The fundamental definition of force given above is highly academic, involving as it does hypothetical experiments in laboratories situated far out in empty space. Some sort of procedure like this seems to correspond to more or less explicit statements to be found in the literature of mechanics. The meaning in terms of actual operations to be given to such definitions involves complicated inferential reasoning. We would make much closer connection with the conditions of actual experiment if in the definition we substituted for the hypothetical operations in empty space more or less approximately realizable operations on bodies sliding on level table tops without friction. I suppose our instinctive feeling for the laws of mechanics is such that we are convinced that definitions in terms of an interstellar space laboratory or a level table top are actually the same. But in principle we must recognize that when the operations are different, the concepts are different, and if we adopt something equivalent to the table top definition, as it seems we are physically forced to do, we must leave open in our thinking the possibility of finding in the present penumbra, when our accuracy is sufficiently increased, such phenomena perhaps as directional attributes of mass in a gravitational field. We have just considered the sort of problem that we encounter on ordinary scales of magnitude on going from low to high velocities; what becomes of the concepts of force and mass when we go to a very small scale? Down to the atomic scale we may at least slur over the new physical difficulties, for although we cannot of course experiment with actual atoms, we can nevertheless make measurements of the Brownian[17] movement of suspensions in liquids settling in a gravitational field, for example, and the extrapolation to the atom is not a very great one. The mass of each individual atom is obtained by what is equivalent to a process of counting, assuming the law of conservation of mass on an atomic scale. This is justified by all chemical experience. The mass of the component parts of the atoms, the electrons, may also perhaps be given a unique significance after we have decided on the laws of the electrical field, by experiments on acceleration in electrical fields. The question which interests in principle here is what meaning, if any, shall be attached to the mass of the elements of the electron. [Footnote 17: This phenomenon is discussed at length in the book by J. Perrin, Brownian Movement and Molecular Reality, translated by F. Soddy, Taylor and Francis, London, 1909.]