the extraordinary discovery that this power to influence, based on
sympathetic action, is the very mainspring by which physical work can
be sustained, and upon it depends entirely the very action of our
physical senses. Our senses are based upon the appreciation of
Vibration, in the Air and Ether, of greater or less rapidity,
according to the presence in our organs of processes capable of acting
in sympathy with those frequencies. The limits within which our senses
can thus be affected are very small; the ear can only appreciate
thirteen or fourteen octaves in sound, and the eye less than one
octave in light; beyond these limits, owing to the absence of
processes which can be affected sympathetically, all is silent and
dark to us. This capacity for responding to vibration under
sympathetic action is not confined to Organic Senses; the physical
forces, and even inert matter, are also sensitive to its influences,
as I will now demonstrate to you.
In wireless telegraphy it is absolutely necessary that the transmitter
of the electro-magnetic waves should be brought into perfect harmony
with the receiver--without that condition it is impossible to
communicate at a distance; again, a heavy pendulum or swing can, by a
certain force, be pushed, say an inch, from its position of rest, and
each successive push will augment the swing, but only on one
condition, namely, that the force is applied in sympathy with the
pendulum's mode of swing; if the length of the pendulum is 52 feet,
the force must be applied only at the end of each eight seconds, as,
although the pendulum at first is only moving one inch, it will take
four seconds to traverse that one inch, the same as it would take to
traverse 10 feet or more, and will not be back at the original
position till the end of eight seconds; if the force is applied before
that time the swing of the pendulum would be hindered instead of
augmented. Even a steam engine must work under this influence if it is
to be effective; there may be enough force in a boiler to do the work
of a thousand horse-power, but, unless the slide valve is arranged so
that the steam enters the cylinder at exactly the right moment,
namely, in sympathy with the thrust of the piston, no work is
possible.
To understand the next example I want you first to recognise that,
apart from its physical qualities, every material body has certain,
what may be called, traits of character, which belong to it alone;
there is generally one special trait or "partial," namely, the
characteristic which it is easiest for the particular body to
manifest, but I shall show you that by sympathetic action others can
be developed. I have several pieces of ordinary wood, used for
lighting fires, each of which, according to its size and density, has
its special characteristic; if you examined each by itself you would
hardly see that they are different from one another except slightly in
length, but if I throw them down on the table, you would hear that
each of them gives out a clear characteristic note of the musical
scale: to carry this a step forward, I have a long, heavy, iron bar,
about 4 feet long and 2 inches thick, so rigid that no ordinary manual
force can move it out of the straight, and, from mere handling, you
would find it difficult to imagine that it would be amenable to soft
influences. But I have studied this inert mass, and, as each person
has special characteristics, some being more partial than others to,
say, Literary pursuits, Athletics, Music, Poetry, Engineering,
Science, or Metaphysics, so I am able to show that this iron mass has
not only a number of these "partials," some of which are
extraordinarily beautiful and powerful, audible over long distances,
but that by the lightest touch of certain small generating rubbers,
not more than an ounce in weight and tipped with cork or leather,
each of which has been put into perfect sympathy with one of those
traits, I can make that mass demonstrate them both optically and
audibly; but, without those special sympathetic touches, it is silent
and remains an inert mass. This result is obtained by physical contact
between the instrument and the mass, but we will now carry this
another step forward and deal with the subject of the action of
Influence at a distance, or what may be called Prayer, between two of
these rigid masses. From what we have already seen, it is clear that
the Soul of man could not possibly pray with efficacy to a graven
image; there is nothing in sympathy between them, and, without
sympathetic action, influence is impossible; but it is quite possible
for Matter to pray with efficacy to Matter, provided the material
soul, if we may use the analogy, is brought into perfect sympathy with
the material god, and I can now put before you an experiment showing
this taking place.
I have another heavy bar of iron, not so long but of the same
thickness as the one already described, and have found its strongest
characteristic; I have another small rubber, fashioned so that its
characteristic is in perfect sympathy with that of the bar, namely,
that the number of vibrations, in a second, of the instrument are
exactly equal to those of the iron mass, and it is, therefore, as we
saw in the last experiment, able by contact to influence the bar
sympathetically. The slightest touch throws the bar into such violent
vibration that a great volume of sound is produced, which can be heard
a quarter of a mile away. The result of this sympathetic touch is far
from being transient, in fact, the bar will continue to move, audibly,
for a long time. This movement in the mass of iron was started by
physical contact, but having once started the bar praying, willing, or
thinking, whichever you like to call it, that bar now has the power to
affect, without contact, another rigid bar of iron even when removed
to great distances, provided the second bar possesses a similar
characteristic, and that that characteristic has been brought into
perfect _sympathy_ with that of the first bar. I have a second bar
which fulfils these conditions, and, although, at the outset, it had
no power whatever to respond, it has been gradually, as it were,
educated, namely, brought nearer and nearer into sympathy with the
first bar, until it is now able to respond across long distances; it
has acted across the whole length of one of the largest halls in
London so strongly that it could be heard by all present. We will now
reverse the process of bringing these bars into sympathy, and I will
throw the first out of harmony by slightly changing its
characteristic; the change is extremely small, quite inappreciable to
the human ear, the bar giving out as full and pure a note as it did
before the alteration was made; in fact, the change is so slight that
it can still, with a little force, be stimulated by the same
generator, and yet the whole power to influence has been lost; the
first bar, although it is praying with great force, gets no response
from the second bar, and, even if the bars are now brought on to the
same table and put within a few inches of each other, there is still
no reply, there is no sympathetic action, the efficacy of prayer
between the two has been completely destroyed.
