ELECTRICITY PRODUCES ALL THE PHENOMENA OF NATURE
I contend that electricity produces all the phenomena of nature--that it
is the ever active agent in evolving visible forms and substances whose
results are known as laws. Man is the most perfect enfoldment of
nature's electric laws, and the world and the universe are the universal
expression of electric life and energy.
Man and all the visible forms of creation are woven from invisible ether
by electric forces, and, as man's will and thoughts are the governing
force of his electric organism, so simple and universal are the laws of
nature that the will and thoughts of Deity, by electric energy, are the
controlling law and force of the universe, and the ultimate cause
producing all causes, all creations, and all tangible forms.
The natural world is the product of matter, and force and all matter is
one matter represented by the invisible atom, and all physical force is
one force, being the varied manifestations of electric energy. For the
natural world is the spiritual unfoldment made manifest by electric
power.
Therefore all the varied phenomena of nature, the revolution of the
earth on its axis and in its orbit around the sun, the brilliant light
and governing power of the sun, the circling stars, the blazing comet,
the shooting meteor, the gorgeous rainbow, the luminous aurora, and the
dazzling corona are all expressions of electric power. The lightning in
the cloud, the reverberations of thunder, the ebb and flow of the tides,
the wind currents in the air, the swaying of the forest, the variations
of heat and cold, the falling of snow, the rain drop and the dew are all
electric manifestations.
You cannot raise your arm, lift your foot, or move your body except by
electric energy. You cannot see or hear or feel or taste or smell or
exercise any of the functions of the body without bringing to your aid
the electric force which permeates all forms and substance. Electricity
creates the mystery of physical life and provides the food and
sustenance necessary to its growth and development. Electricity works
the miracle of digestion and assimilation and converts inert matter into
blood and bone, tissue and muscle, and organizes man's body into an
electric machine, and runs it as truly and perfectly by electric energy
as the electric motor or generator is run by electricity. Man draws his
electric life currents from the air into the lungs as a great electric
reservoir, there it purifies and energizes the blood and sends it as an
electric fluid and circulating magnetic current through every part of
the body, causing the heart valves to pulsate with measureless force and
the human machine to throb with intense life and power.
The heart throbs and pulse beats of man's body are but the rythmic whir
and vibrations of the human electric machine. Man makes electrical
machines of wood and glass and metal, but nature makes them of flesh
and blood and of all matter and substance. Nature, the all-wise and
mysterious necromancer, makes nothing but electric machines from the
infinitesimal atom to the self-luminous perfected dynamos--the suns and
stars. All things that exist are electric generators or electric
creations of marvelous construction, power and utility; and all
expressions of form and power, all visible objects, and all the varied
phenomena of nature are produced by electric-magnetic energy.
Franklin and Faraday, Harvey, Morse and Edison, by their discoveries
have taught us that as the potter and the clay must come together to
form the rudest vessels, so creative electric force must touch every
sensitive atom in organic being; and keep the wellsprings of life
constantly flowing through all life forms. There is no unfolding of bud
and blossom, tree and shrub, without the coming and going of electric
life-giving sunlight and earth light. They pervade all bodies of matter,
whether world spheres or seed germs, and hold communion with all atomic
centers of sensation in all living organisms. Atoms seek their electric
affinities, life-forces and life-forms touch each other by the grasp of
magnetic attraction and repulsion, and these give personal sensations
and vital forms of being.
Through the medium of electricity, material and mental forces meet
together upon the plane of human consciousness. This is nature's method
of communication between the material and mental within the human brain,
which has been a puzzling and difficult problem of physical science. The
language of the senses is a universal language that has its foundation
in invisible forces.
There is a unity between the light and the eye that indicates their
origin in the same lines of force that now give sight to the brain life.
In the ear, there is evidence that the electric vibratory currents of
force producing sound had a companionship with the electric life-germ in
which the ear had its beginning. So all organs of sense possess
unmistakable evidence of having proceeded out of those electric forces
that are unseen and imponderable. The knowledge of these is the story of
the Garden of Eden, incorporated into the life of every intellectual
being. All the evidence of the senses comes from electric telegrams from
without or within man's physical organism. Seeing and hearing are
wireless telegrams from the ether without, and feeling, smelling,
tasting, are wired telegrams running along the nerves of man's body and
communicating with the brain--the seat of intelligence--and the
reasoning soul.
