102 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Bearing this in mind, we shall experience little difficulty in de- 

 termining the conditions under which the representation and concep- 

 tion of a material object as real are possible. A representation of such 

 an object being an exhibition of the deliverances of sense respecting 

 it, it is plain that nothing can be represented as objectively real, ex- 

 cept in terms of experience. And, since our experience is only of the 

 singular and particular, it is also evident that a concept cannot be 

 represented in the mind as objectively real. Thus, matter as such is 

 not a real thing, but a concept ; it cannot be " realized " in thought. 

 We can realize, or imagine, or represent as actual, only some one par- 

 ticular thing, with all its accidents of particularity — as of particular 

 dimensions, of a particular color, of a particular temperature, and as 

 being either at rest (i. e., in a state of tension) or in motion. All 

 attempts mentally to represent the reality, in and by itself, of any of 

 the elements into which an individual object is analyzed by the pro- 

 cess of abstraction are necessarily futile. The history of speculation is 

 full of attempts of this sort — of attempts to grasp the " thing " as dis- 

 tinct from its properties, the substance apart from its attributes, or, 

 conversely, the attributes apart from their unity, the substance. It is 

 this old error which lies hid in the reasoning of Prof. Tyndall in the 

 passage quoted at the beginning of this article. And the same error 

 lurks in Faraday's endeavor to represent matter as a mere complex of 

 forces. In the one case the properties are imagined to be added to the 

 thing, or the attributes are supposed to be implanted in the substance, 

 as the plums are stuck into the pudding, so that the substance will 

 remain after the attributes are removed ; in the other case the sub- 

 stance is looked upon as a mere sum of the attributes — the pudding is 

 thought to be all plums, which not only have a reality by themselves, 

 but which are alone real. That this apparently trivial illustration is 

 entirely apposite, is readily shown by a reference to the grounds upon 

 which Faraday rejects the hypothesis of corpuscular atoms. While 

 the advocates of this hypothesis seek to remove the plums and to re- 

 tain the pudding, Faraday, on the contrary, takes the plums, and then 

 asks, " Where is the pudding ? " " What do we know," he says (Tyn- 

 dall, " Faraday as a Discoverer," p. 123, American ed.) " of the atom 

 apart from its force ? You imagine a nucleus which may be called 

 a, and surround it by forces which may be called m ; to my mind, the 

 a or nucleus vanishes, and the substance consists in the powers of m. 

 And, indeed, what notion can we form of the nucleus independent of 

 its powers ? What thought remains on which to hang the imagina- 

 tion of an a independent of the acknowledged forces ? " 



The true root of all these errors is a total misconception of the na- 

 ture of reality. All the reality we know is not only spatially finite, 

 but limited in all its aspects ; its whole existence lies in relation and 

 contrast, as I shall show more at length in the next article. We know 

 nothing of force, except by its contrast with mass, or (what is the same 