Do we not then see the principle upon which the efficacy of Prayer
depends, that the whole object of a Human Soul, when using the words
"Thy Will be done," is to bring itself closer and closer into perfect
sympathy with the Absolute? When that is accomplished, we may
understand, from our simile, that not only shall we and our
aspirations be influenced by the Will of the Deity, but that then our
wishes, in their turn, must have great power with God, and it becomes
possible for even "Mountains to be removed and cast into the midst of
the sea."
How truly the Philosopher Paul at the beginning of our Era recognised
that the knowledge of God, which Christ Himself tells us is
Everlasting Life, may be gained by the study of the material creation;
His words were sadly overlooked by many who, half a century ago, were
afraid that the discoveries of Science were dangerous to belief in the
Divine. He says: the unrighteous shall be without excuse because "The
invisible things of Him since the creation of the world are clearly
seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even His
everlasting power and divinity" (Romans i. 18 to 20, R.V.).
We have seen the truth of this wonderful statement, we have traced the
reflection of the greatest attribute of the Deity, Divine Love, on the
material plane. What has been the result of our investigation? We find
that throughout the whole of Nature the one great universal power is
Sympathy.
'Tis verily "love that makes the world go round." What a marvellous
conclusion to our investigation! Let us see where it leads us. The
whole of creation is the materialisation of the Thoughts of the Deity;
we have, therefore, in the forces of Nature, the impress of the very
Essence of God. Our Innermost Self is an emanation from Him, and
Prayer, which, at the beginning, is only a striving to bring ourselves
into harmony with the Deity, must, as the Soul grows in strength and
knowledge, become a great power working under the wonderful principle
of Sympathy. True prayer, indeed, becomes "_Love in Action_," and,
under certain conditions, Prayer may actually be looked upon as the
greatest physical force in Nature. But let us carry this one step
further: can we, by our analogy of Matter praying, understand why "the
knowledge of God is Everlasting Life"? Look at the first iron bar, and
watch how, as long as it keeps on vibrating, the second bar, _because
it is in sympathy_, will be kept in motion. If it were possible for
the first bar to vibrate for ever, the second bar would, speaking
materially, have everlasting life, through its being in perfect
sympathy with the first bar; without this connection the bar would be
lifeless. Now apply this to our Transcendental Personality; it is
being nourished, the knowledge of God is increasing, it is at last
pulsating in perfect harmony with the Deity, and when, for it, the
Material Universe disappears, its _affinity_ to Infinite Love must
give it Everlasting Life. Everything that has not that connection is
but a shadow which will cease to be manifest when the Great Thought is
completed, the volition of the Deity is withdrawn, and the Physical
Universe ceases to exist; nothing can then exist except that which is
perfected, that which is of the essence of God--namely, the
Spiritual. Perfect harmony will then reign supreme, such happiness as
cannot be described in earthly language nor even imagined by our
corporeal senses; hence, in the many passages referring to that
wondrous Life hereafter, we are not told what Heaven is like but only
what is not to be found there:
"Eye hath not seen nor ear heard,
Neither have entered into the heart of man
The things that God hath prepared for them
that love Him."--1 COR. ii. 9.
There are several other phenomena which I might have examined, but I
chose this particular aspect of the Reality, as best illustrating the
subject I am trying to elucidate in these Views, though it was
probably the most difficult one to bring home to the general reading
public. There are, I know, from personal knowledge, many of my readers
who will have been able to follow and appreciate what I have attempted
to demonstrate, but to those who have not grasped the connection
between the Infinite and Finite, the Transcendental and the Physical
Ego, the Real and its Shadow, a few more words of explanation may be
helpful.
It is easy to see that the negatives, Cold, Ignorance, Falsehood,
Ugliness are manifestations of their positives, as given in my list
in View One, and it is also not difficult to show that Evil or Sin is
dependent upon Good in the same way as the Shadow depends upon Light
for its manifestation. Do not let me be misunderstood; I have never
suggested that these negatives or negations have not the appearance of
realities to us, under our present conditions of existence; they
indeed have to be dealt with by us as realities, but they are only
manifested as phenomena on the physical plane, because our Senses, and
therefore Thoughts, are limited by Time and Space and therefore
dependent upon _relativity_.