Man must have a connecting link between his mind and body and the things
about him; and, as that connecting link and medium in man is
electricity, so plain and simple are the laws of nature that God has no
other medium between him and all material creations. Electricity
therefore is both the creative governing energy of Deity over the
universe, and the governing energy of man over all material things. God
controls the universe as man controls his body--by electricity.
Man has five senses: seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, smelling. These
are all communicated to the soul or spiritual body by electricity. Man
feels by the electric flashes that come from every part of his body,
that tingle on his nerves, and beat upon the brain, and touch the
garments of the living soul. He sees through the medium of the electric
etheric waves of light that come from the vibrations of the air around
him. By these swift electric flashes the infinitesimal rays of electric
light enter the retina of the eye and touch the quick vision of the
soul. He hears by the atmospheric waves of electricity that beat upon
his ear drums. He tastes and smells by the same electric process; and
his five senses are but the inward communication of outer surrounding
conditions and substances to his spiritual perception by means of
electricity. Thus the Creative Deity hears and knows, and by the same
forces directs and sustains all things.
Man as an electric engine is far more efficient than any known engine in
which there is a consumption of fuel. In general the amount of work a
man does bears a certain proportion to the fuel he puts into his boiler.
Plants also constitute forms of electric engines to embalm the sun's
rays and use the products rejected by men and animals.
By the radiant energy of the sun, plants are able to decompose carbonic
acid. They form storage cells in which a current of electricity
decomposes the liquid into oxygen and hydrogen and form materials which
again give electricity, motion and heat. The sun enables the plant
engine to work. It also enables the man engine and animal engine, and
world engine to work by furnishing them all with the electric energy and
working power of the universe, that they may do their part in the ever
living forces of cosmic life. The cells of protoplasm are infinitesimal
magnets or electrical machines, all vegetables are but larger magnets,
all animals still larger, till we get to worlds and suns, the greatest
of them all.
All the radiant garments of creation in their varied colors of light and
beauty that now appear to human vision are woven from the same garments
of immortality that wrap themselves around the initial centres of
magnetic attraction.
As the worlds were created by invisible electric forces under the
guidance of the Omnipotent creative spirit, so the same electric forces
are still carrying forward the work of their unfinished structures, and
perfecting the unity and completing the harmony of creation. What we now
call gravity is electric attraction and accretion that was commenced at
the beginning of nature's work of creation, and which continues to be
the occult force that secures the growth of a blade of grass, the
unfolding of the tiniest seed with its inwrapt life-germ and the
development of a world, and which brings us face to face with the
creative force that was the starting point of "the beginning" and will
be the culminating center of all ultimate perfected creation. This
electric life energy touches each growing seed center as at the
beginning it touched each growing world center and reveals the power and
wisdom of creation in every evolving form of life.
The same electric radiate lines that give the parental image in the
mirror by an instantaneous flash of light, give also the parental image
in the germ-life that evolves a new paternity. While we cannot trace the
lines of electrical union that are mingled in this new life, we are
justified in affirming that electric and radiant matter must have
bridged the chasm between the old lives and the new, between parental
duality and the dual forces of electricity that produced a new germinal
individuality. And the new life cannot be possible without the separate
unfolding of two distinct organisms meeting in generative embrace,
imparting a new seed-life. All germ-life has its beginning where
positive and negative magnetic currents blend into unity.
The germinal life and the food supply of plant and animal fix the
boundaries of its being. There can be no evolution of plant life into
animal life. It is not scientific or rational; vegetable, plant and tree
have no independent existence separate from the soil of the earth except
as latent in seed form.
As all material organisms take on their organic form around electric or
magnetic centers drawing their atoms from electrical currents, so all
life-germs take their growth from the magnetic centers of their growing
forms. Here in the field of electric forces is to be found the
generative forces of organic matter--the mysterious births from all
parental life. And the constantly revolving circle of periodic changes
of growth and decay, of life and death, of seed beginning and seed
producing--like sunshine and shadow, light and darkness--are opposite
points in the circle of electric force and physical life. The growing
and dying life-forms intervene between these two points of rest and
renewal, of attraction and repulsion, of positive organism and negative
diffusion of matter.
