- able.—In physics we distinguish between two kinds
of matter—ponderable, obeying the law of universal attraction or weight, and imponderable matter or ether, which we assume to exist and to escape the action of that force. Ether has no weight, or extremely little weight. It is material in so far as it has mass. It is its mass which confers existence on it from the mechanical point of view—a logical existence, inferred from the necessity of explaining the propagation of heat, light, or electricity.
It may be observed that the use of mass really comes to bringing another element, force, to intervene, and we shall see that force is connected with energy; thus it comes to defining matter indirectly by energy. The two fundamental elements are not therefore irreducible; on the contrary, they should be one and the same thing.
Energy is the only Objective Reality.—This fusion into one will become more evident still when we examine the different kinds of energy, each of which exactly corresponds to one of the aspects of active matter. Shall we define matter by extension, by the portion of space it occupies, as certain philosophers do? The physicist will answer that space is only known to us by the expenditure of energy necessary to penetrate it (the activity of our different senses). And then what is weight? It is energy of position (universal attraction). And so with the other attributes. So that if matter were separated from the energetic phenomena by means of which it is revealed to us—weight or energy of position, impenetrability or energy of volume, chemical properties or chemical energies, mass or capacity for kinetic energy—the very idea of matter would vanish. And that comes to
