Hamstringing the Health Seekers

THE American public has always been an easy push over for quack cure-alls and will-o'-the-wisp health cults. Almost anyone, from his own experience, could write a book on "Foibles and Follies in the Search for Health". This item concerns merely my check-off of a few.

Leaving aside miracle shrines and praying to saints, the wearing of amulets and charms, and bottled water from Lourdes, America has had more than its quota of "health" superstitions. They are almost as numerous as mosquito larvae in a New Jersey swamp. Only a few years ago, thousands were repeating to themselves: "Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better." Now they don't bother any more about getting "better". They turn to Christian Science instead, and convince themselves that they never were and never can be sick. Sickness is an "error" of mortal mind and to those who accept "Science and Health" has no real existence, Yet Christian Scientists do continue to die, and even Mrs. Eddy finally had to imagine herself as dead. She "knew" she hadn't been sick even when they put her tenderly in a beautiful, satin-lined casket and closed the lid.

The farmer who carries a potato in his pocket to cure rheumatism -- or is it the gout? --need not invite your smiles, so long as there are city slickers with equally sleazy ideas. If you have read so far, you may be willing to pursue the inquiry a bit further.

First, on my list of "health" pests, are the Big Biceps Boys, who promise to make a Tarzan or a Superman out of you in twenty gruesome lessons. Their plea is always to the runts, with special emphasis on the idea that you shouldn't remain a mouse when you can become a man. Unless you are planning to become a wrestler or a pug, or a bar-room- bouncer, or a knock-em-cold slug, you might as well throw away your money by giving it to the church. Big muscles won't add a single cell to your brain or improve your thinking. They won't even keep disease germs away. They may be useful at times, if you have to move a piano, but more than likely they will get you into trouble if you are at all pugnacious.

Twice a year, at least I am besieged over the phone by a coaxing voice, urging me to join an "exclusive" gymnasium or business executives' club, established for the purpose of daily exercise and the building up of muscle. Here, I am told, I could meet big bankers and brokers, who limber up for the day in the way the monkeys do--by swinging from a bar. If I would only punch a bag regularly, or "chin" myself daily, or jump a hurdle, I would be better fitted to carry on. I cannot see how my hanging upside down, or climbing a rope would help me in my work. I have no intention of becoming either a flag-pole sitter or a steeple-jack.

As a boy, I became friendly with a man in the sideshow of a traveling circus who used to have large blocks of stone broken on his head. He used to let me hold his sledge-hammer for him, before some husky in the audience was invited up to smash the rock. He was featured as the Iron Skull Man, and I so much admired his act that I used to practice it at home With a feather pillow -- and a lot of imagination. I have sometimes wondered why someone hasn't capitalized this idea as conducive to health.Why not, I ask, the Eureka Cult for Developing Thick Skulls?

Some of us manage, somehow, to get through life without much brawn. I have never felt particular need of it myself, even on the occasion when, at an outdoor meeting, some delighted listener hurled a bottle, at me. Muscles, if I had had them, would have complicated matters. Besides, the possession of an idea sometimes gives one confidence. I would have felt rather annoyed at myself, and even that I had lost my morale, if I could not face a crowd in defense of an idea, without the weapons of the mob. The fact that I did not budge sobered them a bit and the meeting went on.

Next, on my list of check-offs, are the "Correct Posture" fiends, who insist that you stand and sit with the stiffness of an arch-duke and the rigidity of a ramrod. I well remember the tortures I went through in school, sitting with my hands behind my back. No slumping Darrows here, no relaxed muscles, no leisure for limb or tissue, or ease of movement. Chins in, chests-out, stomachs in, waists wasp-tight and you were ready for, a goose-step and the Nazi salute. No one, of course, admires a slouchy carriage, but there is a far cry between walking at ease and walking like a robot with rivets in your joints. A West Point cadet looks trim enough in his maneuvers on the parade ground, but he does not walk that way, if he values his health, when he is 'really' on the march. The human body is not built on the inflexible lines of a lead pencil.

