Or, leaving Ether alone, "that half-discovered entity," as Lord Salisbury styled it on a famous occasion, and restricting our attention to ponderable matter, concerning which we know a little more,--how can even this be spoken of as "One"? As we have seen already it is only by a figure of speech that the term "Matter" can be used at all. It stands not for a single thing, but for countless millions and billions of atoms, dispersed through space, some of one kind some of another, no one of which can be imagined to owe its existence or its properties to any other. To say that matter is self-existent is to say that every several atom is self-existent. If this be so, and if this be the ultimate Reality,--then there are as many first principles, or first causes, as there are atoms. Yet none of these could do anything to the purpose towards the evolution of anything, without the concurrence of a multitude of others, nor would such concurrence be possible but for the reign of law, which none of them can have instituted, but to which all alike are subject. Were matter the great reality, even matter composed of "animated atoms," the term _Monism_ would be sadly out of keeping, and should yield its place to _Myriadism_. If, on the other hand, there _is_ a unifying principle amid such diversity, this it must be which can control and direct all to one end. It is undoubtedly hard to understand how the First Principle of all things can be supposed to consist of Atoms, but this is one of the perplexities in which monistic doctrines abound. That atoms _are_, so far as we know, the ultimate constituents of the Fundamental Reality, Professor Haeckel admits. It is true, he adds, that our knowledge of these ultimate elements is still far from satisfying, and he likewise anticipates that atoms will someday be discovered not really to be ultimate, but forms of something, more primal still. Although [he says][174] Monism is on the one hand for us an indispensable and fundamental conception in science, and although, on the other hand, it strives to carry back all phenomena, without exception, to the mechanism of the atom, we must nevertheless still admit that as yet we are by no means in a position to form any satisfactory conception of the exact nature of these atoms, and their relation to the general space-filling, universal ether. Chemistry long ago succeeded in reducing all the various natural substances to combinations of a relatively small number of elements; and the most recent advances of that science have made it in the highest degree probable that these elements ... are themselves in turn only different combinations of a varying number of atoms of one single original element. But in all this we have not as yet obtained any further light as to the real nature of these original atoms or their primal energies.