All matter is charged with electricity, either actual or potential; the sun is hot with it, and doubtless our own heart-beats, our own thinking brains, are intimately related to it; yet it is palpable and visible only in this sudden and extraordinary way.  It defies our analysis, it defies our definitions; it is inscrutable and incomprehensible, yet it will do our errands, light our houses, cook our dinners, and pull our loads.

How humdrum and constant and prosaic the other forces—­gravity, cohesion, chemical affinity, and capillary attraction—­seem when compared with this force of forces, electricity!  How deep and prolonged it slumbers at one time, how terribly active and threatening at another, bellowing through the heavens like an infuriated god seeking whom he may destroy!

The warring of the elements at such times is no figure of speech.  What has so disturbed the peace in the electric equilibrium, as to make possible this sudden outburst, this steep incline in the stream of energy, this ethereal Niagara pouring from heaven to earth?  Is a thunderstorm a display of the atomic energy of which the physicists speak, and which, were it available for our use, would do all the work of the world many times over?

How marvelous that the softest summer breeze, or the impalpable currents of the calmest day, can be torn asunder with such suddenness and violence, by the accumulated energy that slumbers in the imaginary atoms, as to give forth a sound like the rending of mountains or the detonations of earthquakes!

Electricity is the soul of matter.  If Whitman’s paradox is true, that the soul and body are one, in the same sense the scientific paradox is true:  that matter and electricity are one, and both are doubtless a phase of the universal ether—­a reality which can be described only in terms of the negation of matter.  In a flash of lightning we see pure disembodied energy—­probably that which is the main-spring of the universe.  Modern science is more and more inclined to find the explanation of all vital phenomena in electrical stress and change.  We know that an electric current will bring about chemical changes otherwise impracticable.  Nerve force, if not a form of electricity, is probably inseparable from it.  Chemical changes equivalent to the combustion of fuel and the corresponding amount of available energy released have not yet been achieved outside of the living body without great loss.  The living body makes a short cut from fuel to energy, and this avoids the wasteful process of the engine.  What part electricity plays in this process is, of course, only conjectural.

II

Our daily lives go on for the most part in two worlds, the world of mechanical transposition and the world of chemical transformations, but we are usually conscious only of the former.  This is the visible, palpable world of motion and change that rushes and roars around us in the winds, the storms, the floods, the moving and falling bodies, and the whole panorama of our material civilization; the latter is the world of silent, invisible, unsleeping, and all-potent chemical reactions that take place all about us and is confined to the atoms and molecules of matter, as the former is confined to its visible aggregates.