Article April 5, 1913 Issue

The statement of a contributor to the effect that the discovery...

Frederick Dixon—London, England.

London Budget

The statement of a contributor to the effect that the discovery recently claimed by Sir William Ramsay, that matter was the creation of energy, supported the teaching of Mrs. Eddy in Christian Science, is, if you will permit me to say so, true with certain reservations. It is true, that is to say, of her explanation of the relative facts of physical nature; it is not coincident with her teaching of the absolute. There is nothing new in theory in Sir William Ramsay's discovery. Theoretically, in one form or another, it is as old as Plato and the Vedanta, or as young as Berkeley or Professor Ostwald. What is new in it is that he claims to have demonstrated the process by which the energy of Professor Ostwald resolves itself into matter. The postulate of the famous German chemist was put with delightful lucidity in an address delivered some years ago to a congress of natural scientists, assembled at Lubeck, in the following words: "Matter is only a thing imagined, which we have constructed for ourselves, very imperfectly to represent the constant element in the changing series of phenomena. Now that we begin to understand the actual—that is, that which acts upon us—is only energy, we have to ascertain by tests in what relation the two conceptions stand, and the result is without a doubt that of energy alone can reality be predicated." Sir William Ramsay now claims to have demonstrated by actual experiment how matter is produced by energy. Christian Scientists might accept this theory very much in the manner Mrs. Eddy accepted the theory of evolution when she wrote, on page 547 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," "Darwin's theory of evolution from a material basis is more consistent than most theories." That, however, would not affect the real crux of the situation, which is not the unreality of matter regarded as a phenomenon produced by mind or energy, but the unreality of the noumenon of mortal mind or energy which produces the phenomenon of matter.

The unreality of matter, regarded as phenomenon produced by mind or energy, is a theory as old as the hills in the proverb; a fact of which the simple exponents of common sense, who assume the ignorance of Mrs. Eddy in a manner delightful if only for its self-exposed ignorance, are blissfully unconscious. The Vedantist avowed it in the doctrine of Maya when he described matter as an illusion. That is what Plato insisted upon in his theory of participation. That was the root of the struggle between the medieval Conceptualists and Realists, and Abelard is not thought to have had the worst of his reply to the doctrine of Anselm. That was at the bottom of Berkeley's dissent from Locke, and that is the gravamen of Professor Ostwald's lecture. When all is said and done, it is something perilously near the battle over the ass' shadow, and Huxley, with his supreme common sense, pointed this out when he wrote, "If the hypothetical substance of mind is possessed of energy, I, for my part, am unable to see how it is to be discriminated from the hypothetical substance of matter," a statement anticipated by Mrs. Eddy when she wrote on page 409 of Science and Health, "Mortal mind and body combine as one."

The Vedanta, in declaring that the divine Mind was unconscious of the illusion of matter, but that this illusion was produced by the intermediary proceeding from this divine Mind, linked matter on to Spirit, just as firmly as Plato when he explained that an idea was something existent in a soul, or Berkeley when he made Spirit the ultimate of matter. The Gnostic of the second century was really in precisely the same quandary; and so is Professor Ostwald when he makes matter the result of energy. The one exception is Jesus of Nazareth. "The Son of the Virgin-mother," Mrs. Eddy writes on page 534 of Science and Health, "unfolded the remedy for Adam, or error; and the apostle Paul explains this warfare between the idea of divine power, which Jesus presented, and mythological material intelligence called energy and opposed to Spirit."

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