They are the results of the great electric system of attracting and
repelling currents of magnetism that are as fixed in their lines of
force and order of work as the rocks at the foundations of the
mountains. In fact, all that is strong and abiding in matter rests upon
these currents of energy, and all of life is dependent upon the
constancy and perpetually pulsating flow of the unseen electrical
potencies of creation. Life is a universal unity, as light, heat,
electricity and polarization, which evolve it, are unities. The order of
ascending life organism is from the simple to the complex; from the
lowest plane of rock formation the series is upward; from the lowest
form of vegetable life it is up to the highest, and in the animal life
upward till the crowning work is reached in the thinking animal we call
man, who is more than a thinking animal.
To each ascending form there is an endowment of self-perpetuation by
parentage and seed fruitage, which involve the electro-magnetic
condition of germ life. Thus by electrical forces plants build within
each other and form others by elementary atoms, with power of
self-propagation, bridging the life-gulf between silent atom and living
organism as if they were the material work of some spiritual builder.
Thus by electrical forces nature builds all human and animal life-forms
and organisms. The primary atoms of matter have their home in the
electro-magnetic forces and are evolved from them into the material
organisms of creation. When the electro-magnetic origin of light, heat,
physical life and so-called gravitation is fully accepted and their
dynamic energy traced to its potential body, we have reached the
strength of primary forces and the unending circle of electrical
potencies.
This brings us to the border land of creative work, to the mysterious
sea of all life-giving forces, and the universal basis of all existing
creations.
Here spirit, matter, and electricity--the three great basic entities of
creation--work together in full accord in evolving and fashioning all
material growth and material structures. In natural growth protoplasm
gives the material conditions of life without which there could be no
food supplies.
They contain grouped elements of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen and carbon
out of which living structures are reared. Life is dependent upon food
supplies of matter, which supplies must be raised to radiant conditions
by electric forces to secure its assimilation into living organic forms.
Life, therefore, like light, seeks through magnetic action a radiant
plane of matter where it can reveal its working presence. Upon such a
plane all forms of life come to birth from a common parentage--from
electric force and radiant matter, each form endowed with personality,
and powers of reproduction that make them factors of life and growth
upon the radiant plane of creative potencies.
Prof. G. F. Wright of Oberlin says in a recent article: "Evolution does
not solve the mysteries of the universe. It simply pushes them one step
further back. The mystery of the acorn is greater than the mystery of
the oak, for it has compressed in it all the 'power and potency' of the
oak. It is no explanation of a chick to say it is hatched from an egg.
The wonder and the mystery is simply carried back to that infinitesimal
point in the egg which conceals within itself the power of producing the
feathered biped with all its marvelous instincts and adapted organism."
I hold that the infinitesimal point in the egg and the acorn is its
electric center of life-force, or magnetic core, which, under the law of
organic affinity, develops by nutrition and respiration, which are
electric processes, into the chick and the oak. He says: "So, of all the
processes of nature, man's vision sees only the surface. We do not see
causes but only effects. We plant a seed, and all that we see is that
under certain conditions it springs up and produces the blade, then the
ear, and last the full corn in the ear. No one knows how it comes about
that two seeds which look alike under the same conditions produce
different colored flowers and different qualities of fruit. The
beginning of everything is a mystery. If one affirms that things have no
beginning he but increases the mystery. The difficulty with all theories
of evolution is to get a starting point. The time was when philosophers
could speak of the universe as eternal. The geologists fifty years ago
could do so, but the demonstration of the conservation of energy has put
an end to any such easy-going speculation."
All this is well stated and very true, except that by treating all
things as electro-magnets, drawing positive and negative atoms or ions
from air, food and water, we see how by nutrition and accretion animal
and vegetable organism may be evolved by the law of magnetic attraction
and organic affinity. This is the only rational solution and is in
accord with all the processes of nature and with the conservation of
energy. Elsewhere I have endeavored to explain how, by the constant
renewal of matter and electric energy in the sun and in space, the
universe may be eternal and no waste or deterioration occur and, while
always changing, is virtually changeless.