Physical endurance, in the race of life, depends on something more substantial than mere sinew or the spectacular performances of track and team. The "Sprinter" and the get-there-fast athlete are not the physical assets or bundles of energy they were once supposed to be. This has been seen in an actual checkup of American youth.

"The reviewer's own experience in the sad, perspiring grind of examining selectees for physical fitness,"writes E. J. Stieglitz in the Scientific Monthly, for November, "has led him to feel that more lads are rejected because of overstrenuous athletic activity in adolescence than because of any lack of big, bulging muscles. It is furthermore significant that the Army physical training program has revealed that farm boys and white collar clerks develop endurance for the long, grueling grind of military maneuvers quicker and to a higher degree than most high school and collegiate athletes. ... There is far more to fitness than bone and muscle. Included are such factors as mental ability; capacity to learn, to correlate and to judge emotional stability; liberal functional reserve capacities of all the vital organs of the body and an implied promise of high performance in many activities."

Man's body is a bio-chemical machine, and the fuel that goes into it is of vital importance. Food unquestionably plays a definite role in the upkeep of the organism. I am not opposed to dietetics, but much of it that passes for "science" today is ephemeral trash. Among its chief propounders, I include the "balanced diet" fanatics and the 'vitamin tablet" demons.

Men vary in structure as much as the members of the canine world. Some are built like bull-dogs, some like mastiffs, and others like greyhounds or Pekingese. Uniform diets are as ridiculous as a uniform size in neck bands. What suits one may choke another. One must check with medical opinion and himself.

Voltaire was as skinny as they come, but he did quite well for himself before the days of "balanced diets" and vitamin tablets. He wrote incessantly, flayed the church, filled 82 volumes, and lived to be 84. 'What he might have been if he had taken "better care" of himself, no one knows.

From a vitamin viewpoint, he was nothing to look at, and it is horrible to think what our dietary fadists might have done to him, had they taken him in tow. They would have been shocked, in the first place, by his emaciated appearance. "In person," says one of his biographers, "Voltaire was not engaging, even as a young man. His extraordinary thinness [was proverbial]. In old age he was a mere skeleton, with a long nose and eyes of preternatural brilliancy peering out of his wig." What they forget about Voltaire is that he had an extraordinary brain, even though his body was skin and bones.

Darwin suffered from chronic dyspepsia all his life, but it did not apparently alter the superb quality and output of his work. His thinking apparatus was always working in high gear.

I have read high medical opinion, which I respect, that Darwin's diet, was wrong, Perhaps it was. But who wouldn't prefer to live a Darwinian life, with Darwin's stomach and brain and all his magnificent accomplishments, than to be a perfect specimen of gastronomic balance -- and little ease? Better a life like his, with, all its digestive disturbances and daily discomforts, than to have a stomach like an ostrich and an ostrich's brain.

Our food fadists today are among the greatest nuisances in the world. They will show you a cage full of rats, made bigger and fatter on a "proper" diet. But who wants to be a bigger or fatter rat -- or as rotund as a Chesterton? Corpulency, in itself, is no guarantee of health. It is your obesity cases that usually cave in under excessive strain. In our longevity tables, your lean Don Quixotes seem to get as good a break as your fat Falstaffs.

I am, in general physique, no Apollo or:Adonis myself, and my wife assures me (she has graciously endured me since my early twenties) that I never was good looking, even in my youth,but it is too late now to go into extensive renovations. I am of medium height and slight of build and have never weighed more than 136 pounds at any time, but I will match my supply of energy for steady and sustained work (aside from weight-lifting) with any stevedore's. I eat plenty of meat, sleep six hours a day, and walk two or three miles daily.

