seeing how it works in what we call the common
course of Nature. A few examples will suffice.

Hardly more than a generation ago it was supposed that the analysis of
matter could not be carried further than its reduction to some seventy
primary chemical elements, which in various combinations produced all
material substances; but there was no explanation how all these
different elements came into existence. Each appeared to be an original
creation, and there was no accounting for them. But now-a-days, as the
rustic physician says in Moliere's play of the "Medecin Malgre Lui,"
"nous avons change tout cela." Modern science has shown conclusively
that every kind of chemical atom is composed of particles of one
original substance which appears to pervade all space, and to which the
name of Ether has been given. Some of these particles carry a positive
charge of electricity and some a negative, and the chemical atom is
formed by the grouping of a certain number of negatively charged
particles round a centre composed of positive electricity around which
they revolve; and it is the number of these particles and the rate of
their motion that determines the nature of the atom, whether, for
instance, it will be an atom of iron or an atom of hydrogen, and thus we
are brought back to Plato's old aphorism that the Universe consists of
Number and Motion.

The size of these etheric particles is small beyond anything but
abstract mathematical conception. Sir Oliver Lodge is reported to have
made the following comparison in a lecture delivered at Birmingham. "The
chemical atom," he said, "is as small in comparison to a drop of water
as a cricket-ball is compared to the globe of the earth; and yet this
atom is as large in comparison to one of its constituent particles as
Birmingham town-hall is to a pin's head." Again, it has been said that
in proportion to the size of the particles the distance at which they
revolve round the centre of the atom is as great as the distance from
the earth to the sun. I must leave the realization of such infinite
minuteness to the reader's imagination--it is beyond mine.

Modern science thus shows us all material substance, whether that of
inanimate matter or that of our own bodies, as proceeding out of one
primary etheric substance occupying all space and homogeneous, that is
being of a uniform substance--and having no qualities to distinguish one
part from another. Now this conclusion of science is imp