Newton in his theory of gravitation discovered one phase of electric
energy, and his law of gravitation is in reality simply the law of
electrical attraction. But he never knew the cause of it and never
discovered the other and dual phase of electric energy--the law of
electrical repulsion, he never even suspected it. For he held that the
balancing force of gravitation of the other planets kept each planet
from falling into the sun, which it otherwise would have done under the
law of gravitation, which says large bodies attract smaller ones. This
position was untenable, as I have shown in "The Cities of the Sun."
Newton thought that an apple was attracted to the earth because the
earth was larger, and that any larger body would attract a smaller one.
But I hold that size is not what controls attraction; it is electrical
conditions. An amount of substance from the sun would have more
attracting power than the same amount from the earth, because the sun
has more electrical power. A lodestone has more attracting power than
the same amount of ordinary substance. A pound of iron has no attracting
force until it is magnetized; then it will lift many times its weight.
So size, weight, or gravity is no test of attracting power.
I therefore repudiate the law of gravity and adopt electricity, with its
dual force of action and reaction, attraction and repulsion, as the
supreme cosmic evolving force of the universe, creating all light, heat
and life and producing all the varied and wonderful phenomena of nature.
I hold that by the law of electric energy the sun is not a thermal or
heating engine as the astronomers proclaim, but is an electric generator
and is not hot, and that the sun's rays, neither where they originate or
where they act are hot, but they come to the earth as cool currents of
electricity, which generate heat near the earth's surface by coming in
contact with an opposite electricity and the resistance and friction of
its atmosphere. Proof of this is found in the snow-covered peaks of the
tropics and the glaciers of the torrid zone.
I have waited six years for objections to the electric theory of
creation and have found only one recently stated. This first and only
objection is that electricity is a derivative force.
Prof. G. F. Wright, of Oberlin, in an article in the Chicago Record,
Dec., 1902, says: "Many of the speculations concerning the unlimited use
of electricity overlook the fact of its derivative origin. Electricity
is but transformed force. It is not a producer of force but a consumer
of force. It merely directs the force to its specific end. The
electricity which propels and warms the street cars of Buffalo, and
furnishes power to its small factories and illuminates its streets is
merely force diverted from the Falls of Niagara; in other words, it is
transformed gravitation."
True, but gravitation is simply electric attraction, and the electricity
that propels, lights and warms the cars is electric attraction diverted
from the Falls and used on the cars. It is not derivative force, but the
original and only force--electric force transferred from the Falls to
the cars.
But Prof. Wright himself destroys his own argument when he says: "In
other cases the electricity is derived from the heat of consuming coal,
while the coal is the product of the sun's rays, chemically sealed up in
the coal deposits of the early geological ages. Indeed it is easy to see
that all the available force in the world is the product of the sun's
rays." In this we fully agree, for I say the heat of the coal and the
heat of the sun is electricity. The sun's rays, which he says "is all
the available force in the world," is electricity, and the sun is the
great electric heart of the solar system. Thus we differ only in terms.
While he whips electricity around the stump, and says it is a new thing
every time he turns a corner, I say it is the same electricity, without
any change, and proves the oneness of the universe as a vast electric
organism.
Thus our great scientists befog themselves. Now that Langley says there
is only one radiant matter, and light, heat and chemical changes are all
one entity, perhaps he may change his view. I have tried to convince
these crosseyed reasoners that all force is one force and all matter is
one matter, and the scientists are now coming to that conclusion
steadily.
Prof. Wright says again: "The strength and warmth of all animal bodies
is traceable to carbon, and whenever we move a limb or walk, the power
to do it is obtained by the consumption of carbon." Well, I say carbon
is one form of stored electricity. He says: "The ox feeds upon the grass
which is collected or grows through the influence of sunlight," and I
say sunlight is electric currents from the great electric dynamo, the
sun.
He says: "The nebular theory is faulty," and I agree with him. He says:
"Gravitation is an utter mystery that has baffled all scientific
explanation," and I agree with him, and go a step further and affirm
that there is no such thing as gravitation and never was. Newton
discovered one of the dual forces of electricity, which I call universal
electric attraction, and called it gravitation.
He says: "So far as we can see, gravitation acts instantaneously, and
Newton gave up the problem of defining it, and said he had no
explanation except to say God so made it." This is true, but Newton knew
nothing of electricity or his great intellect would likely have
discovered the truth and named and explained it as electric attraction.
