The Universe a Vast Electric Organism

by Geo. W. Warder

He says: "What is it that holds together the parts of which this ultimate atom may be imagined to consist? The only answer is a cohesive force." But he does not attempt to explain what that cohesive force is, while I undertake to say it is magnetic cohesion under the law of electro-magnetism, which holds aggregations of atoms in organic affinity, producing visible form and substance.

He says: "Force is the ultimate of ultimates. Matter and motion are only different manifestations of this unknowable force."

This is making force usurp the place of Deity. Force is a servant, not a master—a tool and not an ultimate cause. Force without intelligence back of it is anarchy and ruin; it is chaos and not a cosmos. God is a scientific necessity.

The ultimate of ultimates is mind or spirit—the eternal intelligent spirit of Deity and man.

I accept the scientific postulate that the conservation of energy and the correlation of forces affirm, first, that there is but one kind of energy or force in the physical universe; but I go further and contend electric energy is that force. Second, that, like matter energy cannot be created or destroyed. Third, that energy appears in a variety of forms as motion, heat, light and so-called gravity and chemical action. Fourth, that these forms of energy are interchangeable—any one form may change into any other form, and all are transformations of the one ultimate force I term electricity. Fifth, that there is nothing in science to show that mind or spirit ever changes into physical energy, or force into mind or matter, or either into the other. This destroys the doctrine of monœcism, or all things from one substance. And Haeckel will have to produce more facts and logic than he has yet set forth to prove that spirit and matter, force and matter are all one and the same thing or substance.

The psychic or mental force is the paramount force, and the true realm of evolution belongs to the mental or spiritual universe and to organic nature. Physical changes are not evolution in the highest sense except as they are the result of spiritual power and unfolding intellect. The highest sphere of evolution is in biology and psychology.

There is matter, mind and force. Materialism is a shallow, one-sided doctrine; and the opposite extreme, that there is no matter, nothing but mind, is also shallow and one-sided. These three separate entities maintain their separate and distinct existence. The electric theory explains and elucidates all natural philosophy and all material phenomena, and is as a scientist has well said, "the best exposition ever offered of the physics and metaphysics of the universe."

In regard to another phase of natural philosophy, Kant proved that in our experience objects can be known only in relation to a subject, and matter only in relation to mind. From this it is evident that mind is at least co-ordinate with matter and cannot be treated as a mere property of matter. From this doctrine Spencer took refuge in the strange notion that we possess two consciousnesses, the consciousness of ideas within us and the consciousness of motions without us. That neither of these could be resolved into the other, though both were the phenomena of an unknowable absolute. This self-contradiction of a dualistic separation between two aspects of our life, which as a matter of fact can never be divided, proved a citadel of ignorance which could not withstand the attacks of logical criticism.

Mr. Spencer's agnostic dualism of objective and subjective mind was due to a fundamental misconception of what is meant by the subjectivity of knowledge. If we have the consciousness of object and subject only in relation to each other, it is not necessary to seek the principle of their unity in any third principle, for his unknowable absolute is "in our mouths and in our hearts," and found in the inseparable unity of experience in which the inward and outward are correlative elements.

It seems Mr. Spencer's agnosticism is a sort of spiritual refuge for the destitutes who renounce their heritage like Esau or waste it like the prodigal son, and feed on husks. For those who by their abstractions separate the elements of experience from each other, are forced to go beyond experience for the unity they have lost, and flounder in the miry bogs of agnosticism.