Section XI. Ancient Thought in Modern Dress.
Modern Science is Ancient Thought distorted, and no more. We have seen, however, what intuitional Scientists think, and are busy about; and now the reader shall be given a few more proofs of the fact that more than one F.R.S. is unconsciously approaching the derided Secret Sciences.
With regard to Cosmogony and primeval matter, modern speculations are undeniably ancient thought, “improved” by contradictory theories of recent origin. The whole foundation belongs to Grecian and Indian Archaic Astronomy and Physics, in those days called always Philosophy. In all the Âryan and Greek speculations, we meet with the conception of an all-pervading, unorganized, and homogeneous Matter, or Chaos, re-named by modern Scientists “nebular condition of the world-stuff.” What Anaxagoras called Chaos in his Homoiomeria is now called “primitive fluid” by Sir William Thomson. The Hindû and Greek Atomists—Kanâda, Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, etc.—are now reflected, as in a clear mirror, in the supporters of the Atomic Theory of our modern days, beginning with Leibnitz's Monads, and ending with the Vortical Atoms of Sir William Thomson.[991] True, the corpuscular theory of old is rejected, and the undulatory theory has taken its place. But the question is, whether the latter is so firmly established as not to be liable to be dethroned like its predecessor? Light, from its metaphysical aspect, has been fully treated in Isis Unveiled:
Light is the first begotten, and the first emanation of the Supreme, and Light is Life, says the Evangelist [and the Kabalist]. Both are electricity—the life principle, the Anima Mundi—pervading the Universe, the electric vivifier of all things. [pg 634]Light is the great Protean magician, and under the divine Will of the Architect[992][or rather the Architects, the “Builders,” called One collectively], its multifarious, omnipotent waves gave birth to every form as well as to every living being. From its swelling electric bosom, spring Matter and Spirit. Within its beams lie the beginnings of all physical and chemical action, and of all cosmic and spiritual phenomena; it vitalizes and disorganizes; it gives life and produces death, and from its Primordial Point gradually emerged into existence the myriads of worlds, visible and invisible celestial bodies. It was at the ray of this First Mother, one in three, that “God,” according to Plato, “lighted a Fire which we now call the Sun,”[993] and which is not the cause of either light or heat, but merely the focus, or, as we might say, the lens, by which the Rays of the Primordial Light become materialized, are concentrated upon our Solar System, and produce all the correlations of forces.[994]
This is the Ether, as just explained in the views of Metcalfe, repeated by Dr. Richardson, save for the submission of the former to some details of the modern undulatory theory. We do not say that we deny the theory; we assert only that it needs completion and reärrangement. But the Occultists are by no means the only heretics in this respect; for Mr. Robert Hunt, F.R.S. finds that:
The undulatory theory does not account for the results of his experiments.[995] Sir David Brewster, in his Treatise on Optics, showing “that the colours of vegetable life arise ... from a specific attraction which the particles of these bodies exercise over the differently-coloured rays of light,” and that “it is by the light of the sun that the coloured juices of plants are elaborated, that the colours of bodies are changed, etc.,” remarks that it is not easy to allow “that such effects can be produced by the mere vibration of an ethereal medium.” And he is forced, he says, “by this class of facts, to reason as if light was material” [?]. Professor Josiah P. Cooke, of Harvard University, says that he “cannot agree ... with those who regard the wave-theory of light as an established principle of science.”[996]Herschell's doctrine, that the intensity of light, in effect of each undulation, “is inversely as the square of the distance from the luminous body,” if correct, damages a good deal, if it does not kill, the undulatory theory. That he is right, was proved repeatedly by experiments with photometers; and though it begins to be much doubted, the undulatory theory is still alive.[997]
To this remark of Sir David Brewster—“forced to reason as if light was material”—there is a good deal to reply. Light, in one sense, is [pg 635] certainly as material as is electricity itself. And if electricity is not material, if it is only a “mode of motion,” how is it that it can be stored up in Faure's accumulators? Helmholtz says that electricity must be as atomic as matter; and Mr. W. Crookes, F.R.S., supported the view in his address at Birmingham, in 1886, to the Chemical Section of the British Association, of which he was President. This is what Helmholtz says:
If we accept the hypothesis that the elementary substances are composed of atoms, we cannot avoid concluding that electricity also, positive as well as negative, is divided into definite elementary portions, which behave like atoms of electricity.[998]
Here we have to repeat that which was already said in Section VIII, that there is but one science that can henceforth direct modern research into the one path which will lead to the discovery of the whole, hitherto Occult, truth, and it is the youngest of all—Chemistry, as it now stands reformed. There is no other, not excluding Astronomy, that can so unerringly guide scientific intuition, as can Chemistry. Two proofs of this are to be found in the world of Science—two great Chemists, each among the greatest in his own country, namely, Mr. Crookes and the late Professor Butlerof: the one is a thorough believer in abnormal phenomena; the other was as fervid a Spiritualist, as he was great in the natural sciences. It becomes evident that, while pondering over the ultimate divisibility of Matter, and in the hitherto fruitless chase after the element of negative atomic weight, the scientifically trained mind of the Chemist must feel irresistibly drawn towards those ever-shrouded worlds, to that mysterious Beyond, whose measureless depths seem to close against the approach of the too materialistic hand that would fain draw aside its veil. “It is the unknown and the ever-unknowable,” warns the Monist-Agnostic. “Not so,” answers the persevering Chemist. “We are on the track and we are not daunted, and fain would we enter the mysterious region which ignorance tickets unknown.”
In his Presidential Address at Birmingham Mr. Crookes said: