Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 13.djvu/369

Rh can have less. While the form of this energy changes, the substance endures forever. In this respect it resembles matter. The forms of both matter and energy are fleeting, but the invisible substance endures. By their interactions they incessantly alter each other. The forms of energy determine the forms of matter, and the forms of matter determine the forms of energy. In this respect their interdependence is mutual. The form of matter determines whether energy shall be moulded into heat, light, sound, magnetism, chemical affinity, cohesion, or molar motion. The mode and amount of energy determine whether matter will be solid, liquid, or gas, opaque or transparent, colored or colorless, etc. As all matter must have some form, so all energy must have some mode.

Whatever form matter may assume, that form is built from the elements of form of which matter can never divest itself. While matter and energy have independent substantive existences, form has no existence apart from the matter with which it is found. One piece of matter cannot give up its form to another, as one collision-ball can give its energy to another. The failure to see this truth has led to serious mistakes among psychologists. The elements of form belonging to one piece of matter may be put together in the same order as found in another piece, so that the identical form may appear to have been transmitted. The elements of form belonging to matter may imitate or mimic each other, but this does not constitute identity. The two words R'O'S'E', ROSE, may look alike, but each has its own form. If we transpose them as entire words, ROSE, R'O'S'E, they have not given up their own forms. If we transpose them letter by letter, as beneath, each still retains its own form, and has not appropriated that of its neighbor:

When transposed as entire words, the entire forms are transposed at once, and, when transposed as letters, the forms are transposed in their elements. At the base of the left thumb of the writer there is a scar, made during boyhood. All the tissue has probably been removed several times, as in the transposition of the letters of our word ROSE; but because the material that supplied the waste has been the same in kind, and because these elements of form have been put up in the original order at every change, a scar is there to-day like the one of years ago. For convenience' sake we call it the same scar, yet it is no more the same than are our two words, when transposed, identical. By one set of the elements of form imitating another an illusion is established that makes it appear as if the identical form was transmitted from one mass of matter to another, just as the identical energy is