Leadbeater, Charles W.: Man Visible and Invisible: Examples of different types of men as seen by means of trained clairvoyance (London, 1902)

THE PLANES OF NATURE. (J

the gaseous condition, or raised to some other
state still, finer than their own.

In ordinary science we speak of an atom of
oxygen, an atom of hydrogen, an atom of any of
the sixty or seventy substances which chemists
call elements, the theory being that that is an
element which cannot be further reduced, and
that each of these elements has its atom—and an
atom, as we may see from the Greek derivation
of the word, means that which cannot be cut, or
further subdivided. Occult science tells us, what
many scientists have frequently suspected, that
all these so-called elements are not in the true
sense of the word elements at all; that what we
call an atom of oxygen or hydrogen is not the
ultimate, and in fact is not an atom at all, but
a molecule which can under certain circumstances
be broken up into atoms. By repeating this
breaking-up process it is found that we arrive
eventually at an infinite number of definite
physical atoms which are all alike; so that there
is one substance at the back of all substances,
and different combinations of its ultimate atoms
give us what in chemistry are called atoms of
oxygen or hydrogen, gold or silver, lithium or
platinum, etc. When these are all broken up
we get back to a set of atoms which are all
identical, except that some of them are positive
and some negative.