44 
C. L. Herrick 
method of thought which accepts change as the expression of 
spontaneity. So only can we conceive of the operations of pure 
energy and universal will. 
Respecting the atomic theory in general, we may say that it 
sustains much the same relation to the science of energy that the 
theory of number does to the science of quantity. The mathe- 
matics of number is of great practical convenience — is, in fact, 
an indispensable tool under our present limitations; but the 
student of higher -mathematics feels that it is an inadequate, 
if not erroneous, makeshift for dealing with quantity as discon- 
tinuous while all quantity is really and logically continuous. 
So with atomic theories; they may be quite indispensable in 
our attempts to express the forms of kinetic manifestations, 
but they are all inadequate by reason of the necessary implication 
of discontinuity. This weakness is revealed in the fact that it 
has been found necessary to supplement the atom by a postulated 
pure fluid in which the atoms are supposed to be bathed. 
When claiming continuity as an attribute of energy, of course 
it is not spatial continuity nor precisely temporal continuity that 
is meant, but kinetic or dynamic continuity — an idea already 
familiar to students of Lotze. 
It must be left to mathematicians to decide whether the prop- 
erties of activity can be construed on this basis; but we suspect 
that the successful solutions of problems of molecular physics 
will be found capable of conversion into terms of the equation 
of continuity. 
It is true, and no disparagement, that dynamic monism is 
not novel — in fact it is fully as old as Heraclitus, at least. It 
may seem a little singular to those who know Coleridge only as 
a poet to discover that he was the first to clearly enunciate this 
doctrine in England, but that such was the fact appears in more 
than one passage, as witness the following: 
Space is the name for God; it is the most perfect image of soul, pure 
soul being to us nothing but unresisted action. Whenever motion is 
resisted, limitation begins — and limitation is the first constituent of 
body; the more omnipresent it is in a given space, the more that space 
is body or matter; and thus all body presupposes soul, inasmuch as all 
resistance presupposes action. 
For some time past monistic thinking has been content, in Eng- 
land and America at least, to rest satisfied with a form of analytic 
