Keely and His Discoveries: Aerial Navigation

by Mrs. Bloomfield H. Moore

INTRODUCTION.

Ex Vivo Omnia.

We stand before the dawning of a new day in science and humanity,—a new discovery, surpassing any that has been hitherto made; which promises to afford us a key to some of the most recondite secrets of nature, and to open up to our view a new world.—Dr. Hufeland.

The error of our century in questions of research seems to have been in the persistent investigation of the phenomena of matter (or material organization) as the sole province of physics, regarding psychical research as lying outside. The term physics is derived from a Greek word signifying “nature.” Nature does not limit herself to matter and mechanism. The phenomena of spirit are as much a part of Nature as are those of matter. The psychological theories of our physicists display a decided leaning towards materialism, disregarding the manifestations of the vital principle,—the vis motrix,—and refusing to investigate beyond the limits which they have imposed upon themselves, and which, if accepted by all, would take us back to the belief of the pagans, as echoed by Voltaire:

Est-ce-là ce rayon de l’Essence Suprême

Que l’on nous peint si lumineux?

Est-ce-là cet Esprit survivant à nous-même?

Il nait avec nos sens, croît, s’affaiblit comme eux:

Hélas! il périra de même.

Sympathetic philosophy teaches that the various phenomena of the human constitution cannot be properly comprehended and explained without observing the distinction between the physical and material, and the moral and spiritual nature of man. It demonstrates incontrovertibly the separate existence and independent activity of the soul of man, and that the spirit governs the body instead of being governed by the body. As Spenser has said,—

For of the soul the body form doth take;

For soul is form, and doth the body make.

Huxley tells us that science prospers exactly in proportion as it is religious, and that religion flourishes in exact proportion to the scientific depth and firmness of its basis. “Civilization, society, and morals,” says Figuier, “are like a string of beads, whose fastening is the belief in the immortality of the soul. Break the fastening and the beads are scattered.”

Now, as Nature nowhere exhibits to our visual perceptions a soul acting without a body, and as we do not know in what manner the spiritual faculties are united to the organization, psychology is compelled to investigate the operations of the intellect as if they were performed altogether independently of the body; whereas they are only manifested, in the ordinary state of existence, through the intermediate agency of the corporeal organs.

The accumulation of psychological facts and speculations which characterize this age appears to have made little or no permanent impression upon the minds of our scientists and our philosophers. Bishop Berkeley asks, “Have not Fatalism and Sadducism gained ground during the general passion for the corpuscularian and mechanical philosophy which hath prevailed?” Buffon, in writing of the sympathy, or relation, which exists throughout the whole animal economy, said, “Let us, with the ancients, call this singular correspondence of the different parts of the body a sympathy, or, with the moderns consider it as an unknown relation in the action of the nervous system, we cannot too carefully observe its effects, if we wish to perfect the theory of medicine.” Colquhoun, commenting upon Buffon’s statement, says that far too little attention has been paid to the spiritual nature of man,—to the effects of those immaterial and invisible influences which, analogous to the chemical and electrical agents, are the true springs of our organization, continually producing changes internally which are externally perceived as the marked effects of unseen causes, and which cannot be explained upon the principles of any law of mechanism.

These unseen causes are now made clear to us by the truths which Vibratory Physics and Sympathetic Philosophy demonstrate and sustain. The prophecy of Dr. Hufeland (made in connection with an account of certain phenomena arising from the unchangeable laws of sympathetic association) is soon to be fulfilled, and the door thrown open to “a new world” of research. Professor Rücker in his papers on “Molecular Forces,” William Crookes in his lecture on “The Genesis of Elements,” Norman Lockyer in his book on “The Chemistry of the Sun,”—all these scientists have approached so near to this hitherto bolted, double-barred and locked portal that the wonder is not so much that they have approached as that, drawing so near, they have not passed within.

Professor Rücker, in his papers (read before the Royal Institution of Great Britain) explaining the attractive and repulsive action of molecules, found himself obliged to apologize to scientists for suggesting the possibility of an intelligence by which alone he could explain certain phenomena unaccounted for by science; but do we not find proof in ourselves that the action of molecules is an intelligent action? For we must admit the individuality of the molecules in our organisms, in order to understand how it is that nourishment maintains life. Try as we may to account for the action of aliment upon the system, all is resolved into the fact that there must be some intelligent force at work. Do we ourselves disunite and intermingle, by myriad channels, in order to rejoin and replace a molecule which awaits this aid? We must either affirm that it is so, that we place them where we think they are needed, or that it is the molecules that find a place of themselves. We know that we are occupied in other ways which demand all our thoughts. It must, therefore, be that these molecules find their own place. Admit this, and we accord life and intelligence to them. If we reason that it is our nerves which appropriate substances that they need for the maintenance of their energy and their harmonious action, we then concede to the nerves what we deny to the molecules. Or, if we think it more natural to attribute this power to the viscera,—the stomach, for example,—we only change the thesis.

It will be said that it is pantheism to assert that matter, under all the forms which it presents, is only groups of aggregates of sympathetic molecules, of a substance unalterable in its individualities; a thinking, acting substance. Let us not deny what we are unable to explain. God is all that is, without everything that is being individually God. Etheric force has been compared to the trunk of a tree, the roots of which rest in Infinity. The branches of the tree correspond to the various modifications of this one force,—heat, light, electricity, and its close companion force, magnetism. It is held in suspension in our atmosphere. It exists throughout the universe. Actual science not admitting a void, then all things must touch one another. To touch is to be but one by contiguity, or there would be between one thing and another something which might be termed space, or nothing. Now, as nothing cannot exist, there must be something between “the atomic triplets” which are, according to the Keely theory, found in each molecule. This something in the molecule he affirms to be “the universal fluid,” or molecular ether. One thing touching another, all must therefore be all in all, and through all, by the sensitive combination of all the molecules in the universe, as is demonstrated by electricity, galvanism, the loadstone, etc. If we account for the intelligent action of molecules by attributing it to what has been variously called “the universal fluid,” “the electric fluid,” “the galvanic fluid,” “the nervous fluid,” “the magnetic fluid,” it will only be substituting one name for another; it is still some part or other of the organization which discerns and joins to itself a portion of one of the fluids referred to, or one of these fluids which discerns and mingles with the material molecules; it is still the life of the part, the life of the molecule, life individualized in all and through all.

Admitting, then, that there is a universal fluid, it must exist in and through all things. If void does not exist, everything is full; if all is full, everything is in contact; if everything is in contact, the whole influences and is influenced because all is life; and life is movement, because movement is a continual disunion and union of all the molecules which compose the whole. The ancient philosophers admitted all this. Under the different names of “macrocosm,” “microcosm,” “corpuscles,” “emanations,” “attraction,” “repulsion,” “sympathy,” and “antipathy,”—all names which are only one,—their various propositions were merely the product of inductions influenced by their modes of observing, as the deductions of scientists are influenced in our day.

Balzac tells us that everything here below is the product of an ethereal substance, the common basis of various phenomena, known under the inappropriate names of electricity, heat, light, galvanic and magnetic fluid, etc., and that the universality of its transmutations constitutes what is vulgarly called matter. We cannot take up a book on physics (written with true scientific knowledge) in which we do not find evidence that its author acknowledges that there is, correctly speaking, but one force in nature. Radcliffe tells us that what is called electricity is only a one-sided aspect of a law which, when fully revealed, will be found to rule over organic as well as inorganic nature—a law to which the discoveries of science and the teachings of philosophy alike bear testimony,—a law which does not entomb life in matter, but which transfigures matter with a life which, when traced to its source, will prove only to be the effluence of the Divine life.

Macvicar teaches that the nearer we ascend to the fountain-head of being and of action, the more magical must everything inevitably become; for that fountain-head is pure volition. And pure volition, as a cause is precisely what is meant by magic; for by magic is meant a mode of producing a phenomenon without mechanical appliances,—that is, without that seeming continuity of resisting parts and that leverage which satisfy our muscular sense and our imagination and bring the phenomenon into the category of what we call “the natural;” that is, the sphere of the elastic, the gravitating,—the sphere into which the vis inertiæ is alone admitted.

There is in Professor Crookes’s “Genesis of the Elements” an hypothesis of great interest,—a projectment of philosophical truth which brings him nearer than any known living scientist to the ground held by Keely. Davy defines hypothesis as the scaffolding of science, useful to build up true knowledge, but capable of being put up or taken down at pleasure, without injuring the edifice of philosophy. When we find men in different parts of the world constructing the same kind of scaffolding, we may feel fairly sure that they have an edifice to build. The scaffolding may prove to be insecure, but it can be flung away and another constructed. It is the edifice that is all-important,—the philosophy not the hypotheses. The science of learning, says Professor Lesley, and the science of knowledge are not quite identical; and learning has too often, in the case of individuals, overwhelmed and smothered to death knowledge. It is a familiar fact that great discoveries come at long intervals, brought by specially-commissioned and highly-endowed messengers; while a perpetual procession of humble servants of nature arrive with gifts of lesser moment, but equally genuine, curious, and interesting novelties. From what unknown land does all this wealth of information come? Who are these bearers of it? And who intrusted each with his particular burden, which he carries aloft as if it deserved exclusive admiration? Why do those who bring the best things walk so seriously and modestly along as if they were in the performance of a sacred duty, for which they scarcely esteem themselves worthy?

The Bishop of Carlisle, in his paper on “The Uniformity of Nature,” suggests the answer to all who are prepared to approach the abyss which has hitherto divided physical science from spiritual science,—an abyss which is soon to be illumined by the sunlight of demonstration and spanned by the bridge of knowledge. To quote from the paper of the Bishop of Carlisle, “There are matters of the highest moment which manifestly do lie outside the domain of physical science. The possibility of the continuance of human existence in a spiritual form after the termination of physical life is, beyond contradiction, one of the grandest and most momentous of possibilities, but in the nature of things it lies outside physics. Yet there is nothing absolutely absurd, nothing which contradicts any human instinct, in the supposition of such possibility; consequently, the student of physical science, even if he cannot find time or inclination to look into such matters himself, may well have patience with those who can. And he may easily afford to be generous: the field of physical science is grand enough for any ambition, and there is room enough in the wide world both for physical and for psychical research.”

But does psychical research lie outside the domain of physical science? What is the supernatural but the higher workings of laws which we call natural, as far as we have been able to investigate them? Is not the supernatural, then, just as legitimate a subject of consideration, for the truly scientific mind, as is the natural? If it explains, satisfactorily, phenomena which cannot be otherwise explained, there is no good reason why its aid should not be invoked by men of science. The truth is, that the ordinary course of nature is one continued miracle, one continued manifestation of the Divine mind. “Everything which is, is thought,” says Amiel, “but not conscious and individual thought. Everything is a symbol of a symbol; and a symbol of what?—of mind. We are hemmed round with mystery, and the greatest mysteries are contained in what we see, and do, every day.”

Keely affirms, with other philosophers, that there is only one unique substance, and that this substance is the Divine spirit, the spirit of life, and that this spirit of life is God, who fills everything with His thoughts; disjoining and grouping together these multitudes of thoughts in different bodies called atmospheres, fluids, matters, animal, vegetable, and mineral forms.

Herbert Spencer says that amid the mysteries that become the more mysterious the more they are thought about, there will remain the one absolute certainty, that we are ever in the presence of an infinite and an eternal energy, from which all things proceed. Macvicar foreshadowed the teachings of this new philosophy when he wrote, “All motion in the universe is rhythmical. This is seen in the forward and backward movement of the pendulum, the ebb and the flow of the tides, the succession of day and night, the systolic and diastolic action of the heart, and in the inspiration and expiration of the lungs. Our breathing is a double motion of universal æther, an active and a reactive movement. This androgyne principle, with its dual motion, is the breath of God in man.” The writings of the ancients teem with these ideas, which have been handed down to us from generation to generation, and are now flashing their light, like torches in the darkness, upon mysteries too long regarded as “lying outside the domains of physical science.”

Twenty years ago Macvicar wrote his “Sketch of a Philosophy,” in which he advanced the above views, with other views now maintained and demonstrated by Keely, who during these twenty years, without knowing Macvicar’s views, or of his existence even, has been engaged in that “dead-work which cannot be delegated,” the result of which is not learning, but knowledge; for learning, says Lessing, is only our knowledge of the experience of others; knowledge is our own. This burden of dead-work, writes Lesley, every great discoverer has had to carry for years and years, unknown to the world at large, before the world was electrified by his appearance as its genius. Without it, there can be no discovery of what is rightly called a scientific truth. Every advancement in science comes from this “dead-work,” and creates, of its own nature, an improvement in the condition of the race; putting, as it does, the multitudes of human society on a fairer and friendlier footing with one another. And during these twenty years of “dead-work” the discoverer of etheric force has pursued the even tenor of his way, under circumstances which show him to be a giant in intellectual greatness, insensible to paltry, hostile criticism, patient under opposition, dead to all temptations of self-interest, calmly superior to the misjudgments of the short-sighted and ignoble; noble means as indispensable to him as noble ends; fame and riches less important than his honour; his joys arising from the accomplishment of his work and the love and the sympathy of the few who have comprehended him! “Only the noble-hearted can understand the noble-hearted.” Keely’s chief ambition has been to utilize the force he discovered; not for his own aggrandizement, but to bless the lives of his fellow-men. He has scaled the rocks which barricade earth from heaven, and he knows that the fire which he has brought down with him is divine.

