that
these two objects were nearly always pursued contemporaneously. That is
to my mind an extraordinary example of the force of atomic
consciousness. The idea itself was absolutely correct; but the men who
followed it had slight knowledge of its unity, and none whatever of its
proper pursuit. They would have worked on their special lines to
eternity before advancing a single step toward their object. And this
because they did not know what life was, and death was, and what the
metals ultimately signified which they, blind fools, so unsuccessfully
tried to transmute. But we know more than they. We have climbed no doubt
in the footholds they have carved, and we have gained the summit they
only saw in the mirage of hope. For we know that there is no life, no
death, no metals, no matter, no emotions, no thoughts; but that all
that we call by these names is only the ether in various conditions.
Life! I could live as long as this earth will submit to human existence
if I had studied that paltry problem. Metals! The ship in which you sail
was bought with gold manufactured in my crucibles.

"The unintelligent--or I should say the grossly ignorant--have long held
over the heads of the pioneers of science these two great charges: No
man has ever yet transmuted a metal; no man has ever yet proved the
connecting link between organic and inorganic life. I say _life_, for I
take it that this company admits that a slab of granite is as much alive
as any man or woman I see before me. But I have manufactured gold, and I
could have manufactured protoplasm if I had devoted my life to that
object. My studies have been almost wholly on the inorganic plane. Hence
the 'philosopher's stone' came in my way, but not the 'elixir of life.'
The molecules of protoplasm are only a little more complex than the
molecules of hydrogen or nitrogen or iron or coal. You may fuse iron,
vaporise water, intermix the gases; but the molecules of all change
little in such metamorphosis. And you may slay twenty thousand men at
Waterloo or Sedan, or ten thousand generations may be numbered with the
dust, and not an ounce of protoplasm lies dead. All molecules are merely
arrangements of atoms made under different degrees of pressure and of
different ages. And all atoms are constructed of identical
constituents--the ether, as I have said. Therefore the ether, which was
from the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, which is the same
yesterday, to-day, and for ever,