My health habits are my own, and, if they are wrong, I have no one to blame but myself., I smoke incessantly which is bad---and I consume coffee as some inebriates consume whisky. Every article of mine you see in print -- along with all the copy I destroy -- is stimulated by caffeine. If I crack up as I may any time what do a few years one way or the other really matter? I have done some of the things I like to do in life, have had domestic tranquility, a daughter and a son, and more than my share of worldly contentment. As to poundage, why worry? If I weighed more, it would merely mean that I would have to carry around more weight than I do. Compactness, I find, is something of a convenience, even if it isn't impressive in a crowd,

I have a high regard for medicine, even though, as a science, it is, still in its infancy. Its triumphs are substantial. Most medicine is "practice", and there will still have to be many more guinea pigs. This is inevitable. Yet I will place my confidence in a reputable physician or a modern clinic sooner than in any of the homebrew cultists who prate about "health".

Man is, what he eats, but not all that he eats contributes to his cerebral upkeep or the improvement of his intellectual faculties. No one gets wisdom through the mouth, and those who devote too much time to finical food habits will have no time for the development of their brains. There is phosphorus in the brain as there is phosphorus in fish, but no amount of fish-eating (I like fish myself) will improve one's thinking apparatus. If it did, half the world would he brighter than it is.

Leaving out pathological disturbances, health depends:largely on the metabolism of the body as a whole and a well-stabilized nervous system. These and a properly functioning glandular system will make for a balanced organism.

No one can rise above the potentialities of his cerebral system. What he is will depend on what kind of brain he has, and there is little he can do about it after the die is cast. With good brains or bad, we must travel along as best we can. And no amount of proteins, or starch, or vitamin tablets will alter one's cranial structure or cerebral equipment.

It's the cortex that counts. What your gray matter is, that you will be, and it won't matter much whether your nose is straight or snub, your muscles firm or flabby, or whether you have a glass eye. Byron had a club foot, Steinmetz was a hunchback, and Milton was blind. One of the shrewdest men I ever knew was a bed-ridden invalid who lived on gruel.

The tiger in the jungle does not bother about "diet" or vitamin pills. He eats what he likes, or what he can get, and either thrives or dies. Nature in the rough, under natural selection, kills off all but the most vigorous:types. In our hot-house civilization, we nurse the human race along, preserving everything that walks on two legs, regardless of whether they are worth saving or not. And we hope to improve the stock by feeding it vitamin pills ! How does it help the world if all of us are saved and the worst types breed?

Few of us, at any period of life,attain the splendid mental vigor of my fine friend, Sir Buckston Browne, who, at the age of 93, thinks with clarity and good humor and preserves a well-balanced outlook on life. What his secret of vitality is, I cannot surmise, but he is a rationalist in the full sense of the word and still going strong.

Last on my list of check-offs are the Nudists and their loony antics in pursuit of health. Outdoor life is alluring enough, and so are glens and glades, but frisking about in the woods, like nymphs and satyrs, for the sake of ozone, is something to laugh at. Anyone who thinks that good fresh air cannot reach the skin through thin summer garments or the flimsy frocks our women wear, has a lot to learn about the penetrating quality of air. Nudists are quite daft on what they think are the basic requirements for the body to "breathe". So they take to bareness in order to get more ozone into their systems, not realizing that a bear can breathe with forty pounds of fur on its hide. One is no more obliged to strip to the skin in order to breathe more oxygen than he is obliged to take his breeches off to eat more food. An Eskimo, bundled in fur, can inhale fresh air quite as well as the Hottentot with a loin cloth. And I can find no figures to show that he is any less robust or healthy than a jungle savage who goes bare. But the Nudists will, have their little frolic, whether the great goddess Hygeia looks on or not. Most of their interest in bare bodies, I believe, is built on sex starvation or springs from the first stirrings of adolescent awakening. Still, it is their own affair if they like to look at one another.

