Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/768

 752 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

We are given to understand that green and red are not qualities of inert matter, but results of motion. Fragrant and fetid, bitter, sweet, salt, savory, are results of chemical attacks upon the nerves of smell and taste. Heavy is a tug. Hot and cold are the vibra- tion of molecules. Sounds loud and shrill are effects upon us of motions violent and swift; sounds soft and low, of motions slow and gentle. Every quality known to any sense of ours is the effect on us of action; and we know matter only by these sensations which nothing but action can stimulate. Hence, if the quality of a stone appears to us fixed and constant, that is because the activities that reach us from the stone are steady; as the earth seems solid and unstirred because its rush and whirl are without interruption, so the stone is to our senses an unchang- ing thing, because it is the expression of a steady and un jarring process. This theory of being implies that there are constant activities continually issuing in results that do not change, results that are commonly described as static phenomena ; while there are also other activities which reveal their presence by frequent change, and it is these changing effects that are commonly called processes. But if this theory be true, then the static is every- where a cross-section of the dynamic. Acceptance of this view suggests a corresponding view of the nature of science. Each thing being the result of a continuous process, the science that explains it must set forth the process of which it is an expression. Science echoes back to Heraclitus his travra x*P&~ The whole

activity. It is asserted that uranium, thorium, and radium, being elements, by the procedure of their own activities become transmuted into other substances which also are elements. The address of the president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, published in the Popular Science Monthly for Octo- ber, 1904, contains the following: Gravitation, attraction, and repulsion between electrically charged bodies, molecular action, and chemical affinity are " the feebler forces of nature" and "sink into insignificance beside the attractions and repul- sions between the electric monads themselves." " If the dust beneath our feet be indeed compounded of innumerable systems, whose elements are ever in the most rapid motion, yet retain through uncounted ages their equilibrium unshaken . . . ." " The new theory of matter analyzes matter, whether molar or molecular, into something which is not matter at all. The atom is now no more than the relatively vast theater of operations in which minute monads perform their orderly evolutions ; while the monads themselves are not regarded as units of matter, but a* units of electricity, so that matter is not merely explained, but explained away."