It is just because Keely's discovery would lead to a knowledge of one of the most Occult secrets, a secret which can never be allowed to fall into the hands of the masses, that his failure to push his discoveries to their logical end seems certain to Occultists. But of this more presently. Even in its limitations this discovery may prove of the greatest benefit. For:
Step by step, with a patient perseverance which some day the world will honour, this man of genius has made his researches, overcoming the colossal difficulties which again and again raised up in his path what seemed to be (to all but himself) insurmountable barriers to further progress: but never has the world's index finger so pointed to an hour when all is making ready for the advent of the new form of force that mankind is waiting for. Nature, always reluctant to yield her secrets, is listening to the demands made upon her by her master, necessity. The coal mines of the world cannot long afford the increasing drain made upon them. Steam has reached its utmost limits of power, and does not fulfil the requirements of the age. It knows that its days are numbered. Electricity holds back, with bated breath, dependent upon the approach of her sister colleague. Air ships are riding at anchor, as it were, waiting for the force which is to make aërial navigation something more than a dream. As easily as men communicate with their offices from their homes by means of the telephone, so will the inhabitants of separate continents talk across the ocean. Imagination is palsied when seeking to foresee the [pg 612]grand results of this marvellous discovery, when once it is applied to art and mechanics. In taking the throne which it will force steam to abdicate, dynaspheric force will rule the world with a power so mighty in the interests of civilization, that no finite mind can conjecture the results. Laurence Oliphant, in his preface to Scientific Religion, says: “A new moral future is dawning upon the human race—one, certainly, of which it stands much in need.” In no way could this new moral future be so widely, so universally, commenced as by the utilizing of dynaspheric force to beneficial purposes in life.
The Occultists are ready to admit all this with the eloquent writer. Molecular vibration is, undeniably, “Keely's legitimate field of research,” and the discoveries made by him will prove wonderful—yet only in his hands and through himself. The world so far will get but that with which it can be safely entrusted. The truth of this assertion has, perhaps, not yet quite dawned upon the discoverer himself, since he writes that he is absolutely certain that he will accomplish all that he has promised, and that he will then give it out to the world; but it must dawn upon him, and at no very far distant date. And what he says in reference to his work is a good proof of it:
In considering the operation of my engine, the visitor, in order to have even an approximate conception of its modus operandi, must discard all thought of engines that are operated upon the principle of pressure and exhaustion, by the expansion of steam or other analogous gas which impinges upon an abutment, such as the piston of a steam-engine. My engine has neither piston nor eccentrics, nor is there one grain of pressure exerted in the engine, whatever may be the size or capacity of it. My system, in every part and detail, both in the developing of my power and in every branch of its utilization, is based and founded on sympathetic vibration. In no other way would it be possible to awaken or develop my force, and equally impossible would it be to operate my engine upon any other principle.... This, however, is the true system; and henceforth all my operations will be conducted in this manner—that is to say, my power will be generated, my engines run, my cannon operated, through a wire. It has been only after years of incessant labour, and the making of almost innumerable experiments, involving not only the construction of a great many most peculiar mechanical structures, and the closest investigation and study of the phenomenal properties of the substance “ether,” per se, produced, that I have been able to dispense with complicated mechanism, and to obtain, as I claim, mastery over the subtle and strange force with which I am dealing.
The passages underlined by us, are those which bear directly on the Occult side of the application of the vibratory Force, that which Mr. Keely calls “sympathetic vibration.” The “wire” is already a step below, or downward from the pure Etheric plane into the Terrestrial. The discoverer has produced marvels—the word “miracle” is not too [pg 613] strong—when acting through the inter-etheric Force alone, the fifth and sixth principles of Âkâsha. From a generator six feet long, he has come down to one “no larger than an old-fashioned silver watch”; and this by itself is a miracle of mechanical, but not of spiritual, genius. As was well said by his great patroness and defender, Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore:
The two forms of force which he has been experimenting with, and the phenomena attending them, are the very antithesis of each other.
One was generated and acted upon by and through himself. No one, who should have repeated the thing done by himself, could have produced the same results. It was truly Keely's Ether that acted, while Smith's or Brown's Ether would have remained for ever barren of results. For Keely's difficulty has hitherto been to produce a machine which would develop and regulate the Force without the intervention of any “will power” or personal influence of the operator, whether conscious or unconscious. In this he has failed, so far as others were concerned, for no one but himself could operate on his “machines.” Occultly this was a far more advanced achievement than the “success” which he anticipates from his wire, but the results obtained from the fifth and sixth planes of the Etheric, or Astral, Force, will never be permitted to serve for purposes of commerce and traffic. That Keely's organism is directly connected with the production of his marvellous results is proven by the following statement, emanating from one who knows the great discoverer intimately.
At one time the shareholders of the “Keely Motor Co.” put a man in his workshop for the express purpose of discovering his secret. After six months of close watching, he said to J. W. Keely one day: “I know how it is done, now.” They had been setting up a machine together, and Keely was manipulating the stop-cock which turned the force on and off. “Try it, then,” was the answer. The man turned the cock, and nothing came. “Let me see you do it again,” the man said to Keely. The latter complied, and the machinery operated at once. Again the other tried, but without success. Then Keely put his hand on his shoulder and told him to try once more. He did so, with the result of an instantaneous production of the current.
This fact, if true, settles the question.
We are told that Mr. Keely defines electricity “as a certain form of atomic vibration.” In this he is quite right; but this is Electricity on the terrestrial plane, and through terrestrial correlations. He estimates—