chapter_10_text
It was Crookes’s fate to open the road which has brought man to nature’s lower border and even across it, although he himself was in search of her upper border. What he was denied, we are in a position to achieve to-day, provided we do not expect to succeed by methods similar to those of atomic physics, and do not look for similar results.
chapter_10_text
To show that there is a fourth state of matter, rightly so called, which represents in actual fact the upper border of nature, and to point the way that leads to it and across it, is the purpose of this chapter.
chapter_10_text
From our previous comparison of the older conception of the four elementary conditions of nature with that now held of the three states of ponderable matter, we may expect that the fourth state will have something in common with heat. Heat is indeed the energy which transforms matter by carrying it from the solid to the liquid and gaseous states. Not so obvious is the fact that heat, apart from being an agent working at matter in this way, is the very essence underlying all material existence, out of which matter in its three ponderable states comes into being and into which it is capable of returning again. Such a conception of matter was naturally absent from the age of the Contra-Levitatem orientation of the human mind. To create this conception, a new Pro-Levitate orientation is required.
chapter_10_text
Apart from producing liquefaction and vaporization, heat has also the property of acting on physical matter so that its volume increases. Both facts are linked together by science through the thermodynamic conception of heat. As this conception firmly blocks the road to the recognition of the role of heat as the fourth state of matter, our first task will be to determine our own standpoint with regard to it. Further obstacles on our way are the so-called Laws of Conservation, which state that no matter and no energy – which for present-day science have become one and the same thing – can ever disappear into ‘nothing’ or come into being out of ‘nothing’. This idea, also, will therefore require our early attention.2
chapter_20_merge_container
chapter_10_text
As we know of mass through a definite sense-perception, so we know of heat. In the latter case we rely on the sense of warmth. In Chapter VIII we took the opportunity to test the objectivity of the information received through this sense. Still, one-eyed, colour-blind observation is naturally unable to take account of these sense-messages. To this kind of observation nothing is accessible, we know, except spatial displacements of single point-like entities. Hence we find Bacon and Hooke already attributing the sensation of warmth to minute fast-moving particles of matter impinging on the skin. Some time later we find Locke taking up the same picture. We see from this how little the mechanical theory of heat owes to empirical facts. For even in Locke’s time the connexion between heat and mechanical action, as recognized to-day, was completely unknown.
chapter_10_text
With this idea firmly rooted in his mind, modern man had no difficulty in using it to explain both thermal expansion and the effect of heat on the different states of matter, and so, finally, these states themselves. Thermal expansion was thus attributed to an increase in the average distance between the assumed minute particles, caused by an increase in their rate of movement; the liquid state was held to differ from the solid, and similarly the gaseous from the liquid, by the interspaces between the particles becoming relatively so great that the gravitational pull between them became too weak to hold them together.
chapter_1_text
Putting the question thus, I was led inevitably to a conclusion which science itself had failed to draw from its idea of evolution. Whatever the driving factor in evolution may be, it is clear that in the kingdoms of nature leading up to man this factor has always worked on the evolving organisms from outside. The moment we come to man himself, however, and see how evolution has flowered in his power of conscious thought, we have to reckon with a fundamental change.
chapter_1_text
Once a being has recognized itself as a product of evolution, it immediately ceases to be that and nothing more. With its very first act of self-knowledge it transcends its previous limits, and must in future rely on its own conscious actions for the carrying on of its development.
chapter_1_text
For me, accordingly, the concept of evolution, when thought through to the end, began to suggest the possibility of further growth in man’s spiritual capacities. But I saw also that this growth could no longer be merely passive, and the question which now beset me was: by what action of his own can man break his way into this new phase of evolution? I saw that this action must not consist merely in giving outer effect to the natural powers of human thinking; that was happening everywhere in the disordered world around me. The necessary action must have inner effects; indeed, it had to be one whereby the will was turned upon the thinking-powers themselves, entirely transforming them, and so removing the discrepancy between the thinker and the doer in modern man.