One day, when he was deep in his studies of Radiant Matter, Sir William
Crookes touched a little table which stood between our two chairs, and
said to me, "We shall announce to the world in a year or two, perhaps
sooner, that the atoms of which this table is composed are made up of
tiny charges of electricity, and we shall prove that each one of those
tiny electrons, relative to its size, is farther away from its nearest
neighbour than our earth from the nearest star."
I have lived to see this prophecy fulfilled, though its implications are
not yet understood.
The Church does not yet realise that physical science, hitherto regarded
as the enemy of religion and the mocker of philosophy, presents us now
with the world of the transcendentalists, the world of the
metaphysicians, the world of religious seers--a world which is real and
visible only to our limited senses, but a world which disappears from
all vision and definition directly we bring to its investigation those
ingenious instruments of science which act as extensions of our senses.
Every schoolboy is now aware that a door is solid only to his eyes and
touch; that with the aid of X-rays it becomes transparent, the light
passing through it as water passes through network, revealing what is on
the other side. Every schoolboy also knows that his own body can be so
photographed as to reveal its skeleton.
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