EIGHTH HEAD.

THE KNOT.

The Unknowable. 1. Ultimate Nature of Matter. 2. Logical Chemistry. - 3. The Dustbin of Science. 4. Story of the Crumb.

The All-Thing being made up of strength and stuffing, we are naturally curious to learn what the stuffing is made up of.

Unhappily the spirit of Athanasius now enters again into the author of the Story of Shaping, without driving out that of Andrónikos of Rhodes.

"The ultimate nature of Matter remains unknown and unknowable."

I

Unknowable has never struck me as a useful word, and it is generally an unlucky one. As soon as any enchanter has declared to us that the path of the

sun across the sky is unknowable, some learner is sure to come forward and tell us all about it. As soon as another has affirmed that the number of hairs on a man's head is unknowable, the exact figures are sure to be forthcoming from a statistician. (Since these words were first written the Nobel Prize for Physics has been awarded for the discovery of the ultimate nature of Matter,) It is difficult to see what any one thinks he has to gain by holding up a warning hand to posterity in this fashion, with a-Thus far shalt thou come, and no farther!

And consider what it is that remains unknowable. The ultimate nature of Matter. "Ultimate nature" sounds far too much like ta meta ta phusika. Why does this writer take it for granted that Matter has an ultimate nature? He goes on to say,-“We can only infer what it is, by learning what it does." Clearly he sees some difference between being and doing, he knows but will not tell. He seems to say in other words,-I see something called Matter moving about, and hence I infer that there is another something called its Ultimate Nature, keeping still; which other something is unknowable.-Surely that is like building a bridge you never intend to cross.

Yet the author is better than his word, for he goes on to tell us somewhat, if not of the ultimate, at least of the penultimate, nature of Matter.

"The actions of bodies, whatever their states, are explicable only on the assumption that the bodies are made up of infinitely small particles which, in their combined state, as mechanical units, are called molecules, and in their free state, as chemical units, are called atoms.

"Infinitely" is a big word. When we have reached infinity the ultimate cannot be much farther on. The author, unhappily, was using it only as a sort of swear word, meaning very small, for presently he calculates the size of these infinitely small particles. As many of them (he says) would go into a drop of water as cricket-balls into an Earth.-I have forgotten how many angels could dance upon a needle's point, according to the highest theological authority.

But at this point the Story of Creation becomes so knotty, and the writer loses his way so hopelessly among the terms element, molecule and atom, that I have to put in my own homely words what I have gathered to be the teaching of Materialism on this head. Nor ought the writer to be blamed for his failure, since he has evidently started with the belief that his authorities know what they are saying, whereas I have started with the belief that they most probably do not.

By the word element I understand modern chemists to mean those webworks in the All-Thing, such

as hydrogen and gold, which they have not been able to unweave, as they unweave water into oxygen and hydrogen. Of the elements, which he sometimes carelessly calls atoms, the author of the Story of Creation says in his sternest Athanasian vein,"Since the present universe had its beginning the elements have undergone no change. In some past universe, perhaps, they were less stubborn. In the meanwhile, of course, they are outside the Theory of Evolution, although my teacher omits to note the fact.

Of the atom, its modern discoverer, Dalton, proudly declared," No man can split an atom;" or, in other words, no man can split the unsplitable. The eminent Huxley no less rashly boasted, “The atom is truly an immortal being. My author, with a diffidence as welcome as it is unexpected, contents himself with saying that the atoms have not yet been split. And even that is not true.

I find there are at least three atoms known to science, or at least to scientology, the arithmetical atom, the physical one, and the logical one. Of these the logical one has been kept intact by unheard of efforts; the other two have been split, and are being split every day.

The first, or chemical atom, is no more than an arithmetical term, in short it is an item. The chemist has found that when his elements unite with each other they do so always in fixed proportions, and it is the proportion which he is thinking of when he uses the word atom. Thus when he wants to say that in every gallon of water, or steam, there are two pints of hydrogen for one pint of oxygen,

he puts it that the atom" of hydrogen is H2. In hydrochloric acid this atom splits, and we get H1 or more simply H. It is this atom which is sometimes confused with element in the Story of Creation and elsewhere. It appears to have no more to do with the nature of Matter than the figure 0 has.

The atom which has for so long engaged the attention of physicists, or physical chemists, is of course the old atom of Democritus, and is merely a small crumb of Matter, measuring, according to the latest and best of my authorities, a thousand millionth of an inch across. The Story of Creation terms it an assumption, or, shall we say, an image formed in the mind. Of such crumbs, real or imaginary, Matter is at present believed to be made up. When the experiment famous for giving us the Röntgen rays is made, still smaller crumblets, called corpuscles, are believed to be rent away from the main crumb, and thus the physical atom is split.

The molecule may be regarded as a married crumb, and sometimes a polygamous one. Thus in the case of water the oxygen crumb was long believed to take to itself two hydrogen crumbs, and the little heap thus formed was not three crumbs, but one crumb. Such a molecule may be likened to a bronze coin made by melting down together two copper coins and one tin coin. No one, of course, has ever seen or handled any such crumbs. The chemist cannot pick his little heaps out of the real heap, but he can work a sort of earthquake by which the whole heap of bronze coins is rent into two heaps, one of tin coins, and one of copper coins. Every