I 
THE TEXAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
[Annual Address by the President.] 
WHAT IS MATTER? 
DR. SIDNEY E. MEZES.* 
An address of this character is required by custom to set forth 
large themes. As the representative of a learned society for the 
occasion, the speaker must assume the virtue of corporated wisdom 
and scholarship. He speaks, as it were, ex cathedra, and must simu- 
late the manner and matter of such weighty utterances to the best 
of his poor ability. He must painfully gather wise saws and modern 
instances, and present them as his own, with a ponderous and un- 
smiling gravity. The robes are on his shoulders and the insignia 
in his hands, and no other choice is open. 
With this duty laid upon me, I will ask the Academy to consider 
tonight nothing less than the earliest and the latest problem to excite 
scientific curiosity. Thales and Anaxemander, the smiling Democri- 
tus and the dark Heracleitus asked, at the dawn of science, What 
is Matter? What is the stuff of which the world is made? And 
Kelvin, Thompson, Lodge and Rutherford, twenty-five centuries later, 
with all the resources of modern science at their disposal, are still 
asking, What is Matter? The great difference is that at last the 
solution seems to be dawning upon our view, a solution so simple 
that we can but marvel at the denseness of the human wit which 
failed, and in large measure still fails, to accept it, though it was 
proclaimed, in dark words to be sure, by Heracleitus in the early fifth 
century B. C. 
Of course, there is no question as to the reality of matter. No 
sane man doubts, or ever has doubted that. With the problem prop- 
erly stated, even Bishop Berkeley would not have done so, though 
unquestionably he thought he did, and many since his day have been 
misled by his self-deception. Berkeley merely disagreed, rightly, 
as we shall see, with the common view of what matter is. He said, 
in effect, Matter is as different as is at all possible from what you, 
the man in the street, think it to be. And to Berkeley’s real doctrine 
the doughty Dr. Johnson had no answer. By kicking the stone he 
Professor of Philosophy, University of Texas. 