This so-called secret is an open secret, which, after it is known, may be read everywhere,—in the revolution of the planets as well as in the crystallization of minerals and in the growth of a flower.

“But why does not Keely share his knowledge with others?” “Why does he not proclaim his secret to the world?” are questions that are often asked. Keely has no secret to proclaim to the world. Not until the aerial ship is in operation will the world be able to comprehend the nature of Keely’s discoveries. When the distinguished physicist, Professor Dewar, of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, goes to America this summer, he will be instructed by Mr. Keely in his dissociation processes. Every man who has passed the mere threshold of science ought to be aware that it is quite possible to be in possession of a series of facts long before he is capable of giving a rational and satisfactory explanation of them—in short, before he is enabled to discover their causes even. This “dead-work” has occupied many years of Keely’s life; and only within the last five years has he reached that degree of perfection which warranted the erection of a scaffolding for the construction of the true edifice of philosophy.

We have only to recall the wonderful discoveries which have been made in modern times, relative to the properties of heat, of electricity, of galvanism, etc., in order to acknowledge that had any man ventured to anticipate the powers and uses of the steam-engine, the voltaic pile, the electrical battery, or of any other of those mighty instruments by means of which the mind of man has acquired so vast a dominion over the world of matter, he would probably have been considered a visionary; and had he been able to exhibit the effects of any of these instruments, before the principles which regulate their action had become generally known to philosophers, they would in all likelihood have been attributed to fraud or to juggling. Herein lies the secret of Keely’s delay. His work is not yet completed to that point where he can cease experimenting and publish the results of his “dead-work” to the world.

“When will he be ready?” is a question often asked; but it is one that God only can answer, as to the year and day. It now seems as if the time were near at hand,—within this very year; but not even Keely himself can fix the date, until he has finished his present course of experiments, his “graduation” of his twenty-seventh and last group of depolar disks, for effecting change and interchange with polar force.

“But what are his hypotheses? And what the tenets of his new philosophy?” His hypotheses are as antithetic to existing hypotheses in chemistry as the Newtonian system, at its first publication, was antithetic to the vortices of Descartes. The philosophy is not of his creation; nor is it a new philosophy. It is as old as the universe. Its tenets are unpopular, heterodox tenets, but their grandeur, when compared with prevailing theories, will cause the latter to appear like the soap-bubbles that Sir William Drummond said the grown-up children of science amuse themselves with; whilst the honest vulgar stand gazing in stupid admiration, dignifying these learned vagaries with the name of science. It is the sole edifice of true philosophy, the corner-stone of which was laid at Creation, when God said, “Let there be light; and there was light.” The scaffolding which our modern Prometheus has built is not the airy fabric of delusion, nor the baser fabric of a fraud, as has been so often asserted. It has been built plank by plank, upon firm ground, and every plank is of pure gold, as will be seen in due time.

It has been justly said that we have no ground for assuming that we have approached a limit in the field of discovery, or for claiming finality in our interpretations of Nature. We have, as yet, only lifted one corner of the curtain, enabling us to peep at some of the machinery by which her operations are effected, while much more remains concealed; and we know little of the marvels which in course of time may be made clear to us.

Earnest minds in all ages and in all countries have arrived at the same inferences which Keely has reached in his researches,—viz., that the one intelligent force in nature is not a mere mathematical dynamism in space and time, but a true Power existing in its type and fulness,—deity. You may say that such an inference belongs to religion, not to science, but you cannot divorce the two. No systematic distinction between philosophical, religious, and scientific ideas can be maintained. All the three run into one another with the most perfect legitimacy. Their dissociation can be effected only by art, their divorce only by violence. Great as is the revolution in mechanics which is to take place through this discovery, it has an equally important bearing on all questions connected with psychical research. Once demonstrated, we shall hear no more of the brain secreting thought, as the liver secretes bile. The laws of “rhythmical harmony,” of “assimilation,” of “sympathetic association,” will be found governing all things, in the glorious heavens above us, down to the least atom upon our earth. Leibnitz’s assertion, that “perceptivity and its correlative perceptibility are coextensive with the whole sphere of individualized being,” will be accounted for without depriving us of a Creator. “The music of the spheres” will be proved a reality, instead of a figure of speech. St. Paul’s words, “In Him we live, and move, and have our being,” will be better understood. The power of mind over matter will be incontrovertibly demonstrated.

“The requirement of every demonstration is that it shall give sufficient proof of the truth it asserts.” This Keely is prepared to give,—mechanical demonstration; and should he really have discovered the fundamental creative law, which he long since divined must exist, proving that the universal ether which permeates all molecules is the tangible link between God and man, connecting the infinite with the finite,—that it is the true protoplasm, or mother element of everything,—we may look for a philosophy which will explain all unexplained phenomena and reconcile the conflicting opinions of scientists.

The great law of sympathetic association, once understood, will become known as it is,—viz., as the governing medium of the universe. Herein lies the secret, the revelation of which will usher in the spiritual age foretold by the Prophets of the Old Testament and the Apostles of the New Testament. Inspiration is not confined to prophets and apostles and poets: the man of science, the writer, all who reach out after the Infinite, receive their measure of inspiration according to their capacity. We need a new revelation to turn back “the tidal wave of materialism” which has rolled in upon the scientific world, as much as Moses needed one when he sought to penetrate the mysteries of the Creation; and our revelation is near at hand,—a revelation which will change the statical “I am” into the dynamical “I will,”—a revelation which, while teaching us to look from Nature up to Nature’s God, will reveal to us our own powers as “children of God,” as “heirs of immortality.”

“Knowledge,” said Lord Beaconsfield, “is like the mystic ladder in the Patriarch’s dream. Its base rests on the primeval earth—its crest is lost in the shadowy splendour of the empyrean; while the great authors who, for traditionary ages, have held the chain of science and philosophy, of poesy and erudition, are the angels ascending and descending the sacred scale, maintaining, as it were, the communication between man and heaven.”

This beautiful imagery holds within it that seed of truth, which is said to exist in the wildest fable; for, although all great discoveries, pertaining to the material world, have been made gradually, with much starting on the wrong track, much false deduction and much worthless result, spiritual truths can be revealed to man in no other way than by that spiritual influence which maintains communication between the terrestrial and the celestial, or the material and the spiritual. “Truth is attained through immediate intuition,” say the Aryan teachers; but only by those who have educated their sixth sense; as will be seen in Mr. Sinclair’s new work, “Vera Vita; or, the Philosophy of Sympathy.” While the imaginative scientist is puzzling himself about new natural forces and the apparent suspension of old and hitherto invariable laws, Sinclair, in his writings, shows us that it is because we do not recognize the elements of nature that their influences remain mysterious to us.

Mr. Sinclair is as firm in his belief as is Mr. Keely that this element is the great connecting link between the Creator and the created, and that it is capable of rendering more marvellous services to man than all the discovered uses of electricity.

The coincidences in the theories of these two philosophers are the more remarkable, inasmuch as Mr. Sinclair’s have their origin, as set forth in his book “A New Creed,” in metaphysics; while “Keely’s wide and far-reaching philosophy” (to quote the words of a distinguished physicist) “has a physical genesis, and has been developed by long years of patient and persistent research.” But it is an undisputed fact that, in countries far distant from each other, different men have fallen into the same lines of research; and have made correspondent discoveries, at the same time, without having had any communication with each other; and never has there been a time when so many were testing all things that appear to give proof of the super-sensual element in man. There is a very general impression all over the world, says Marie Correlli, that the time is ripe for a clearer revelation of God and “the hidden things of God” than we have ever had before.

All persons who are interested in Keely’s discoveries and the nature of the unknown element discovered by Keely and Sinclair, will find in the writings of the latter a more lucid explanation of sympathetic association than Keely himself has ever been able to give in writing. The title of this remarkable book would have been more wisely chosen had its author called it “A New Element and a New Order of Things.” The Rev. Philip Schaff, D.D., says of creeds:—“The Bible is the word of God to man: the Creed is the answer of man to God. The Bible is the book to be explained and applied; the Creed is the Church’s understanding and summary of the Bible.” It is in this light that Mr. Sinclair’s new creed, human and humane, should be read.

There is no conductivity in the ether lines, writes Sinclair, for selfish desires and motives; for they are not of the soul, but are only sounds of the lips (or wishes of the material part of us), so that the established connecting-rod between the living soul and the source of life is insulated from desires that are not begotten in sympathy, and they at once run to earth. Where there is no connection there can be no communion. Without the natural sympathetic etheric connection between the source of life and the soul, there can be no communication. “A New Creed,” like the sympathetic etheric philosophy of Keely, reveals the connecting link between the finite and the Infinite, and teaches us that the primal law of evolution and of progress is slowly but surely preparing our race for the time when Christianity will be something more than a mere profession, and “the brotherhood of humanity” will no longer be the meaningless phrase that it now is. We are led to see, by this pure philosophy, that “our solar system is a type of a healthy social system; that in it each one affects, binds, controls, sustains, helps, makes free each other; that no star lives for itself alone;” that man was not made to mourn, and that our sufferings arise from our ignorance of the laws governing the innate motive power within us.

The times are not degenerate! Men’s faith

Mounts higher than of old. No crumbling creed

Can take from the immortal soul its need

Of something greater than itself. The wraith

Of dead belief we cherished in our youth,

Fades but to let us welcome new born truth.

Man may not worship at the ancient shrine,

Prone on his face, in self-accusing scorn.

That night is passed; he hails a fairer morn,

And knows himself a something half divine!

No humble worm whose heritage is sin,

But part of God—he feels the Christ within!

No fierce Jehovah with a frowning mien

He worships. Nay, through love, and not through fear,

He seeks the truth, and finds its source is near!

He feels and owns the power of things unseen,

Where once he scoffed. God’s great primeval plan

Is fast unfolding in the soul of man.—Ella W. Wilcox.

KEELY AND HIS DISCOVERIES.

CHAPTER I.

1872 TO 1882.

INTRODUCTORY.

Within the half-century the hypothetical ether has amply vindicated its novel claim to take its place as a mysterious entity side by side with matter and energy among the ultimate components of the objective universe …. Modern science sets before our eyes the comprehensive and glorious idea of a cosmos which is one and the same throughout, in sun and star and world and atom, in light and heat and life and mechanism, in herb and tree and man and animal, in body, soul, and spirit, mind and matter.—Grant Allen on Evolution.

The man who can demonstrate the existence of an unsuspected and unknown force has a right, in the absence of demonstrative proof to the contrary, to form his own theory of its origin, and to make it the basis of his own system. Keely is looking at physical phenomena and their explanations from a point of view so different from that of the inductive school, that we hardly know how to combine the two, or show their bearings upon each other. For myself, I think now, as I thought and said in my address, that the absolutely exclusive position, taken up by Huxley, Tyndall, and the so-called Material School, is ludicrously indefensible; and that we should be as perfectly open to evidence in any direction, as we were 2000 years ago.—The Rev. H. W. Watson, D.Sc., F.R.S.

So many men of learning are now holding Dr. Watson’s views that the time seems to have arrived, in which the theories of Keely will receive, from those who are competent to judge of their value, the attention that they deserve. Before entering upon their merits, or setting them down for others to judge of their worth, the way must be prepared by showing the claims which they possess from their correspondence with some of the most advanced ideas of the present day, as well as with the teachings of the wisest men in past centuries.

The mode which is the least laborious to accomplish this end, is by collecting what has been written and printed, which bears upon, and elucidates this subject.

It is now very generally known that Mr. Keely, while pursuing a line of experiment in vibrations, “accidentally” as Edison would say, made his discovery of an energy, the origin of which was unknown to himself; and six years passed, in experiment, before he was able to repeat its production at will. In the meantime he had exhausted his resources and willingly accepted the proposal of men, who, after witnessing the operation of the energy that he was able to show with this unknown force, offered to organize a company to furnish him with the means to construct an engine to use this force as the motive power, anticipating immediate success.

But discovery is one thing, invention quite another thing, and the years rolled on without Mr. Keely’s being able to fulfil his promises. In 1882, which was about ten years after the company was formed, an action at law was brought against him for non-fulfilment of his contract. The Evening Bulletin of March 30th of that year thus explains, truthfully, the position.

THE KEELY MOTOR.

A STATEMENT FROM ONE OF THE INVENTOR’S STOCKHOLDERS.

“To the Editor of the Evening Bulletin: In your issue of last Tuesday appears an article which deserves attention, and also calls for some explanation upon that very much misunderstood question of the Keely motor. From some cause not easy to learn, there seems to be a tendency to keep only one side of that subject before the public.

“Being one of the unfortunates of the Keely motor speculation, interest has led me to investigate not only the invention and the man who has everything to do with it, but also the management of the company, which is equally important to those who put their money into the enterprise as an investment. Permit me, therefore, to state a few of the facts which, if known, would very much change some of the popular views now held.

