Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/283

Rh Such is the indubitable testimony of all common experience and of almost all scientific experience. Right here is one of the strategic points of the whole situation. How trustworthy is the testimony of common experience and of so much of science as supports it in this matter?

Some physicists, how many I do not know, but seemingly a considerable number, do not feel themselves compelled to admit that there are no real objects in the world possessing but a single attribute. As I understand the conception of the electron as a corpuscle ("a little body" you note) of pure, negative electricity—of just electricity and nothing else—of "electricity with no material support" as some writers say, is virtually, though perhaps not admittedly, a natural body with but a single attribute. All ordinary experience is certainly to the effect that electricity is an attribute of natural bodies rather than a wholly independent body. The innumerable mechanisms all about us, batteries, dynamos, conducting wires, transformers, etc., for producing and handling it, are unequivocal witnesses to the truth of this assertion.

Before it can be admitted that electricity or the "ether of space" or any single entity with but a single attribute under any name whatever, is the real essence and explanation of the whole visible world, we must examine intently what would be involved in such an admission, and also the positive evidence advanced in support of the hypothesis.

First look at the matter for a moment historically or racially as one might say. One of the most significant results of modern anthropological research is the clear demonstration that the mind of primitive man is not clearly differentiated as to the way it recognizes objects in the world by which it is surrounded; that what is subjective and what is objective are very imperfectly separated in the primitive mind as compared with what they are in the mind of civilized man. Indeed the process of becoming civilized may be well characterized by saying that it consists in the gradual sifting out in consciousness of objective, sensible experiences from purely subjective experiences. The chief interest to us about this disentanglement of the human mind from the external world is that it consists, in large part at least, in discovering that what civilized men unquestionably recognize as attributes of natural objects, are held by primitive men to be independent entities on a footing with actual objects, that is, with objects composed of numerous attributes properly combined. The roar of the waterfall, the hoot of the owl, the destroying force of the storm, disease, hunger and the thousand and one other incidents of common life universally recognized by men under civilization as states or conditions of their appropriate objects, are conceived by savages to be independent beings. And it is clear that something of the same sort marks the development of each individual civilized man from earliest childhood to the full consciousness of mature life. In the terminology of biological evolution we have here an instance of the law