I am opposed to Nudism solely on esthetic grounds. Faces (most of them) are bad enough to look at, but the human form divine, with glorious exceptions, looks better draped. As a youth, I studied art and learned how difficult it was to get even professional models that looked well in the bare. Beauty of form and figure as we see it in the ancient marbles of the Greeks or in our better stage reviews of today, is not an average possession, and I should hate to see the day when Nudism is practiced in the subway. Even our "Miss Americas" are selected with care, and I am told that the Rockette girls, with their symmetry of form and graceful movement, are hard to find. For the sake of others, the Nudists should corral themselves in their Garden of Eden and keep their hedge-rows high.

As for our semi-bare colonies sizzling themselves on the sand, with their lumps and bumps of flesh and their none too pictorial anatomy, they are saddening to the eye. And what have these sand lizards accomplished when the day is through? Sunshine is healthful enough, but a sun-baked back is no more conducive to health than a parboiled face. And what have tanned arms and legs to do with health?

Here ends my hurried and very incomplete check-off of weird notions and wacky ideas, which any reader may extend or enlarge for himself out of his own experience or from the almost endless examples of everyday life. It is because health is so precious to man, and is sought by all, from prime minister to ditch-digger, and from prima Donna to dish-washer, that many are ready to grasp at straws and to resort to devices which are as ineffectual as a rabbit's foot in one's pocket or a horseshoe over the door. Those who are susceptible to the blandishments of the health fads will find no end of phony ideas from which to choose.

Health is an alluring lady, seldom in one's keeping for long, and as flirtatious and fickle as she is lovely to behold. If she will abide with you for a time, she will at least teach you how to appreciate her better after she is gone.

Muddlers of Science

MR. BREWSTER will have to be more precise as to what part of the "new physics" he accepts and what part he rejects, before we can determine just what our discussion is about. As pointed out in my previous paper, there are large slices of the "new physics" that are not science at all. "Matterless energy" is one, the "annihilation of matter" is another. These are not scientific doctrines, but hopeless fictions. I should like to know just how Mr. Brewster stands on these two phrases.

There is nothing wrong, of course, with the science of physics itself. Our knowledge of the workings of matter is more solidly grounded today than ever before. And it is materialistic throughout. The fault lies in the teachings of a mystical clique in science, whose occultism and visionary ideas are brandished about as a legitimate part of "modern physics."

"Science now knows," says Mr. Brewster, "... that there are quite common forms of energy that are completely dissociated from any sort of matter, forms which, in theory at least, once created, may last a million years completely out of contact with any material thing.' Permit me to state that "science" knows nothing of the sort. Some of our dream-world physicists have talked about such an "energy," just as some of them have talked about "haunted houses," ghostly visitations, and table levitations, but the laboratory worker has discovered no such animal. In dealing with "energy," he knows of it only in terms of the material, or as an activity of matter. All "energy" is found, handled, and tabulated under the materialistic label.

As for Mr. Brewster's contention that matter "may be absolutely wiped out, cease to be matter of any sort, disappear completely from the universe," this occurs only in books. Such "matter" as this is wholly unknown in any physical laboratory. It is quite as fictitious as Mrs. Guppy's flight.

Mr. Brewster's remark that materialism is a system that "explains everything in terms of something that nobody knows anything about" would be an effective reply if true. While we have no "direct experience" of electrons and protons as we have of marbles or apples, and know nothing of what they "are really like" in appearance, they are not so ghostly nor even as invisible as mystics believe. We can trace their tracks on photographic plates. That is more than can be said for the "matterless energy" and ''spiritualized universe" of the Munchausen school. And, essentially important, they are material particles, the proton weighing the eleven-octillionth of an ounce and the electron having a mass about 1/1800 of that of a proton. Here is a material "atom," something that does not belong in a metaphysical world.

Where stands materialism in the light of the "indeterminable" electron? asks Mr. Brewster. Precisely where it stood before, when the electron was unknown. It still stands as the doctrine that all that is, is matter in motion. And the intricacies and complexities of "motions" far down in the atom do not in any way disturb our predictions as to what matter will do under given circumstances. We can still "predict" larger mass movements with certainty.

