So you see that this mysterious, wonderful Universal Ether--in order to "be" at all--must be a "Something" possessing certain qualities or properties of Substance--many of the properties of qualities being exactly contradictory and opposed to each other--and yet it cannot be Substance as we know it. It is a Paradoxical thing. It could only belong to another and an entirely different order of existence from that of Substance as we know it. It must possess characteristics and properties of an order as yet unknown to us by name--for which the material world contains no analogy--for which Substance has no analogues. It must be a far more complex thing than is even the most complex thing we call Matter, or that which we call Force or Energy. And yet, it has been claimed that it would explain both--yes, contain within itself the possibility of both. And yet, in face of what has just been said, the writer must confess, humbly and with a full realization of the enormity of the offence, that he supposes advancing a theory, a little further on in this book that will attempt to identify this Something--this Universal Ether--with a Something else that we know, although not through the senses or by means of instruments. Bear with him kindly, he begs of you, while he proceeds gradually along the path that leads to the theory. Scientists have compared Substance moving through the Ether as a coarse seive moving through water, the latter making room for the passage of the seive, and then closing up behind it. If this be amended by the idea that the moving seive, while allowing the water to pass through it freely, still carries along with it a thin film of water which clings to the wires of the seive by adhesion--if there be admitted this "clinging film" as well as the body of the water through which the seive moves--then the illustration answers quite well as a crude illustration of Substance and "The Ether." This fact is important in view of the theory that will be advanced, further on in this book. Prof. Lodge, in his interesting work, "Modern Views of Electricity," mentions a number of experiments tending to prove the above mentioned fact, which is not so generally known as other facts relating to the Ether.