Imponderable elements

Besides man is composed of tissues and organic liquids penetrated by an imponderable element called consciousness . Now the living body sum of tissues and organic liquids has its own existence linked to a regular affinity to the contingent universe. Can we not then suppose... 

Berzelius himself made experiments on contact electricity. He thought that electricity (the nature of which is unknown), seems to be the first cause of the activity all around us in nature. He preferred the two-fluid to the one-fluid theory. In the first edition (1808) of his Ldrbok he explained the development of heat and light on combustion by Lavoisier s caloric theory (see Vol. Ill, p. 422) and added light, electricity, and magnetism to caloric to form a group of imponderable elements. The ponderable elements are divided into metals and non-metals, the latter being called metalloids this name had been used by Erman for the metals of the alkalis and earths later it was applied to semi-metals like arsenic. 

Empedocles four elements do not represent a multiplication of the prote hyle, but rather a gloss that conceals its complications. Aristotle agreed that ultimately there was only one primal substance, but it was too remote, too unknowable, to serve as the basis for a philosophy of matter. So he accepted Empedocles elements as a kind of intermediary between this imponderable stuff and the tangible world. This instinct to reduce cosmic questions to manageable ones is one reason why Aristotle was so influential. 

A second problem was Lavoisier s postulation of the element caloric —a kind of imponderable heat fluid. In certain ways, caloric was a substitute for the... 

During most of 1788 Lavoisier wrote his masterpiece TraM Eldmentaire de Chimie and it was published in early 1789 (see Figure 211). The project had started as an attempt to provide an accessible introduction to chemistry, evolved to update the 1787 Mdthode de nomenclature chimique and became the most important treatise in the history of chemistry. It included the first modern list of chemical elements (33 in number, including the imponderables light and... 

Although we have thus rendered it probable, that the molecules of bodies considered at present as elementary, are immediately compounded of many others, more or less resembling them. . . there must be a point at which these, and other elements, exist in a primary or ultimate form and beyond which, if they can be supposed to be subdivided, they must become something altogether different.. . . Indeed, such submolecules may be imagined to resemble in some degree, the imponderable matters, heat, c., not only by their extreme tenuity, but in other characters also. ... 

---