Monism as Connecting Religion and Science | Page 5

grapple more closely with this fundamental problem of the philosophy of nature, and to determine more exactly the nature of atoms as well as their relation to the space-filling ether. And the idea steadily gains ground that no such thing as empty space exists, and that everywhere the primitive atoms of ponderable matter or heavy "mass" are separated from each other by the homogeneous ether which extends throughout all space. This extremely light and attenuated (if not imponderable) ether causes, by its vibrations, all the phenomena of light and heat, electricity and magnetism. We can imagine it either as a continuous substance occupying the space between the mass-atoms, or as composed of separate particles; in the latter case we might perhaps attribute to these ether-atoms an inherent power of repulsion in contrast to the immanent attracting power of the heavy mass-atoms, and the whole mechanism of cosmic life would then be reducible to the attraction of the latter and the repulsion of the former. We might also place the "vibrations of the cosmic ether" alongside of the "operation of space in general," in the sense in which these words are used by Professor Schlesinger.
At any rate, theoretical physics has in recent years made an advance of fundamental importance and widest reach in our knowledge of nature, in that it has come nearer to a knowledge of this cosmic ether, and has forced the question of its essence, its structure, and its motion into the foreground of monistic nature-philosophy. Only a few years ago the cosmic ether was to the majority of scientists an imponderable something, of which, strictly speaking, absolutely nothing was known, and which could be admitted provisionally only as a precarious working hypothesis. All this was changed when Heinrich Hertz (1888) demonstrated the nature of electrical energy, by his beautiful experiments establishing the conjecture of Faraday that light and heat, electricity and magnetism, are closely related phenomena of one single set of forces, and depend on transverse vibrations of the ether. Light itself--whatever else it be--is always and everywhere an electrical phenomenon. The ether itself is no longer hypothetical; its existence can at any moment be demonstrated by electrical and optical experiment. We know the length of the light wave and the electric wave. Indeed, some physicists believe that they can even determine approximately the density of ether. If by means of the airpump we remove from a bell-jar the atmospheric air (except an insignificant residue), the quantity of light within it remains unchanged; it is the vibrating ether we see.[9] These advances in our knowledge of the ether mean an immense gain for monistic philosophy. For they do away with the erroneous ideas of empty space and _actio in distans_; the whole of infinite space, in so far as it is not occupied by mass-atoms ("ponderable matter"), is filled by the ether. Our ideas of space and time are quite other than those taught by Kant a hundred years ago; the "critical" system of the great Koenigsberg philosopher exhibits in this respect, as well as in his teleological view of the organic world and in his metaphysics, dogmatic weaknesses of the most pronounced kind.[8] And religion itself, in its reasonable forms, can take over the ether theory as an article of faith, bringing into contradistinction the mobile cosmic ether as creating divinity, and the inert heavy mass as material of creation.[11] From this successfully scaled height of monistic knowledge there open up before our joyously quickened spirit of research and discovery new and surprising prospects, which promise to bring us still nearer to the solution of the one great riddle of the world. What is the relation of this light mobile cosmic ether to the heavy inert "mass," to the ponderable matter which we chemically investigate, and which we can only think of as constituted of atoms? Our modern analytical chemistry remains for the present at a standstill, in presence of some seventy irreducible elements, or so-called primary substances. But the reciprocal relation of these elements, the affinity of their combinations, their spectroscopic behaviour, and so forth, make it in the highest degree probable that they are all merely historical products of an evolutionary process, having their origin in various dispositions and combinations of a varying number of original atoms.
To these original or mass-atoms--the ultimate discrete particles of inert "ponderable matter"--we can with more or less probability ascribe a number of eternal and inalienable fundamental attributes; they are probably everywhere in space, of like magnitude and constitution. Although possessing a definite finite magnitude, they are, by virtue of their very nature, indivisible. Their shape we may take to be spherical; they are inert (in the physical sense), unchangeable, inelastic, and impenetrable by the ether. Apart from the attribute of inertia, the most important characteristic of these ultimate