Evolution and creation / by Sir Oliver Lodge.

  • Oliver Lodge
Date:
1930
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Evolution and creation / by Sir Oliver Lodge. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    mental existence is an electron, and that groupings of electrons can be scattered like a crowd, without destroying anything except the grouping. Even suppose that in the progress of discovery we found that an electron was not permanent either, but was rather like a knot in the Ether which could be untied. What should we have to say then ? Merely that the electron was not so fundamental an existence as we had imagined, though its constituent substance, the Ether, was. Thus if we are willing to interpret the term “ existence ” as connoting only a fundamental kind of existence, then, so far as we know, nothing that exists can be destroyed. If the question ever arises whether any given kind of entity is permanent and indestructible, we should only have to ask, on this hypothesis, whether it really and fundamentally exists. It used to be said that the two funda¬ mental existences were Matter and Energy; and of late there has been a tendency to unify these two apparently diverse things. Without raising that large and technical
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