THE CONSTITUTION OF MATTER. li 
uniform we call matter. A single one of these energies 
shows forth, stripped of this dress, and bare. It rules all 
the others, because it knows them all without their know- 
ing it. It is not power merely, but consciousness besides. 
It isthe soul. How define it otherwise than as force in its 
purest essence, since we look upon it, as on the marble of 
the antique, in splendid nakedness, which is radiant beauty 
too? 
Whether we consider coarser matter which can be 
weighed and felt, or that more subtile, lively, and active 
matter we call ether, or again the spiritual principle, which 
is energy simple, we have then always before us only har- 
monious collections of forces, symmetrical activities, or- 
dered powers, more or less conscious of the part they play 
in the infinite concert whose glorious music the Creator 
composed. Letus set aside for a moment the variety of 
groupings which determine the succession and the manifold 
aspects of these forces, and there will remain, as constitu- 
ent principles of the web of the universe, as irreducible 
and primordial ingredients of the world, nothing but dy- 
namic points, nothing but monads. 
The term of the rigorous analysis of phenomena is, 
definitely, the conception of an infinity of centres of simi- 
lar and unextended forces, of energies without forms, sim- 
ple and eternal. We ask what these forces are, and we 
assert in answer that it is impossible to distinguish them 
from motion. Force may be conceived, but not shaped to 
the fancy. The clearest and truest thing we can say of it 
is, that it is an energy analogous to that whose constant 
and undeniable presence we feel dwelling in our deepest 
selves. ‘The only force of which we have consciousness,” 
says Henry Sainte-Claire Deville, “is will.” Our soul, 
which gives us consciousness of force, is also the type of it, 
in this sense that, if we wish to pierce to the elementary 
mechanisms of the world, we are imperiously driven to 