“There are perhaps a thousand stockholders in the Keely Motor Company. The mass of these, like myself, are not the prosecutors in this case against Mr. Keely. We do not believe that Mr. Keely can be forced to divulge any valuable secrets if he possesses them. We do not believe that a case in court is calculated to prolong the inventor’s life, or render it more safe from the accidents to which he is exposed. We do not believe that these proceedings are likely to increase his good will towards the company. Some of us know that by purchasing Keely motor stock, we have not thereby put our money into the invention, nor has Mr. Keely had the benefit of it. We also know that some, if not all, of the parties to this prosecution, especially those who are most vehement in its favour under the pretence of protecting the common stockholders, are selfish to the last degree, while for themselves they have the least cause to complain. Their official records show an utter disregard of the interests of stockholders or the rights of the inventor: while the success of the invention is to them a secondary consideration. It is they, and not the inventor, who have drummed up the customers, and recommended and sold the stock. They, and not he, are answerable to the purchasers. If Mr. Keely is guilty of deception, they are to say the least equally so. Look at a few statements:

“When the Keely Motor Company was started, in 1874, its organizers received their stock without paying for it. About three-fourths of the whole amount were thus given away by Mr. Keely. He retained about one-seventh, and was cheated out of a good portion of that before he had gone far. Only 400 shares out of 20,000 were retained in the treasury, and that but a short time; for these recipients of the “dead-head stock” made hasty havoc of the market by a rapid unloading of their shares and pocketing the proceeds. So the poor little 400 shares of treasury stock brought only the minimum price to afford temporary relief to a distressed company.

“The bankrupt condition of this incipient corporation threatened it with a cessation of existence, unless somebody came to the rescue, for the ‘originals,’ who had received a harvest by the sale of their ‘free stock,’ would not now give a dollar to save the concern. They were all fixed, but what of the innocent stockholders who had purchased this stock? They should not be allowed to suffer, as they must if the company went out. So Mr. Keely came to the rescue, and consented to the following scheme, which was prepared by schemers, as the sequel proved. He had two inventions besides the motor, and they could be handled to advantage in this emergency. These Mr. Keely assigned to the company, and the stock was increased from 20,000 to 100,000 shares. The 80,000 new shares were to be divided equally: 40,000 to pay for the inventions, and 40,000 went to the company without one dollar of pay. So, Mr. Keely received no money in this transaction; and of the 40,000 shares which he should have received, not 5000 ever reached him; fraudulent claims having captured the rest while in the hands of the ‘trustee.’ Of the 5000 shares also, much had been obligated in advance by the inventor to carry forward the work which otherwise must have been delayed, so that he had less than 1000 shares left when all claims were settled. This grand act is called the ‘consolidation,’ which took place in 1879, and since which all moneys raised by the company have come from the sale of shares out of this 40,000, which Mr. Keely then gave to the company. By some mysterious operations in the ‘management’ this ‘Treasury Stock’ has shrunk away very rapidly, bringing at times only a fraction of the price which other stocks of the same kind were selling for in the market, while the little cash which it has brought has only in part been used by Mr. Keely, and that has been served out to him in a sparing way, which would be shameful even if he had not furnished it all to begin with. The company now owe to Mr. Keely fifty thousand dollars loaned outright in its early history. To this indebtedness considerable has since been added. The public statements that Mr. Keely has been supplied with large amounts of money from the company are untrue, while it is true that of those who are regarded as his dupes a half dozen or more have made on an average at least $50,000 each from the ‘enterprise.’ The money with which Mr. Keely capitalized the company, in the first place, was obtained from the sale of territorial rights to men who have formed other companies for the purpose.

“If Mr. Keely deserves prosecution by any parties, it is those who bought these rights, and not the ring who now control the company with stock which has cost them nothing.

“If anybody deserves to be sued by the stockholders it is these very persons who recommended and sold them the stock, and have taken the benefit of it, and who at the same time are responsible for the miserable management which has caused detention of the work, distress in the company, depreciation in the stock and dissatisfaction among stockholders.

“One.”

The further history of “The Keely Motor Bubble” will be given later on, but it is the position in earlier years, that we must first deal with, to get a clear comprehension of the causes of the delays which again and again shattered the hopes of the sanguine investors just when they were the most buoyant, from an apparent increased control of the mysterious force Keely was handling. Further quotations from the press will best show the light in which Keely’s work was regarded by those who considered themselves competent to pass judgment upon him and his efforts. The Daily News in Philadelphia, on May 25th, 1886, contained a most sensible editorial, with the heading

What has Keely Discovered?

“For a number of years Mr. John W. Keely, of this city, and various associates have occupied the attention of the public to a greater or less extent, from time to time. The claim on behalf of Mr. Keely is that he has discovered a new motive power, so far transcending all previous achievements in this direction, as to overturn most of the universally recognized conclusions regarding dynamics. Of course such a claim was sure to be met with derision, and the derision was sure of continuance until silenced by the most thorough practical demonstration.

“Discussion of the matter has not seemed profitable in the absence of such a demonstration; but now it seems proper to note an apparently new status of Mr. Keely’s affairs, as shown by some experiments conducted last Saturday in the presence of a number of visitors. Some, at least, of these visitors were qualified for critical observation, and the noteworthy fact is that Mr. Keely was able to produce, under their close inspection, a dynamic result which none of them pretended to account for by any known law of physics, outside of that which Mr. Keely claims as the base of his operation. He evolved, almost instantaneously, according to the united report of those who were present, a substance having an elastic energy varying from 10,000 to 20,000 pounds per square inch, and instantly discharged or liberated it into the atmosphere, without the evolution of heat in its production, or of cold on its sudden liberation. These phenomena alone would seem to establish that the substance he is dealing with is one not hitherto known to science.

“It seems rather frivolous to dismiss this matter with the supposition that trained specialists are to be hoodwinked by concealed springs, buried pipes for the introduction of compressed air and the like. Surely such gentlemen ought very easily to determine at once whether the surroundings and conditions of the experiments were such as to favour any kind of legerdemain; and if they found them so, it is strange that they should spend some hours in investigating that which has been asserted to be ‘a transparent humbug.’

“The appearances are that Mr. Keely has at least removed his enterprise from the domain of ridicule to that of respectful investigation, and this, after all, is great progress.”

On Wednesday, July 28th, 1886, the Public Ledger had a leader headed,

Let us have some actual useful Work.

“With regard to the occasional revivals of the Keely motor, whether annual, semi-annual, or biennial, as they have come along in the last ten or a dozen years, the Ledger has paid but little attention to them for a long time; and possibly this last display last week might have been allowed to take the same unnoticed course, but that the “whizz” of the big sphere seems to have been so rapid, and the racket so stunning, as to more greatly puzzle those present at the exhibition than on any former occasion. The matter for a long time has presented itself to us in but two aspects mainly. First, there was large public interest in the asserted development of physical force by new and very strange means—very interesting if there really was a probability of a new device or new means of developing power that could be harnessed and made to do useful work; and second, so far as the matter took the form of exploiting a private enterprise or stimulating a boom for a private speculation, there was but very limited interest for the public. In this latter aspect it was almost exclusively an affair between Mr. Keely and the stockholders of his company, who felt willing to back their faith in the substantiality of his invention or discovery, by investing their money in the company’s stock. This was no affair for a public journal to meddle in, unless some imposture was designed that might affect the general public.

“That is the way the Ledger has regarded the matter for several years; and, as during that period it seemed to be almost exclusively a private matter of little public interest, we have had little or no concern with it. Of course the Ledger stood ready all the time, as it stands now ready, to welcome anything that promises to be useful or of advantage in any way as an addition to the mechanical or other working facilities of our day. That Mr. Keely might have a clue to such an addition we did not dispute on the mere ground that it was new or strange, or because experts pronounced it impossible; for many stranger things have happened. Mankind, even those who are illumined by the highest human knowledge and intelligence, do not yet know all that is to be known, as we are reminded almost every day by the strides of scientific and mechanical progress. We would rather have found Mr. Keely less inclined to be mysterious; we could have wished him to have been less disposed to talk in terms that sound very like meaningless jargon to most well-informed persons; but still we did not think it proper, or fair, or wise, to reject his claims on these grounds, but have simply let them rest in abeyance, so far as the Ledger is concerned, because behind all this, and behind many more such essays, is the possibility that the success of some one of them may solve the problem of what is to be done when the world’s supply of fuel, whether in form of wood, or coal, or peat, or gas, is either practically exhausted or to be got at only at a cost that would largely preclude its use. Mr. Keely, we say, may have a clue to that, as also may some one of those who are experimenting with the several manifestations of electric or magnetic force.

“What we would have had Mr. Keely do, and, until he does it, his operations have but little practical value in the sight of the Ledger, would have been to harness his motor to do some useful work, to gear it by cogwheel or by belt and pulley, or by some other mechanical device, to a main shaft that has driving lathes, or planers, or other machines—something that was doing actual useful work, day in and day out, as other machines do. Of machines that will manifest great pressure on a gauge, of contrivances that have enormous lifting power, of explosives that demonstrate stupendous force, the appliances of science and the mechanic arts have large numbers, and they are handier and more manageable than any Mr. Keely has shown. These are not to the point—except, perhaps, to persons endowed with large faith. The machine that will do actual, useful, large work, by a manipulation of new energy, or by a display of energy by new and manageable means, this or these are the things the public and the Ledger will be glad to hail.”

At this time Mr. Keely had not reached that stage in his researches when he could carry out the suggestions made by the able writer of the Ledger leader; and if our discoverer of an unknown force had not been known to some persons “endowed with large faith” in his discovery, it would have been lost to the world. An anonymous writer has said the idea that living nature is not a collection of dead-heads, never seems to have struck the non-progressivists. The thing that is has been, and the thing that is will continue to be; this is the sum and substance of the doctrine they profess. They commit the mistake of supposing they live in a finished planet when in reality they exist on an orb that has relatively just begun to live. The time allowed us for observation and study of nature and of ourselves, is limited in a marked degree. Just when we are beginning to know how to read the book, we are forced to close its pages because the intellectual eyesight finds itself within the trammels of age. All we can do is to make a hit here, and a hit there, and to hand on our little bit of intelligence to those who come after us, in the hope that they also will keep their eyes and ears open, and, in like manner, hand on a cumulative store of knowledge to their heirs and successors. During the brief span of a man’s existence, then, it is difficult for him to prove much progress either in himself or in his surroundings. The eternal hills seem the same to him when the light of life dies out, as when first his eyes beheld their outlines. Stern, uncompromising, apparently immutable, the hills remain to him the type of all that is fixed, all that is unchangeable around. Yet this is not the story of science. Tennyson, who is always true to nature, says:—

“The hills are shadows, and they flow

From form to form, and nothing stands;

They melt like mists, the solid lands;

Like clouds they shape themselves and go.”

In Memoriam, cxxiii., 2nd Stanza.

This is good poetry; better still, it is good science.

The Himalayas, big and grand as they are, must represent mountains whose rise was a thing of a very “recent” date, geologically speaking. This is proved, because we see rocks belonging to a relatively recent age, appearing as part and parcel of their lofty peaks. Very different is the case with the hills and mountains of, say, north-western Scotland. There you come upon peaks of an age well-nigh coëval with the world’s earliest settling down to a steady, solid, and respectable existence. The Scottish hills are the old, the very old, aristocrats of the cosmical circle; the Himalayas, Alps, and the rest, are the new race whose origin goes not further back than a generation, as it were.

Yet, about the oldest of the mountains there is nothing which is absolutely enduring. Equally with the newer hills, geological progress and action are written on the face of their history. The hills are only phases of cosmical arrangement; they are here in the to-day of the world; they may be gone in the world’s to-morrow. Before Science had learned to lisp this, the prophetic word of men moved by the Holy Ghost had said: “Of old Thou hast laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of Thy hands. They shall perish, but Thou remainest; yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment, and as a vesture shalt Thou change them and they shall be changed.” The world is neither perfect nor finished in a geological sense, any more than it is perfect in an ethical sense. It is full of progressive action everywhere, and, to quote from another author, “our planet and our solar system are but as the small dust of the balance in the colossal scale of the worlds that are.”

Had there been no one to read the future in the light of the past, among those who witnessed the production of the force discovered by Keely in 1872, he could not have continued his researches, as he has done during these intervening years, from lack of the funds necessary to carry them on. But there were men who knew the worth of the discovery, and who, sanguine as to almost immediate results, did something more than stand idly “ready to welcome” them when produced. They furnished the money with which Keely laboured year after year, and encouraged him to persevere, when without such aid he might have been forced to abandon his researches for want of the necessaries of life. During this period, Keely’s discovery was only thought of in reference to its commercial value, and for a decade he made no progress: but, after his researches led up to the conviction that he was on the road to another and infinitely more important discovery, namely, the source of life and the connecting link between intelligent will and matter, his progress has been almost uninterrupted. His ambition is not only to give a costless motive power to the world, but to make clear to men of science the path he is exploring.

CHAPTER II.

1882 TO 1886.

ETHER THE TRUE PROTOPLASM, AN EPITOME OF MACVICAR’S SKETCH OF A PHILOSOPHY.

All that has been predicted of atoms, their attractions and repulsions, according to the primary laws of their being, only becomes intelligible when we assume the presence of mind.—Sir John F. W. Herschell (1865).

It is in no small degree reassuring to find that we are not chained to inert matter, but to the living energies of its forms …. This leads us to the inference, long suspected, that all matter, as well as the ethereal medium itself consists ultimately of one and the same primordial element.—Col. A. T. Fraser, Darkness and Light in the Land of Egypt.

For ten years Keely’s demonstrations were confined to the liberation, at will, of the energy he had “stumbled over” while experimenting on vibrations in 1872; and his efforts were put forth for the construction of “the perfect engine,” which he had promised to The Keely Motor Company. He made the mistake of pursuing his researches on the line of invention instead of discovery. All his thoughts were concentrated in this direction up to the year 1882. Engine after engine was abandoned and sold as old metal, in his repeated failures to construct one that would keep up the rotary motion of the ether that was necessary to hold it in any structure. Explosion after explosion occurred, sometimes harmless to him, at other times laying him up for weeks at a time.

