Actual mechanics, busy at their work-benches, satisfied with a hypothesis which was accurate enough for their immediate needs, thought very little of these far-reaching implications. But here were weapons forged to a nicety for the hands of the leaders of that vast movement which today we loosely and inaccurately call modern paganism--it being neither pagan nor modern, but an old, old disease marked by the hardening of the arteries of the soul self-deprived of conscious communion with God. Pains were taken to bring Newton’s findings home to every intellect. Popular science became intensely interesting, and hot with fervor; for in reality it was not science at all but anti-religious propaganda--and this even when it sugar-coated itself, as it sometimes did, with phrases having what might pass for a pious taste. But it was more than even the “tough-minded”--that is to say, sclerotic-brained--long could endure. Oliver L. Reiser, of the University of Pittsburg (a writer for _The Monist_) goes so far as to say that “had Newton been able to foresee the inevitable logical consequences of his doctrine in the godless universe of Laplace, he might have been constrained towards a more hospitable regard for the views of Leibniz”--the reference, of course, being to the attempt of Leibniz to reconcile the mechanical Cartesian universe with the idea that creation, after all, has a meaning and a purpose. Newton, indeed, might have done even more than this. But he died leaving us nothing but a big machine which continued to dominate men’s minds until about the year 1890, when the whole thing suddenly broke down. Says R. A. Millikan, of the Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics, writing recently for _Scribner’s_: “In [the discovery of radio-activity and the electrical constitution of matter] the physical world changed in our thinking over night in its fundamental elements from a fixed, changeless, static, dead thing, to a changing, evolving, dynamic, living organism. Two principles, conservation of mass and conservation of energy, are now gone, clean gone, as distinct and separate verities.” In other words, matter and energy are now thought to be capable of changing, the one into the other. In the opinion of G. Urbain,[101] the experiments of Rutherford entitle us to say that there are “two chemical elements, the electron and proton, out of which the universe is made.” But--“we physical chemists of today do not tell what matter is.... The least metaphysical among us all see in electrons and protons merely centers of convergence of lines of force. That evidently explains nothing fundamental.... It makes for us a world formed of minute hairy points, the hairs strikingly abstract.”