Section III. Is Gravitation a Law?
The corpuscular theory has been unceremoniously put aside; but gravitation—the principle that all bodies attract each other with a force proportional directly to their masses, and inversely to the squares of the distances between them—survives to this day and reigns, supreme as ever, in the alleged ethereal waves of Space. As a hypothesis, it had been threatened with death for its inadequacy to embrace all the facts presented to it; as a physical law, it is the King of the late and once all-potent “Imponderables.” “It is little short of blasphemy ... an insult to Newton's grand memory to doubt it!”—is the exclamation of an American reviewer of Isis Unveiled. Well; what is finally that invisible and intangible God in whom we should believe on blind faith? Astronomers who see in gravitation an easy-going solution for many things, and a universal force which allows them to calculate planetary motions, care little about the Cause of Attraction. They call Gravity a law, a cause in itself. We call the forces acting under that name effects, and very secondary effects, too. One day it will be found that the scientific hypothesis does not answer after all; and then it will follow the corpuscular theory of light, and be consigned to rest for many scientific æons in the archives of all exploded speculations. Has not Newton himself expressed grave doubts about the nature of Force and the corporeality of the “Agents,” as they were then called? So has Cuvier, another scientific light shining in the night of research. He warns his readers, in the Révolution du Globe, about the doubtful nature of the so-called Forces, saying that “it is not so sure whether those agents were not after all Spiritual Powers [des agents spirituels].” At the outset of his Principia, Sir Isaac Newton took the greatest care to impress upon his school that he did not use the word “attraction,” with regard to the mutual action of bodies in a physical sense. To him it was, he said, a purely mathematical conception, involving no [pg 533] consideration of real and primary physical causes. In a passage of his Principia,[810] he tells us plainly that, physically considered, attractions are rather impulses. In Section xi (Introduction), he expresses the opinion that “there is some subtle spirit by the force and action of which all movements of matter are determined”;[811] and in his Third Letter to Bentley he says:
It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter, without mutual contact, as it must do if gravitation, in the sense of Epicurus, be essential and inherent in it.... That gravity should be innate, inherent and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance, through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else by and through which their action may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man, who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws; but whether this agent be material or immaterial I have left to the consideration of my readers.
At this, even Newton's contemporaries got frightened—at the apparent return of Occult Causes into the domain of Physics. Leibnitz called his principle of attraction “an incorporeal and inexplicable power.” The supposition of an attractive faculty and a perfect void was characterized by Bernoulli as “revolting,” the principle of actio in distans finding then no more favour than it does now. Euler, on the other hand, thought the action of gravity was due to either a Spirit or some subtle medium. And yet Newton knew of, if he did not accept, the Ether of the Ancients. He regarded the intermediate space between the sidereal bodies as vacuum. Therefore he believed in “subtle Spirit” and Spirits as we do, guiding the so-called attraction. The above-quoted words of the great man have produced poor results. The “absurdity” has now become a dogma in the case of pure Materialism, which repeats: “No Matter without Force, no Force without Matter; Matter and Force are inseparable, eternal and indestructible [true]; there can be no independent Force, since all Force is an inherent and necessary property of Matter [false]; consequently, there is no immaterial Creative Power.” Oh, poor Sir Isaac!
If, leaving aside all the other eminent men of Science who agreed in opinion with Euler and Leibnitz, the Occultists claim as their authorities and supporters Sir Isaac Newton and Cuvier only, as above cited, they need fear little from Modern Science, and may loudly and proudly [pg 534] proclaim their beliefs. But the hesitation and doubts of the above cited authorities, and of many others, too, whom we could name, did not in the least prevent scientific speculation from wool-gathering in the fields of brute matter just as before. First it was matter and an imponderable fluid distinct from it; then came the imponderable fluid so much criticized by Grove; then Ether, which was at first discontinuous and then became continuous; after which came the “mechanical” Forces. These have now settled in life as “modes of motion,” and the Ether has become more mysterious and problematical than ever. More than one man of Science objects to such crude materialistic views. But then, from the days of Plato, who repeatedly asks his readers not to confuse incorporeal Elements with their Principles—the transcendental or spiritual Elements; from those of the great Alchemists, who, like Paracelsus, made a great difference between a phenomenon and its cause, or the Noumenon; to Grove, who, though he sees “no reason to divest universally diffused matter of the functions common to all matter,” yet uses the term Forces where his critics, “who do not attach to the word any idea of a specific action,” say Force; from those days to this, nothing has proved competent to stem the tide of brutal Materialism. Gravitation is the sole cause, the acting God, and Matter is its prophet, said the men of Science only a few years ago.