Two more years were lost in efforts to devise an automatic arrangement, which should enable the machine, invented by Keely for liberating the energy, to be handled by any operator, and it was not until 1884 that steady progress was seen, from year to year, as the result of his enlarged researches. When Keely was asked, at this time, how long he thought it would be before he would have the engine he was then at work upon ready to patent, he illustrated his situation by an anecdote: “A man fell down, one dark night, into a mine; catching a rope in his descent, he clung to it until morning. With the first glimpse of daylight, he saw that had he let go his hold of the rope he would have had but a few inches to fall. I am precisely in the situation of that man. I do not know how near success may be, nor yet how far off it is.”

August 5th, 1885, the New York Home Journal announced that Keely had imprisoned the ether; and, as was then wrongly supposed, that the unknown force was the ether itself; not the medium of the force, as it is now known to be. The late George Perry, who was then editor of that journal, heralded the announcement with these comments:—“No object seems to be too high or remote for human endeavour. It is not strange that some of these attempts should stagger the faith of all but the boldest imaginations. A notable example of this class is the famous etheric motor invented by Keely, of Philadelphia, and the subject of a communication which we print below from a well-known American lady in Italy. The inventor claims to have found a new force, one that entirely transcends those that have been hitherto appropriated for human use. Heat, steam, electricity, magnetism are but crude antetypes of this new discovery. It is essentially the creator of these forces. It is scarcely less than the ‘primum mobile.’

Indeed in reading the exposition of its potentialities one can hardly help doubting whether the concrete matter of our earth is not too weak and volatile to contain, restrain, and direct this vast cosmic energy except in infinitesimal proportions. How shall iron and steel stand before the power which builds up and clasps the very atoms of their mass? Where shall the inventor look for ‘safety discs’ to stay his new-found force, when every substance within his reach is but a residuum of the activity of this identical principle? How shall strength of materials avail against the power that gives, and indeed is, strength of materials? This, however, is but a metaphysical doubt, and as the invention has already demonstrated its practical efficiency on a small scale, there is a presumption that it may be extended to the higher degrees. At all events, whether the force can or cannot be harnessed to do the daily work of the world, the discovery is one that will mark an epoch in the progress of science and give the inventor and his patrons a meed of immortality. Granted they are but poets building a lofty cosmical rhyme, their work shall have not the less an enduring honour.”

The New Force—Etheric Vapour.

The discoverer of a hitherto unknown force in nature which, when certain inventions are perfected, will create a revolution in science, as well as in mechanics, has for many years concentrated his mind upon gaining supreme control over one of nature’s greatest and grandest forces. Or, more correctly speaking, in efforts to control and apply to mechanics one of the various manifestations of the one force in nature.

“The force which binds the atoms, which controls secreting glands,

Is the same that guides the planets, acting by divine commands.”

The hypothetical ether conceived of by scientists, to account for the transmission of light, is not hypothetical to this discoverer. He knows its nature and its power. By the operation of an instrument of his own invention, he can release it at will from the suspension in which it is always held in our atmosphere. It is so liberated, by an almost instantaneous process of intense vibratory action, and passed through a tube the opening of which is no larger than a pin’s head, furnishing sufficient power to run a one hundred horse-power engine. The importance of this discovery cannot be conceived; its limit seems boundless; its value cannot be put in figures. Step by step, with a patient perseverance which one day the world will honour, this man of genius has made his researches, fighting with and overcoming difficulties which seemed insurmountable, during years in which no disinterested hands were extended to aid him, no encouraging words of appreciation bestowed upon him by the scientists whom he vainly tried to interest in his experiments; assailed by calumnies, which, emanating from those who should have been the first to extend aid, have over and over pierced his noble heart like poisoned arrows.

History will not forget that, in the nineteenth century, the story of Prometheus found a counterpart, and that the greatest man of the age, seeking to scale the heavens to bring down blessings for mankind, met with Prometheus’s reward from the vultures of calumny who, up to the present moment, have not spared their talons upon him.

The dangerous conditions attending the introductory features of the development of etheric vapour are not yet entirely overcome; but this throws no shadow of a doubt as to the inventor’s eventual success in the minds of those who know the magnitude of the difficulties he has already mastered.

O. W. Babcock, in an American journal says of this discovery, “Human comprehension is inadequate to grasp its possibilities or power, for prosperity and for peace. It includes all that relates mechanically to travel, manufacture, mining, engineering and warfare. The discoverer has entered a new world, and although an unexplored wilderness of untold wealth lies beyond, he is treading firmly its border, which daily widens as with ever-increasing interest he pursues his explorations. He has passed the dreary realm where scientists are groping. His researches are made in the open field of elemental force, where gravity, inertia, cohesion, momentum are disturbed in their haunts and diverted to use; where, from the unity of origin, emanates infinite energy in its diversified forms,” and to this I would add—where he, the discoverer, is able to look from nature up to nature’s God, understanding and explaining, as no mortal ever before understood and explained, how simple is the way in which God “works His wonders to perform.”

A compilation of Macvicar’s “Sketch of a Philosophy,” entitled “Ether the true Protoplasm,” was sent to Mr. Keely; and shortly after, Mrs. Hughes’ book on the evolution of tones and colours. Mr. Keely will himself, in his theoretical exposé make known the manner in which he was led, by the writings of Dr. Macvicar and Mrs. Hughes, into the knowledge which raised the veil that had before hidden from him the operations of Nature with this “the most powerful and most general of all her forces;” operations which will explain all that is now mysterious to us in the workings of gravity.

The question has been asked whether science, having destroyed faith, has supplied us with anything better. But has science destroyed faith? Certainly not. There would be no such thing as counterfeit coin were it not for the existence of sterling gold. True science has its counterfeit, and it is due to spurious science that the bulwarks of religious faith have been besieged; but they are not destroyed. Drummond says that it will be the splendid task of the future theology to disclose to scepticism the naturalness of the supernatural.

The pure Philosophy which true science seems about to reveal discloses not a universe of dead matter, but a universe alive from its core to its outermost extremity, and animated by mind and means, to which matter, perfectly organized, is absolutely subservient. It illuminates mysteries of nature which have only been partially revealed to us, and lifts the veil which has hitherto shrouded in darkness still greater mysteries involved in this universal power, which keeps and sustains all systems of worlds in their relation towards each and all. More and more clearly shall we be led by true science to see that the universe “is founded upon a distinct idea,” and that the harmony of this distinct idea is manifested in all of God’s works. Sir Isaac Newton, in his “Fundamental Principles of Natural Philosophy,” calls the great magnetic agent “the soul of the world,” and says, “all senses are excited by this spirit, and through it the animals move their limbs; but these things cannot be explained in few words, and we have not yet sufficient experience to determine fully the laws by which this universal spirit operates.” Centuries may pass before these laws will be “fully understood”; but Etheric Philosophy casts a plummet into depths that have never been sounded, and reveals this “unparticled substance,” “the cosmic matter,” “the primal stuff,” “the celestial ocean of universal ether,” as the true protoplasm, and the medium by which mind shapes matter and gives it all its properties. It teaches us that, through it, we are connected in sympathy with all other souls and with all the objects of nature, even, to the stars and all the heavenly bodies. But even though we do not understand the laws which control its operations, we find therein a legitimate field of research. It is surely more legitimate for science to ascribe failures in such researches to our still existing ignorance of that which we may possibly know in time than to set such laws down as unknowable. “Thought in its spontaneity has the run of the universe, and there should be no bar to discovery.” Our only hope, says Macvicar, lies in the universality of the cosmical laws and the ultimate homogeneity of created substances, or reality.

In stating some of the various hypotheses which have been put forward by Macvicar, more as a sketch than as a new system of philosophy, it is not necessary to make any comments. If the scaffolding be good the edifice will appear in time. If worthless, no edifice can be constructed. Therefore, it must be remembered that it is only with the scaffolding that we have to do at present. If it has been left for our age to demonstrate the truth or the falsity of certain deductions made in past ages—if we arrive at a partial knowledge, even, of truths which ancient wisdom saw with dim vision, we must never forget that our century has had the benefit of the light reflected down the stream of time. Macvicar’s “Sketch of a Philosophy” was published in 1868. He said that his ideas would not be acceptable, or even intelligible, to an age when the popular demand is for very light reading; when science is marvellously content with the attainments which it has already made; and when, “as to the method of science we are told, with more and more confidence every day, that all we can do for the discovery of realities is to go out of doors, leaving ‘the inner man’ all alone, and to compare the odour of the present with the smell of the past, and then, turning our noses towards the future, to follow them wherever they may lead us.” He continues, Sensation, we are taught, is the alone architect of all trustworthy knowledge; the author both as to form and substance of all that is belief-worthy. No such thing as intuition, we are told; reason merely a habit, rising from the long-continued use of the organism. This looking only to mechanism is as much the plague and sorrow of our times as it was when Macvicar complained of it as divorcing science from philosophy. Philosophic wisdom, says Willcox, is a structure built up of all knowledges—grand and sublime: permanent, not of the present nor the past. Science holds, in its relation to philosophy, the same position that theology sustains to religion. “En dehors de toutes les sciences spéciales et au-dessus d’elles, il y a lieu à une science plus haute et plus générale, et, c’est ce qu’ on appelle philosophie.”—(Paul Janet, Revue des Deux Mondes.)

Of what nature are the ideas which Macvicar was so sure would be unpopular? In compiling from his writings, such are selected as seem to be the best, toward elucidating the mysteries which lie in the operation of the laws governing the universal ether, so far as his hypotheses carried him. If matter without form preceded the creation of vitality, “it is only when the principle of life had been given,” says Charpignon, “that the intrinsic properties of atoms were compelled, by the law of affinities, to form individualities; which, from that moment, becoming a centre of action, were enabled to act as modifying causes of the principle of life, and assimilate themselves to it, according to the ends of their creation.” Here is a conjecture, to start with, that it will be well to remember; for, as in the hypotheses of Macvicar and the demonstrations of Keely, the law of assimilation is made the pivot upon which all turns, “providing at once for the free and the forced, at once for mind and for matter, and placing them in a scientific relationship to one another.” This law Macvicar calls the “cosmical law,” because to it alone, ever operating under the eye and fulfilling the design of the great Creator who is always and in all places immanent to His creation, an appeal is ever made. By this law a far greater number of the phenomena of nature and the laboratory can be explained than have been otherwise explained by scores of laws which are frankly admitted to be empirical. Surely this is no slight claim for this law to be studied, with a view to its acceptance or rejection. To repeat, this law is to the effect that every individualized object tends to assimilate itself to itself, in successive moments of its existence, and all objects to assimilate one another. The ground of it is, that the simple and pure substance of creation, has for its special function to manifest the Creator; and consequently to assimilate itself to His will and attributes, in so far as the finite can assimilate itself to the Infinite. Hence it is, in its own nature, wholly plastic or devoid of fixed innate properties, and wholly assimilative, both with respect to its own portions or parts and to surrounding objects, as well as to its position in space, and, in so far as it is capable, to the mind of the Creator. Thus, there immediately awake, in the material elements, individuality and the properties of sphericity, elasticity, and inertia, along with a tendency to be assimilated as to place, or, as it is commonly called, reciprocal attraction. Hence, in the first place, the construction in the ether, or realm of light, of groups of ethereal elements, generating material elements. Hence, secondly, a tendency in the material elements, when previously distributed in space, to form into groups, in which their ethereal atmospheres may become completely confluent; while their material nuclei, being possessed of a more powerful individuality than ethereal elements, come into juxtaposition merely, thus constituting molecules. By legitimate deductions from cosmical law, the forms and structures of these molecules must always be as symmetrical as the reaction of their own constituent particles, and that of their surroundings, will allow. The law of assimilation gives the same results as mathematics in determining the forms of systems of equal, and similar, elastic and reciprocally attractive spherical forces, or centres of force, when they have settled in a state of equilibrium; proving these forms to be symmetrical in the highest degree. Here, however, Macvicar and Keely differ, in hypothesis, as to the structure of the ultimate material element; but this difference does not affect “the scaffolding” of pure philosophy, in which everything that is cognizable has its own place, is on a solid basis, is harmonious with its surroundings, and is explained and justified by them:—raising chemistry to the level and bringing it within the sphere of mechanics; investing its objects, at the same time, with all the distinctness of the objects of other branches of natural science.

Because the chemist in his laboratory cannot succeed in decomposing certain substances, it has been inferred that they are essentially undecomposable, simple and untransformable; and on this hypothesis the whole science of mineralogy proceeds. But when it is considered that all of these chemical atoms, before they have come into the chemist’s hands, have been securely consolidated and mineralized, so as to be able to withstand the ordeal of the volcano and the central heat, compared with which the most powerful analytic agencies of the laboratory are but a mimicry, is it for a moment to be supposed, although their internal structure were still molecular, that they would break down in the chemist’s hands? Surely, all his containing vessels, which are but things of human art, must go to pieces before them.

