Grey matter

“ The worthy M. Carteret felt hot and cold all over. He had an enormous regard for M. le Marquis de Trévargan and a wholesome terror of the Minister's secret agent, and between the two he did not know to which saint he should pray for protection.
"Loyalty is a matter of degree," here interposed the Man in Grey in his usual monotone; "as Monsieur le Marquis well knows." ”

“ Without protest or opposition on the part of the master of the house, the Man in Grey had taken command of the small army of scared domestics.
"Monsieur le Sous-Préfet," he said, "before I can help you in this matter, I must make a hurried inspection of your domain. I shall require three of your men to come with me. They must come armed with a stout joist, with pickaxes and a few heavy tools. You yourself and your women servants must remain on guard outside the bedroom door. Should Marie Vaillant attempt a sortie, seize her and, above all, see she does not do herself an injury. ”

“ Again, leaving this insoluble question, let us ask whether substance has, in reality, anything like that extended solidity which it presents to our consciousness. The portion of space occupied by a piece of metal, seems to eyes and fingers perfectly filled: we perceive a homogeneous, resisting mass, without any breach of continuity. Shall we then say that Matter is as actually solid as it appears? Shall we say that whether it consists of an infinitely divisible element or of ultimate units incapable of further division, its parts are everywhere in actual contact? ”

“ Still another objection lies in the fact that wherever the gray matter exists near the surface of the brain, it consists of three distinct layers, separated by a white substance, and the outermost layer is white, not gray. ”

“ If gold and carbon, iron and oxygen are at bottom composed of particles that are mere duplicates of each other, as seems to be the case, how can these elements and the six dozen or more others maintain their individuality throughout nature as we know they do, even in the far distant stars, except by the sleepless care of an Intelligence whose Word is as effective in one part of the universe as in another, and to whose Word these particles of matter can show no inertia and no disobedience, because they have no powers or properties except what He has imparted? ”

“ It is a very noteworthy fact that the structure of the gray matter differs materially from that of the white. In the gray matter nerve-cells are found in addition to nervous fibers, the former originating nervous force, while the latter are simply capable of conveying this subtile force. Thus it may be said that it is in the gray matter that thought is chiefly evolved, and from this layer that purposive actions spring. ”

“ When, therefore, the scientist takes us back into primeval ages, and shows us the elemental forms of matter, as ether, or gas, or fluid, commingling or rushing asunder in wild chaotic fury, gradually subsiding into rock and metal, we admit the facts so plainly recorded in the structure and substance of the earth. But we say that all these movements, combinations, and formations were the effects of the spirit of God brooding over these inorganic dead elements, selecting, arranging, combining, and fixing them in forms suitable for the foundation of the kingdoms of nature and human beings. ”

“ In this transformation of sulphurous substance from a higher material state, nearer to levity, to that of the solid crystal, we may behold an image of the generation of matter. For every physical substance and, therefore, every chemical element, exists originally as a pure function in the dynamic processes of the universe. Wherever, as a result of the action of gravity, such a function congeals materially, there we meet it in the form of a physical-material substance. ”

“ The crystals in the earth, therefore, must have originated at a time when the relation between levity and gravity on the earth was different from what it is, in this sphere, to-day.
The same language is spoken by the property of transparency which is so predominant among crystals. One of the fundamental characteristics of heavy solid matter is to resist light - in other words, to be opaque. Exposed to heat, however, physical substance loses this feature to the extent that at the border of its ponderability all matter becomes pervious to light. ”

“ Green is merely their synthesis, the terrestrial, finite totality.
372. The genesis of colours is thus the genesis of the elements, or that of matter. It cannot be otherwise; for the becoming of matter is verily an offuscation of light, a coloration. Colour agrees essentially with the elements, and is itself nothing different from element. Fire is in its essence red, as being the impartient of light and heat; air is in its essence nothing else than the blue æther by virtue of its being gaseous; water is the green æther, earth the yellow. If the æther is tensed, it then becomes red or fire ”

“ The graver thoughts of science have, in connexion with speculations about light and heat, imagined a limit within which all the play of material action is confined—a vast globe of ethereal matter, within which all material bodies are embraced, and without which the activities of light, heat, electricity, magnetism, and gravitation, could not exist. ”

“ However, whether the metalline Particles, to which they owe their Colours, are, in either Quantity or Quality, in Condition to have any effect in the Body, is a Matter worthy of a strict and regular Tryal ”

“ But, before speaking of the atmosphere of monads that surround us, I must define the auras or emanations that proceed from all objects in nature.
As an aromatic scent emanates from a flower, so all other bodies emit either colors or rays of “imponderable” matter. Copper and Arsenic send out auras of red matter; Lead and Sulphur emit a blue colored substance; Gold, Silver Antimony green, etc. In short, Science teaches that all matter is luminous, i. e. shines by its own light. ”

“ But the greenness or redness, though involving the consideration both of mind affected, and matter affecting, is not less conceivable by us as a quality of matter than the weight, which also involves the consideration of two substances, affecting and affected, though both go under the name of matter alone. ”

“ From a black and amorphous matter we have made to issue crystalline substances of every shade of color—reds, saffrons, greens, violets, and blues—alizarine, the same substance as tints the flowers of the madder, and that wonderful aniline, colorless as the ray of light before it has been resolved by the prism, but containing in posse, like the same ray, all the colors of the rainbow. What do we know of stone-coal, the origin of so many marvels and refractory to all analysis? ”

