University of Virginia Library

Chapter 4
The Indestructibility of Matter

§52. Not because the truth is unfamiliar, is it needful here to assert the indestructibility of Matter; but partly because the symmetry of our argument demands enunciation of this truth, and partly because the evidence on which it is accepted must be examined. Could it be shown, or could it with reason be supposed, that Matter, either in its aggregates or in its units, ever becomes nonexistent, it would be needful either to ascertain under what conditions it becomes non-existent, or else to confess that Science and Philosophy are impossible. For if, instead of having to deal with fixed quantities and weights, we had to deal with quantities and weights which are apt, wholly or in part, to be annihilated, there would be introduced an incalculable element, fatal to all positive conclusions. Clearly, therefore, the proposition that matter is indestructible must be deliberately considered.

So far from being admitted as a self-evident truth, this would, in primitive times, have been rejected as a self-evident error. There was once universally current, a notion that things could vanish into nothing, or arise out of nothing. If men did not believe this in the strict sense of the word (which would imply that the process of creation or annihilation was clearly represented in consciousness), they still believed that they believed it; and how nearly, in their confused thoughts, the one was equivalent to the other, is shown by their conduct. Nor, indeed, have dark ages and inferior minds alone betrayed this belief. In its dogmas respecting the beginning and end of the world, the current theology clearly implies it; and it may be questioned whether Shakespeare, in his poetical anticipation of a time when all things shall disappear and "leave not a wrack behind," was not under its influence. The accumulation of experiences, however, and still more the organization of experiences, has slowly reversed this conviction. All apparent proofs that something can come out of nothing, a wider knowledge has one by one cancelled. The comet which is suddenly discovered and nightly waxes larger, is proved not to be a newly-created body but a body which was until lately beyond the range of vision. The cloud formed a few minutes ago in the sky, consists not of substance that has just begun to be, but of substance that previously existed in a transparent form. And similarly with a crystal or a precipitate in relation to the fluid depositing it. Conversely, the seeming annihilations of matter turn out to be only changes of state. It is found that the evaporated water, though it has become invisible, may be brought by condensation to its original shape. Though from a discharged fowling-piece the gunpowder has disappeared, there have appeared in place of it certain gases which, in assuming a larger volume, have caused the explosion. Not, however, until the rise of quantitative chemistry, could the conclusion suggested by such experiences be harmonized with all the facts. When, having ascertained not only the combinations formed by various substances, but also the proportions in which they combine, chemists were enabled to account for the matter that had made its appearance or become invisible, scepticism was dissipated. And of the general conclusion thus reached, the exact analysis daily made, by which the same portion of matter is pursued through numerous disguises and finally separated, furnish never-ceasing confirmations.

Such has become the effect of this specific evidence, joined to that general evidence which the continued existence of familiar objects gives us, that the Indestructibility of Matter is now held by many to be a truth of which the negation is inconceivable.

§53. This last fact rises the question whether we have any higher warrant for this fundamental belief than the warrant of conscious induction. Before showing that we have a higher warrant, some explanations are needful.

The consciousness of logical necessity, is the consciousness that a certain conclusion is implicitly contained in certain premises explicitly stated. If, contrasting a young child and an adult, we see that this consciousness of logical necessity, absent from the one is present in the other, we are taught that there is a growing up to the recognition of certain necessary truths, merely by the unfolding of the inherited intellectual forms and facilities.

To state the case more specifically: — Before a truth can be known as necessary, two conditions must be fulfilled. There must be a mental structure capable of grasping the terms of the proposition and the relation alleged between them; and there must be such definite and deliberate mental representation of these terms, as makes possible a clear consciousness of this relation. Non-fulfilment of either condition may cause non-recognition of the necessity of the truth. Let us take cases.

The savage who cannot count the fingers on one hand, can frame no definite thought answering to the statement that 7 and 5 are 12; still less can he frame the consciousness that no other total is possible.

The boy adding up figures inattentively says to himself that 7 and 5 are 11; and may repeatedly bring out a wrong result by repeatedly making this error.

Neither the non-recognition of the truth that 7 and 5 are 12, which in the savage results from undeveloped mental structure, nor the assertion, due to the boy's careless mental action, that they make 11, leads us to doubt the necessity of the relation between these two separately-existing numbers and the sum they make when existing together. Nor does failure from either cause to apprehend the necessity of this relation, make us hesitate to say that when its terms are distinctly represented in thought, its necessity will be seen; and that, apart from multiplied experiences, this necessity becomes cognizable when structures and functions are so far developed that groups of 7 and 5 and 12 can be mentally grasped.

