and conducts thought from mind to mind, as the wire does the electric
current. The higher spirituality to which the race has advanced enables
one to perceive and experience this truth more or less, some to a great
degree, some only in a minor; but some sort of perception is universal,
and is seen as phenomena, or as indications of the working of spiritual
laws, according to the individual who recognizes it. One of these
striking phases may be seen in the experience that results from absence
and separation. Let two persons who are mutually sympathetic and
responsive to each other meet, and they at once strike the chord of
ardent social enjoyment in their companionship, and the note of prelude
to an enthusiastic friendship. Let a sudden separation come in the
external world, and the mutual spiritual experience is strangely full
of color, of vital sympathy, of vivid perceptions. Evidently, the
spirits of each meet and mingle, independent of the fact that a thousand
miles of distance lie between the individuals. What is distance to the
spiritual being? It is not an element which bears any significance to
that part of the nature which has transcended time and place. In such an
experience as this, and one that occurred recently between two persons,
one writes to the other:--
"I talk to you incessantly. I find currents from my life continually
running out like telegraph wires to yours."
And a letter written by the other person, crossing this one on the way,
had borne a message something to the effect:--
"I go about companioned by you. Far more actually present you are to me
than those by whom I am surrounded. Everything I read and think keeps
referring itself to you for response."
Between these two persons telepathy was working perfectly. Absence and
separation made no blank, but rather a season filled with the most
intense and direct sense of psychical communion. They were
meeting--spirit to spirit--more closely, more clearly, indeed, than
would have been possible had they been dwelling under one roof. For
personality, and all the incidents and accidents and interruptions
hinder rather than help actual companionship, when it is on this higher
plane of spirit to spirit in mutual, swift, unerring response.
In this phase of actual experience may we not find a hint from which to
study the words of Jesus to his disciples,--"It is expedient for you
that I go away." Through that mystic silence that fell between them on
His departure from the visible world, there thrilled the sense of a
communion so near, so exalted, so divinely sweet, that it could never
have been theirs in the external life. To give this it was expedient
that He should go away. Here we find the key to the separations that
must occur between friends by the demands of life, or that occur by
death, but that may be in either case infinitely deeper in spiritual
communion. The friend with whom we are in any real relations is nearer,
even when the ocean rolls between, than one in the same room can be with
whom we are not in special sympathy; and one who has gone into the
invisible world is nearer still, as out of the realm of pure spirit the
communion is still stronger and more direct and more intense. For this
is "a universe of reciprocal forces." The very ether is the medium of
communication between spirit and spirit.
Marconi has recently completed a new wonder in the shape of a ship
detector. By means of this instrument the course of any ship having one
aboard can be traced, wherever she may be in mid-ocean. It acts on the
principle of the wireless telegraph, but does not require a wireless
plant to operate it. No operator is needed on the ship, the shore
stations locating the ships by a system of tunings. It is proposed to
install this system on the leading liners, and the home office can thus
know at every moment the exact position of a ship and note her progress
as she moves along her course. Should the vessel become disabled it will
become noted, and by means of the chart her position can be known and
assistance can be sent to her.
Here is one of the most marvellous among the new illustrations of the
finer forces. But this "ship detector," which acts on the principle of
wireless telegraphy, is less potent than are the electric forces in
every human being, if it were known how to control and utilize these to
serve the purposes of perception. For perception is a faculty that may
far transcend both sight and hearing. Perception is a faculty of the
soul--often undeveloped; rarely developed to anything like its full
possibilities, but capable of locating objects or of discerning persons
and events, or of apprehending states of mind in others, regardless of
space, as the ship's detector and the shore stations become aware of
each other through their relation of finer vibrations. A recent
experimenter in electric and super-physical force, M. Tessier
d'Helbaicy, states this theory: "Taking as his premise the fundamental
law of physical science, that all chemical reaction is accompanied by a
generation of heat and electricity, he said to himself that the human
body, with the innumerable and incessant chemical reactions presented by
all its cells, should create a thermo-electric pile of great power. In
any case, the Austrian savant, Reichenbach, in his remarkable series of
experiments, has already proved, fifty years ago, that we radiate
electric waves of a special kind, visible in the dark under certain
conditions, and these present positive and negative poles." This being
granted, M. d'Helbaicy has measured the yielding power of the human
machine in heat and electricity, and has compared these with what the
heat industrial machines can do, such as those run by steam, dynamos,
and electric piles.
