The Metaphysics of a Naturalist 
47 
that the technical jargon of science, as well as everyday language, 
seems to imply the existence of what are called material units 
or atoms. Modern molecular physics, however, has found that 
the attempt to analyze the nature of such units destroys them 
and is returning to the naive concept of childhood that forces 
simply are, and require no separate explanation of their ^ bare- 
ness. ^ ^ In other words, the tendency in physics is to identify being 
with activity. 
Ontology has not been more happy in its search for substance’’ 
— the metaphysical somewhat that stands under and explains 
all being. This search may be frankly abandoned as futile, 
for it has not proven possible to avoid a final admission that the 
ultimate cause of all being resides in the purely spontaneous 
activity of an absolute Being and nothing has been gained by 
ages of dialectic in the effort to interpose various steps between 
this force or activity and its expression. It is better therefore 
frankly to admit that human thought can go no further than to 
assume the existence of such a spontaneous activity as the source 
of being, and accordingly bend our efforts to the task of attempt- 
ing the analysis of the form and mutual relations of the several 
expressions of this energy. 
Modern molecular physics and chemistry as expounded by 
such men as Lord Kelvin and Professor Ostwald throw into strong 
relief the insufficiency of molecular hypotheses whose postulates 
require one to accept at one "and the same time the doctrine that 
force is inseparably associated with material elements and that 
these elements are capable of acting upon one another over unfilled 
space, or that the same imponderable ether is capable of con- 
veying infinite quanta of forces without offering resistance to 
moving masses of matter. 
It is not true that matter and force are in perpetual partner- 
ship, one being passive, the other active. Modern science knows 
of no such thing — can conceive of no such thing — as passive 
matter. The properties of matter by which alone it can be 
known are all forces in action. Impenetrability is an expression 
for molecular bombardment of opposing force. Energy is the one 
permanent indestructible element in our thinking. It is claimed 
that matter is indestructible, but this merely means that when, 
for example, the various forces whose common name in our nomen- 
clature is gunpowder change their form, their exact dynamic 
