The phenomena of mesmerism are explicable upon no other hypothesis than the projection of a current of force from the operator into the subject. If a man can project this force by an exercise of the will, what prevents his attracting it toward himself by reversing the current? Unless, indeed, it be urged that the force is generated within his body and cannot be attracted from any supply without. But even under such an hypothesis, if he can generate a superabundant supply to saturate another person, or even an inanimate object by his will, why cannot he generate it in excess for self-saturation?
In his work on Anthropology, Professor J. R. Buchanan notes the tendency of the natural gestures to follow the direction of the phrenological organs; the attitude of combativeness being downward and backward; that of hope and spirituality upward and forward; that of firmness upward and backward; and so on. The adepts of Hermetic science know this principle so well that they explain the levitation of their own bodies, whenever it happens unawares, by saying that the thought is so intently fixed upon a point above them, that when the body is thoroughly imbued with the astral influence, it follows the mental aspiration and rises into the air as easily as a cork held beneath the water rises to the surface when its buoyancy is allowed to assert itself. The giddiness felt by certain persons when standing upon the brink of a chasm is explained upon the same principle. Young children, who have little or no active imagination, and in whom experience has not had sufficient time to develop fear, are seldom, if ever, giddy; but the adult of a certain mental temperament, seeing the chasm and picturing in his imaginative fancy the consequences of a fall, allows himself to be drawn by the attraction of the earth, and unless the spell of fascination be broken, his body will follow his thought to the foot of the precipice.
That this giddiness is purely a temperamental affair, is shown in the fact that some persons never experience the sensation, and inquiry will probably reveal the fact that such are deficient in the imaginative faculty. We have a case in view—a gentleman who, in 1858, had so firm a nerve that he horrified the witnesses by standing upon the coping of the Arc de Triomphe, in Paris, with folded arms, and his feet half over the edge; but, having since become short-sighted, was taken with a panic upon attempting to cross a plank-walk over the courtyard of a hotel, where the footway was more than two feet and a half wide, and there was no danger. He looked at the flagging below, gave his fancy free play, and would have fallen had he not quickly sat down.
It is a dogma of science that perpetual motion is impossible; it is another dogma, that the allegation that the Hermetists discovered the elixir of life, and that certain of them, by partaking of it, prolonged their existence far beyond the usual term, is a superstitious absurdity. And the claim that the baser metals have been transmuted into gold, and that the universal solvent was discovered, excites only contemptuous derision in a century which has crowned the edifice of philosophy with a copestone of protoplasm. The first is declared a physical impossibility; as much so, according to Babinet, the astronomer, as the “levitation of an object without contact;”[749] the second, a physiological vagary begotten of a disordered mind; the third, a chemical absurdity.
Balfour Stewart says that while the man of science cannot assert that “he is intimately acquainted with all the forces of nature, and cannot prove that perpetual motion is impossible; for, in truth, he knows very little of these forces ... he does think that he has entered into the spirit and design of nature, and therefore he denies at once the possibility of such a machine.”[750] If he has discovered the design of nature, he certainly has not the spirit, for he denies its existence in one sense; and denying spirit he prevents that perfect understanding of universal law which would redeem modern philosophy from its thousand mortifying dilemmas and mistakes. If Professor B. Stewart’s negation is founded upon no better analogy than that of his French contemporary, Babinet, he is in danger of a like humiliating catastrophe. The universe itself illustrates the actuality of perpetual motion; and the atomic theory, which has proved such a balm to the exhausted minds of our cosmic explorers, is based upon it. The telescope searching through space, and the microscope probing the mysteries of the little world in a drop of water, reveal the same law in operation; and, as everything below is like everything above, who would presume to say that when the conservation of energy is better understood, and the two additional forces of the kabalists are added to the catalogue of orthodox science, it may not be discovered how to construct a machine which shall run without friction and supply itself with energy in proportion to its wastes? “Fifty years ago,” says the venerable Mr. de Lara, “a Hamburg paper, quoting from an English one an account of the opening of the Manchester and Liverpool Railway, pronounced it a gross fabrication; capping the climax by saying, ‘even so far extends the credulity of the English;’” the moral is apparent. The recent discovery of the compound called METALLINE, by an American chemist, makes it appear probable that friction can, in a large degree, be overcome. One thing is certain, when a man shall have discovered the perpetual motion he will be able to understand by analogy all the secrets of nature; progress in direct ratio with resistance.