[Sidenote: A Glorious Inauguration.]
The new year of 1903 was inaugurated by the scientific success of the
most remarkable, the most marvellous achievement of any age,--that of
wireless telegraphy. "Before you write 1903 I will have demonstrated the
success of wireless communication," exclaimed Marconi, early in 1902;
and ten days before the dawning of the year he named, the achievement
was an undisputed success. It is so marvellous a thing that thought,
without visible mechanism, can be flashed through the air, across the
ocean, and record itself, that the success of Marconi can be held as
nothing less than sublime. It is the most impressive of all the
realizations of the past decade in entering on the unseen and intangible
potencies. It has become a familiar thing to see the cars in city
streets, and carriages move swiftly by a motor power that is invisible
to the eye; a power that no one can analyze or detect save in its
effects and its results. It has become so familiar a thing that one can
carry on a conversation with a friend at a thousand miles' distance,
that one forgets how wonderful it really is. Within the memory of men
still living is the time when it required forty days to make the voyage
to Europe, and to obtain, or to send, news between the two countries.
Now, within forty minutes, the news is flashed under the ocean. All
these discoveries that annihilate Time and Space are simply the result
of the evolution of life to higher stages; of the advance of man into
the ethereal realm. For is not the underlying and fundamental truth
this: that all is spirit? One may talk of "the spiritual life," but
there is no other life! Withdraw the spiritual element, and there is no
life at all! The difference, then, between the physical and the material
worlds is only a difference of degree,--as ice-water, steam, and vapor
are only different degrees and conditions of the same element. Progress
is the transformation of the physical into the spiritual; of the lower
and cruder and denser life into the finer, the more potent, the more
ethereal. Energy is proportioned in potency to its ethereal aspects. In
its cruder and denser form there is only a low degree of potency, and in
its more ethereal forms is there higher potency. The ox-team is a dense
and crude form of potency, and the electric motor is the more ethereal
and intense form of energy. Now the progress of humanity is unfailingly
registered by its advance into the employment of the ethereal forces and
the more intense energies, as these form conditions that react upon
life. How far more intelligent a nation may be when its facilities for
swift intercommunication foster and stimulate and instantly disseminate
the knowledge of all events, discoveries, and experiences; and when its
facilities for swift transportation facilitate all economic and social
intercourse! Judged, then, by their unfailing measurements, how
significant was the triumphal achievement of wireless telegraphy on the
eve of the dawn of 1903.
If telepathy is "the science of the soul's interchange with God--of the
interchange of the thought of one soul with another;" if it "reveal
that realm of consciousness where all God's thought is interpreted to
the soul:" if "its vibration never dies out of the atmosphere of
thought;" the discovery of this great law must indeed take precedence of
that of any other achievement of the past century.
The nature of Human Personality holds the secret of spiritual evolution.
It doth not yet appear what man may be; but the increasing knowledge of
his powers; the development of those heretofore latent and unrecognized,
are combining to throw a new illumination on not only the aspects, but
the purposes of life. Man is coming into enlightenment concerning the
environment of the spiritual world as one more immediately controlling
him, as well as one far more profound and significant, than the
environment of matter and of ether. As things go, the chief emphasis has
always been placed upon the material environment. Man has not
infrequently been willing to sell his soul for a mess of pottage--his
chief concern being, not the loss of his soul, but the gain of the
pottage. He has been willing to exchange the entire devotion of all his
energies for a finer and more resplendent quality of food, clothing, and
shelter,--for a palace in which to live, for private cars and steam
yachts in which to go about, and all the paraphernalia accessible to the
multi-millionaire. But it is not all that these possessions typify which
constitutes his most important environment. It is that degree of the
spiritual world with which his own quality of spiritual life is fitted
to ally itself. "The life of the organism consists in its power of
interchanging energy with that of its environment," says Frederic W. H.
