---
title: Improvement Era
description: Monthly periodical of the Mormon church, 1897 onward. This library holds the issues of November 1897 to December 1930.
authors:
  - Snow, Chester
collections:
  - periodicals
tags:
  - magazine
  - improvement-era
periodical: Improvement Era
volume: 10
number: 2
published: 1906-12
publisher: Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations
publisher_place: Salt Lake City
language: en
type: magazine
reference: 'Chester Snow, "Energy," *Improvement Era* 10, no. 2 (December 1906): 108–109.'
source:
  url: https://archive.org/details/improvementera1002unse
  transcription: Transcribed from the Internet Archive scan of each issue (the item for each issue is named in the issue's own source); unnumbered advertising leaves are omitted, printed page numbers are kept as page markers.
  identifier: improvementera1002unse
start_page: 108
end_page: 109
rights:
  status: public-domain
  basis: US publication 1930 or earlier (published 1906-12)
  source: https://archive.org/details/improvementera1002unse
  publication_year: 1906
  note: The Internet Archive item metadata carries a blanket "© Copyright by Intellectual Reserve, Inc." notice. The library owner judged it inapplicable because this issue was published in 1906, before 1931; a scan-level notice does not restore copyright.
---

# Energy

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Energy.

 ' 'Not only around our infancy doth heaven and all its splendors lie." When we focus our attention upon an apparently trifling process with other thoughts than the care of self and the petty human greed for gain, desiring, (however vainly) to see it as it is, with its infinite connections and relations in space and in time to all other things and motions and changes, we get glimpses through the veil with startling clearness and reality of another busy, surging, rushing existence, primeval, vast and unformed —a spacefilling, world-power and world- stuff, some of whose briefest and tiniest undulations are called the destinies of living creatures and of men.

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—

 ON THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE. 109

 While I was writing, the other day, I suspected that my fountain pen was getting empty. I held it up, point downward. Slowly from the holder, the black ink oozed down the edges of the golden pen. So slow and continuous was the motion that, although I could see the black bead at the point growing larger and shinier, yet I could not perceive the intermediate motion from the holder down. Presently the black bulb ceased to grow. I

held it aloft. I backward and forward. turned it around, I

marvelled at the complexity of that black mass of liquid, at the multitudinous forces, acting, there, here, right before my eyes. I thought with awe how the earth is continually pulling straight downwards with a certain definite force upon each tiny molecule of that black mass. My muscles grew tense as I thought how each particle was pulling and striving with all its might, always moving in the direction of the resultant force (that resultant who shall calculate?) and always attracting its

neighbors far and seemed almost like a living near. It thing, or, rather, a whole world of living things, and I saw a huge giant peering through that smooth, shining surface into that other world, where strange forms fight in the darkness, and the everlasting forces, electrical, magnetic, molecular, chemical, superpose their effects, where old forms are shattered and new ones evolved from the fragments, where whole systems are swallowed up in the great vortex-change, and where all matter is but the plaything of one unresting, uncreated god energy. — Chester Snow, B. S.

What is an