We may say the same of the elixir of life, by which is understood physical life, the soul being of course deathless only by reason of its divine immortal union with spirit. But continual or perpetual does not mean endless. The kabalists have never claimed that either an endless physical life or unending motion is possible. The Hermetic axiom maintains that only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reäbsorbed by it at the end of time) are incorruptible and eternal. But, in possession of a knowledge of occult natural forces, yet undiscovered by the materialists, they asserted that both physical life and mechanical motion could be prolonged indefinitely. The philosophers’ stone had more than one meaning attached to its mysterious origin. Says Professor Wilder: “The study of alchemy was even more universal than the several writers upon it appear to have known, and was always the auxiliary, if not identical with, the occult sciences of magic, necromancy, and astrology; probably from the same fact that they were originally but forms of a spiritualism which was generally extant in all ages of human history.”
Our greatest wonder is, that the very men who view the human body simply as a “digesting machine,” should object to the idea that if some equivalent for metalline could be applied between its molecules, it should run without friction. Man’s body is taken from the earth, or dust, according to Genesis; which allegory bars the claims of modern analysts to original discovery of the nature of the inorganic constituents of human body. If the author of Genesis knew this, and Aristotle taught the identity between the life-principle of plants, animals, and men, our affiliation with mother earth seems to have been settled long ago.
Elie de Beaumont has recently reasserted the old doctrine of Hermes that there is a terrestrial circulation comparable to that of the blood of man. Now, since it is a doctrine as old as time, that nature is continually renewing her wasted energies by absorption from the source of energy, why should the child differ from the parent? Why may not man, by discovering the source and nature of this recuperative energy, extract from the earth herself the juice or quintessence with which to replenish his own forces? This may have been the great secret of the alchemists. Stop the circulation of the terrestrial fluids and we have stagnation, putrefaction, death; stop the circulation of the fluids in man, and stagnation, absorption, calcification from old age, and death ensue. If the alchemists had simply discovered some chemical compound capable of keeping the channels of our circulation unclogged, would not all the rest easily follow? And why, we ask, if the surface-waters of certain mineral springs have such virtue in the cure of disease and the restoration of physical vigor, is it illogical to say that if we could get the first runnings from the alembic of nature in the bowels of the earth, we might, perhaps, find that the fountain of youth was no myth after all. Jennings asserts that the elixir was produced out of the secret chemical laboratories of nature by some adepts; and Robert Boyle, the chemist, mentions a medicated wine or cordial which Dr. Lefevre tried with wonderful effect upon an old woman.
Alchemy is as old as tradition itself. “The first authentic record on this subject,” says William Godwin, “is an edict of Diocletian, about 300 years after Christ, ordering a diligent search to be made in Egypt for all the ancient books which treated of the art of making gold and silver, that they might be consigned to the flames. This edict necessarily presumes a certain antiquity to the pursuit; and fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries.”
And this question of transmutation—this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitæ in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius, Geberus, Arnoldus, Thomas Aquinas, Bernardus Comes, Joannes Penotus, Quercetanus Geber, the Arabian father of European alchemy, Eugenius Philalethes, Baptista Porta, Rubeus, Dornesius, Vogelius, Irenæus Philaletha Cosmopolita, and many mediæval alchemists and Hermetic philosophers assert the fact. Must we believe them all visionaries and lunatics, these otherwise great and learned scholars? Francesco Picus, in his work De Auro, gives eighteen instances of gold being produced in his presence by artificial means; and Thomas Vaughan,[751] going to a goldsmith to sell 1,200 marks worth of gold, when the man suspiciously remarked that the gold was too pure to have ever come out of a mine, ran away, leaving the money behind him. In a preceding chapter we have brought forward the testimony of a number of authors to this effect.