25/115 SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS By FRANK H. SPRAGUE

Every normal human mind is capable of recognizing three dimensions of space; and it is by reason of this three-dimensional conception that one is able to perceive material substances, bodies. Scientific investigation reveals the fact that all material bodies are composed of inconceivably minute atoms or centers of force;

that those atoms, even in the densest substances, such as flint or diamond, are not contiguous, but are so widely distributed that the intervening space exceeds by hundreds of times the space occupied by the atoms themselves; so that, were it possible to construct a magnifying glass of sufficient power, the atoms of which the diamond is composed would very likely appear quite as diffused as the tail of a comet.

The atoms are not stationary, but exceedingly active, and display a variety of motive tendencies. Under certain conditions they collect in groups as atomic families, molecules, which are susceptible to the influence of a superior, organizing, formative Intelligence.

Lord Kelvin estimates that were a drop of water magnified so that it would appear the size of the earth, each molecule would appear as large as a pea; also, that under ordinary conditions of humidity, the number of molecules contained in a cubic inch of the earth’s atmosphere, would be equal to the number ten raised to the twenty-third power. So intensely active are the molecules in the atmosphere, that Maxwell calculated that each one must experience eight hundred billion collisions in a single second.

Again, as we look upward in the scale of material forms, we find that worlds are organized into solar systems, and solar systems into still more stupendous groups. And all this magnificent exhibition of exterior forms, great and small, manifests one supreme law of attraction. Nothing is inanimate; there is no such thing as “dead matter.”

Prof. Dolbear says: “The study of molecular science is steadily making us aware that that which we call matter is something very different in its nature from what men have formerly thought. It has generally been assumed that matter is dead, inert, and made of nothing; whereas it turns out to have a basis on something which we call ether,

the properties of which are so radically different from those of matter as exhibited in physical phenomena, that no conclusion as to its possibilities can be drawn except as they are manifested in the attributes of matter. The so-called laws of nature represent only a portion of the laws of matter. The latter are called mechanical, and phenomena of that class are all subservient to what are called mechanical laws.