The present prevailing theory of development contradicts one half by the other half. It extends the doctrine of development and transmutation to species which happen to be visible to such eyes as we have; it denies it to such as happen to be invisible to us. If all animals and plants have been obtained by the secular synthesis of transformed monera, and the differentiation of the organs composing them—thus giving in the last analysis one form and kind of protoplasm as the root of all; the pursuit of the same line of thought—the same theory, applied to the atoms of the chemist, with their various properties and atomic weights, gives, as the common ground of all, a single material element; each chemical atom being a structure composed of this material element, but so stable as to be indecomposable in the laboratory. Let this be granted, as asserted by Macvicar in 1868, and by Keely now, and the theory of evolution, whatever may be the case as to its cogency, at least possesses a scientific form. It is no longer a conception which breaks down midway between its first and its last terms. But letting science, in this respect, stand for the present as it is, and supposing the seventy recognized elements of the laboratory (which do not include the twenty or more new elements recently said to have been discovered by Krüss and Nilson in certain rare Scandinavian minerals) or rather, perhaps, some very high multiple of their number to constitute that cosmic gas from which the solar system has been evolved, the theory of development shows itself to be as imperfect on the great scale, and in point of extent, as it is in point of homogeneity in its intimate material. Macvicar continues—Beyond that cosmic gas there certainly is the ether, a medium which no longer can be ignored in any physical theory of nature. What, then, is the relation of the cosmic gas to the ether? Evolutionists do not answer this question, but Macvicar seeks to render the whole system of thought homogeneous, and to show that, just as all organisms are the synthetic developments of one kind of moneron, and all chemical atoms and molecules the synthetic development of one kind of material element, so is the material element a synthetic development of ethereal elements. These also are Mr. Keely’s views; but neither Macvicar nor Keely rest in the conception of a congeries of particles which are wholly blind and devoid of feeling and thought, diffused throughout all space, believing such particles to be the first of things. “Reason, if it is to enjoy intellectual repose, can have it only in finding, beyond and above all things else, a unity, a power, intelligence, personality—in one word, God. This is the only legitimate haven of a theory of development: sending back the tide of materialism and pantheism which has swept its mire over our age into the ebb again; as, after having reached the full, it has so often done already, before the constitutional instincts or inspirations of humanity, with which speculative minds may, indeed, dally for a generation but which are ultimately inexorable.” Macvicar maintains with Keely that from God, as the Author of all, nature may be reached with those very features which it is seen to possess; that it is essential to every philosophy, which is or shall be in harmony with intelligence, that it shall be based upon a unity; that no philosophy possesses all the claims to intellectual regard which it may possibly have, unless that unity be an intelligent Being; that to suppose thought and feeling to wake up for the first time in that which was previously blind and dead from all eternity, is nothing short of absurd to those who are led by the evidence of design, to look from nature up to nature’s God, in whom all nature lives and moves and has its being.

While the protoplasm of the biologist is a substance which is more or less opaque or visible, the protoplasm now conceived of as the material of the whole creation in its first state, when development is to begin, must, on the contrary, be altogether homogeneous and invisible. But none the less is it entitled to the name of protoplasm; nay, it alone must be justly entitled to that name, for it is the first of created things, and, being the product of an Almighty Being, it must be altogether plastic in His hands. It can have no constitution of its own derived from itself; but must, so far as the finite can, with respect to the infinite, reflect, represent, embody, show forth His attributes and being. Still, there is limitation to this. Certain properties and demands with regard to that which exists, with limited extension, in space, are inexorable. Macvicar reasons that with such limitations the primal substance of creation must be fully obedient or assimilated to the Creator—not in a transient manner, but permanently; and that in its nature the primal substance, the true protoplasm, must be an assimilative substance. Granting that this protoplasm be partitioned into individualities, he makes the deduction that each and all of these individualized beings and things would, up to the full measure of their capacity, not only tend to assimilate themselves to the ever-present Being to whom they owe their own being, but they would tend also to assimilate themselves each to itself, with respect both to space and time; as also that they would all tend to assimilate one another. Taking this as the cosmical mode of action, or law, and on the strength of this law alone, without invoking the aid of any other law, he attempts to explain all those phenomena to which the physicist, the chemist, and the biologist usually address themselves. Illustrating the manner in which this law applies itself to phenomena, he gives as the first products of this law the perpetuation of an original mode of existence, and the establishment of permanence of properties under certain restrictions; the ground of the remarkable persistency and permanence of well-constituted species; a general harmony and homology throughout all creation: proceeding to illustrate its action on the mental or spiritual world; accounting for perception, remembrance, reasoning, imagining, judging, and upon all our other modes of mental activity, as operations of the cosmical law of assimilation.

In the world of physics he gives, as illustrations of this same law of assimilation, attraction, inertia, elasticity, heredity, reversion, symmetry culminating in sphericity or symmetrical cellularity, chemical and electrical action; especially in voltaic action the influence and the persistence of this law is most remarkably displayed. By the way of familiar illustration, he takes the original voltaic cell, and without attempting to explain how one solid, copper or platinum, comes to be less assimilable to a liquid than another, such as zinc, he shows that just what we are to expect, from this law of assimilation, takes place—viz., that at the zinc there tends to form a stratum of oxygen, and that, at the platinum, there tends to form a stratum of hydrogen. Pursuing the old view as to the cause of the state of tension induced in the dilute sulphuric acid, the continuous decomposition of the water, the solidifying action of the zinc surface, he confines his attention to the current of force instituted by the oxygen; advancing the idea that this is not merely force in general, of which all that is to be considered is its quantity and direction; but force, of which the form of its elements or their formative power is also to be considered;—that formative power being representative or productive of oxygen. To the objection that such a conception is occult and mysterious, he asks if it is more occult and mysterious than what is implied and confessed to be hid under the term electricity, or in the phenomena of heredity, or than anything else which is adduced as a cause of a particular phenomenon. The cosmical law of assimilation explains all these phenomena, and, without any special hypothesis, is precisely what is wanted, in order to render natural knowledge as a whole accessible to the student: something which puts him in possession, from the first, of a master-thought, which, if he carry it along with him, will present all nature as a harmony; explaining all that stands in need of explanation. Macvicar continues:—

If it be asked how possibly out of one law, and such a one, there could arise anything like that endless variety which nature displays, the answer is, that the law operates between two limits, poles, or points of assimilation, which are entirely dissimilar, and by two processes simultaneously, analysis and synthesis, which are the opposites of each other. Hence it comes to pass that actual nature is a web, in which unity and multiplicity, identity and difference, are everywhere interwoven, and in such harmony that nature is everywhere beautiful.

It is not necessary here to repeat the illustrations by which Macvicar seeks to demonstrate that existence is force—self-manifesting, or spontaneously radiant, so to speak, into that which is idea, if there be a recipient of ideas, or a percipient of ideas; or, more generally, a percipient within the sphere of its action. He does not prescribe any limits, in space, as to the extent of this self-manifesting power. Thus, it is one of the most certain facts in physics that every atom of this planet, nay, every atom of the planet Neptune, whose distance from the sun is thirty times as great as our distance, manifests itself to every atom of this planet—not, indeed, as a percept, but as the subject and the object of attraction or motion. Nay, by the aid of the ether, which is the grand medium whereby the self-manifesting power of being is enabled to take effect at a distance when no other being is interposed, the fixed stars manifest themselves at our planet, though their distances be inconceivably great. Distant objects acting like all objects assimilatively, assimilate the intervening ether and the optic apparatus to themselves, and thus render themselves perceptible. This they do, indeed, only under great limitation, imposed by the laws of inertia or motion in space, to which the ether is subject—limitation which, in man, it requires self-teaching and experience to remove, so that he may perceive the object in its true forms and dimensions. But this is only man’s peculiarity, in consequence of his organic defects at birth. The chick, the day it leaves the egg, can run up with equal precision to a crumb of bread, or to an ant’s egg at a distance. And so with all species whose myo-neuro-cerebral system functions perfectly from their birth. At his best, the embodied mind in man sees objects only in perspective. But the nature of this self-manifesting power need not be dwelt upon, since it is only the existence of this power that is insisted upon. How far beyond the visible and tangible parts of the body, the spirit, as a power exerting some kind of action or other, extends, Macvicar thinks cannot be determined. No doubt, every force has a centre of action; but as to the full extent in space of a unit of natural force, as an agent of one kind or another, no limits can be assigned. Who shall tell us the boundary in the outward of that power which says “I will,” “I feel,” “I see”? Its modes of acting mechanically are, no doubt, limited to the extent of the investing organism. Nay, in order to their extending even so far, it is necessary that the unity of the organism be maintained by the healthy integrity of the nervous system. In that case consciousness claims all the organism as its domain; and not only when the organism is entire does it refer any pain that arises to the region that is hurt, but after a limb has been amputated, and when it exists only as a phantom, consciousness still feels towards it as if it were still the old reality. Such is the effect of habit, or present assimilation to previous practice.

Our cosmical law, the law of assimilation, must determine, if not the nature, at least the mode of action of this force—this self-manifesting power—for plainly this action must be assimilative. And that it is so, when giving rise to perception, is clearly and distinctly seen; for what is the perceiving of an object, but the mind, as a percipient, assimilating itself to that object? and what is the percept or remembrance of the object, which remains in the mind but the idea—that is, the assimilated symbol of the object, which, however, in consequence of the intrusion in the perception of the mind’s own activity, and of other previously acquired ideas, as also the perceptive image is often very defective as a representation of the reality perceived? We may say that this self-manifesting power, which is thus the characteristic of all that exists, is the agency provided whereby the cosmical law of assimilation shall be realized, though the intimate nature of that agency remains, as now, wholly inscrutable. Nor can it be said to be physical until it is embodied in the ether. In that case, it is rhythmical, or undulatory, and formally representative of the object whence it emanates. But it is enough to know that the most intimate and ultimate property—the characteristic, in short, of that which exists—is self-manifesting power. Now, the existence of a self-manifesting power in an object implies that the object is itself a power or force, or an aggregate of such. This is enough for the purposes of philosophy and science, and we only deceive ourselves when we suppose that we can think of anything that exists and which is not at the same time a force or power ….

Of most things that exist, if not of all, let us say that they are capable of existing in either of two states—the dynamical or the statical—and that, when viewed as dynamical, they are forces or powers; when viewed as statical, they are substances. When we exhaust or think away the properties of existence, the last which vanishes is self-manifesting power in the object which exists, this property being such that when it vanishes so does the object to which existence was awarded. In the science of the day it is maintained by our most popular authors and lecturers that the “physical forces”—taken in the singular number, physical force—is the last word, the ultimate principle. The physical forces are represented as all that there is for God, whereas they are but as the fingers of God.

The idea of antecedent design, either in reference to nature as a whole, or in reference to any object in particular, is dropped as unscientific, or repudiated as unsound; in short, a reference to the physical forces, is the last word permitted in any treatise, if that treatise is to be admitted as possessing a scientific character. Or, if there be one word more, it is only the “correlation” of those same physical forces, and their “conservation,” or persistence eternally in the same amount of energy in the universe. In their own place and within their own sphere, these are physical truths, which are of the greatest value. The former is a wholesome relapse into the old philosophy of nature. The latter is also a return to a view which is more sound than that which was popular before the doctrine of conservation was resuscitated.

Descartes’ opinion, that there was a conservation of motion in the universe, was demonstrated by Newton to be a mistake. Leibnitz adjusted the truth between these great men, showing that it was not motion, but the possibility or means of motion—in one word, energy—that was conserved in the universe.

The doctrine of the conservation of energy amounts to nothing more than this, that inasmuch as every ultimate atom of matter is perfectly elastic, so is the whole universe of atoms perfectly elastic. Hence it is a doctrine which cannot be legitimately extended beyond the merely material sphere; except on the assumption that matter is the only reality, and that there is no such thing as a spiritual world at all—an assumption which, however often it has been made, serves only to awaken a prevailing voice to the contrary, and the firm vote of a large majority to the effect that mind exists as well as matter.

Taking the law of assimilation as the cosmical law, together with self-manifesting power as the characteristic of being, we reach a primary classification of created objects, which corresponds with that which is known as mind and matter—or rather let us say mind and that which is not mind; for there is ground for the apprehension that mind and matter do not include all that exists; and that, along with matter, ether ought to be considered as something intimately related to matter indeed, but yet not just matter. When the elements of the ethereal medium are regarded as truly and simply material, however small and light they may be, the elasticity and pressure which must be assigned to that medium in order to admit of the velocity of light, are altogether out of the harmony of things, and wholly incredible, especially when confronted with the phenomena and the theory of astronomy. Thus, to justify the velocity of light on the same principles as those of sound, in various material media, the ethereal pressure must be 122,400,000,000 times greater than that of the atmosphere—which is incredible, says Macvicar.

But what as to mind? To find what shall be called mind, let us suppose an individualized object which is not an isolated object, or a universe to itself, but a member in a system; then, in obedience to what has been stated, that object must be at once self-manifesting and impressed by the other objects around it, and, in being so impressed, assimilated to them more or less …. Admitting the self-manifesting power to be sensitive, percipient, or conscious, then quantity or intensity of substance or power in a monad is the condition requisite for feeling and thought. And thus, by an immediate co-ordination of our fundamental ideas of self-manifesting power and assimilative action, more or less, we reach a distinct conception of mind viewed in relation with that which is not mind. By this deduction, the primeval created substance, the true protoplasm is still supposed to be homogeneous, animated by its assimilation to the everlasting, the Infinite.

This protoplasm is partitioned in varying degrees so that there are in creation some individualized or separate objects or forces consisting of so small an amount or such weakness of substance that they are wholly fixed and merely perceptible, while there are others consisting of so much more that they are free in their inner life, and have power to perceive themselves also—not, indeed, in the centres of their being, and as unimpressed and without ideas, but as members in a system, impressed or assimilated by other objects, and so having ideas, with power to look in this direction or that, and to act accordingly.

