Page:The Philosophy of Creation.djvu/111



It may be well here to recall that since love causes the brain to act, and since that which causes activity must have a body, or be a substance either natural or supernatural, love must be a substance. The examination of natural phenomena leads up to and enforces the truth of this. Sound is from the activity of air, a substance. Heat and light from the sun are from the activity of an intervening substantial ether, a still higher substance capable of more complex motion. Electricity is but another manifestation of the same substance, a substance so subtile and so underlying grosser matter that it is able to operate upon the forces that bind atoms together, and to rend asunder the hardest objects. It is a universally diffused substance polarizing the earths and permeating the universe. Though finer and so superior to what we are accustomed to think of as substantial, it is most enduring, eluding destruction, and escaping decay because it is essentially a substance (sub-stare)—a thing that stands under to hold out. Gravity is the activity of a substance having still more subtile and more universal power. Nothing eludes its grasp. Acting in matter it gives bodies forces that draw them together after the similitude of affections