Allotropic state

There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognizable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we've been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single radically-unchanged element.

What he enforces in his account of the two letters and very ably traces through Lawrence's writing of the teens is the relevance of Zola in understanding why Lawrence reacted as he did to the Futurists-why at first he reached for those otherwise oddly scientific terms to analyse "the new human phenomenon" that he realised he was now interested in: the fiddle-bow and sand; the allotropic states of diamond, coal and carbon; and the physiology of matter that the laugh of the woman supposedly shares with molecules of steel.