Every chemical formula is based on definite knowledge of what matter will do. The chemist who compounds nitro-glycerin knows exactly how it will act. The astronomer who predicts an eclipse of the sun or the return of a comet knows how matter will move. The biologist can foretell just what will occur under the Mendelian raw. We know precisely what water will do when brought to the boiling point, it will change into steam. We can predict, in a hundred thousand ways, how groups of protons and electrons will behave. We can send messages and music through the air; Mr. Brewster can talk to me through a copper wire extending from Andover to New York, or even without any wire at all. I myself have addressed "over the air" thousands of listeners I have never seen. And all this was "predictable" independent of the "unpredictable" movement of protons and electrons far down in the atom.

Physics and materialism are essentially the same: each deals with matter in motion. "Without matter there can be no motion, no movement, no phenomena, no "energy" no radiation, no anything -- not even a Mr. Brewster. Or does Mr. Brewster' think otherwise ? If he does, he is eligible for membership in the Old Order of Oriental Occultists.

When our mystical physicists can walk into a non-material laboratory, experiment with matterless apparatus, and convert some nothing into something and something into nothing, it will be time enough to celebrate the collapse of materialism. Every laboratory experiment involves a handling of matter. And that matter, in all its diversified activities, is as much with us today as it ever was.

And the activities of this matter, expressed in terms of "energy", are with us also. "Energy" loses nothing of itself or of its indestructible character through its manifold transformations. "All the life of the universe," writes Jeans, 1 "may be regarded as manifestations of energy masquerading in various forms, and all the changes in the universe as energy running about from one of these forms to the other, but always without altering its total amount. Such is the great law of conservation of energy." If there is a Humpty Dumpty in the picture, it is the smashed egg of mysticism, which all the king's horses and all the king's men can't put together again.
1. The Universe Around Us, p. 97.

In a letter accompanying his article to The Truth Seeker, Mr. Brewster objects to my use of the term "infinitely small" as applied to tiny bodies. All bodies are "finite," he insists -- which is true. Permit me to say, however, that my use of this term has dictionary sanction. I turn to Funk and Wagnall's Practical Standard Dictionary, and read: "Infinitely small: so small as to be incalculable and insignificant for all practical purposes." This is an exact description of sub-atomic particles and the sense in which the term was used.

It is my personal opinion that our mystical scientists have sold Mr. Brewster metaphysical jargon. They have sold it quite as impressively, quite as successfully as Crookes and Lodge and Lombroso sold Spiritualism to the credulous a few decades ago. It is but a short step from séance apparitions and mediumistic claptrap to the mathematical physicists of today, who divide matter (on paper) until it ceases to exist, or who see in sub-atomic exploration the path to a spiritual world.

It is within the memory of many men living that Crookes walked arm-in-arm with a ghost, that Lodge wrote "Raymond" and talked of "spiritual" whiskey-and-sodas, and that Lombroso told stories of shoes that walked:by themselves! Even Zoliner "proved" the "fourth dimension" by means of a spook. That was "modern physics" then; today our transcendental scientists hand us a vacuous universe composed of symbols and equations! In the words of Eddington, "matter and all else that is in the physical world have been reduced to a shadowy symbolism." 2
2. Science and the Unseen World, p 22.

"Modern physicists" have all but lost their last glint of humor. They solemnly assure us now, not only that matter is out of fashion, but that they can count the protons. The "elusive"' protons are not "elusive" to them : they actually tell us how many there are in the universe! If that isn't a "pontifical" bluff, I fail to know the meaning of the term.

If anybody were to presume to tell Mr. Brewster how many grains of sand there are on the beach at Atlantic City, he would be put down at once as a little bit flighty in the head. If Mr. Brewster's best friend were to inform him how many grains of dust are floating about in Grand Central Terminal, he would begin to fear for his friend's mental health. Yet when Sir Arthur Eddington tells us there are 15,747,724,136,275,002,577,605,653,961,181,555,468,044,717,914-,527,116,709,366,231,425,076,185,631,031,296 protons in the universe, we are expected to drop our jaws in amazement in the presence of "modern physics." The oracle of transcendental physics has spoken!

