Page:Eddington A. Space Time and Gravitation. 1920.djvu/215

XII] the phenomena otherwise regulated by the despotism of the mind? We cannot foretell what the final answer will be; but, at present, we have to admit that there are laws which appear to have their seat in external nature. The most important of these, if not the only law, is a law of atomicity. Why does that quality of the world which distinguishes matter from emptiness exist only in certain lumps called atoms or electrons, all of comparable mass? Whence arises this discontinuity? At present, there seems no ground for believing that discontinuity is a law due to the mind; indeed the mind seems rather to take pains to smooth the discontinuities of nature into continuous perception. We can only suppose that there is something in the nature of things that causes this aggregation into atoms. Probably our analysis into point-events is not final; and if it could be pushed further to reach something still more fundamental, then atomicity and the remaining laws of physics would be seen as identities. This indeed is the only kind of explanation that a physicist could accept as ultimate. But this more ultimate analysis stands on a different plane from that by which the point-events were reached. The world may be so constituted that the laws of atomicity must necessarily hold; but, so far as the mind is concerned, there seems no reason why it should have been constituted in that way. We can conceive a world constituted otherwise. But our argument hitherto has been that, however the world is constituted, the necessary combinations of things can be found which obey the laws of mechanics, gravitation and electrodynamics, and these combinations are ready to play the part of the world of perception for any mind that is tuned to appreciate them; and further, any world of perception of a different character would be rejected by the mind as unsubstantial.

If atomicity depends on laws inherent in nature, it seems at first difficult to understand why it should relate to matter especially; since matter is not of any great account in the analytical scheme, and owes its importance to irrelevant considerations introduced by the mind. It has appeared, however, that atomicity is by no means confined to matter and electricity; the quantum, which plays so great a part in recent physics, is apparently an atom of action. So nature cannot be accused of