Myers,--"of appropriating by its own action some fraction of that
pre-existent and limitless power. We human beings exist, in the first
place, in a world of matter," he continues, "whence we draw the obvious
sustenance of our bodily functions. We exist also in a world of ether;
that is to say, we are constructed to respond to a system of laws,
ultimately continuous, no doubt, with the laws of matter, but affording
a new, a generalized, a profounder conception of the Cosmos. On this
environment our organic existence depends as absolutely as on the
material environment, although less obviously,--but ... within, beyond
the world of ether, as a still profounder, still more generalized aspect
of the Cosmos, must lie, as I believe, the world of spiritual life."
This world of spiritual life, a deeper reality, a profounder realm of
energy than the ethereal world, is the true environment of the spirit
even while embodied in physical form; and the secret of all success, of
all achievement, of all progress, of all happiness, is to discover
increasing means by which we may thus relate ourselves to our native
realm. Science and Psychical Research are supplementing Religion; are,
indeed, incorporating themselves into Religion as vital factors of the
spiritual progress of humanity. Far from being hostile elements to the
revelation of the Divine Power given in the Bible, they explain, they
extend, they interpret that revelation. As Archdeacon Wilberforce so
finely points out, God is ever the same, "but what men see of Him
changes,--changes without contradiction of the past conceptions."
* * * * *
"It was a definite promise of God that He should unfold, develop,
spiritualize the conceptions of the early Christian faith, revealing
gradually, as men should be able to assimilate them, higher, nobler
views of the nature, character, and purpose of the Eternal Father,"
continued Archdeacon Wilberforce in a memorable sermon preached in
Westminster Abbey, and he added:--
"It is, I suppose, inevitable that timid hearts, rooted in the
traditions of the past, iron-bound in antiquated definitions,
should imagine that the foundations of faith are shaken. They
forget that the Christ told us that when His visible presence was
removed He would speak by His spirit, as He had only delivered the
preliminaries of His full message; that there were truths yet to be
unfolded which men would receive and assimilate as the generations
succeeded one another,--'as the thoughts of men widened with the
progress of the suns.' I have been told by experts that the
astronomers who built those marvels of antiquity, the Pyramids of
the Nile, pierced a slanting shaft through the larger pyramid which
pointed direct to the Pole-star, and that in those days had you
gazed heavenward through the shaft into the Eastern night, the
Pole-star alone would have met your eye. It was in the ages of the
past, it was when the Southern Cross was visible from the British
Isles. Slowly, imperceptibly, the orientation of the planet has
changed. Did you now look up into the midnight sky through the
shaft in the Great Pyramid you would not see the Pole-star; new
brilliant space-worlds would shine down on you. But the heavens
have not altered, and the shaft of the pyramid is not guilty, so to
speak, of unorthodoxy. A new view of the heavens has quietly come,
for the earth's axis has changed its place. Similarly, it is the
work of the spirit of the ascended Jesus to advance the axis of the
Church of God from glory to glory. Conceptions of the Universal
Soul once prominent before the telescope of human faith and
aspiration grow, enlarge, expand. He changeth not; He is ever the
same. And these conceptions will change until knowledge, in the
sense of the acquisition of facts, shall be no more, and intuitive
perception of the transcendent majesty of the Universal Life shall
fill our souls forever."
