e theory which connects by invisible bonds of transmitted energy the
perishable material body with its counterpart in the world of ether. The
materialism of the argument is indeed partly veiled by the terminology
in which this counterpart is called a "spiritual body," but in this
novel use or abuse of scriptural language there seems to me to be a
strange confusion of ideas. Bear in mind that the "invisible universe"
into which energy is constantly passing is simply the luminiferous
ether, which our authors, to suit the requirements of their hypothesis,
have gratuitously endowed with a complexity and variety of structure
analogous to that of the visible world of matter. Their language is not
always quite so precise as one could desire, for while they sometimes
speak of the ether itself as the "unseen universe," they sometimes
allude to a primordial medium yet subtler in constitution and presumably
more immaterial. Herein lies the confusion. Why should the luminiferous
ether, or any primordial medium in which it may have been generated, be
regarded as in any way "spiritual"? Great physicists, like less trained
thinkers, are sometimes liable to be unconsciously influenced by old
associations of ideas which, ostensibly repudiated, still lurk under
cover of the words we use. I fear that the old associations which led
the ancients to describe the soul as a breath or a shadow, and which
account for the etymologies of such words as "ghost" and "spirit,"
have had something to do with this spiritualization of the interstellar
ether. Some share may also have been contributed by the Platonic notion
of the "grossness" or "bruteness" of tangible matter,--a notion which
has survived in Christian theology, and which educated men of the
present day have by no means universally outgrown. Save for some such
old associations as these, why should it be supposed that matter becomes
"spriritualized" as it diminishes in apparent substantiality? Why should
matter be pronounced respectable in the inverse ratio of its density
or ponderability? Why is a diamond any more chargeable with "grossness"
than a cubic centimetre of hydrogen? Obviously such fancies are purely
of mythologic parentage. Now the luminiferous ether, upon which our
authors make such extensive demands, may be physically "ethereal"
enough, in spite of the enormous elasticity which leads Professor Jevons
to characterize it as "adamantine"; but most assuredly we have not the
slightest