Most assuredly, matter is not that inert thing that we commonly suppose.
A comparison will aid in comprehending this. Take a carriage-wheel. Place it horizontally on a pivot. While the wheel is motionless, let a rubber ball fall between its spokes. This ball will almost always pass through between the spokes. Now give a slight movement to the wheel. The ball will be pretty often hit by the revolving spokes, and will rebound. If we increase the rotation, the ball will now no longer pass through the wheel, which will have become for it a wholly impenetrable disc.
We can try a similar experiment by arranging the wheel vertically and shooting arrows through it. A bicycle-wheel will serve the purpose very well, owing to the slenderness of its spokes. When not in movement, the arrows will pass through it nine times out of ten. In movement, it will produce in the arrows deviations more or less marked. With increase in the speed, it would be made impenetrable, and all the arrows would be broken as if against the steel plating of an armored ship.
These comparisons allow us to understand how matter is really only a mode of motion, only an expression of force, a manifestation of energy. It will disappear (it must be borne in mind) on analysis, which ends by taking refuge in the intangible, invisible, imponderable, and almost immaterial atom. The atom itself which was regarded as the basis of matter fifty years ago, has now disappeared, or rather has been metamorphosed and reappears as a hypothetical, impalpable vortex.
I will allow myself to repeat here what I have said a hundred times elsewhere: The universe is a dynamism.
The difficulty we have in explaining to ourselves apparitions, materializations, when we try to apply to them the ordinary conception of matter, is considerably lessened the moment we conceive that matter is only a mode of motion.
Life itself, from the most rudimentary cell up to the most complicated organism, is a special kind of movement, a movement determined and organized by a directing force. According to this theory, momentary apparitions would be less difficult to accept and to comprehend. The vital force of the medium might externalize itself and produce in a point of space a vibratory system which should be the counterpart of itself, in a more or less advanced degree of visibility and solidity. These phenomena can with difficulty be reconciled with the old hypothesis of the independent and intrinsic existence of matter: They better fit that of matter as a mode of motion—in a word, simple movement, giving the sensation of matter.
There is, of course, only one substance, the primitive substance, which antedates the original nebula—the womb from which all bodies in the universe have issued. The substances which the chemists take to be simple bodies—oxygen, hydrogen, azote, iron, gold, silver, etc.—are mineral elements which have been gradually formed and differentiated, just as, later, the vegetable and animal species were differentiated. And not only is the substance of the world one, but it also has the same origin as energy, and these two forms are mutually interchangeable. Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.[86]
The unique substance is immaterial and unknowable in its essence. We see and touch only its condensations, its aggregations, its arrangements; that is to say, forms produced by movement. Matter, force, life, thought, are all one.
In reality, there is only one principle in the universe, and it is at once intelligence, force, and matter, embracing all that is and all that possibly can be. That which we call matter is only a form of motion. At the basis of all is force, dynamism, and universal mind, or spirit.