State of matter

“ There is but little difference in their real meaning, and all the Versions express the first state of things.24 The whole collection of matter, created in a fluid state, was a crude, indigested chaos: all belonging to our system, as the sun, moon, stars, earth, and seas, lay blended together in one vast, confused mass, without any arrangement of their constituent particles, heavy and light, dense and rare, fluid and solid, being all mixed together ”

“ Whatever physics may regard as the ultimate constituents of matter, it always supposes these constituents to be indestructible. Since the immediate data of sense are not indestructible but in a state of perpetual flux, it is argued that these data themselves cannot be among the ultimate constituents of matter. ”

“ I shall therefore assume, as a working hypothesis, that the human body acts according to the same laws of physics and chemistry as those which govern dead matter, and that it differs from dead matter, not by its laws, but by the extraordinary complexity of its structure. ”

“ Science has dealt and delved patiently with the laws of matter. From Cuvier to Huxley, we have a long line of clear-eyed workers. The gravitating force between all molecules; the law of continuity; the inertial force of matter; the sublime facts of organic co-ordination and adaptation,--all these are recognized, analyzed, recorded, taught. We have learned that the true meaning of the word law, as applied to Nature, is not decree, but formula of invariable order, immutable as the constitution of ultimate units of matter. Order is not imposed upon Nature. ”

“ Can you think even of anything without a material basis? Is it possible to imagine the annihilation of a single atom? Is it possible for you to conceive of the creation of an atom? Can you have a thought that was not suggested to you by what you call matter? ”

“ Our knowledge of the material world is obtained by means of the senses, of sight and touch and so on. At first it is supposed that things are just as they seem, but two opposite sophistications soon destroy this naïve belief. On the one hand the physicists cut up matter into molecules, atoms, corpuscles, and as many more such subdivisions as their future needs may make them postulate, and the units at which they arrive are uncommonly different from the visible, tangible objects of daily life. ”

“ In the preceding chapter, I suggested what may be called a minimum definition of matter, that is to say, one in which matter has, so to speak, as little “substance” as is compatible with the truth of physics. In adopting a definition of this kind, we are playing for safety: our tenuous matter will exist, even if something more beefy also exists. ”

“ The Structure of the Atom In all that we have said hitherto on the subject of man from without, we have taken a common-sense view of the material world. We have not asked ourselves: What is matter? Is there such a thing, or is the outside world composed of stuff of a different kind? And what light does a correct theory of the physical world throw upon the process of perception? ”

“ The word matter is the name of a collection of particles and every particle is a combination of essentials. The concept of matter has passed through the crucible of human experience and the most thorough and profound scientific investigation. All human knowledge, all scientific research, all ideation, and all logical expression are founded on this concept. To deny the reality of matter is to murder reason. ”

“ Spite of all the pains I have taken to show that I regard matter as itself a localized manifestation of force—spite of all the evidence that our idea of a unit of matter, or atom, is regarded by me simply as a symbol which the form of our thought obliges us to use, but which we can not suppose answers to the reality without committing ourselves to alternative impossibilities of thought, I am debited with the belief that matter actually consists "of space-occupying units, having shape and measurement." ”

“ We can easily suppose that in this way there may be the most profound and admirable reasons for the existence of the present universal properties of matter, which we cannot apprehend in consequence of the limited nature of our knowledge, and of our faculties. ”

“ The prominent lesson of science to men, therefore, is faith in the intangible and invisible. Shall we talk of matter as the great reality of the world, the prominent substance? It is nothing but the battleground of terrific forces. Every particle of matter, the chemists tell us, is strained up to its last degree of endurance. ”

“ The attractive forces, gravity, chemical affinity, and cohesion, whether these forces are many or one, are inherent properties of matter. Every atom has its definite capacity of attraction, which may be exercised or not according to circumstances. ”

“ Yet we do not for that reason refrain from deducing the existence of matter from the manifestations of certain phenomena and from our experience with them. It is perfectly true that we know matter only by the manifestations of certain physical phenomena; that we can not define the nature of its substance. All we can do, by the most minute analysis, is to arrive at the perception of the ultimate particles or units of matter ”

“ We know that those atoms obey certain conditions which appear to be dependent upon the influences of motion, gravitation, heat, light, electricity, and chemical force. These powers are only known to us by their effects; we only detect their action by their operations upon matter; and although we regard the several phenomena which we have discovered, as the manifestations of different principles, it is possible they may be but modifications of some one universal power, of which these are but a few of its modes of action. ”

“ The laws of what we call the material world continue unvaried. And, when the vast system of things was first set in motion, every thing, so far as depends on inert matter, was determined to the minutest particle, even to the end of time. ”

“ In so far as matter may be conceived to exist in a purely passive state, it is, imaginably, older than motion. ”

“ If the smallest parts which we can imagine and distinguish in bodies differ from each other only by the nature of the motions to which they are subjected, if motion alone rules and determines the variety of different attributes which characterizes these atoms, if in a word the unity of matter exists—and it must exist—what is this fundamental and primary matter whence all the rest proceed? ”

“ If the properties of such a system of bodies are found to correspond to those of gases, an important physical analogy will be established, which may lead to more accurate knowledge of the properties of matter. ”

“ We can have no knowledge of the existence, even, of material things, save from their phenomena, the manifestation of interchanging forces, upon which rests our threefold basis of knowledge, perception, cognition, and comparison. We know nothing of matter, except as affected by internal or external force, nor of force itself, except as it acts in one mode or another upon matter. ”

