When William Crookes chose as one of the titles of his paper on the newly discovered properties of electricity, 'The Fourth State of Matter', it was to express his belief that he had found a state of matter, additional to the three known ones, which represented 'the borderland where matter and force seem to merge into one another, the shadowy realm between known and unknown' for which his soul had been longing ever since the death of his beloved brother.¹ All that has followed from his discovery, down to the transformation of matter itself into freely working energy, shows that he was right in thinking he had reached some borderland of nature. But the character of the forces which are thus liberated makes it equally clear that this is not the borderland he was looking for. Nature - by which we mean physical nature - has in fact two borders, one touching the realm of the intramaterial energies which are liberated by disrupting the structure of atomic nuclei, the other leading over into creative Chaos, the fountain-head of all that appears in nature as intelligent design.

So far as science allowed Mayer any credit for his work, this was based on the opinion that through his discovery he had provided the final vindication of the mechanical theory of heat. This judgment, however, was only piling one wrong upon another. Mayer's destiny was truly tragic. When he began to publicize his conviction of the numerical equilibrium between spent and created energy, he met with so much scepticism, even derision, that from sheer despair his mind at times became clouded. When at last toward the end of his life he received the recognition his discovery deserved (not before being dragged through a painful priority dispute which Joule forced upon him and lost), the scientists had begun to use his idea for bolstering up a hypothesis directly counter to the idea which had led him to his discovery, and for the sake of which he had accepted so much suffering.

As the gravity-field decreases in strength with increasing distance from the centre of the field, that is, in the outward direction, so does the levity-field decrease in strength with increasing distance from its periphery, or in the inward direction. In both fields the direction of movement is from regions of lower to those of higher intensity. This is why things 'fall' under the influence of gravity and 'rise' under the influence of levity.⁴

three ponderable states.

This fact alone shows that potentization leads into a realm of material effects at variance with the ordinary scientific conception of matter. Moreover, we can carry the dilutions as far as we please without destroying the capacity of the substance to produce physiological reactions. On the contrary, as soon as its original capacity is reduced to a minimum by dilution, further dilution gives it the power to cause actually stronger reactions, of a different and usually opposite kind. This second capacity rises through stages to a variable maximum as dilution proceeds.

It is this combination of kinship and polar opposition which led people of old to regard both lightning in the heights and seismic disturbances in the depths as signs of direct intervention by higher powers in the affairs of men. A trace of this old feeling lingers in the Greek word θειον (theion), divine, which was used to denote both lightning and sulphur. Influenced by the same conception, the Romans regarded as holy a spot where lightning had struck the earth; they even fenced it off to protect it from human contact. Note in this respect also the biblical report of the event on Mount Sinai, mentioned before, telling of an interplay of volcanic and meteorological phenomena as a sign of the direct intervention of the Godhead.

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.

Mayer's spiritual kin are not to be found among the heat-theorists of his time, such as Helmholtz and others, but among thinkers of the stamp of Goethe, Howard and Ruskin. His basic idea of the inner connexion between all forms of energy in nature corresponds entirely with Goethe's idea of metamorphosis. Just as Goethe saw in the ur-plant the Idea common to all plant-forms or, in the various plant-organs, the metamorphosis of one and the same ur-organ, so was Mayer convinced of the existence of an ur-force which expressed itself in varying guises in the separate energy-forms of nature. In the picture of the physical universe which hovered before him, the transformation of one form of energy into another - such as mechanical energy into electrical, this into chemical and so on - was somewhat similar to Goethe's picture of the organic life of the earth, in which the metamorphosis of one living form into another constantly occurred. 'There is in nature', said Mayer, 'a specific dimension of immaterial constitution which preserves its value in all changes taking place among the objects observed, whereas its form of appearance alters in the most manifold ways.'

How does thermal expansion read as a letter in nature's script when seen in the light of the two contrasting field-concepts?

Our observations have led us to a concept of heat essentially different from that held by modern science. Science looks on heat simply as a condition of ponderable matter. We, on the contrary, are led to recognize in heat a fourth condition into which matter may pass on leaving the three ponderable conditions, and out of which it may emerge on the way to ponderability.