly regarded 
as determined, mechanical, and as capable of accurate 
definition or description. In the higher or complexer 
~_—— 
*Department of Philosophy, University of Utah. 
