Chapter XI (part 3)

The pioneers of natural science do not enjoy such a serene point of view, and to this circumstance the natural sciences are indebted for their continuous development. I venture to lift the brilliant and familiar veil and throw open the sanctuaries of scientific thought, now poised upon the summit of two contrasted contemplations of the world. The steersman of science shall be ceaselessly vigilant, despite the felicity of his voyage; above him shall invariably shine the stars by which he finds his way upon the ocean of the unknown. At the time in which we are living now the constellations in the skies of our science have changed, and a new star has flashed out, having no equal to itself in brightness. Persistent scientific investigation has expanded the volume of the knowable to dimensions which could scarcely be imagined only a short time—fifteen or twenty years—ago. Number remains, as before, the lawmaker of nature, but, being capable of representation, it has escaped from that mode of contemplating the world which regarded as possible its representation by mechanical models. This augmentation of knowledge gives a sufficient number of images for the construction of the world, but they destroy its architecture as that is known to us, and create as it were a new order, extending far, in its free lines, beyond the limits not only of the old visible world, but even beyond the fundamental forms of our thinking. I have now to lead you to the summits from which open the perspectives that are re-forming the very basis of our understanding of the world. The ascent to them amid the ruins of classical physics is attended with p. 128 no small difficulty, and I ask in advance your indulgence and shall exercise all my efforts to simplify and shorten our path as far as possible. Prof. Oumoff proceeds to picture the evolution of form "from the atom to the electron," from materialistic and mechanistic ideas about the universe to the electro-magnetic theory. The axioms of mechanics are only fragments, and their application may be compared to the judgment concerning the contents of an entire chapter by means of a single sentence. Therefore it is not strange that the attempt of the mechanistic explanation of the properties of the electro-magnetic ether by the aid of axioms in which these properties were either denied or one-sidedly predetermined was doomed to failure. . . . The mechanistic contemplation of the world appeared as one-sided. . . . In the image of the world, unity was not in evidence. The electro-magnetic world could not remain as something quite alien, unrelated to matter. The material mode of contemplating the world, with its fixed formula, had no sufficient flexibility to bring about unification through it and its principles. There remained only one way out—to sacrifice one of the worlds—the material, the mechanistic, or the electro-magnetic. It was necessary to find sufficient foundations for decision on the one side or on the other. These were not slow to appear. The consequent development of physics is a process against matter, which ended with its expulsion. But along with this negative activity has gone the creative work of the reformation of electro-magnetic symbolics; it was forced to become adequate to express the properties of the material world: its atomic structure, inertia, radiation and absorption of energy, electromagnetic phenomena. . . . . . . On the horizon of scientific thought was arising the electronic theory of matter. Through electrical corpuscles was opening the connection between matter and vacuum. . . . . . . The idea of a special substratum filling the vacuum—ether—became superfluous. . . . Light and heat are born by the motion of electrons. They are the suns of microcosms. . . . The universe consists of positive and negative corpuscles, bound by electro-magnetic fields.