Newton discovered an imaginary force, an idea, a dream, "an occult
force," as Leibnitz called it. Newton had an imagination which the
scientific plodders who have come after him lacked. They have dug in the
dirt, while he sailed through azure seas, and linked suns and worlds
together by a mere sweep of the imagination, without any explanation or
conceivable cause, and called it gravity. He might just as well have
called it ponderosity.
Phillip Akinson, in his work on electricity, 1902, asserts that "energy
manifests itself either in masses of matter or in small particles,
called molecules, and thus we have two kinds--mass energy and molecular
energy." But have we two kinds of energy? Mass energy and molecular
energy is the same.
Mass energy is but the aggregation of molecular energy.
Large bodies attract small ones because they possess more electric
energy. Gravity or weight is but another name for aggregate molecular
electric attraction of the earth for everything upon its surface. The
gravity or weight of a man is the pull or force with which the electric
attraction of the earth holds him to its surface. In other words, the
earth is a vast magnet, and man's body is a smaller magnet, and as the
magnetic core of a steel magnet draws all metals towards its magnetic
center, so does the earth magnet draw all things toward its center.
The same author states that, "the earth is a great thermopile generating
electric currents by the difference of potential between its heated and
cooled parts." In this I agree with him, but he only states one of a
thousand ways to generate electric currents.
He says further: "Heat is believed to be a certain mode of molecular
motion, and electricity to be another mode; but the nature of the motion
of each has never been discovered." And I think never will, as long as
the false notion prevails that heat and electricity are modes of motion.
A mode of motion is nonsense, for motion is an effect produced by a
cause--it is not a cause. And all cause of motion is electricity, and
the mode of operation is the law of electro-magnetism.
There is no difference in the law or the mode of operation of electric
currents in a volcano, in a cloud, in the earth, in the sun or planets,
in an electric light, or in a man's body. The same law exists and the
same natural results follow when one lights the gas with a flash of
electricity from his finger, as when a meteor blazes, a comet flares out
in space, or a sun becomes luminous. The same force that man causes to
run along a telegraph wire, or through a telephone circuit, or which
runs a street car line, or is taken by the brushes from a revolving
dynamo, is the same force and operated under the same law or mode of
force as the electric life-giving currents that come from the sun
constantly in an omnipotent tide of power.
Prof. Thomson says: "The earth is generally found to be negatively
electrified, and is insulated in its atmosphere, being in fact a
conductor touched only by air--a strong insulator."
He says further: "The quality of non-resistance to electric force of the
interplanetary ether being considered, the earth, the atmosphere and the
surrounding medium may be regarded as constituting respectively, the
inner coating, the dielectric and the outer coating of a large Leyden
jar charged negatively."
Prof. S. P. Thomson in "Electricity and Magnetism," says: "Gilbert made
the discovery that the compass points north and south because the earth
is also a great magnet. Faraday said: 'All matter is in a magnetic
condition.' Sir Oliver Lodge says: 'The idea that magnetism is a whirl
of electricity is as old as Ampere. Perceiving that a magnet could be
initiated by an electric whirl, he made the hypothesis that an electric
whirl existed in every magnet.'"
Maxwell announced the proposition that electro-magnetic phenomena and
light phenomena have their origin in the same medium and are identical
in nature. Hertz, by actually producing, detecting and controlling
electric waves, caused the discovery of wireless electricity. And it is
by the wonderful wireless telegraphy of light that man is put in
communication with every considerable body in the universe, including
even the invisible. By it the goings on in Sirius and Algol, Orion and
the Pleiades are reported across enormous stretches of millions of
millions of miles of space. And by the vibratory motion of the invisibly
small, all things are revealed; the infinitely little has enabled us to
conquer the inconceivably big. I hold seeing and hearing are the
simplest examples of wireless telegraphy.
Elihu Thomson, the great electrician, says: "Hertz proved that all
luminous phenomena are in essence electrical. Wireless electricity is
the outcome of Hertz's experiments on electric waves, and electrical
conditions and actions are more fundamental than hitherto regarded."
William Ramsey, the distinguished chemist, says: "It is a primary
assumption that atoms of elements or in certain cases groups of atoms
are themselves electrified, and atoms possess positive and negative
poles, and combinations ensue between such oppositely electrified
bodies."
