It does not seem to me absolutely necessary that matter should be composed of solid particles. The "atoms" may be persistent whirlpools of a continuous "substance"—which substance, if at rest, could not affect us (all sensory impression being dependent on motion) and subsequently would FOR US = 0. The evolution of matter would be the getting under weigh of this "nothing for us" until it became the "something for us," the different motions of which give us the mental states we call the qualities of things.
But it needs a very steady head to walk safely among these abysses of thought, and the only use of letting the mind range among them is as a corrective to the hasty dogmatism of the so-called materialists, who talk just as glibly of that of which they know nothing as the most bigoted of the orthodox.
[Here also stand two letters to Lord Farrer, one before, the other after, his address at the Statistical Society on the Relations between Morals, Economics and Statistics, which touch on several philosophical and social questions, always, to his mind, intimately connected, and wherein wrong modes of thought indubitably lead to wrong modes of action. Noteworthy is a defence of the fundamental method of Political Economy, however much its limitations might be forgotten by some of its exponents. The reference to the Church agitation to introduce dogmatic teaching into the elementary schools has also a lasting interest.]
Hodeslea, November 6, 1894.
My dear Farrer,
Whenever you get over the optimism of your youthful constitution (I wish I were endowed with that blessing) you will see that the Gospels and I are right about the Devil being "Prince" (note the distinction—not "king") of the Cosmos.
The a priori road to scientific, political, and all other doctrine is H.R.H. Satan's invention—it is the intellectual, broad, and easy path which leadeth to Jehannum.
The king's road is the strait path of painful observation and experiment, and few they be that enter thereon.
R.G. Latham, queerest of men, had singular flashes of insight now and then. Forty years ago he gravely told me that the existence of the Established Church was to his mind one of the best evidences of the recency of the evolution of the human type from the simian.
How much there is to confirm this view in present public opinion and the intellectual character of those who influence it!