But such attention was never called to the said passages before Nov. 28, 1881, when Dr. Hunt read his “Celestial Chemistry, from the time of Newton.” As Le Couturier says:
Till then the idea was universal, even among the men of Science, that Newton had, while advocating the corpuscular theory, preached a void.
The passages had been “long neglected,” no doubt because they contradicted and clashed with the preconceived pet theories of the day, till finally the undulatory theory imperiously required the presence of an “ethereal medium” to explain it. This is the whole secret.
Anyhow, it is from this theory of Newton of a universal void, taught, if not believed in by himself, that dates the immense scorn now shown by modern Physics for ancient. The old sages had maintained that “Nature abhorred a vacuum,” and the greatest mathematicians of the [pg 538] world—read of the Western races—had discovered the antiquated “fallacy” and exposed it. And now Modern Science, however ungracefully, vindicates Archaic Knowledge, and has, moreover, to vindicate Newton's character and powers of observation at this late hour, after having neglected, for one century and a half, to pay any attention to such very important passages—perchance, because it was wiser not to attract any notice to them. Better late than never!
And now Father Æther is re-welcomed with open arms and wedded to gravitation, linked to it for weal or woe, until the day when it, or both, shall be replaced by something else. Three hundred years ago it was plenum everywhere, then it became one dismal vacuity; later still the sidereal ocean-beds, dried up by Science, rolled onward once more their ethereal waves. Recede ut procedas must become the motto of exact Science—“exact,” chiefly, in finding itself inexact every leap-year.
But we will not quarrel with the great men. They had to go back to the earliest “Gods of Pythagoras and old Kanâda” for the very backbone and marrow of their correlations and “newest” discoveries, and this may well afford good hope to the Occultists for their minor Gods. For we believe in Le Couturier's prophecy about gravitation. We know the day is approaching when an absolute reform will be demanded in the present modes of Science by the Scientists themselves, as was done by Sir William Grove, F.R.S. Till that day there is nothing to be done. For if gravitation were dethroned to-morrow, the Scientists would discover some other new mode of mechanical motion the day after.[822] Rough and up-hill is the path of true Science, and its days are full of vexation of spirit. But in the face of its “thousand” contradictory hypotheses offered as explanations of physical phenomena, there has been no better hypothesis than “motion”—however paradoxically interpreted by Materialism. As may be found in the first pages of this Volume, Occultists have nothing to say against Motion,[823] the Great Breath of Mr. Herbert Spencer's “Unknowable.” [pg 539] But, believing that everything on Earth is the shadow of something in Space, they believe in smaller “Breaths,” which, living, intelligent and independent of all but Law, blow in every direction during manvantaric periods. These Science will reject. But whatever may be made to replace attraction, alias gravitation, the result will be the same. Science will be as far then from the solution of its difficulties as it is now, unless it comes to some compromise with Occultism, and even with Alchemy—a supposition which will be regarded as an impertinence, but remains, nevertheless, a fact. As Faye says:
Il manque quelque chose aux géologues pour faire la géologie de la Lune; c'est d'être astronomes. À la vérité, il manque aussi quelque chose aux astronomes pour aborder avec fruit cette étude, c'est d'être géologues.[824]
But he might have added, with still more pointedness:
Ce qui manque à tous les deux, c'est l'intuition du mystique.
Let us remember Sir William Grove's wise “concluding remarks,” on the ultimate structure of Matter, or the minutiæ of molecular actions, which, he thought, man will never know.