No lover of physical and chemical science can do other than profoundly admire the atomic theory of modern physics. But there is no sound physicist or chemist but is sufficiently alive to its difficulties to know that in every form in which it has been presented, it is, to say no more, tentative and hypothetic. In Mr. Spencer’s philosophy it becomes a fundamental fact of the beginning. But the existence of atoms being granted, how did they arise? ‘If you ask the materialist,’ says Professor Tyndall, ‘whence is this matter ... who or what divided it into molecules ... he has no answer.’[10] So that here, in spite of the claim made, no philosophy can be ‘complete;’ and even the doctrine of an eternally automatic evolution is philosophically inadequate. But these atoms of the primordial haze are ‘resistant;’ such a quality can only result from a special affection of matter by motion; whence came or how arose such an affection of matter? Its existence in the atoms of the nebula inevitably implies ‘preceding history,’ but it is not given; and this pregnant atomic haze is, so far as we can see, without colour, without chemical affinity or reaction, without light, electricity, or magnetism, and devoid of all cohesion. Clearly, these are not the atoms of the chemical elements known to us. They are not the atoms of Dalton nor of Clark Maxwell. The atoms of the cosmic mist are, by the very terms of the formula, naked of quality; and, by the limiting conditions of the definition of the cloud as homogeneous, are, throughout all the abysms of space, alike in size, in shape, and in motions. Equal extensions of space moving at equal rates. [Footnote 10: _Fragments of Science_, vol. ii. p. 396.] By these conditions, then, it is manifest that primordial matter is in itself infinitely powerless and inert. Motion can affect it; but can there be motion of any _new_ kind originated without a power to cause it? If that can be, the fundamental acts of human reason are untrustworthy; and man is incapable of knowledge or deduction, which is absurd. Then what was the power that determined new motions in the primordial homogeneous matter? It could not by any demand in the formula be even gravity, if that were competent. Modern thought and knowledge cannot allow gravitation to be a property of matter. Ether is matter, but it does not gravitate. Gravity is therefore an occult affection of matter by motion, that has a history ‘to be accounted for.’