ual creatures walk the earth
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep."

If there is a life very much different from and very much higher than
our present one, it is not strange we are ignorant of it. It is
impossible to make a person understand anything which is entirely unlike
all that has ever been seen or heard, for every idea in the world that
man has came to him by nature. Man[79] cannot conceive of anything the
hint of which has not been received from his surroundings. He can
imagine an animal with the hoof of a bison, with the pouch of a
kangaroo, with the wings of an eagle, with the beak of a bird, and with
the tail of a lion; and yet every point of this monster he borrowed from
nature. Everything he can think of, everything he can dream of, is
borrowed from his surroundings--everything. "So, if an angel should come
and tell of another life, it would mean nothing to us, unless we could
translate it into terms of our own experience. We could not understand a
'light that never was on land or sea.' Our ignorance is not even then a
probability against our belief."[80]

As has already been stated, the visible universe must have its doom,
must end as it began, by consisting of a single mass of matter; but is
there not a more primitive state of matter than the matter such as we
know it? Yes; and the so-called ether is that matter. It is unlike any
of the forms of matter which we can weigh and measure. It is in some
respects like unto a fluid, and in some respects like unto a solid. It
is both hard and elastic to an almost inconceivable degree. "It fills
all material bodies like a sea in which the atoms of the material bodies
are as islands, and it occupies the whole of what we call empty space.
It is so sensitive that a disturbance in any part of it causes a 'tremor
which is felt on the surface of countless worlds.' It exerts frictions;
and although the friction is infinitely small, yet as it has an almost
infinite time to work in, it will diminish the momentum of the planets,
and diminish their ability to maintain their distance from the sun, the
consequence of which will be the planets will fall into the sun, and the
solar system will end where it begun."[81]

According to Sir William Thompson, the ultimate atoms of matter are
vortex rings, which Professor Clifford describes as being more closely
packed together (finer grained) in ether than in matter. And he says,
"whatever may turn out to be the ultimate na