MONISM 



it is proved by pure reason that the human mind is in- 

 capable of knowing it, or of forming any positive or 

 negative idea of it? Lucus a non lucendo! We may, 

 therefore, leave this supernatural metaphysical world to 

 faith and fiction, and confine our studies to the real 

 physical world, nature. The idea of physics as a com- 

 prehensive natural philosophy, as it was conceived in 

 classic Greece, has been more and more restricted in 

 the course of time. To-day it is generally taken to 

 mean the science of the phenomena of inorganic nature, 

 their empirical determination by observation and ex- 

 periment (experimental physics) , and their reduction to 

 fixed natural laws and mathematical formulae (theo- 

 retical or mathematical physics). Of late a distinction 

 has been drawn between the physics of mass and the 

 physics of ether; the one deals with mechanics, the 

 movement and equilibrium of ponderable matter, of 

 solid, fluid, and gaseous bodies (statics and dynamics, 

 gravitation, acoustics, meteorology) ; the other is oc- 

 cupied with the phenomena of ether (or imponderable 

 matter) and its relations to mass (electricity, galvanism, 

 magnetism, optics, and calorics). In all these branches 

 of inorganic physics the monistic view is now generally 

 received, and all attempt at dualistic explanation aban- 

 doned. 



The vast department of chemistry, which has now 

 become so important both for theoretical and practical 

 purposes, is really only a part of physics. But while 

 modern physics restricts itself to the study of inorganic 

 forms of energy and their conversions, chemistry, as the 

 science of matter, takes up the study of the qualitative 

 differences between the various kinds of ponderable 

 matter. It divides ponderable bodies into some seventy- 

 eight elements, the relations of which to each other have 

 been determined in the periodic system of the elements, 

 and their probable common origin from some primitive 



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