Flubdub like this is not new with the metaphysical school. Eddington himself is essentially a hopeless mystic, whose superstitious utterances in matters of religion are as brilliant as a Kentucky mountaineer's, refined, in part, only by his cultural contacts in the field of science. Men such as Eddington have gummed up more problems in physical science than they have ever solved. I cite him merely as an outstanding type of the occult brood.

As to the question, "how does any Materialist know that thought is not precisely the energy constituent of the atom, and as such, at least potentially, eternal?" the answer is simple: Function cannot survive the organ. Thinking, as a mode of motion, depends on the functioning of the brain and nervous system. No amount of academic tall-talk can refute the argument of the priest Meslier, who in his later years, turned from Catholicism to materialism. "We ridicule,'' writes he, "the simplicity of some nations whose fashion is to bury provisions with the dead --- under the idea that this food might be useful and necessary to them in another life. Is it more ridiculous or more absurd to believe that men will eat after death than to imagine that they will think; that they will have agreeable or disagreeable ideas; that they will enjoy; that they will suffer; that they will be conscious of sorrow or joy when the organs which produce sensations or ideas are dissolved and reduced to dust?"

He who thinks he can prove the indestructibility of thought from the conservation of energy might just as well try to prove that our brains are indestructible because matter is eternal. Matter and energy are both indestructible, but brains and thinking may both be destroyed, the latter even during the life-time of the individual. A blow or a blood-clot will blot out the most brilliant thought in the world, and a man may lie in a coma for days at a time before drawing his last breath.

Mr. Brewster will have to watch his step if he does not wish to be baptized in the hog-wash of "modern physics."

Mysticism In Modern Physics

MATERIALISM has triumphed over every attempt to discredit it on the ground of new discoveries in physics.
-JOSEPH McCABE, The Triumph of Materialism, p. 25.

MY able friend, Edwin Tenney Brewster, raises a pertinent question concerning the present status of materialism. Briefly, he puts the question: "Has materialism been discredited by the new physics?"

The answer, of course, very much depends on what one understands by the "new physics". Today almost anything goes, in a world of four dimensions and "curved" space. Ever since the Einsteinian vogue for verbal quackery arose we have been victimized by words. To the Waldemar Kaempfferts of modern "physics," lump of iron is no longer an aggregation of compact particles but "congealed energy"; to some of our rationalists and freethinkers abroad, calling themselves materialists, matter is "a cluster of behaviors".

How "behaviors" can ''cluster" or otherwise behave so as to become matter, or "energy" can be come "congealed" into an ax-head or a crowbar, is left to the imagination. The tyranny of words still plays havoc with clear thinking.

Actually the "new physics" is not essentially new, nor is it all physics. A good part of it is not even sane or intelligible. On the whole, it is a conglomeration of yoga mysticism and highly diluted science with a generous sprinkling of Berleian metaphysics. Our transcendental physicists do not deal with moving particles of substance in the manner of 19th century materialists, but with a "dematerialized", fast fading universe rapidly being absorbed by a spiritual world. To them, matter is obliterated or is suffering an eternal black-out. In a word, the material universe has been shot from under us.

But has it?

Materialism is defined in the Encyclopedia Britannica as "the theory which regards all the facts of the universe as explainable in terms of matter and motion, and in particular explains all psychical processes by physical and chemical changes in the nervous system."

The early materialists taught a material world, composed of tiny moving particles called "atoms". These were the indestructible bricks of the universe. "The conception that matter is made up of particles or atoms, and that these particles are in a state of ceaseless motion, is to be met with in Hindu and Phoenician philosophy," writes Sir Edward Thorpe. 1 "It was taught by Anaxagoras, Leukippos and Demokritos to the Greeks, and by Lucretius to the Romans."
1. History of Chemistry, p. 20.