Let me put the case of Good and Evil before you, as analogous to, say,
Light and Shadow. Moral laws and responsibility thereto are dependent
upon the existence of Goodness; the purely animal Homo was, as I have
pointed out, free from sin or responsibility until the advent of the
Spiritual made manifest, in that animal, the physical Ego and raised
him far above all other animals. Man thus became a responsible moral
being, a living soul, aware of Right, and therefore of Wrong, and
certain acts then became for him sin that were not sin before. Thus
the advent of Christ, and, in a less degree, the coming into the world
of every good man, so raised, and is raising, the level of moral
rectitude that things become sin that were not sin before; St. Paul
himself specially recognises this when he says that without law there
is no sin. The Goodness, then, brought into the world by Christ, did
not create sin but made it manifest, and gave it the appearance of
reality under our present conditions of life and thought. How well the
Mystic Paul understood that the Invisible is the Real, and that the
Visible--namely, the phenomena of nature--is only dependent upon Time
for its manifestation. His words are: "For the things which are seen
are temporal, but the things which are not seen are Eternal."
I have tried in these Views to use only simple everyday language, and
am fully aware how inadequate are the words I have employed; but my
readers will have, I hope, recognised how difficult, and in many cases
impossible, it is, in treating these metaphysical subjects, to find
words to express the exact meaning; we have to describe the Infinite
in terms of the finite, and by use of imperfect finite analogies to
get a glimpse of the otherwise unthinkable, and even then it requires
a mystical sense, or what St. Paul called spiritual discernment, to
see beyond the physical mists. If the whole of the phenomena of Nature
must be looked upon as the manifestation of the Divine Noumenon, it
follows that Matter is as divine as the Spiritual, though not as real;
it is His shadow, or the outline of His very image, thrown upon the
material plane of our sensations; and the principle of sympathetic
action, upon which, as we have seen, the whole power to influence
depends throughout the Universe, becomes surely the best symbol we can
use for understanding the efficacy of prayer and the connection
between our Transcendental Self and the All-loving. Realise that the
Transcendental Ego is a Spirit, and therefore akin to the Great
Spirit, not only in essence, but in "loving and knowing communion,"
then look at my last experiment, where we saw two material bodies
(remember they are shadow manifestations of the Reality) which could
influence each other from the fact that they were akin, not only in
substance, but in perfect sympathetic communion.
If now we watch the shadows of two human beings thrown upon a wall,
and see those shadows shaking hands and embracing each other, are we
not justified in concluding that those images give us a true
explanation of what is really taking place? and is not that exactly
what I have done? have I not shown, as I proposed to do, that it is
possible by examining the phenomena of Nature (the shadows of the
Reality) to reach that point where we may even feel that we are
listening to, or having divulged to us, some of what may be called the
very thoughts of the Great Reality?
VIEW FIVE
THE PHYSICAL FILM
We have seen in former Views that the whole Phenomenal Universe, as
perceived by our senses, and all intellectual thoughts or concepts
based on those perceptions, are, in reality, only mists or shadows;
they have no existence apart from our physical senses, and may be
likened to a thin film, which at death is pricked and passes away like
a scroll, leaving us face to face with the Reality. We thus seemed to
grasp that all phenomena, including our Physical Egos, are but the
shadows or outline of the Reality, as depicted on our limited plane of
consciousness; but these phenomena, having Motion for their basis, are
none the less real to us under our present outlook, limited as it is
by conditioning in Time and Space, and we have to deal with them as
realities in our everyday life. I want to make this distinction clear
in the present View.
Those of us who were youngsters in the 'sixties, and were fortunate
enough to be taken to that land of wonders for children, the London
Polytechnic, will remember seeing what were called Professor Pepper's
Ghosts. By means of a large sheet of glass on the stage, the
_reflection_ of a human being (otherwise invisible), which we will
call the "_unreal_," was, by the audience, seen walking alongside the
people on the stage, and it was impossible to say which was the real
and which the unreal. When the unreal was made to appear further back
on the stage, it was apparently seen through the real figures and they
appeared as ghosts, for they were seen to be transparent. If now we
fix, perpendicularly on a table, a small pane of glass, and place,
say, an orange in front and another orange behind it, we can arrange
so that an observer, looking through the glass, sees two oranges
alongside each other, one being the real and the other the unreal,
and, with proper lighting and dark background, it is impossible to
determine which is which, as they are both apparently real oranges. We
will call the real, A, and the unreal, B; we now also introduce a
human hand on both sides of the glass, and again we have apparently
two real hands close to the oranges; if the real hand is now seen to
try to touch the B orange, it passes through it, but it can take up
the A; and the same result is seen when the unreal hand tries to grasp
them, except that it can grasp the B but not the A; it is, in fact,
only the unreal that can apprehend the unreal, and the real the real.