Such, then, according to Macvicar, is the nature of mind or spirit. It is a being so constituted as to be at once in possession of ideas, and so far fixed; and also in possession of undetermined life or activity, and so far free. These are, as it were, the opposite poles of its being, and the conditions of its activity. If either is wanting, the other vanishes. Without something fixed in the mind, some object of thought or feeling, there can be no thinking or feeling. Without something unfixed there can be nothing to think or to feel with, much less can there be any thinking or feeling of self—that is, self-consciousness. But, grant this condition in the individual, and add the law of assimilation, operating first from God above, thus giving reason and conscience, on the higher aspect of our being; and, secondly, from nature around, thus giving observation and instincts harmonious with our situation in the system of the universe, and then human nature emerges.

But human nature plainly belongs to the last day of the work of creation rather than the first, where we are now. In man, to all appearance, the organism is the mother and nurse of the spirit. And though the assimilative action of the mind upon the body becomes normally, at least, stronger and stronger as life advances, so long as the organ retains all its perfection, yet at first the assimilative action of the body upon the mind is almost everything. The infant, the child, is little else but the victim of sensation—that is, of assimilations in its mind, effected by the force of external nature, including the organism itself. But as the mind, through the sustained action towards the focus of the myo-neuro-cerebral system, which is in the brain, gains quantity or intensity—in one word, energy—it becomes more independent and free, and more able to react out of itself upon the organism in any direction of which it makes choice ….

Hitherto, Macvicar has proceeded analytically, or from the one to the many; now, synthetically, from multiplicity to unity:—he continues:—As to the matter in hand, we may say, shortly, that a world of substances becoming multiple and diffuse, and at last merging into ethereal elements, being now given as the product of the law of assimilation in reference to the immensity of the Creator, the same law, when viewed in reference to the unity of the Creator, leads us to infer a process of quite a contrary character. It leads us to expect to find the ethereal elements tending to construct unities of greater energy than themselves. Then, if all cosmical action is cyclical, matter, when existing free in the ether, must ultimately tend to dissolve into pure ether again; for, if the law of creation is as a cycle, in which, after development and as its fruit, the last term gives the first, then has he grounds for his conjecture that complication in structure is necessary to the segregation of nervous matter, and the construction of a “myo-neuro-cerebral system”; and that ether and matter, after developing a molecular economy, as the mother and nurse of a soul or monad of a higher order than the merely material element, through or by this organism, complete the cycle of the economy of the material nature, and eventually touch upon the spiritual world again and contribute to it. Whether this inference is correct or not, it presents a noble hypothesis for consideration, and one which should command attention at a time when the writings of John Worrell Keely, the discoverer of polar energy, and the inventor of vibratory machinery for the utilization of this force in mechanics, are about to be given to the world, supporting as they do, some of “the unwelcome views” advanced by Macvicar a quarter of a century ago. Although Macvicar and Keely differ in their theories of molecular morphology, they agree entirely in calling the cosmical law of sympathetic association or assimilation the watchword and the law of creation. This true protoplasm, the ether, which Macvicar postulated, Keely claims to have proved “a reality”: making use of the ether, which he liberates by vibratory machinery, as the medium of a motive power, which he calls “sympathetic negative attraction.”

CHAPTER III.

THE NATURE OF KEELY’S PROBLEMS.

1885 TO 1887.

Too few the helpers on the road,

Too heavy burdens in the load.

When a movement is willed a current is sent forth from the brain.

Sir James Crichton Browne.

In November 1884, Mr. Keely obtained a standard for progressive research in the success of an experiment, which he had tried many times before, without arriving at the result that his theories had led him to expect. One of those present, at the time that this test was made, afterwards wrote to Mr. Keely, to obtain an explanation of the dynamic force which had been witnessed, causing a small globe to rotate when two persons had taken hold of the rod together, with a firm grasp; one of whom was standing on a circular sheet of metal, from which piano wires stretched toward the globe, near enough to touch one of the plates of glass which insulated the ball. Mr. Keely replied, “I cannot describe it other than the receptive concussion of the two forces, positive and negative, coming together, seeking their coincidents and thus producing rotation by harmonious waves, not streams. You ask if sound waves had anything to do with the motion of the globe? Nothing; the introductory settings are entirely different. The ball ceased to rotate when I took your left hand in my right hand, while with our other hands holding the iron rod resting on the metal plate, because the receptive flows became independent of the circular chord of resonation as set up mechanically. The power of rotation comes on the positive; and the power of negation breaks it up.”…

Encouraged by this confirmation of his theories, Keely pursued his researches with renewed vigour. At this time he wrote, “I am straining every nerve to accomplish certain matters in a given time, working from twelve to fourteen hours daily. Although in my illness I have had some peaceful hours in thinking over the fascinating points associated with the researches to which I am devoting my life, I have also had some very stormy ones in reviewing the many unjust insinuations and denouncements that have been heaped upon me by the ignorant and the base-hearted. My one desire has been the acquisition of knowledge; and, no matter how great the impediment thrown in my path, I will work without ceasing to attain my end. After struggling for over seventeen years, allowing scientists to examine my machinery in the most thorough manner, and to make the most sensitive tests, denunciations have multiplied against me. One charge is that I use sodium in my mercury, in the vacuum test. I have thought that I would never again make any effort to prove that I am honest; but I am working in a new lead, and for the satisfaction of the few friends that I have I propose to show my introductory evolutions, in proof of the negatization of an etheric substance to produce vacuum. The mercury may be delivered to me by an expert: I will operate from an open mercury bath: using the most perfect mercury gauge obtainable, attached to the same sphere that the column is operated from. Professor Rogers, the highest authority we have, saw the operation of inducing these etheric vacuums and pronounced the result wonderful. He said that the scientific world would go down on its knees, if I produced only one pound of vacuum under the conditions named. I showed from one to fourteen lbs. during the evolutions …. As soon as I have been able to combine all the positive and negative forces of etheric vibration in the triple vibratory sphere-engine that I am now at work upon, in short, as soon as I have completed a perfect, patentable machine, then my labours will cease on the Motor line; and after my patents are taken out, I will devote the remainder of my life to Aerial Navigation, for I have the only true system to make it an entire success in the vibratory lift and the vibratory push-process.”

It will be seen that, at this stage, Keely had no idea of giving up the engine; and was still as confident of ultimate success as in the beginning. There is no doubt that, had not the time arrived when the directing power of Providence led him away in quite another direction from the line that he was then working upon, his system for Aerial Navigation would have been lost to this century. “The heart of man deviseth his way, but the Lord directs his steps.”

About this time Keely met with an accident. Under date March 22nd, he wrote, “It has been impossible for me to write, my right hand and arm were so severely strained, but I have not been idle. I have had time for reflection, and I have been setting up a key to explain vibratory rotation. I have also a plan for a device to be attached to the Liberator as an indicator to show when the neutral centre is free from its intensification while operating. In this way the dangerous influences will be avoided which present themselves on the extension of the vibratory waves that operate the gun. All the introductory details of the present engine are as perfect as is possible for the first lead. It is in the form of a sphere, about thirty inches in diameter and weighs 800 lbs. Yesterday saw the pure, positive action of my new Liberator. Mr. Collier and his brother George were present, and witnessed thirty expulsions, made by myself; after which I had them produce the vapour, by imitating my manipulations; which they were unable to do with the old generator. They were very much delighted. To say that the last three weeks have been trying ones, is using very mild language to express what I have suffered from accidents, disappointments, etc., etc. I have been frozen in at my workshop; and all things seemed to go wrong; but my present successes are as an anchor, which I thank God for, who, in His bountiful goodness, has carried me into a port of safety over tempestuous seas.” Again, under various dates, Keely wrote:—“Unbounded success has crowned my new departure. I am now preparing new features that are necessary as adjuncts to denote the true condition, as regards safety in my different vibratory operations.” “Without the aid sent me from on high there would have been nothing left of the discovery mechanically; nor would there now be a single foot-hold on which hope could rest for a completion of the Keely Motor enterprise.”… “I had an accident to one of my registers this morning. It burst with a tremendous report, shaking things up in a lively way, but no other damage was done beyond that to the register.”

“The draughts are nearly completed for the compound vibratory engine, and next week the work will be commenced and pushed forward with all possible speed. This is the machine for continuous operation. The Liberator is as perfect as is possible; and, if the outside adjuncts are in proper sympathy, my struggles will soon be at an end.”… “All things are verging into a condition of perfection through the aid that I have received, but for which the science of vibratory etheric force would, as far as my researches are concerned, have been lost to the world. I feel that the world is waiting for this force; that this advance in science is necessary to keep the proper equilibrium in our age of progress.”…

“There are moments in which I feel that I can measure the very stars, which shine like Edens in planetary space; fit abodes for beings who have made it the study of their lives on earth to create peace and happiness for all around them. Is nature a mystery? No, God is in nature. I do not believe in the line, ‘God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.’ In my estimation, He moves in a very plain and simple way, if we will open our hearts to the understanding of His way. To the man who cannot appreciate the workings of nature, chemically and otherwise, God’s ways may appear mysterious; but when he comes to know nature’s works he will find simplicity itself in its highest order of expression.

“Could I have one wish, as to science, gratified, I would ask to live long enough to be able to appreciate even but one etheric variation in planetary evolution. It might take fifty thousand years to attain this knowledge, but what is that period of time when compared with the cycles that have passed away since this earth existed? Yes, in one sense, ‘God does move in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.’ ”…

“The whirlpool of science has indeed engulphed me in its fascinating vortex.”…

“May 20th.—Yesterday was a day of trials and disappointments. It seemed as if nothing would work right. After labouring six hours to set my safety process, the first operation of the Liberator tore the caps all to pieces. I replaced them by a set of duplicates, and set the Liberator down to the low octaves, when everything worked to a charm. Night was approaching, and I left the workshop to get something to eat, returning about eight o’clock to re-conduct experiments, in order to discover if possible the cause of the sudden and most unexpected intensification. I followed up with great care the progressive lines until I reached the tenth octave, and then liberated a score of times, yet no variation on liberator. Next, I made an attachment to my safety arrangement, and also to my strongest resonator, to experiment on vibratory rotation with my shell; when, within two minutes, it attained a frightful velocity: then I suddenly retracted to the negative, bringing the velocity down from about 1500 per minute to 150. The operation was magnificent, lasting sixty-four minutes, when a second intensification took place, demolishing two safety-shells and one vibratory indicator. I was perfectly dumbfounded, and unable to account for such a phenomenon. It was then near midnight, but I had made up my mind not to discontinue until I had solved the mystery. After an hour’s reflection, I set up a new position on the resonating wave plates in the forty resonating circuit on the base of liberator; and got a result which for purity of uniformity surpassed all experiments that I have ever made. I believe I have now struck the root of this difficulty, and that I shall be able to master it; and obtain continuity of action with perfect rotation.”

“June 1st, 1885.—I am in a perfect sea of mental and physical strain, intensified in anticipation of the near approach of final and complete success, and bombarded from all points of the compass by demands and inquiries; yet, in my researches, months pass as minutes. The immense mental and physical strain of the past few weeks, the struggles and disappointments have almost broken me up. Until the reaction took place, which followed my success, I could never have conceived the possibility of my becoming so reduced in strength as I am now. My labours in the future will be of a much milder character; but, before I again commence them, I must have a few days more of recuperation. I was so absorbed in my researches that I forgot my duty to myself, as regards the requirements of health, and I am now paying the penalty. It has been misery to me to have absorbed so much more time and capital than I anticipated; and without the heaven-sent aid which I have received the world would have lost sight of me for ever.”…

“In view of the unjust comments in certain journals, I intend to withdraw entirely from all contact with newspaper men, to give no more exhibitions after the one which closes the series, and to devote all my time and energies to bringing my models into a patentable condition. It is said that the New York reporters intended to denounce me before witnessing my last experiments. Certainly utter ignorance of my philosophy was displayed in their articles, but they were like the viper biting on the file, and only hurt themselves: for men who possess but a moderate degree of scientific knowledge have denounced them, in turn, as the most ignorant men they had ever come in contact with. They stated that I started with a power estimated at over one million pounds pressure to the square inch on the head of my liberator, a sheer absurdity. The rock I am standing on can no more be moved by a whirlwind of such attacks than the atmospheric disturbance of equilibrium emanating from a butterfly’s wing in motion could blow down the rock of Gibraltar. I enclose a newspaper cutting: it was written by an engineer who has interested himself sufficiently in my work to be able to thoroughly understand my position.”…

“July 15th.—My researches teach me that electricity is but a certain condensed form of atomic vibration, a form showing only the introductory features which precede the etheric vibratory condition. It is a modulated force so conditioned, in its more modest flows, as to be susceptible of benefit to all organisms. Though destructive to a great degree in its explosive positions, it is the medium by which the whole system of organic nature is permeated beneficially; transfusing certain forms of inert matter with life-giving principles. It is to a certain degree an effluence of divinity; but only as the branch is to the tree. We have to go far beyond this condition to reach the pure etheric one, or the body of the tree. The Vibratory Etheric tree has many branches, and electricity is but one of them. Though it is a medium by which the operations of vital forces are performed, it cannot in my opinion be considered the soul of matter.”…

“My safety arrangements (governors and indicators) for liberating are not working well; but I am labouring to attain perfection on these devices, and I hope soon to have them all right.”…

“I have extraordinary powers, it is true, and I must use them to the best advantage; for I know they are the gift of the Almighty, who will, I feel sure, carry me to the end of the work which He has given me to accomplish.”…

“I am positive that this year will terminate my struggles. My work is all progressing satisfactorily, and I am pushing everything forward as rapidly as possible.”…

August 5th.—Mr. Keely wrote to one of his friends,—“I have met with an accident to the Liberator. I was experimenting on the third order of intensification, when the rotation on the circuit was thrown down in the compound resonating chamber, which, by the instantaneous multiplication of the volume induced thereby, caused an explosion bursting the metal casing which enclosed the forty resonators, completely dismantling the Liberator. The shock took my senses from me for a few moments, but I was not even scratched this time. A part of the wall was torn away, and resonators and vibrators were thrown all over the room. The neighbourhood was quite lively for a time, but I quieted all fears by telling the frightened ones that I was only experimenting. I allowed everything to remain until Dr. Woods and Mr. Collier had seen the effect of the explosion.”

