_Mechanical Explanation of the Universe. Matter is Mass._—Physicists have a tendency to consider all natural phenomena from the point of view of mechanics. They believe that there is a mechanical explanation of the universe. They are always on the look out for it, implicitly or explicitly. They endeavour to reduce each category of physical facts to the type of the facts of mechanics. They have made up their minds to see nowhere anything but the play of motion and force. Astronomy is celestial mechanics. Acoustics is the mechanics of the vibratory movements of the air or of sonorous bodies. Physical optics has become the mechanics of the undulations of the ether, after having been the mechanics of emission—a wonderful mechanics which represents exactly all the phenomena of light, and furnishes us with a perfect objective image of it. Heat, in its turn, has been reduced to a mode of motion, and thermodynamics claims to embrace all its manifestations. As early as 1812, Sir Humphry Davy wrote as follows:—“The immediate cause of heat is motion, and the laws of transmission are precisely the same as those of the transmission of motion.” From that time forth, this conception developed into what is really a science. The constitution of gases has been conceived by means of two elements—particles, and the motions of these particles, determined in the strictest detail. And finally, in spite of the difficulties of the representation of electrical and magnetic phenomena after Ampère and before Maxwell and Hertz, physicists have been able to announce in the second half of the nineteenth century the unity of the physical forces realized in and by mechanics. From that time forth, all phenomena have been conceived as motion or modes of motion, only differing essentially one from the other in so far as motions may differ—that is to say, in the masses of the moving particles, their velocities, and their trajectories. The external world has appeared essentially homogeneous; it has fallen a prize to mechanics. Above all, there is heterogeneity in ourselves. It is in the brain, which responds to the nervous influx engendered by the longitudinal vibration of the air, by the specific sensation of sound, which responds to the transverse vibration of the ether by a luminous sensation, and in general to each form of motion by an irreducible specific sensation.