In a recent pamphlet on “The Density of AEther,” Sir Oliver Lodge remarks:—­

“Just as the ratio of mass to volume is small in the case of a solar system or a nebula or a cobweb, I have been driven to think that the observed mechanical density of matter is probably an excessively small fraction of the total density of the substance or aether contained in the space which it thus partially occupies—­the substance of which it may hypothetically be held to be composed.

“Thus, for instance, consider a mass of platinum, and assume that its atoms are composed of electrons, or of some structures not wholly dissimilar:  the space which these bodies actually fill, as compared with the whole space which in a sense they ‘occupy,’ is comparable to one ten-millionth of the whole, even inside each atom; and the fraction is still smaller if it refers to the visible mass.  So that a kind of minimum estimate of aetherial density, on this basis, would be something like ten thousand million times that of platinum.”

And further on he adds that this density may well turn out to be fifty thousand million times that of platinum.  “The densest matter known,” he says, “is trivial and gossamer-like compared with the unmodified aether in the same space.”

Incredible as this seems to our ordinary ideas, it is undoubtedly an understatement rather than an exaggeration of the true proportion as observed in the case of koilon.  We shall understand how this can be so if we remember that koilon seems absolutely homogeneous and solid even when examined by a power of magnification which makes physical atoms appear in size and arrangement like cottages scattered over a lonely moor, and when we further add to this the recollection that the bubbles of which these atoms in turn are composed are themselves what may be not inaptly called fragments of nothingness.

In the same pamphlet Sir Oliver Lodge makes a very striking estimate of the intrinsic energy of the aether.  He says:  “The total output of a million-kilowatt power station for thirty million years exists permanently, and at present inaccessibly in every cubic millimetre of space.”  Here again he is probably underestimating the stupendous truth.

It may naturally be asked how, if all this be so, it is possible that we can move about freely in a solid ten thousand million times denser, as Sir Oliver Lodge says, than platinum.  The obvious answer is that, where densities differ sufficiently, they can move through each other with perfect freedom; water or air can pass through cloth; air can pass through water; an astral form passes unconsciously through a physical wall, or through an ordinary human body; many of us have seen an astral form walk through a physical, neither being conscious of the passage; it does not matter whether we say that a ghost has passed through a wall, or a wall has passed through a ghost.  A gnome passes freely through a rock, and walks about