“‘Which in whirls constitutes matter.’  Professor Lodge believed that ’some etheric molecules revolved so rapidly on their axis that they could not be penetrated.’  Watch the soap-bubbles that I am blowing.  Each and every one is revolving as the earth revolves, from west to east.  What I wish to call your attention to is the fact that can be proven, both mathematically and theoretically, that at a certain rate of speed in the revolution they could not be penetrated by any rifle-ball.  At a higher rate of speed they would be harder than globes of solid chilled steel, harder even than carbon.  Professor Lodge believed that the etheric molecule revolved so rapidly that, thin as it was in its shell, it gave us the dust out of which worlds were made.  There is one fatal error in this idea, although it is held even now by many.  It is based entirely on gravity, and gravity is alone considered in its problems.  There are two great forces in the universe, not one, as many scientific people fail to remember —­Gravity and Apergy, or the centrifugal and centripetal forces.  The pull in is and must be always balanced by the pull out.  There is in the universe as much repulsion as attraction, and the former is a force quite as important as the latter.  The bubble’s speed kept increasing until apergy, the tendency to fly off, overcame gravity, and it ruptured.

“Professor Lodge failed to take into account this apergic force, this tendency to fly off, when he gave such high revolutionary speed to the etheric molecules, a speed in which apergy would necessarily exceed gravity.  The failure to take apergy into consideration has been the undoing of many physicists.

“Today we know that the ether is matter, the same as our own, only finer and rarer and in much more rapid vibration.  We know that this ether has its solids, liquids and gases formed from molecules of its atoms, even as our own are formed.  We know that its atoms combine as ours do, and while we have but eighty elementary combinations, it must have more than double the number.  We know that every form and shape and combination of these elements from this plane flows from inherited tendencies having their root in the etheric world.

“The two worlds are one world—­as much at one with ours as the world of gas about us is at one with our liquids and solids.  It is ‘continuity, not impact.’  They not only touch everywhere and in everything, but they are one and the same in action and reaction.”

Thus spake a certain wise teacher of physics.  To his wise utterances, we can only add that such as we are today “we see through a glass, darkly.”  Yet there will come a day when the physical bandages will be removed from our eyes, and we shall see face to face the beauty and grandeur and glory of this invisible world, and that in truth it ’transmits by continuity and not impact every action and reaction of which matter is capable,’ forming one continuous chain of cause and effect, without a link missing.  There are no gulfs to cross; no bridges to be made.  It is here; not there.  It is at one with us.  And we are at one with it.  One and the same law controls and guides the etheric atom and the physical atom made from its molecules, whether the latter are made in “whirls,” as at first supposed, or by orderly combination as now believed.