Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/30

 only carried one step farther this trend of nineteenth-century science. Its moral is the extreme superficiality of the broad generalizations which mankind acquires on the basis of sense-perception. The continuous effort to understand the world has carried us far away from all those obvious ideas. Matter has been identified with energy, and energy is sheer activity; the passive substratum composed of self-identical enduring bits of matter has been abandoned, so far as concerns any fundamentai description. Obviously this notion expresses an important derivative fact. But it has ceased to be the presupposed basis of theory. The modern point of view is expressed in terms of energy, activity, and the vibratory differentiations of space-time. Any local agitation shakes the whele universe. The distant effects are minute, but they are there. The concept of matter presupposed simple location. Each bit of matter was self-contained, localized in