The orders of intensification for accelerating dissociation would not be understood by any explanations that could be made, if unaccompanied by the demonstrations witnessed by the late Professor Leidy, Dr. Brinton, and others.

When the ether flows from a tube, its negative centre represents molecular sub-division, carrying interstitially (or between its molecules) the lowest order of liberated ozone. This is the first order of ozone and is wonderfully refreshing and vitalizing to those who breathe it. The second order, or atomic separation, releases a much higher grade of ozone; in fact, too pure for inhalation, as it produces insensibility. The third order, or etheric, is the one that has been (though attended with much danger to the operator) utilized by Keely in his carbon register to produce the circuit of high vibration that breaks up the molecular magnetism which is recognized as cohesion.

The acceleration of these orders is governed by the introductory impulse on a certain combination of vibratory chords, arranged for this purpose in the instrument, with which Keely dissociates the elements of water; and which he calls a liberator.

In molecular dissociation one fork of 620 is used, setting the chords on the first octave.

In atomic separation, two forks: one of 620 and one of 630 per second; setting the chords on the second octave.

In the etheric three forks: one of 620, one of 630, and one of 12,000, setting the chords on the third octave.

Keely’s Three Systems.

My first system is the one which requires introductory mediums of differential gravities, air and water, to induce disturbance of equilibrium on the liberation of vapour, which only reached the inter-atomic position and was held there by the submersion of the molecular and atomic leads in the ‘generator’ I then used. It was impossible with these mediums to go beyond the atomic with this instrument; and I could not dispense with the water until my liberator was invented, nor reach the maximum of the full line of vibration. My first system embraces liberator engine and gun.

“My second system of dissociation I consider complete, as far as the liberation of the ether is concerned, but not sufficiently complete, as yet, in its devices for indicating and governing the vibratory etheric circuit, to make it a safe medium.

“My third system embraces aerial and sub-marine navigation. The experimental sphere intended to test the combination of the positive and negative rotation is nearly completed.

… “I have done everything that I could do to demonstrate the integrity of my inventions, and I will never again allow my devices to be submitted to examinations; not that I am afraid they will be stolen, but I do not wish to have the construction of my improved mechanical devices known until my patents are taken out. Nor will I ever again make a statement, specifying the time when certain work will be finished. If I thought to-morrow would end all my struggles on this system, I would not say so. I have been a great sufferer from my inability to keep my promises, fully believing in my power to keep them, and now I must and will prove that all is right before I promise.

… “The work on the vibratory engine is progressing rapidly. I spend an hour or two every day at the shop where my work is being done, examining every part of it critically as it is being put together. The safety arrangements which I am having attached to my liberator will greatly improve it. Its operation will now be conducted with a gum bulb instead of a violin bow, the pressure of which gives the introductory chord of impulse that vitalizes the whole machine. The chords will all be set in progressive sympathy from the first octave to the fortieth ….

“I have been writing out some of my theories as to sound and odour. These two subjects have intensified me considerably of late, on account of the peculiar position they occupy in their lines of sub-division; as also the peculiar laws that govern them in their dissemination. I see the time approaching when I will be able to write up my system of the true philosophy of nature’s grandest force, and have at my control the proper apparatus to analyze and demonstrate all the progressive links of transmittive sympathy from the crude molecular to the high etheric.”…

“December 17th, 1885.—The setting up of the circles for computing the different lines of etheric chords, in setting the vibratory conditions for continuity, requires close study. I feel convinced that a perfect solution of my difficulties will follow when this part of the work has been completed; and that, before many weeks have passed, a revelation will be unfolded that will startle the world; a revelation, so simple in its character, that the physicists will stand aghast, and perhaps feel humiliated by the nature of their efforts in the past to solve certain problems …. I find my chief trouble in chording up the masses of the different parts composing the negative centres. The negative centre is included in the one-third volume of shell or sphere, starting from the neutral axis or point of suspension. This point of suspension only becomes perfect when the rotation is established on the sphere. One hundred revolutions per minute is all the velocity required to neutralize the gravity of the central third with the velocity of the vibratory circuit at one hundred thousand per second. Taking all matters into consideration associated with the mechanical part of the enterprise, the month of January ought to find all completed, ready for sympathetic graduation. But I fear to be too sanguine when I remember the loss of time and the interferences from exhibitions to which I have been subjected in the past. I feel more and more the great importance of devoting all my energies to the great task that Divine Power has ordained me to perform.”…

At the close of the year 1885, everything seemed to promise full and complete success during the coming year. Mr. Charles Collier, the patent lawyer, shared Keely’s confidence in the near completion of his “struggles.” The stock-holders were enthusiastic, and the stockbrokers were on the qui vive, anticipating a great rise in the shares of The Keely Motor Company. Mr. Collier had written in August to Major Ricarde-Seaver[1]: “The Bank of England is not more solid than is our enterprise. My belief is that the present year will see us through, patents and all.”

The journals had ceased to ridicule, and some of them were giving serious attention to the possibilities lying hidden in the discovery of an unknown force. In 1886, Mr. William Walsh, editor of “Lippincott’s Magazine,” accepted a paper on the subject, publishing it in the September number. It was entitled Keely’s Etheric Force.

This was the first article accepted by any Philadelphia editor, setting forth Keely’s claims on the public for the patience and protection which the discoverer of a force in nature needs, while researching the unknown laws that govern its operation. Up to this time Keely had been held responsible for the errors made in the premature organization of a Keely Motor Company, and the selling of stock before there was anything to give in return for the money paid in by investors.

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[1] This electrician took the first box of stored electricity from Paris to Sir William Thomson (now Lord Kelvin) in Edinburgh; and as early as in 1884 he had convinced himself that Keely had grounds for his claims as a discoverer of an unknown force in nature. [↑]

CHAPTER IV.

SYMPATHETIC VIBRATORY FORCE, 1887.

The teleological view was opposed to the mechanical, which regarded the universe as a collocation of mere facts without any further significance. The mechanical view looked backward to the antecedents of a phenomenon, and explained things by reducing them to their lowest terms; the teleological or philosophical view looked forward to the end or purpose which was being realized, which was the reason of the whole development, and in the deepest sense its cause. Mechanical explanation was an infinite progress, which could ultimately explain nothing; in the last resort, causæ efficientes pendent a finalibus. In defining the nature of the end which it thus asserted, philosophy had to wage unsparing battle against the naturalistic tendencies of our time.—(From a Review of Professor Seth’s address delivered in Glasgow in 1891.)

In 1887, a series of articles appeared in The British Mercantile Gazette, then edited by Mr. Arthur Goddard. The June number devoted more than eight columns to the progress and present position of the discoverer of Etheric Force.

To the Editor of the British Mercantile Gazette.

Sir,—Dr. Ziermann, a German writer, has said that a great deal of sound sense and moral courage are required to introduce ideas which will only be recognised as truth after the lapse of time. He adds, “Nay, even to recognize their truth will require more understanding than falls to the share of most men.” The day will come, I think, when your action in giving the pages of your journal to quotations from Mr. Keely’s papers on Etheric Physics and Etheric Philosophy, will make known your claim to this ‘understanding.’ In the meantime, you have, by your appreciation of his labours and your sympathy in his trials, extended that assistance to the discoverer of this newly-known force in Nature which is more powerful than any other agent in inspiring to renewed efforts; after ridicule and calumny, long continued, have done their worst towards depressing the vital centres of nerve-force. When Mr. Keely has made known the law of sympathetic association to the world, the full meaning of the words “sympathy,” “help,” “consolation,” will be better understood than they are now. The most important discoveries, the most difficult problems of research, the most arduous scientific labours have been achieved by men who have battled with persecution and contempt at every step of their progress; enduring all, as he has done, with patience; in the full assurance that the glorious truths entrusted to him to reveal will, in the end, be proclaimed for the advancement of the race. “The nobler the soul,” writes Ouida, “the more sensitive it is to the blows of injustice.” Cicero tells us that praise stimulates great souls into greater exertions; and Plutarch said that souls are sensitive to sympathy, to praise, and to blame, in exact proportions to the fineness of their fibre. Mr. Keely proves this truth by actual tests, as will be seen in time, to the satisfaction of all investigators.

Every branch of science, every doctrine of extensive application, has had its alphabet, its rudiments, its grammar; indeed, at each fresh step in the path of discovery, the researcher has to work out by experiments the unknown laws which govern his discovery. Ignorant himself, he builds up his knowledge upon a foundation which, uncertain as it must be at first, becomes as secure as that of Gibraltar rocks when, one by one, he has removed the misshapen stones of error, and replaced them with the hewn granite blocks of truth. To attempt to introduce scientists, without any previous preparation, to any new system, no matter how solid its foundation, would be like giving a book published in Greek to a man to read who had never before seen its characters. We do not expect a complicated problem in the higher mathematical analysis to be solved by one who is ignorant of the elementary rules of arithmetic. Just as futile would it be to expect scientists to comprehend the laws of etheric physics and etheric philosophy at one glance.

‘There are some secrets which, who knows not now,

Must, ere he reach them, climb the heapy Alps

Of science, and devote long years to toil.’

Norman Lockyer, in his ‘Chemistry of the Sun,’ writes of molecules that ‘one feels as if dealing with something that is more like a mental than a physical attribute—a sort of expression of free will on the part of the molecules.’ Herein lies one of the secrets of Mr. Keely’s so-called ‘compound secret.’ Again, Mr. Lockyer writes: ‘The law which connects radiation with absorption, and at once enables us to read the riddle set by the sun and stars, is, then, simply the law of sympathetic vibration.’ This is the very corner-stone of Mr. Keely’s philosophy—yes, even of his discovery.

It has been said that all great men who have lived, or who now live, have been indebted for their knowledge to teachers or to books; but all progress depends upon the use made of such knowledge when acquired. In order to bear fruit, knowledge must be increased by reflection, and by placing the mind in that attitude which brings into play the powers of intuition; or, rather, placing it in the receptive state which admits of the in-flowing of what is called inspiration.

Molecular vibration is Keely’s legitimate field of research. In this field his discovery was made, many years since; but it is only now, within this year, that he has reached any approach to a solution of the stupendous problems which have arisen barring and baffling all progress, at times, towards the complete subjugation and control of the force that he had discovered. Again and again has he invited the attention of scientists to his discovery, from the commencement of his researches; but the few scientists who condescended to accept his invitations were so ignorant of the mysteries which they sought to investigate—of ‘the alphabet and rudiments’ of etheric physics—that they found it easier to accuse him of jugglery and of fraud than to account for the phenomena that they witnessed. They addressed their report to a public even more ignorant than themselves, if such a thing could be possible, with the result of preventing other scientists, who would have better understood the experiments, from examining into Keely’s claims, as the discoverer of an unknown force. A system of doctrine can be legitimately refuted only upon its own principles, viz., by disproving its facts, and invalidating the principles deduced from them. It is, then, the facts, and not the opinions of the ignorant or the prejudiced, which are of chief importance here, as in all other questions of moment.

All those men who have witnessed the production of etheric force and its application experimentally, during the exhibitions given at various times, have, if capable of understanding such a marvellous discovery as Keely has made, agreed to a man in bearing testimony, at the time, that no known force could have produced such results under the same conditions.

It is now three years since Keely invited certain English men of science (experimenting in the same field where his explorations commenced) to examine his Liberator; which was dismantled for the purpose, and all its parts assembled for examination before being put together for the production of etheric force, when these men refused to visit his workshop, and it has been said that a Professor of the University of Pennsylvania prevented the investigation by his assertion that compressed air is the force used by Keely with which to dupe his audiences. A schoolboy’s knowledge of the change of temperature always accompanying the compression of air would prevent such an assertion from being made by anyone who had witnessed the operation of the Liberator in the production and storage of etheric force, during which there is not the slightest change of temperature. Had these English scientists, with their knowledge of acoustics, been present on the occasion referred to, no such groundless assertion would have possessed any influence with either; and the world of science would have sooner known and acknowledged the nature and the worth of this great discovery.