The above simile may help some of my readers to understand how the
phenomena of Nature, though having no real existence apart from our
senses, have the appearance of reality to us, because both we and the
whole Phenomenal Universe are the unreal of our analogy, namely, the
reflection or shadow of the Real on the physical plane. If we run
against a stone wall, which is also part, with us, of the shadow, we
hurt ourselves and acknowledge its existence, but to the Real it would
not be an obstruction at all, it is not there. We know that this wall
is not really solid, it is made up of Atoms revolving round each other
but never touching, but the man in the street would give as the reason
why it hurt, that it was dense, or what is called hard; if the wall
were made of hay, or cotton wool, or of sunbeams, we should not suffer
by running against it; in fact, the denser anything becomes, the more
it shows its character of being real to our senses. If we take this as
the true explanation for the Physical Universe, we are met with
something quite beyond our powers of comprehension, when we try to
form a conception of the all-pervading Ether; unless we may look upon
it as actually a _presentation_ of the Reality itself. If we wave our
hand, we can feel the obstruction of the air, but we cannot feel the
Ether. We think our earth very solid, and we know it is rushing round
the sun at the enormous rate of 60,000 miles per hour, but it finds no
obstruction in the Ether, there is no retardation of its velocity; and
yet the study of Radio-Activity has quite lately shown us that that
Ether is not only as dense as iron, or a hundred or a thousand times
denser, but millions of times denser than that metal; and yet it
permeates all matter like a sieve. In Sir Oliver Lodge's words, "the
Ether is so dense that matter by comparison is like a gossamer or a
filmy imperceptible mist." We can, therefore, by again using our
"Ghost" analogy, understand why matter cannot obstruct the Ether, or
vice versa; there is no perceivable friction between them, unless, as
I shall presently suggest, we may find something akin to obstruction
by Matter, not to Ether itself, but to its pressure, in the phenomenon
of Gravitation.
The evidence we are gradually winning from Radio-Activity seems to be
leading us to the conclusion that all forms of matter are but
different motions or strains in the Ether (perhaps, as Lord Kelvin
thought, in the form of vortices), that the different atoms of which
matter is composed are, as suggested in View Three, _apertures_ of
different complexity of outline--namely, those points at which Ether
is absent or its density attenuated. Have we not apparently here
another example of Positive and Negative, the Invisible the Ether, as
the Real, and the Visible, the Material Universe, as its Negative the
Unreal, similar to our list of Positives and Negatives in View One?
Ether itself cannot be explained by any of the known dynamical laws,
though it is probably the very root and cause of all of them; it is
absolutely beyond our plane of perception or conception. We can only
perceive certain effects of its presence when it comes into our
limited world of consciousness, under the aspects of Time and
Space--namely, in its movements, which we classify as forms of matter
and modes of energy.
It is only lately that we have been able to see clearly that the
effects known to us as Light, Heat, Electricity, and Magnetism are
caused by pulsations or rills of different rapidity in the Ether (this
will be referred to in a later View); it is also probably the cause of
what we call Gravitation, and we shall see that the action of
Gravitation may, after all, be not in the direction of a pull but must
be looked upon as a pushing force. Gravitation is common to all
matter; in common language, every particle attracts every other
particle with a force directly proportional to its mass, and
inversely to the square of its distance; it is a very weak force
compared with others we know, and difficult to measure except when a
large mass of matter is involved. Perhaps this will be clearer, and
not far from the truth, if I say that the force of Gravitation exerted
between two masses of matter compared with that which we find acting
between the constituents of matter--namely, in chemical affinity, is
comparable to the difference existing between the density of matter
and the density of Ether.
The latest calculation of the pressure of the Ether is almost
inconceivable--namely, about 25,000 tons on the square inch, or
3,600,000 tons on the square foot; it may well therefore be that, in
the degree of permeability of matter by the Ether, when we can
calculate it, will be found the explanation of what we call
Gravitation between two masses; they are each shielding the other from
Ether pressure, in its own direction, with an obstructive force equal
to its mass. The reason why the earth appears to attract us, is that
it is shielding us from a certain amount of pressure in its direction;
and we know that we are also apparently attracting every particle of
the earth with a force proportionate to our mass, because we are,
however slightly, shielding the earth from pressure in our direction;
if this is the true explanation, Gravitation is a phenomenon of the
Ether; it will be seen to be a movement of matter in the line of least
pressure, and is therefore a push and not a pull.
Let us now come down to what we understand better concerning the
subject of this View.