Page:Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century.djvu/53

 mechanical equivalent of heat, vortex-atoms and so forth. In subsequent editions, and there are many, the physical basis disappeared more and more; and the book took more of the appearance of a philosophical and theological essay.

In my lecture on Clifford I explained how an anagram had appeared in Nature in 1874 and how that later the anagram was explained in The Unseen Universe as follows: "Thought conceived to affect the matter of another universe simultaneously with this may explain a future state." The kernel of the book is this so-called discovery. Preliminary chapters are devoted to a survey of the beliefs of ancient peoples about the immortality of the soul; to physical axioms, to an exposition of the doctrines and hypotheses concerning energy, matter and ether; and to the biological doctrine of development; it is only in the last chapter that we come to the "unseen universe." What is meant by the "unseen universe?" Matter, according to the authors is made up of molecules, which are supposed to be vortex-rings made of the luminiferous ether; the luminiferous ether is in turn supposed to be made of much smaller molecules which are vortex-rings of a second ether. These smaller molecules with the ether in which they float constitute the unseen universe. The authors see reason to believe that the unseen universe absorbs energy from the visible universe and vice versa; in this way a communication is established between them. The human soul is a frame made of the refined molecules and exists in the unseen universe, although in life it is attached to the body. Every thought we think is accompanied by certain motions of the coarse molecules of the brain; these motions are propagated through the visible universe, but a part of each motion is absorbed by the fine molecules of the soul. Consequently the soul as well as the body has an organ of memory; at death the soul with its organ of memory is simply set free from association with the coarse molecules of the body. In this way, the authors considered that they had shown the physical possibility of the immortality of the soul. So far the book may be considered to be a legitimate and inter-