Roget says that if we are to reason at all, we can reason only upon the principle that for every effect there must exist a corresponding cause; or, in other words, that there is an established and invariable order of sequence among the changes which take place in the universe. The bar to all further reasoning lies in the fact that there are men who, admitting all the phenomena we behold are the effects of certain causes, still say that these causes are utterly unknown to us, and that their discovery is wholly beyond the reach of our faculties. Those who urge this do not seem to be aware that its general application in every sense would shake the foundation of every kind of knowledge—even that which we regard as built upon the most solid basis. Of causation it is agreed that we know nothing; all that we do know is that one event succeeds another with undeviating constancy; and what do we know of magnetism, electricity, galvanism, but such facts as have been elicited by the labours of experimental enquirers, and the laws which have been deduced from their generalization? Would it be considered a sufficient reason for the absolute rejection of any of these facts—or a whole class of facts—that we are still ignorant of the principle upon which they depend, and that such knowledge is beyond our reach? Facts are every day believed, upon observation, or upon testimony, which we should be exceedingly puzzled to account for, if called upon to do so. Every man who has passed the mere threshold of science ought to be aware that it is quite possible to be in possession of a series of facts, long before he is capable of giving a rational and satisfactory explanation of them; in short, before he is enabled to discover their causes. Also that he must classify his facts and construct hypotheses before he can impart his experimental position to others. Many things which were, for a long time, treated as fabulous and incredible have been proved, in our age, to be authentic facts, as soon as the evidence in support of them was duly subjected to the crucible of scientific investigation. Take, for example, Professor Dewar’s researches in the cause, or origin, of meteoric stones. Fortunately for his branches of research and experiment, he is possessed of that philosophical spirit and energy which enables him to divest himself of all prejudice, and, in constructing his theories, to welcome the evidence of truth from whatever quarter it approaches. More than two thousand years elapsed between the first record of the phenomenon, by Anaxagoras, and Mr. Howard’s observations in 1802, during which time the fact was disputed most strenuously by many, while, in our time, Professor Dewar’s explanations of the same, upon intelligible and satisfactory principles, have confirmed the statements made centuries ago. How few the years, in comparison, since Keely’s grand discovery first broke upon his own mind, which he has devoted to experiment, to invention, to the classification of facts, and the building up of hypotheses, before reaching the goal of his desires. Men will marvel at the shortness of the period when all that he has accomplished is made known. The delays which have occurred in bringing before the world the actual discovery of this primal force, from which all the forces of nature spring, have been in part occasioned by the want of that sympathy and appreciation which Keely would have received from his fellow-men, had scientists believed him to be honest in his claims. He would not then have been left in the merciless hands of “a ring,” which gave or withheld financial aid according as he could be “thumbscrewed,” into giving exhibitions for speculative ends on the part of “the ring.” These costly days of delay are now a thing of the past. Keely’s programme of work for the remainder of the year embraces such exhibitions of his progress as can be given without interfering with this programme.

Coleridge says in “Table Talk,”—“I have seen what I am certain I would not have believed on your telling; and in all reason, therefore, I can neither expect nor wish that you should believe on mine.” It is of all tasks the most difficult to procure any favourable reception for doctrines which are objectionable only because they are deemed to be incompatible with preconceived notions. It does not answer to disturb the calmness of views now held by our most eminent physicists, who seem to expect that nature will always accommodate her operations to their preconceived notions of possibility, and adapt her phenomena to their arbitrary systems of philosophy. We are all familiar with the anecdote of the wise Indian potentate who imagined that his informant was imposing upon his credulity when giving him an accurate description of the steam-engine. Now what would be thought of that philosopher who, in attempting to communicate an adequate idea of the operation of the steam-engine, should content himself with a mere description of its mechanism—of its wheels and levers, and cylinders and pistons—keeping entirely out of view the moving power—the steam; and ridiculing all investigation into the nature, application, and phenomena of this power. Yet this is exactly what microscopic observers of the animal economy call “absurd and useless inquiry.” The true springs of our organization are not these muscles, these arteries, these nerves, which are described and experimented upon with so much care and exactness. They are hidden springs, the action of which are as miracles to those who have vainly tried to account for the motion of the muscles at the command of the will; for the power of vision, which places the human eye in intimate and immediate connection with the soul—dependent as they are upon unknown laws, assigned them by the great, omniscient and omnipotent Being by whom they were originally created, and Who is the one source of all power.

Although in our present ordinary state of existence we are permitted to see only “as through a glass darkly,” ignorant of many of the powers and processes of nature, as well as of the causes to which they are to be ascribed, we are not, therefore, entitled to set limits to her operations, and to say to her, “Hitherto shalt thou go, and no further! “We must not presume, says Glanvill, to assign bounds to the exercise of the power of the Almighty, nor are these operations and that power to be controlled by the arbitrary theories and capricious fancies of man. We are surrounded by the incredible—the seemingly miraculous. Who would not ask for demonstration when told that a gnat’s wing, in its ordinary flight, beats many hundred times in a second? But what is this, when compared to the astonishing truths which modern optical inquiries reveal—such as teach us that the sensation of violet light affects our eyes 707 millions of millions of times per second in order to effect that sensation?

How strangely must they estimate nature, how highly must they value their own conceits, who deny the possibility of any cause of any effect, merely because it is incomprehensible. In fact, what do men comprehend? What do they know of causes? When Newton said that gravitation held the world together, he assigned no reason why the heavenly bodies do not fly off from each other into infinite space. The discoverer of etheric force is able to give the reasons for, and the explanations of, the laws involved in all that he asserts; or, rather, all that he propounds; for, with the true humility of wisdom, he asserts nothing. Newton at first thought that he had discovered in electricity the ether which he asserted pervades all nature, until, by repeated experiments, he became convinced of the insufficiency of that principle to explain the phenomena. Other philosophers have speculated upon magnetism in the same way, and upon the similarity between magnetism and electricity. Mr. Keely’s experiments show that the two are, in part, antagonistic, and that both are but modifications of the one force in nature. There have been some physiologists who have maintained that the nerves are merely the conductors of some fluid from the brain and spinal cord to the different parts of the body, and that this circulating fluid is capable of an external expansion, which takes place with such energy as to form an atmosphere, or sphere of activity, similar to that of electrical bodies. Dr. Roget observes that the velocity with which the nerves subservient to sensation transmit the impressions they receive at one extremity, along their whole course, exceeds all measurement, and can be compared only to that of electricity passing along a conducting wire. A comparison with gravity would have been nearer the truth, though no computation ever has been made, or ever can be made, between the flight of gravity and of electricity, so infinitely swifter is the former.

Béclard almost completely demonstrated the truth of Roget’s hypothesis concerning the action of “the nervous fluid” by cutting a nerve of considerable size, adjoining a muscle, which induced paralysis in this part. Perceiving the contractile action reappear, when he approached the two ends of the nerve to the distance of three lines, he became convinced that an imponderable substance, a fluid of some kind, traversed the interval of separation, in order to restore the muscular action. By another experiment he demonstrated its striking analogy to galvanic electricity. The late Professor Keil, of Jena, also made some very interesting experiments of the same character, one of which tends to demonstrate the susceptibility of the nervous system to the magnetic influence, and the efficacy of the magnet in the cure of certain infirmities. It was communicated by him to a meeting of the Royal Society of London more than fifty years since. If we are justified, then, in assuming the existence of this nervous fluid, writes Colquhoun, in 1836, whether secreted by, or merely conducted by the nerves, and of its analogy to the other known, active, and imponderable fluids, and of its capability of external expansion, as in the case of electricity, it does not appear to be a very violent or unwarrantable proceeding to extend the hypothesis a little further, and to infer that it is also capable of being transmitted or directed outwards, either involuntarily or by the volition of one individual, with such energy as to produce certain real and perceptible effects upon the organism of another, in a manner analogous to what is known to occur in the case of the torpedo the gymnotus-electricus, etc.

Should it be that Mr. Keely’s compound secret includes any explanation of this operation of will-force, showing that it may be cultivated, in common with the other powers which God has given us, we shall then recover some of the knowledge lost out of the world, or retained only in gipsy tribes and among Indian adepts.

The effects of the law of sympathetic association, which Mr. Keely demonstrates as the governing medium of the universe, find illustrations in inanimate nature. What else is the influence which one string of a lute has upon a string of another lute when a stroke upon it causes a proportionable motion and sound in the sympathizing consort, which is distant from it, and not perceptibly touched? It has been found that, in a watchmaker’s shop, the timepieces, or clocks, connected with the same wall or shelf, have such a sympathetic effect in keeping time, that they stop those which beat in irregular time; and, if any are at rest, set those going which beat accurately. Norman Lockyer deals with the law of sympathetic association as follows:—“While in the giving out of light we are dealing with molecular vibration taking place so energetically as to give rise to luminous radiation, absorption phenomena afford no evidence of this motion of the molecules when their vibrations are far less violent.”… “The molecules are so apt to vibrate each in its own period that they will take up vibrations from light which is passing among them, provided always that the light thus passing among them contains the proper vibrations.”… “Let us try to get a mental image of what goes on. There is an experiment in the world of sound which will help us.”… “Take two large tuning-forks, mounted on sounding-boxes, and tuned to exact unison. One of the forks is set in active vibration by means of a fiddle-bow, and then brought near to the other one, the open mouths presented to each other. After a few moments, if the fork originally sounded is damped to stop its sound, it will be found that the other fork has taken up the vibration, and is sounding distinctly. If the two forks are not in unison, no amount of bowing of the one will have the slightest effect in producing sound from the other.”

Although physicists know that this extraordinary influence exists between inanimate objects as a class, they look upon the human organism as little more than a machine, taking small interest in researches which evince the dominion of mind over matter. Keely’s experimental research in this province has shown him that it is neither the electric nor the magnetic flow, but the etheric, which sends its current along our nerves; that the electric or the magnetic bears an infinitely small ratio to that of an etheric flow, both as to velocity and tenuity; that true coincidents can exist between any mediums—cartilage to steel, steel to wood, wood to stone, and stone to cartilage; that the same influence (sympathetic association) which governs all the solids holds the same governing influence over all liquids; and again, from liquid to solid, embracing the three kingdoms, animal, vegetable and mineral; that the action of mind over matter thoroughly substantiates these incontrovertible laws of sympathetic etheric influence; that the only true medium which exists in nature is the sympathetic flow emanating from the normal human brain, governing correctly the graduating and setting-up of the true sympathetic vibratory positions in machinery necessary to success; that these flows come in on the order of the fifth and seventh positions of atomic subdivision, compound ether a resultant of this subdivision; that, if metallic mediums are brought under the influence of this sympathetic flow they become organisms which carry the same influence with them that the human brain does over living physical positions—that the composition of the metallic and of the physical are one and the same thing, although the molecular arrangement of the physical may be entirely opposite to the metallic on their aggregations; that the harmonious chords induced by sympathetic positive vibration permeate the molecules in each, notwithstanding, and bring about the perfect equation of any differentiation that may exist—in one, the same as in the other—and thus they become one and the same medium[1] for sympathetic transmission; that the etheric flow is of a tenuity coincident to the condition governing the seventh subdivision of matter—a condition of subtlety that readily and instantaneously permeates all forms of aggregated matter, from air to solid hammered steel—the velocity of the permeation being the same with the one as with the other; that the tenuity of the etheric flow is so infinitely fine that any magnifying glass, the power of which would enlarge the smallest grain of sand to the size of the sun, brought to bear upon it, would not make it visible to us; that light, traversing at the speed of 200,000 miles per second a distance requiring a thousand centuries to reach, would be traversed by the etheric flow in an indefinite fragment of a second.

These are some of the problems which Mr. Keely has had to solve before he could adapt his vibratory machinery to the etheric flow. The true conditions for transmitting it sympathetically through a differential wire of platinum and silver have now been attained, after eight years of intense study and elaborate experiment. The introductory indications began to show themselves about two years ago, but the intermissions on transmission were so frequent and so great as to discourage Mr. Keely from further research on this line. Then came one of those “inspirations” which men call “accident,” revealing to him “the true conditions” necessary to produce a sympathetic flow, free of differentiation, proving conclusively the truth of his theory of the law governing the atomic triplets in their association. Differentiation, by compound negative vibration of their neutral centres, causes antagonism, and thus the great attractive power that aggregates them becomes one of dispersion or expansion, accompanied by immense velocity of rotation, which carries its influence through the whole volume of air, 230 cubic inches contained in sphere, within its 33⅓ chord of its circle of coincidence. By this wire of platinum and silver the current of force is now passed to run the vibratory disk, thus altogether upsetting the “compressed air” theory of Professor Barker, Dr. Hall, and others of less note.

“In setting the conditions of molecular sympathetic transmission by wire,” writes Keely, “the same law calls for the harmonious adjustment of the thirds, to produce a non-intermittent flow of sympathy. Intermission means failure here. That differential molecular volume is required, in two different mediums of molecular density, to destroy differentiation of sympathetic flow, seems at first sight to controvert the very law established by the great Creator, which constitutes harmony—a paradoxical position which has heretofore misled physicists who have propounded and set forth most erroneous doctrines, because they have accepted the introductory conditions, discarding their sympathetic surroundings. The volume of the neutral centre of the earth is of no more magnitude than the one of a molecule: the sympathetic condition of one can be reached in the same time as the other by its coincident chord.”

Thus it will be seen what difficulties Keely has encountered in his persevering efforts to use the etheric flow in vibratory machinery. One by one he has conquered each, attaining the transmission of the etheric current in the same manner as the electric current, with this one notable difference—that, in order to show insulation to the sceptical, he passes the etheric current through blocks of glass in running his vibratory devices.

When Keely’s system is finished, then, and not until then, all that is involved in his discovery will be made known to the world.