Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 65.djvu/504

500 This view must, however, be profoundly modified if we accept the electric theory of matter. We can then no longer hold that if the internal energy of a sun were as far as possible converted into heat either by its contraction under the stress of gravitation or by chemical reactions between its elements or by any other interatomic force; and that were the heat so generated to be dissipated, as in time it must be, through infinite space, its whole energy would be exhausted. On the contrary, the amount thus lost would be absolutely insignificant compared with what remained stored up within the separate atoms. The system in its corporate capacity would become bankrupt—the wealth of its individual constituents would be scarcely diminished. They would lie side by side, without movement, without chemical affinity; yet each one, howsoever inert in its external relations, the theater of violent motions, and of powerful internal forces.

Or put the same thought in another form: when the sudden appearance of some new star in the telescopic field gives notice to the astronomer that he, and, perhaps, in the whole universe, he alone, is witnessing the conflagration of a world; the tremendous forces by which this far-off tragedy is being accomplished must surely move his awe. Yet not only would the members of each separate atomic system pursue their relative course unchanged, while the atoms themselves were thus riven violently apart in flaming vapor, but the forces by which such a world is shattered are really negligible compared with those by which each atom of it is held together.

In common, therefore, with all other living things we seem to be practically concerned chiefly with the feebler forces of nature, and with energy in its least powerful manifestations. Chemical affinity and cohesion are on this theory no more than the slight residual effects of the internal electrical forces which keep the atom in being. Gravitation, though it be the shaping force which concentrates nebula? into organized systems of suns and satellites, is trifling compared with the attractions and repulsions with which we are familiar between electrically charged bodies; while these again sink into insignificance beside the attractions and repulsions between the electric monads themselves. The irregular molecular movements which constitute heat, on which the very possibility of organic life seems absolutely to hang, and in whose transformations applied science is at present so largely concerned, can not rival the kinetic energy stored within the molecules themselves. This prodigious mechanism seems outside the range of our immediate interests. We live, so to speak, merely on its fringe. It has for us no promise of utilitarian value. It will not drive our mills; we can not harness it to our trains. Yet not less on that account does it stir the intellectual imagination. The starry heavens have, from time immemorial, moved the worship or the wonder of