gnated with thought and heaven, and is
really of God, and not of the Devil, as we had too hastily believed."
This conception of matter underlies the new materialism of such men as
Huxley and Tyndall. But there is much in the new physics apart from its
chemical aspects that ought to appeal to the Emersonian type of mind.
Did not Emerson in his first poem, "The Sphinx," sing of

Journeying atoms,
Primordial wholes?

In those ever-moving and indivisible atoms he touches the very
corner-stone of the modern scientific conception of matter. It is hardly
an exaggeration to say that in this conception we are brought into
contact with a kind of transcendental physics. A new world for the
imagination is open--a world where the laws and necessities of
ponderable bodies do not apply. The world of gross matter disappears,
and in its place we see matter dematerialized, and escaping from the
bondage of the world of tangible bodies; we see a world where friction
is abolished, where perpetual motion is no longer impossible; where two
bodies may occupy the same space at the same time; where collisions and
disruptions take place without loss of energy; where subtraction often
means more--as when the poison of a substance is rendered more virulent
by the removal of one or more atoms of one of the elements; and where
addition often means less--as when three parts of the gases of oxygen
and hydrogen unite and form only two parts of watery vapor; where mass
and form, centre and circumference, size and structure, exist without
any of the qualities ordinarily associated with these things through our
experience in a three-dimension world. We see, or contemplate, bodies
which are indivisible; if we divide them, their nature changes; if we
divide a molecule of water, we get atoms of hydrogen and oxygen gas; if
we divide a molecule of salt, we get atoms of chlorine gas and atoms of
the metal sodium, which means that we have reached a point where matter
is no longer divisible in a mechanical sense, but only in a chemical
sense; which again means that great and small, place and time, inside
and outside, dimensions and spatial relations, have lost their ordinary
meanings. Two bodies get inside of each other. To the physicist, heat
and motion are one; light is only a mechanical vibration in the ether;
sound is only a vibration in the air, which the ear interprets as sound.
The world is as still as death till the living ear comes to receive the