atal quality of atomic
dissociation appears to be universal, and operates whenever we brush a
piece of glass with silk; it works in the sunshine and raindrops in
lightnings and flame; it prevails in the waterfall and the stormy sea"
and a writer in the Edinburgh Review (December, 1903) remarks in this
connection "Matter he (Sir William Crookes) consequently regards as
doomed to destruction. Sooner or later it will have dissolved into the
'formless mist' of protyle and 'the hour hand of eternity will have
completed one revolution.' The 'dissipation of energy' has then found
its correlative in the 'dissolution of Matter.'"

The scope of this revolution may only be gauged by the fact that one
writer ("The Alchemy of the Sea," London "Outlook," Feb. 11, 1905) has
ventured to say, and this is but one voice in a general chorus: "To-day
no one believes in the existence of elements; no one questions the
possibility of a new alchemy; and the actual evolution of one element
from another has been observed in the laboratory--observed by Sir
William Ramsey in London, and confirmed by a chemist in St. Petersburg."
Helium being an evolution of radium and it is expected furthermore that
radium will prove to be an evolution of uranium and so there is a
constant process as the writer points out of what was formerly called
alchemy the transmutation of one metal into another.

It is clear that in face of these facts the arguments of Engels
possess even greater force at the present day than when they were
enunciated and that the old hard and fast method of arguing from
absolute truths is dead and done for.

Only statesmen see fit to still harp on the same phrases which have
become as it were a part of the popular mental structure and by
constant appeals to the old watchwords to obscure the fact of change.
Were one not acquainted with the essential stupidity of the political
mind and the lack of grasp which is the characteristic of statesmen,
it might be imagined that all this was done with malice aforethought
and that there was a sort of tacit conspiracy on the part of the
politicians to delude the people. But experience of the inexcusable
blunders and the inexplicable errors into which statesmen are
continually driven forces the conclusion that they are in reality no
whit in advance of the electorate and that only now and then a
Beaconsfield appears who can understand the drift of events. Such a
man is the "revolutionist" which Beaconsf