The early concept of the atom was that of a hard, impenetrable, bullet-like particle. So far as we know, this may be a perfect description of the ultimate atom, far down. It is not our present idea of what we call the atom in laboratory work. Our present "atom" is a solar system itself, composed tiny material particles revolving around a central mass.

Of what, then, does the present atom consist? "The normal atom", says Jeans, 2 "consists of protons, electrons, and energy, each of which contributes something to its weight". Each part of the atom is material. The "energy" released from the atom in the form of radiation carries weight. All radiation is material. Even A- and B- rays are "material particles", says Jeans.3
2. The Universe Around Us, p. 118.
3. Ibid, p 119.

NO one has improved on Maxwell's concept of "energy". "Energy", says he, 4 "cannot exist except in connection with matter. . . . It has no individual existence, such as that which we attribute to particular portions of matter."
4. Matter and Motion, pp; 165-166.

"Energy" is merely a blanket term or convenient expression for matter at work. Yet it is loosely argued that since matter is reducible in terms of "energy", matter can thereby be destroyed or replaced by "energy". But every erg of "energy" is always identified by mass and weight. These are physical properties. We never find "energy" running around loose like a ghost nor apart from matter. "An erg of energy, in any form", says Eddington, 5 "has a mass of 1.1.10-21 grammes". Wherever we find "energy" we find matter.
5. Stars and Atoms, p. 97

A good deal of verbiage has wrapped itself around the "new physics". Words and phrases are used with little or no regard for their accepted meanings. Some of this is deliberately done to distort the facts. We still hear the "splitting" of the atom, referred to as if it meant the "annihilation" of matter. It means, of course, nothing of the kind.

What is "splitting" the atom? Briefly, separating the positive and negative charges of electricity called protons and electrons, of which the atom is composed. These were isolated by "bombarding" the atom with high power radioactive particles bearing a positive charge. Some of these "bullets", in hitting the nucleus, or positive charge of the atom, were repelled or deflected from their paths. The positive and negative particles of the atom were thereby exposed. The atom had been "split".

The sub-atomic world is material throughout. Our mystical physicists cannot name a single ingredient of the "split" atom that is not material. An electron, says Jeans, 6 is "a plain material particle". The electron has definite mass and weight so has the proton, which, is 1,855 times heavier than the electron. Nor can the mystic escape by saying that since everything is "electricity" We can dispense with matter. "Electricity is material", says Millikan. 7 Wherever we turn, we are confronted by matter.
6. The Universe Around Us, p. 130.
7. The Electron, p 186.

The "splitting" of the atom has in no way discredited the doctrine of materialism. On the contrary, it has strikingly confirmed what materialists have all along maintained, namely, that the ultimate unit of matter would probably be found very far down and that matter is subject to further division. That which passed for the "indivisible" atom in the laboratory would be broken down or found to consist of finer units.

The ancient Greek materialists held these views, which later were ardently championed by the great Roman materialist, Lucretius. Buchner, whose famous "Force and Matter" is a classic of materialism, taught that we must expect a finer division of matter before we reach the indestructible unit, or real atom. Years before Sir J. J. Thomson "split" the atom near the end of the last century, Buchner wrote: 8 "It has also become very probable through recent investigations that the substances heretofore regarded by us as elements or original bodies are nothing of the kind, but are themselves compounds, and that the so-called atoms therefore consist of units of a higher grade, as the molecule does of atoms". In a word, the "splitting" of the atom was here foreseen by a "gross" materialist of the 19th century.
8. Force and Matter, p. 38.

