“Il n’y a pas de parole humaine qui peut donner une idée de la Divinité. Dieu c’est tout. Il n’a pas de personalité. Dieu est partout et nulle part. Dieu est le foyer qui allume la nature. Dieu est un foyer universel, dont les hommes ne sont que la vapeur la plus éloignée, la plus faible. Chaque homme est l’extremité d’un rayon de Lui-même. Il n’existe que Dieu.”
LETTER XII.
The Odometer or Divining-Ring.—How come upon by the author—His first experiments—The phenomena an objective proof of the reality of the Od-force.
“Qualis ab incepto” shall be the motto of this twelfth letter, the materials of which were undreamt of by me, when some three months ago I remitted the new and corrected edition of “the Letters” to England. The occasion which led me to the knowledge of the facts I have to mention, and their bearing, tally curiously with what has gone before.
For it is again winter, with its long, solitary evenings, against the tedium of which I had to seek a resource; and I bethought me, this time, of occupying myself with looking into the higher mathematics. Accordingly I sent to Herr Caspari, professor of mathematics in the gymnasium at Boppard, to solicit him to give me the instruction and assistance which I needed. And he obligingly came, in the evening of the 31st of December, to sit by my side and converse with me. And I went over preliminarily my schoolboy recollections of the elements of mathematics, and was pleased at finding the remembered difficulties vanish before the explanations of my well-informed tutor. And I learned, to my vast delight, that the inability under which asymptotes labour to touch hyperbolas is a purely arbitrary one, like the legislative prohibition not to marry with one’s deceased wife’s sister; but that, unlike the latter, it can be evaded; inasmuch as an asymptote, by changing its name and forfeiting its properties, may at any time unite itself with the object to which it had before been infinitely near. Again, I found my boyish distrust and disbelief in sines and cosines replaced by an intelligent and well-satisfied acquaintance with them. And I even obtained a glimpse of the higher analysis itself, pointing with its unerring finger to the exact height, else unmeasurable, at which my candle should stand in the centre of my round table, to shed upon it its maximum of illumination.
A liberal hour being over, and my dolphin-like recreation ended, my new friend entered into desultory chat, and asked me, among other things, if I had not written something on the divining-rod. I replied to his question by giving him the copy I had of “the Letters;” and promised, as a New-Year’s gift for the morrow, to present him with the implement itself. And I lent him Von Reichenbach’s book on Od, with which he was unacquainted. Then he told me that there were two or three experiments, possibly akin to trials with the divining-rod, with which he had been familiar for years, and which he had shown to many without receiving an explanation of them. He said that as far as he knew they were original and his own; and that he would willingly show them to me. He wanted only for that purpose a piece of silver, a gold ring, and a bit of silk. These were easily found. And he attached the silk to the ring, which he then held suspended by the silk over a silver spoon, at a distance of half an inch.
Shortly the ring shaped its first vague movements into regular oscillations in a direction to and fro, or towards and from, Herr Caspari. I will call such oscillations longitudinal. It was evident to me, that this phenomenon must be akin to the motion of the divining-rod.
Then, at Herr Caspari’s suggestion, I summoned the maid, who was directed to place her hand in Herr Caspari’s disengaged hand. On her doing so, the oscillations of the ring became transverse. How pregnant was this fact! An Od-current had been established between the two experimenters; and the apparent influence of the two metals on each other had been modified.
Herr Caspari told me that, as far as he knew, these experiments would only succeed when made with silver and gold, and a bit of silk. But he said that he had still another experiment to show me, which he did the following day. He said he had a little pea-like bit of something, which he had been told was schwefel-kies, that exhibited another motion: when held suspended by silk over either of the fingers, it rotated one way; when held suspended over the thumb, it rotated in the contrary direction.