Mr. Francis Grierson, a prominent scientist of London, in a recent
London periodical, says: "So far as we know electricity is the soul of
visible form. What we call brain waves have an analogy to electric
waves. The discoveries and inventions of the last ten years have made
child's play of every previously known system of philosophy. The simple
but amazing facts disclosed during the past five years, render the
dreams, speculations and guesswork of the past absurd. The little we
know in a practical way is more than all the philosophers of the past
knew from Aristotle to Leibnitz."
Prof. Langley, in his address at the 1902 session of the American
Association of Science, stated that, "up to 1872 it was almost
universally believed that there were three different kinds of
energy--actinic, luminous and thermal--represented in the spectrum;" but
he affirmed: "There is only one radiant energy which appears to us as
actinic, luminous or thermal, according to the way we observe it.
"Heat and light are not things in themselves, but different sensations
in our bodies, or different effects in other bodies. They are merely
effects of this mysterious thing we call radiant energy." He thus
sustains my position and the electric theory of creation, which is, that
there is but one universal and ultimate energy which he calls radiant
and I call electric energy, and which are the same thing.
It is said that an Italian physicist wrote in 1843: "Light is merely a
series of colorific indications, sensible to the organs of light, or
vice versa; the radiations of obscure heat are veritable invisible
radiations of light." This Langley, by his elaborate researches, more
refined and complex than all preceding ones, proved to be true. Since so
orthodox a scientist as Langley has proven there is but one energy, the
other scientists may stumble over it awhile and then accept it, because
he is high authority.
Sir Oliver Lodge, in the "Electrical World," of February 21st, 1903,
sustains the electrical theory strongly. He says: "All matter is
electrical in its nature. The difference between one kind of matter and
another lies in the physical and chemical properties of the atoms; but
the difference between the atoms is merely due to the difference of the
electric grouping of the atoms."
He holds that the Thompson corpuscles are all electric. Thomson's
theory is that negative electricity is matter. Lodge holds that all
matter down to the ultimate corpuscle is electricity or electrical
substance. Thus I am sustained by the highest most recent authority.
Prof. E. L. Larkin, of the California University, said recently: "The
earth has a permanent charge of negative electricity, and the atmosphere
is positive. The surface potential is therefore very near zero. This
permits electro-magnetic waves from the sun to act with unabated
energy." Prof. Lucien I. Blake of the Kansas University said in a recent
lecture: "All atoms of matter are charged with electricity. All vital
actions are always connected with electricity."
I could fill a volume with recent statements of scientists showing that
electricity produces all the phenomena of nature, all of which they have
learned in the last few years, while as a pioneer in this field of
thought I have been trying to propagate these electrical theories for
many years.
Every year new facts are discovered showing that electricity is the
cosmic, evolving, ultimate and only force in nature and the universe is
a vast electric machine or organism moved by electric currents of
measureless force and power. The earth revolves around the sun, the sun
gravitates around some siderial center in motion like itself, and
myriads of suns and planets with their countless population move with
many times the velocity of a cannon ball. Stars that seem tranquil and
motionless in the heavens are projected through space with a velocity of
one hundred to two hundred miles per second. The constituent atoms of
our bodies move relatively with as much velocity as the stars in
heaven. Motion--electric energy--reigns everywhere, forms everything,
controls, handles and evolves all suns and planets, all physical life,
substance and organisms in human experience and universal nature.
The electric rays of light from suns and stars of the most distant
constellations dart their beams across the universe, and centuries
after, the impulse of electric energy enters the human eye, and gives
sense and vision to the soul. Thus the dynamic chains of electric light
binds into living unity the realms of matter and mind, "through
measureless amplitudes of space and time."
These electric currents are not only the source of all natural
phenomena, but the sea of electro-magnetism from which they come is the
reservoir of life, which stands back of all the myriad manifestations of
physical existence, and is the great fountain of vitality from which all
life must come.
What is electricity? Tesla says it is "invisible light," Atkins says it
is "molecular motion," Fleming says it is "a spiral twist of the ether,"
but the best definition is given in the Scriptures where it says all
things were made by the "word of His power." It is the word of creative
power.