“ It is the existing properties or qualities of matter that affect us. Matter is hard, it is yellow, it is sweet. Now the very qualities that make matter as we know it are demonstrated by modern science to be but ‘modes of motion;’ matter is hot because the ultimate atoms of it vibrate in a special manner. ”

“ Every atom is invested with properties peculiar to all of its class; and each one possesses powers, to which in mute obedience it is compelled, by which these properties are modified, and the character of matter varied. ”

“ And this is only natural, for the trend of recent research has made clear the fact that one of the three greatest problems of modern astronomy and astrophysics, ranking with the structure of the universe and the evolution of celestial bodies, is the constitution of matter. ”

“ But when you talk of matter as something in itself inert and motionless, your parents or tutors surely cannot have left you so ignorant as not to know that no form of matter is motionless and inert: every particle is constantly in motion and constantly acted upon by agencies, of which heat is the most apparent and rapid, but vril the most subtle, and, when skilfully wielded, the most powerful. ”

“ Thus originated the idea of matter, in which was grouped all that was sensibly connected with mass, and continued with it, such as weight, volume, chemical properties, etc., and the physical law of the conservation of mass passed into the metaphysical axiom of the conservation of matter. ”

“ A. Matter.—As extended substance, matter occupies infinite space, and each individual body forms a part of the universe as real substance. The law of the conservation of matter teaches us that the sum of matter is eternal and unchangeable. This applies equally to the various kinds of matter which we call the chemical elements, or ponderable matter, and to the ether that fills the spaces between the atoms and molecules, or imponderable matter. ”

“ What has been called matter is, so far as we know now, simply a complex of energies, and he has sought to extend the "energetic" principle from physical or chemical to biological, psychical, and social phenomena. ”

“ True or false, it is the definitive theory of matter of the twentieth century.
Quite aside from the question of the exact constitution of the ultimate particles of matter, questions as to the distribution of such particles, their mutual relations, properties, and actions, came in for a full share of attention during the nineteenth century, though the foundations for the modern speculations were furnished in a previous epoch. ”

“ Reduce matter to atoms in motion: these atoms, though denuded of physical qualities, are determined only in relation to an eventual vision and an eventual contact, the one without light and the other without materiality. ”

“ The necessity of determining aright the bearings of the new views reached or suggested by science as to the ultimate constitution of matter, the conservation of energy, cosmic evolution, the age and duration of the present physical system, &c., has been the chief factor in the latest developments of the argument a contingentia inundi. ”

“ What is Matter?—Having seen that the conception of the atom is immature, and incapable of demonstration, we find matter, of which the atom is supposed to be the foundation, equally incapable of definition. With matter we never come in sensuous contact; we only know its forces, as expressed in phenomena.
The succession of seasons, the recurrence of day and night, the teeming earth, the starry heavens [14] —these are manifestations of matter. Matter here is revealed to us as an appearance. Matter is appearance; phenomena are concrete expressions of force. ”

“ In this view the solid form of matter is not only the basis and origin of all its further determinations—of all its evolutions and changes—but it is also the primary and typical element of its mental representation and conception. ”

“ The question of the ultimate structure of matter, as has already been pointed out, is also speculative in the sense that the mechanism upon which its properties are based is out of the range of direct observation. ”

“ We have been seeking, in this chapter, to define matter so that there must be such a thing if the formulæ of physics are true. If we had made our definition such as to secure that a particle of matter should be what one thinks of as substantial, a hard, definite lump, we should not have been sure that any such thing exists. ”

“ To this spiritual world we may refer the marvellously complex forces which we know as gravitation, cohesion, chemical force, radiant force, and electricity, without which the material universe could not exist for a moment in its present form, and perhaps not at all, since without these forces, and perhaps others which may be termed atomic, it is doubtful whether matter itself could have any existence. ”

“ As the chapters of the preceding book carried us out into a macrocosm of inconceivable magnitude, our present studies are to reveal a microcosm of equally inconceivable smallness. As the studies of the physicist attempted to reveal the very nature of matter and of energy, we have now to seek the solution of the yet more inscrutable problems of life and of mind. ”

“ The essential property of matter is its mass and its inertia. Mass remains constant everywhere and always, it even remains when a chemical transformation changes all observable properties of matter, and has apparently created an entirely new body. ”

“ The position which I seek to establish in this essay is, that the various imponderable agencies, or the affections of matter which constitute the main objects of experimental physics, viz., heat, light, electricity, magnetism, chemical affinity, and motion, are all correlative, or have a reciprocal dependence;—that neither, taken abstractedly, can be said to be the essential or proximate cause of the others ”

“ Under this class of claims, that from the limitations of the human brain can neither be proved nor disproved, are the conventional definitions of matter, and accepted distinctions between matter and mind, or other forms of force.
The qualities that for ages have been attributed to matter, as inertia and extension, apply correctly enough to that limited portion and form of matter that the senses can appreciate; but, as has been shown, all but an infinitesimal portion of Nature is permanently sealed against the senses. ”

“ After this preliminary statement of the results of experimental investigation, we said, "Therefore, it is now regarded as a fundamental truth of physical science, and a fundamental law of Nature, that force, like matter, is never created or destroyed." The proposition is stated as an inference, as an induction from observations, as a result of experimental inquiry into the physical processes of Nature, and as a pure principle of science. ”

“ The effects of the force, called either affinity or attraction, which maintains these elements united, are not beyond the range of our observation; tables of affinity, and of atomic weights, have been constructed, which enable the chemist to dominate over matter, just as the astronomer embraces the stars, the atoms of the world, by the law of universal gravitation. ”