“ Gray is semi-neutral, and denotes a class of cool cinereous colours, faint of hue; whence we have blue grays, olive grays, green grays, purple grays, and grays of all hues in which blue predominates; but no yellow or red grays, the predominance of such hues carrying the compounds into the classes of brown and marrone, of which [30] gray is the natural opposite. Grey is neutral, and is composed of or can be resolved into black and white alone, from a mixture of which two colours it springs in an infinite series. ”

“ And that according to the 7th Observation, a very little variation of obliquity will change the reflected Colour, where the thin Body or small Particles is rarer than the ambient Medium, insomuch that such a small Particle will at diversly oblique Incidences reflect all sorts of Colours, in so great a variety that the Colour resulting from them all, confusedly reflected from a heap of such Particles, must rather be a white or grey than any other Colour, or at best it must be but a very imperfect and dirty Colour. ”

“ Such concentrations of levity do indeed exist in varied forms. One is the 'warmth-body' represented by the blood-heat of the higher animals and man. There is, however, an occurrence of this kind also on the purely mineral level of nature, and it is this which has particular significance for our present study of matter. We meet it in all physical substances which have the peculiarity of being combustible. ”

“ The mediate tensions of æther, or the mixture of Light and Dark, are mean conditions of White and Black, mixtures of the two extremes or androgynisms of White and Black. If we do not call White and Black colours, colours are then partial positions of light in matter, or in the dark. ”

“ And as objects, in proportion to their distance, are more or less affected by the interposition of the atmosphere, so, also, do the parts of the individual objects themselves, become more or less grey as they recede. The boundaries of a white object are less white, and of a black object less black, than the parts nearest the eye. ”

“ Are we pointed to the crystal and shown how its forms prophesy of organization, of plant, and animal, we delight to recognize the fact, and rejoice to see the evidence of the Divine purpose even in the lowest forms of matter. The Lord does not leave Himself without a witness of His final purpose in the creation, and of His presence and power in the dead elements of matter. The rock did not purify itself, select its finest substances, and combine them into the diamond, ruby, and emerald. ”

“ I have often had occasion to allude to the apparent connection of brilliancy of colour with vigour of life or purity of substance. This is pre-eminently the case in the mineral kingdom. The perfection with which the particles of any substance unite in crystallization, corresponds in that kingdom to the vital power in organic nature; and it is a universal law, that according to the purity of any substance, and according to the energy of its crystallization, is its beauty or brightness. Pure earths are white when in powder ”

“ Nothing is more simple than to suppose that the arrangement of their particles is such, as to transmit some of the coloured rays of light, and to reflect others, in which case the stone must appear of the colour of the rays which it reflects. But besides, it frequently happens that the colour of a stone is owing to a mixture of some metallic matter. ”

“ A heat so powerful—for we know of no other force which could thus hold apart the atoms of matter—would doubtless be sufficient to resolve every known substance into its simplest elementary constituents, perhaps into a very few primordial elements ”

“ That which gives us our sensation of colour is the atomic preponderance of one of these attributes. Thus if an atom or combination of atoms reflects highly it translates itself through the retina into our brains as a high force, namely, as a yellow. If an atom absorbs more than it reflects, it takes and retains the reflective force of light, and, in discharging this limited power, produces in us the sensation of blue. Now, that point on a round object where the light is strongest is the point nearest the light. As the planes of the object curve away from the light they diminish in brilliancy. ”

“ Colour does not depend only upon chemical composition nor solely upon the aggregation of the particles, but upon these and other things besides not yet explained. All matter is in a state of motion. If you heat a substance you communicate an increased activity of motion to the particles of which it consists. When certain coloured rays of light are falling upon a substance, these coloured rays of light have a motion peculiar to themselves. ”

“ According to this argument, nothing exists which has not solidity and extension, and nothing is extended and solid but matter, which in one state forms a crystal, in another a blade of grass, in a third a butterfly, and in other states other forms. The essence of grass, or the essence of crystal, in other words, those native energies of their several forms constituting and keeping them what they are, can no more be explained than can the essentiality of human nature. ”

“ As these pigments differ so widely in hue and other properties, no fixed rules can be given for their admixture: to ensure neutrality, practice and a correct eye are indispensable. Without perfect neutrality, difficult to attain and rarely to be met with, grey ceases to exist. In pure white, pure grey, and pure black, colour is, so to speak, conspicuous by its absence. ”

“ Colour is certainly a property regulated by material bodies; or rather, the presence of matter is necessary to the production of colour. Chlorine gas is a pale yellow, and nitrous vapour a yellowish red. These and one or two other vapours, which are near the point of condensation into fluids, are the only coloured gaseous or vaporiform bodies. The sky is blue, because the material particles of the atmosphere reflect back the blue rays. But we have more practical illustrations than this. The flame of hydrogen burning with oxygen gives scarcely any light ”

“ When he thought of color he should not be diverted by living tissue, but ought always to consider electricity. The more charges on the nucleus, the more color there ought to be. Since the first twenty-seven elements are comparatively light and abundant, color in real richness ought to begin at number twenty-eight He closed his eyes and dreamed of ascending scales—oxides running soberly in red and brown and black, sulphides fitting in with dusky gold, chlorides almost prismatic. ”

“ The results which have been obtained in the examination of radio-activity, of kathode rays, of spectra at different temperatures, and of phenomena allied to these, bring again into prominence the ancient problem of the structure of what we call matter. Is matter fundamentally homogeneous or heterogeneous? Chemistry studies the relations between the changes of composition and the changes of properties which happen simultaneously in material systems. The burning fire of wood, coal, or gas; the preparation of food to excite and to satisfy the appetite ”