GENERAL MEETING. 61 
and substantiality. We have only to go to Apuleius for this, and 
it is doubtful if even now the notion of the indestructibility of mat- 
ter is anything but a scientific conviction, for do we not see num- 
bers of our contemporary fellow-citizens meeting together frequently 
in our midst to witness feats of materialization out of nonentity by 
powers akin to those of the sorcerer, without an idea of incongruity ? 
Nor has the essentially modern doctrine of the conservation of en- 
ergy anything to do with the belief in its reality. Few people ap- 
prehend it even now. No philosopher understood it a hundred 
years ago. Its verity rests on a sufficiently general inductive basis, 
from the refined and exhaustive experiments of Joule, and the the- 
oretical conclusions of Mayer and Clausius, and it is accepted in 
the same sense that the law of gravitation is accepted. But the 
duality of matter and energy to the exclusion of force is a verbal 
shift, the assumption of which removes no difficulty. Matter, the 
object, remains unexplained; and energy, the phenomenon, becomes 
segregated and unintelligible. Energy, in fact, is but mass in phe- 
nomenal manifestation, being a product of triple factors, two of 
which—translation and speed—are not things, but variable and 
evanescent conditions, and, taken together, constitute motion. Mass 
is the absolute or persistent factor, but the evanescent character 
of the variable component—motion—would render the entire phe- 
nomenon—energy—apparitional, were it not for the distance re- 
lation involved in motion, which, under the same inscrutable agency 
which modifies and saps the motion renders it potential upon change 
of sign. This agency, the dynamical source of the-manifestation, 
being central to mass and likewise persistent and constant, renders 
the positive and negative potentialities of movement constantly 
equal, and the actual and potential energies consequently comple- 
mentary, from which energy gets its character of conservation. 
Energy cannot therefore be that other reality of existence (be- 
sides matter), since force is clearly the one reality at the bottom of 
the manifestation of both, to whose persistence and resistance to 
change, except through transformation, the conservation of both is 
due. This one reality is, in its triple aspect of causation, (1) at- 
traction—the source and modifier of motion; (2) inertia—the con- 
server of motion; and (3) repulsion—the distributer of motion; 
or, more correctly, in its aspect of quality: (1) vis centripeta-—the 
power of mutual control across distance; (2) vis insita—the power 
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