In these latter days one may hold all his old faith and add to it
knowledge, as Saint Paul himself enjoins. One of these powers of the
spiritual man now being rapidly developed is that of telepathy. We shall
learn to _talk in thought_, as well as in oral speech. We shall learn to
"call up" the friend at a distance, or the friend in the Unseen, as
unmistakably as we now call up a friend by telephone. Time and Space are
the limits which define the terrestrial life as distinct from the
celestial. But man is, primarily, a celestial being. He is, first of
all, a spirit, belonging to the spiritual world, and only secondarily
and temporarily a denizen of earth. He can regain, to some extent, at
least, his celestial faculties. For centuries he has accepted
imprisonment in the senses. His release is at hand. He has but to assert
his own pre-eminence as a spiritual being with spiritual powers. He has
but to exert these in order to prove to himself their existence, and to
develop them to their increasing use. Extension of power over the
material universe, more wonderful and more potent, and more
all-comprehending than even Marconi's wonderful wireless telegraphy, is
at hand. "It doth not yet appear what we shall be;" but that man can
create and control his destiny to an increasing extent, is true. It is
the evolution of religion,--of that faith which has added to itself
knowledge. Thought is the highest manifestation of energy; and when man
learns to live in thought he acts upon all his environment with energies
that are immortal.
Professor Leavenworth of the State University Observatory in Minnesota
photographed the new asteroid Eros at a distance estimated to be some
thirty-six millions of miles,--a distance that renders it impossible to
discern this planet even through the strongest telescope. Exact
mathematical calculation had worked out the problem of the location of
Eros, and the sensitive photographic plate caught it, even though it is
beyond the power of the telescope.
This scientific fact illustrates perfectly the way in which an unseen
universe exists about us, registering its existence on the sensitive
plate of spiritual impression. Science has long since established the
truth of the different rates of vibration that characterize different
things. The reason that the psychic (or spiritual) body of those who
have passed from the physical to the ethereal world is unseen is simply
that the ethereal body is in a state of vibration too high for the eye
to follow. Stephen Phillips expresses a deep scientific truth when he
says:--
"I tell you we are fooled by the eye, the ear;
These organs muffle as from that real world
That lies about us."
Yet in every human being there lies latent the inner sight and the inner
hearing, which can be increasingly developed by psycho-physical
culture; by such habits of life as make the physical body more flexible,
more subtle, and which thus raise to a far higher rate its degree of
vibration, and enable the organs of sight and hearing to be far less
"muffled" than they are in those who live more in the mere life of the
senses. This unseen world that lies about us may be explored; the unseen
friends who encompass us may be recognized by those who will so live as
to develop the psychic senses, and so as to allow the psychic body to
take greater control of its physical instrument; this unseen world is
simply the natural continuation of the physical universe in the scale of
evolution. Science is every day penetrating its space, and the horizon
line of mystery constantly recedes. What is wireless telegraphy but one
of those marvels which a decade ago we should have considered as quite
beyond the horizon line of our experimental knowledge, and as belonging
to the unrevealed mysteries of the spiritual universe? The ordinary
trolley car of to-day--moving without visible means--would have been
regarded as a miracle a century ago. There is no hard and fast line
between the physical and the ethereal worlds. They melt into one
another and are determined only by degrees. Any element may exist as a
solid, a liquid, a gas, or in the etheric condition, and one state is no
less real than another. The trend of progress is leading humanity
constantly into the realm of finer forces; of more subtle forms of
expression. The trend of progress is constantly discarding the more
ponderous and clumsy for the subtle, the swift, and the more ethereal
form of mechanism. Instead of the stage coach, with two, four, or six
horses, we have the automobile; instead of the sailing ship, the
twin-screw propeller; instead of stoves or fireplaces, with fuel to be
carried in and refuse to be carried out, we have the hot-water radiator,
and are on the eve of having heat, as we already have light, from
electricity.
Now when science provides the explanation of this ethereal universe
surrounding and interpenetrating that in which we live and psychic
science begins to explore it and formulate its means and methods, there
are persons who object on the ground of its "materializing heaven." If
one were to inquire as to what this idea of heaven is he would probably
receive no more definite reply than that it was supposed to be a
condition of playing on golden harps and waving palm branches. The
figurative pictures of the New Testament have largely been accepted as
literal ones, and it may be an open question as to which condition would
be the more "material," that of walking golden streets, waving branches
of palms and devoting one's time to the harp, or the life that
prefigures itself as a development and expansion of our present
intellectual, artistic, and spiritual life.
