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energy on the same scale as uranium, thorium and radium. Such transmutations are still beyond the power of man to effect, but he would be a bold prophet who would declare for how long a time this may remain true.

If the ancient legend of a philosopher's stone ever becomes reality, and if means are found for artificially transmuting the elements, or artificially increasing to a sufficient extent the natural rate of their disintegration, the transmutation of the material would be of little significance compared with the liberation of a source of energy immensely more abundant and powerful than any now available. As foretold of the philosopher's stone, transmutation would be, in a physical sense, the veritable elixir of life.

The gulf of ignorance which alone divides us from the use and application of the new source of energy would have been bridged. Exhaustion of the coal-supply would no longer have any terrors, for fuel and fuel-fed machines would be superseded, as they in their turn have displaced animal labour. The Ship of Life would have drawn out for ever from the shallows and backwaters wherein it took its origin, and, fairly launched on the primal tide, the flood would bear it far. The story of the struggle for existence on a daily modicum of sunlight, the fevered existence of the moment on ever-increasing draughts from a dwindling store, the meaning of which was no sooner realised than it was in danger of exhaustion, would become as the nightmare of the past. Reality and myth would exchange places. For, in sober truth, if one attempted to forecast, from the experience of the past, the future of a world able to draw at will upon a virtually infinite supply of energy, one would be compelled to depict it simply as a veritable Garden of Eden.

IS SCIENCE NEW?

23

The Garden of Eden with its tree of knowledge of which Adam partook impiously, and was cast adrift to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, lest he should discover and partake of the tree of life, and the whole biblical account of the fall of man, though very ancient as human records go, dates only from yesterday in the whole life of the race. Men have lived on this planet not for thousands but for millions of years past, and of all this length of time myth and history record but the latest moment. Did some earlier race of men actually tread the road we are treading to-day and achieve that emancipation from the physical struggle for existence which would assuredly result from the accomplishment of artificial transmutation? The idea may appear a fanciful one, but it may be reasonably commended to the notice of those who have made a special study of the ancient mythologies and the origins of human beliefs.

The exploiters of the wealth of the world are not its creators. If they were they might have a wider view than that it was created for the competitive acquisition of the most rapacious, unscrupulous and already too well-equipped. The actual state of the world at home and abroad in regard to industry, politics, social conditions and relationships is surely an indictment of the rule of the possessive and acquisitive more powerful than any judge could frame.

The claim is so often made that brains and labour are only two of the three essentials of civilised existence, and that the third, if not the greatest of these, is capital, that one may well ask what is meant. If capital means wealth, that is, the accumulated resources of the world in knowledge and material achievements, the statement is true. If it means the ownership of wealth, without which brains, labour

and knowledge are all unproductive, the statement is only too true. But if it means the individual system of ownership of wealth, and that under another system brains, labour and knowledge would be powerless to advance humanity, the statement is not true. From the point of view of the community, capital is not wealth but debt, the not owning by the community of the resources of the planet whereon it resides; and no more effective and disastrous check to its productive power could well be invented.

More and more is society becoming indebted for the necessities of its continuance to a peculiar class brought into existence by the operation of a corrupt code of laws and government derived from a darker intellectual age. Highly skilled as are the advocates of this code in making black look white, they are scarcely equal to the task of masquerading the debts of the community as its wealth.

The

The multiplication rather than the competitive acquisition of the means of livelihood would be the paramount concern of any community worthy of the name, and, as the obvious preliminary thereto, the study and interpretation of the laws of nature, under which men thrive or starve, would be fostered and honoured above the amassing and expenditure of wealth, above even the profession of arms. creative element, whether the discoverer and originator at the one end or the artificer and labourer at the other, may well ask how is the world the gainer for all their splendid thought and magnificent achievements. This element has never yet ruled the community, and according to the elements who have made such disastrous attempts to do so, it never will. But the same was said, by the same type of mind, about flying before men flew, and probably of every new and difficult step so far accomplished in the ascent of man.

PHYSICAL FORCE-MAN'S SERVANT

OR HIS MASTER?1

THE words "physical force" in my title probably convey to you the correct notion of what is the main subject of my address without any further explanation. As a matter of fact, the term "force," in a strictly scientific sense, is slightly different from that in which it is popularly employed. The word in the title is to be taken in its popular meaning, which is not the passive force or pressure exerted, for example, by a column supporting a roof, but force actively at work, moving something against a resistance; or, if passive, like the force of a coiled spring, or of an explosive, waiting, as it were, the opportunity to become active and do work. In scientific language energy is the term now used to signify what once was, and still is, popularly called force. Energy is the power of doing work (kinetic energy), or anything which can be converted into work (potential energy). When a gun is fired, for example, the potential energy of the explosive is converted into the kinetic energy of the bullet, and this bullet possesses then the power of doing work, of moving itself against a resistance--the resistance of the air and the resistance of the target it strikes.

In ordinary language physical force is often referred to as "brute force," but science does not

1 Address to the Independent Labour Party, Aberdeen, 17th November 1915.

now put much, if any, weight on the various origins of force, or, if you will allow me henceforth to use the proper word, the various origins of energy. The energy is the important thing, whether it is brute energy or not-the power of working and battling against resistance, either of a living animal or of a mass of dead matter in motion. This theory of energy, or doctrine of work-work in the strictly physical sense, not, for example, brain work or artistic work-is of vital importance in fields very remote from science. A living being is distinguished from a dead one because it is working every second of its life, and death is the stoppage of that work. But it is not only living things that work continuously. A running river, a waterfall, is doing the same. When we speak of this as a live world in distinction to the moon, which is often spoken of as a dead one, we mean not only that there is no life on the moon, but also no movement of anything, and no change of any kind.

Energy, in general, is due to motion. If the things moving are masses large enough to see, we speak of their mechanical energy. If the things moving are too small to see, even with the microscope-the molecules or smallest particles of matter that exist we speak of their energy as heat energy. If the particles are still smaller, not matter at all, but electrons or particles of electricity, we speak of their energy as electrical energy. But everything that moves, or has in it the potentiality of movement, possesses energy, and if we trace this energy to its source we find that, in almost every case, it comes from the sun. Trains and ships bear their burdens across land and sea, living creatures run or swim or fly by virtue of energy that comes to us from the sun in the form of radiation, that is, light and heat. In the processes of agriculture this radiant energy is

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