illations in it are the source of other phenomena.
It is the fountain-head of all potential energy. The ether is an
invention of the scientific imagination. We had to have it to account
for light, gravity, and the action of one body upon another at a
distance, as well as to account for other phenomena. The ether is not a
body, it is a medium. All bodies are in motion; matter moves; the ether
is in a state of absolute rest. Says Sir Oliver Lodge, "The ether is
strained, and has the property of exerting strain and recoil." An
electron is like a knot in the ether. The ether is the fluid of fluids,
yet its tension or strain is so great that it is immeasurably more dense
than anything else--a phenomenon that may be paralleled by a jet of
water at such speed that it cannot be cut with a sword or severed by a
hammer. It is so subtle or imponderable that solid bodies are as vacuums
to it, and so pervasive that all conceivable space is filled with it;
"so full," says Clerk Maxwell, "that no human power can remove it from
the smallest portion of space, or produce the slightest flaw in its
infinite continuity."

The scientific imagination, in its attempts to master the workings of
the material universe, has thus given us a creation which in many of its
attributes rivals Omnipotence. It is the sum of all contradictions, and
the source of all reality. The gross matter which we see and feel is one
state of it; electricity, which is without form and void, is another
state of it; and our minds and souls, Sir Oliver Lodge intimates, may be
still another state of it. But all these theories of physical science
are justified by their fruits. The atomic theory of matter, and the
kinetic theory of gases, are mathematically demonstrated. However unreal
and fantastic they may appear to our practical faculties, conversant
only with ponderable bodies, they bear the test of the most rigid and
exact experimentation.

V

After we have marveled over all these hidden things, and been impressed
by the world within world of the material universe, do we get any nearer
to the mystery of life? Can we see where the tremendous change from the
non-living to the living takes place? Can we evoke life from the
omnipotent ether, or see it arise in the whirling stream of atoms and
electrons? Molecular science opens up to us a world where the infinitely
little matches the infinitely great, where matter is dematerialized and
answers to many of the conceptions