They have changed their views several times since then. But do the men of Science understand the innermost thought of Newton, one of the most spiritual-minded and religious men of his day, any better now than they did then? It is certainly to be doubted. Newton is credited with having given the death-blow to the Elemental Vortices of Descartes—the idea of Anaxagoras, resurrected, by the bye—though the last modern “vortical atoms” of Sir William Thomson do not, in truth, differ much from the former. Nevertheless, when his disciple Forbes wrote in the Preface to the chief work of his master a sentence declaring that “attraction was the cause of the system,” Newton was the first to solemnly protest. That which in the mind of the great mathematician assumed the shadowy, but firmly rooted image of God, as the Noumenon of all,[812] was called more philosophically by ancient and [pg 535] modern Philosophers and Occultists—“Gods,” or the creative fashioning Powers. The modes of expression may have been different, and the ideas more or less philosophically enunciated by all sacred and profane Antiquity; but the fundamental thought was the same.[813] For Pythagoras the Forces were Spiritual Entities, Gods, independent of planets and Matter as we see and know them on Earth, who are the rulers of the Sidereal Heaven. Plato represented the planets as moved by an intrinsic Rector, one with his dwelling, like “a boatman in his boat.” As for Aristotle, he called those rulers “immaterial substances”;[814] though as one who had never been initiated, he rejected the Gods as Entities.[815] But this did not prevent him from recognizing the fact that the stars and planets “were not inanimate masses but acting and living bodies indeed.” As if sidereal spirits were the “diviner portions of their phenomena (τὰ θειότερα τῶν φανερῶν).”[816]
If we look for corroboration in more modern and scientific times, we find Tycho Brahe recognizing in the stars a triple force, divine, spiritual and vital. Kepler, putting together the Pythagorean sentence, “the Sun, guardian of Jupiter,” and the verses of David, “He placed his throne in the Sun,” and “the Lord is the Sun,” etc., said that he understood perfectly how the Pythagoreans could believe that all the Globes disseminated through Space were rational Intelligences (facultates ratiocinativæ), circulating round the Sun, “in which resides a pure spirit of fire; the source of the general harmony.”[817]
When an Occultist speaks of Fohat, the energizing and guiding Intelligence in the Universal Electric or Vital Fluid, he is laughed at. [pg 536] Withal, as now shown, the nature neither of electricity, nor of life, nor even of light, is to this day understood. The Occultist sees in the manifestation of every force in Nature, the action of the quality, or the special characteristic of its Noumenon; which Noumenon is a distinct and intelligent Individuality on the other side of the manifested mechanical Universe. Now the Occultist does not deny—on the contrary he will support the view—that light, heat, electricity and so on are affections, not properties or qualities, of Matter. To put it more clearly: Matter is the condition, the necessary basis or vehicle, a sine quâ non, for the manifestation of these Forces, or Agents, on this plane.
But in order to gain the point, the Occultists have to examine the credentials of the law of gravity, first of all, of “Gravitation, the King and Ruler of Matter,” under every form. To do so effectually, the hypothesis, in its earliest appearance, has to be recalled to mind. To begin with, is it Newton who was the first to discover it? The Athenæum of Jan. 26, 1867, has some curious information upon this subject. It says:
Positive evidence can be adduced that Newton derived all his knowledge of Gravitation and its laws from Bœhme, with whom Gravitation or Attraction is the first property of Nature.... For with him, his [Bœhme's] system shows us the inside of things, while modern physical science is content with looking at the outside.