"Unless some insight is gained into the psychical side of things, some
communications realized with intelligences outside our own, some light
thrown upon a more than corporeal descent and destiny of man," wrote
Frederick W. H. Myers in that monumental work entitled "Human
Personality," which offers a rich mine of suggestion, "it would seem
that the shells to be picked up on the shore of the ocean of truth will
ever become scantier, and the agnostics of the future will gaze forth
ever more hopelessly on that gloomy and unvoyageable sea. For vast as is
the visible universe, infinite as may have been the intelligence that
went to its evolution, yet while viewed in the external way in which we
alone can view it--while seen as a product and not as a plan--it cannot
possibly suggest to us an indefinite number of universal laws. Such
cosmic generalizations as gravitation, evolution, correlation of forces,
conservation of energy, though assuredly as yet unexhausted, cannot, in
the nature of things, be even approximately inexhaustible."
[Sidenote: Finer Cosmic Forces.]
The entire trend of progress is toward the continued discovery of finer
cosmic forces and their utilization in practical affairs. Within the
past five years this tendency has strikingly demonstrated itself. The
evolution of the ways and means of travel offers, in itself, an
impressive illustration of this tendency. The visitor to the Musee Cluny
in Paris will find, among the masses of relics of an historic pass, the
state carriages used in the time of Louis XV. and Marie Antoinette. They
are incredibly clumsy and gigantic,--the carriage itself mounted on four
great wheels, two of which are very large, with the two front ones
smaller,--the entire vehicle occupying about twice the space of a modern
conveyance, and its weight must be something to reckon with. Several of
these are standing in the Cluny and offer a strange contrast with the
carriages of to-day. But when these, with their lumbering motion, are
contrasted,--not merely with the modern carriage, but with the flying
automobile,--one realizes, indeed, the evolution in the methods of local
transportation.
Again, let one compare the traditions of the sailing vessels on which
passengers crossed to Europe within the memory of men still living,--the
forty days' passage between Boston and Liverpool which is well within
the memory of Doctor Hale,--with the passage on this latest floating
palace of the ocean, the Kaiser Wilhelm II.,--and he realizes how far
science has penetrated into the more subtle forces, where lightness and
speed take the place of clumsy device and slow motion. To go up to the
hurricane deck of the wonderful Kaiser Wilhelm and look down through the
openings on the six mighty engines, with their intense throb of
vibration day and night, is to behold an object lesson in the
possibilities of motion. With the precision and the persistence of fate,
the great beams fly up--and down. The vibration pervades the entire
vast spaces of the great steamer. It becomes like an electric current, a
thing of life, to be missed when one leaves the steamer as if one had
left there a part of his own life. There is an exhilaration in it that
communicates itself to mind and body. It is like a dynamo generating
vitality. And still more swift and subtle methods of loco-motion are in
the air. Doctor Albertson, an electrical engineer of the Royal
University of Denmark, has an invention for a railroad train without
wheels to make a speed of three hundred miles an hour. "Two things
defeated the attainment of speed above the present maximum (sixty miles
an hour)," says a writer in the "New York Herald," and these are
specified as "the dead weight of the train, and aerial resistance.
"Now comes the announcement that there has been discovered a method of
abolishing the dead weight of the train, leaving only aerial resistance
to be contended with. If this can be done, as Mr. Albertson asserts,
half of the battle is won, and the world may yet be able to travel on
the earth's surface with the much-dreamed-of speed of hundreds of miles
an hour. For many years the great principle of magnetism has been known
to electricians and used in practical work by laymen. Steel companies
have found the magnet useful in lifting huge metal girders. At one end
of their lifting apparatuses they have placed a magnet which, when
charged, grips the steel bars and lifts them, no matter how great their
weight. It has been noticed that a magnet would move to come in contact
with the steel bar as soon as it arrived within the drawing radius,
carrying any amount of weight with it which happened to be attached at
the time.