Manifestly, then, there are recognitions of necessary truths, as such, which accompany mental evolution. And there are ascending gradations in these recognitions. A boy who has intelligence enough to see that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another, may be unable to see that ratios which are severally equal to certain other ratios that are unequal to each other, are themselves unequal; though to a more-developed mind this last axiom is no less obviously necessary than the first.

All this which holds of logical and mathematical truths, holds, with change of terms, of physical truths. There are necessary truths in Physics for the apprehension of which, also, a developed and disciplined intelligence is required; and before such intelligence arises, not only may there be failure to apprehend the necessity of them, but there may be vague beliefs in their contraries. Up to comparatively-recent times, all mankind were in this state of incapacity respecting physical axioms; and the mass of mankind are so still. Effects are expected without causes of fit kinds; or effects extremely disproportionate to causes are looked for; or causes are supposed to end without effects.* But though many are unable to grasp physical axioms, it no more follows that physical axioms are not knowable à priori by a developed intellect, than it follows that logical relations are not necessary, because undeveloped intellects cannot perceive their necessity.

It is thus with the notions which have been current respecting the creation and annihilation of Matter. In the first place, there has been a confounding of two radically-different things — disappearance of Matter from a visible form, say by evaporation, and passage of Matter from existence into non-existence. Until this confusion is avoided, the belief that Matter can be annihilated readily obtains currency. In the second place, the currency of it continues so long as there is not power of introspection enough to make manifest what results from the attempt to annihilate Matter in thought. But when the vague ideas arising in a nervous structure imperfectly organized, are replaced by the clear ideas arising in a definite nervous structure; this definite structure, moulded by experience into correspondence with external things, makes necessary in thought the relations answering to uniformities in things. Hence, among others, the conception of the Indestructibility of Matter.

For self-analysis shows this to be a datum of consciousness. Conceive space to be cleared of all bodies save one. Now imagine the remaining one not to be removed from its place, but to lapse into nothing while standing in that place. You fail. The space which was solid you cannot conceive becoming empty, save by transfer of that which made it solid. What is termed the ultimate incompressibility of Matter, is an admitted law of thought. However small the bulk to which we conceive a piece of matter reduced, it is impossible to conceive it reduced into nothing. While we can represent to ourselves its parts as approximated, we cannot represent to ourselves the quantity of matter as made less. To do this would be to imagine some of the parts compressed into nothing, which is no more possible than to imagine compression of the whole into nothing. Our inability to conceive Matter becoming non-existent, is consequent on the nature of thought. Thought consists in the establishment of relations. There can be no relation established, and therefore no thought framed, when one of the related terms is absent from consciousness. Hence it is impossible to think of something becoming nothing, for the same reason that it is impossible to think of nothing becoming something — the reason, namely, that nothing cannot become an object of consciousness. The annihilation of Matter is unthinkable for the same reason that the creation of Matter is unthinkable.

It must be added that no experimental verification of the truth. that Matter is indestructible, is possible without a tacit assumption of it. For all such verification implies weighing, and weighing assumes that the matter forming the weight remains the same.

§54. And here we are introduced to that which it most concerns us to observe — the nature of the perceptions by which the permanence of Matter is perpetually illustrated. These perceptions under all their forms simply reveal this — that the force which a given quantity of matter embodies remains always the same under the same conditions. A toy which long unseen produces in us a set of visual and tactual feelings like those produced in childhood is recognized as the same because it has the power of affecting us in the same ways. The downward strain of some sovereigns which the bank-clerk weighs to save himself the trouble of counting, proves the special amount of a special kind of Matter; and the goldsmith uses the same test when the shape of the Matter has been changed by a workman. So, too, with special properties. Whether a certain crystal is or is not diamond, is decided by its resistance to abrasion and the degree to which it bends light out of its course. And so the chemist when a piece of substance lately visible and tangible has been reduced to an invisible, intangible gas, but has the same weight, or when the quantity of a certain element is inferred from its ability to neutralize a given quantity of some other element, he refers to the amount of action which the Matter exercises as his measure of the amount of Matter.

Thus, then, by the Indestructibility of Matter, we reilly mean the indestructibility of the force with which Matter affects us. And this truth is made manifest not only by analysis of the à posteriori cognition, but equally so by analysis of the à priori one.*

NOTES