I. The Electromagnetic Ether
(1) Fields and Charges. One can say that the combined efforts of Faraday, Maxwell, and Hertz have resulted in giving us a precise knowledge of the properties of the electromagnetic ether, and of light; of a medium, homogeneous and void of matter, whose state is completely defined, with the exception of gravitation, when we know at any point the direction and magnitude of the electric and magnetic fields.
I insist, for the present, on the possibility of arriving at a conception of fields of force, as well as the related idea of electric charges, independently of all dynamics; I wish by this to imply only a knowledge of the laws of motion and of matter. The two fields possess this property, that their divergence is zero in all parts of the ether; that is to say, the flux of electric and magnetic force is rigorously zero across a closed surface which does not contain any matter in its interior. It is in fact always matter in the ordinary sense of the word which contains and can furnish the electric charges around which the divergence of field exists whose direction varies with the sign of the charges.
In extreme cases where the electric charges appear to be most completely separated from their material support, as in the case of the cathode rays for example, the experimental fact of the granular structure of these rays and the complete indestructibility of their charge, the fact finally that cathodic particles are charges possessing the fundamental property of matter, inertia, and experiencing acceleration in the electromagnetic field, these facts do not allow us to distinguish their charge from the so-called free charge of ordinary electrified matter.
Furthermore, we shall come to the idea not only that there can be no electric charge without matter, but that, in fact, there can be no matter without electricity, an aggregation of electrical centres of the two kinds. Electrons, analogous to the cathode particles, possess almost all the known properties of matter by the fact alone that these centres are electrified. We shall see within what limits this conception can be considered sufficiently known, and if it is necessary to superimpose other properties on those which result from electrically charged centres in order to obtain a satisfactory representation of matter; the ether alone, on the contrary, never contains any electricity. If experiment obliges us to admit the existence of electric charges, positive and negative, from the flux of electric force different from zero across a closed surface drawn entirely in the ether and containing matter, it is otherwise for the magnetic field. Experiment has never furnished an instance where a closed surface drawn in the ether was traversed by a magnetic field different from zero. One