Clearly, then, the "splitting" of the atom has in no way ''exploded" the teaching of materialists. Matter is as indestructible as ever, and is so acknowledged in every text book on chemistry and physics. Not even the most mystical of modern physicists can deny this. Eddington, a leading exponent of transcendental physics, emphatically states: "We have no evidence that the annihilation of matter can occur in nature." 9
9. Stars and Atoms, p. 101

The whole plea for a metaphysical "physics" rests on the erroneous idea that since we cannot predict certain activities far down in the atom, materialism is ruled out. Our inability to register all movements in the sub-atomic world merely means that our implements of detection have not yet been brought to a proper state of precision. We are here dealing with rarefied forms of matter or infinitely small particles, whose complicated motions are beyond the range of our most sensitive instruments. We are facing a world of infinitesimal particles, moving about at terrific speeds and in variable orbits. How small these individual parts are may be visualized from the fact that the hydrogen atom alone weighs only 1.662x10-24 grammes, while the nucleus itself has a diameter of only a millionth of a millionth of an inch.

So far as the parts that make up the "split" atom are concerned, we know that they are material, the central portion, or nucleus bearing a positive charge of electricity, the electron (or electrons) bearing a negative charge. What their patterns or configurations are no one knows. "Neither you nor I", says Jeans, 10 "have any direct experience of either electrons or protons, and no one has so far any inkling of what they are really like." We can visualize their appearance and arrangement only by what occurs or by observing the behavior of the atom.
10. The Universe Around Us, p. 133.

Here lies an Elysian field far the metaphysician and the mystic and a crop of falsehoods. Matter, says the mystic, is becoming more "unpredictable", more "ghostly", more "uncertain", more "unreal", as we delve into its interior. Which is sheer rubbish.

The Heisenberg experiments are frequently cited as damaging to materialism since they are supposed to show there is no stability underlying the physical universe. We cannot depend on what the electrons will do next. This is ludicrous enough. If Heisenberg has knocked "predictability" out of the realm of microcosmic phenomena, he hasn't bothered our laboratory technicians. Real physicists today smile at our sub-atomic mystics and religious ghost chasers. In spite of highly complicated movements within the atom itself, steel girders still stick together, the Empire State Building is where it was before, and you can lease an office in the structure without fearing that it will disappear when your hack is turned. "Predictability" in physics and chemistry is a safe procedure for those who do not follow the rainbow chasers of "modern physics". Matter is still with us, regardless of the grasshopper antics and hopping around of tiny electrons. And it stays put. I myself own a chip of an Egyptian obelisk which is thirty-five centuries old. In spite of its "unpredictable" sub-atomic movements, I predict it will remain a piece of granite for ages to come.

At the World's Fair, General Electric generates 10,000,000 volts of electricity in its exhibit of artificial lightning. "Predictability" in every sense of the word! The charge is under complete control and is child's play in the hands of the operator. Here is physics for you, and no one is disturbed over Heisenberg's headaches as to what may happen next far down in the atom. All physics of a genuine character is based on "predictions" of what matter will do.

As Joseph McCabe wrote me not long ago, "there has been far too much nonsense written about a new physics and new astronomy favoring religion". I quite agree with him, and I lay the blame primarily on the muddlers of science who play up to the religious phantasies of popular credulity.

He who talks of art, and music, and other beautiful things of life as transcending the world of matter forgets that they are grounded in the very matter he affects to despise, and that even a rainbow is as physical as a bar of iron. A great drama, a wonderful painting, a superb statue cause reactions in the human organism as physical or materialistic as the drop of a hammer on our toes. "No one can doubt,"' says Bertrand Russell 11 "that the causes of our emotions when we read Shakespeare or hear Bach are purely physical. Thus we cannot escape the universality of physical causation."
11. The Analysis of Matter.

"Modern physics", writes Jacques Loeb,12 "is mechanistic." And he adds: "Since no discontinuity exists between the matter constituting living and nonliving bodies, biology must also be mechanistic." We must face the fact that all that is, is matter in motion.
12. Mechanistic Science and Metaphysical Romance (Yale Review.)

Real physics today has done something more than "split" the atom. It has blasted metaphysics sky-high and annihilated the pretensions of religion. It is crass mysticism and not "crude materialism" which is committed to the ash heap by modern Science. The doctrines of the mystics are as dry and dead as dinosaur dust.