Now when science provides the explanation of this ethereal universe surrounding and interpenetrating that in which we live and psychic science begins to explore it and formulate its means and methods, there are persons who object on the ground of its "materializing heaven." If one were to inquire as to what this idea of heaven is he would probably receive no more definite reply than that it was supposed to be a condition of playing on golden harps and waving palm branches. The figurative pictures of the New Testament have largely been accepted as literal ones, and it may be an open question as to which condition would be the more "material," that of walking golden streets, waving branches of palms and devoting one's time to the harp, or the life that prefigures itself as a development and expansion of our present intellectual, artistic, and spiritual life.
"Unless some insight is gained into the psychical side of things, some communications realized with intelligences outside our own, some light thrown upon a more than corporeal descent and destiny of man," wrote Frederick W. H. Myers in that monumental work entitled "Human Personality," which offers a rich mine of suggestion, "it would seem that the shells to be picked up on the shore of the ocean of truth will ever become scantier, and the agnostics of the future will gaze forth ever more hopelessly on that gloomy and unvoyageable sea. For vast as is the visible universe, infinite as may have been the intelligence that went to its evolution, yet while viewed in the external way in which we alone can view it—while seen as a product and not as a plan—it cannot possibly suggest to us an indefinite number of universal laws. Such cosmic generalizations as gravitation, evolution, correlation of forces, conservation of energy, though assuredly as yet unexhausted, cannot, in the nature of things, be even approximately inexhaustible."
The entire trend of progress is toward the continued discovery of finer cosmic forces and their utilization in practical affairs. Within the past five years this tendency has strikingly demonstrated itself. The evolution of the ways and means of travel offers, in itself, an impressive illustration of this tendency. The visitor to the Musée Cluny in Paris will find, among the masses of relics of an historic pass, the state carriages used in the time of Louis XV. and Marie Antoinette. They are incredibly clumsy and gigantic,—the carriage itself mounted on four great wheels, two of which are very large, with the two front ones smaller,—the entire vehicle occupying about twice the space of a modern conveyance, and its weight must be something to reckon with. Several of these are standing in the Cluny and offer a strange contrast with the carriages of to-day. But when these, with their lumbering motion, are contrasted,—not merely with the modern carriage, but with the flying automobile,—one realizes, indeed, the evolution in the methods of local transportation.
Again, let one compare the traditions of the sailing vessels on which passengers crossed to Europe within the memory of men still living,—the forty days' passage between Boston and Liverpool which is well within the memory of Doctor Hale,—with the passage on this latest floating palace of the ocean, the Kaiser Wilhelm II.,—and he realizes how far science has penetrated into the more subtle forces, where lightness and speed take the place of clumsy device and slow motion. To go up to the hurricane deck of the wonderful Kaiser Wilhelm and look down through the openings on the six mighty engines, with their intense throb of vibration day and night, is to behold an object lesson in the possibilities of motion. With the precision and the persistence of fate, the great beams fly up—and down. The vibration pervades the entire vast spaces of the great steamer. It becomes like an electric current, a thing of life, to be missed when one leaves the steamer as if one had left there a part of his own life. There is an exhilaration in it that communicates itself to mind and body. It is like a dynamo generating vitality. And still more swift and subtle methods of loco-motion are in the air. Doctor Albertson, an electrical engineer of the Royal University of Denmark, has an invention for a railroad train without wheels to make a speed of three hundred miles an hour. "Two things defeated the attainment of speed above the present maximum (sixty miles an hour)," says a writer in the "New York Herald," and these are specified as "the dead weight of the train, and aerial resistance.
"Now comes the announcement that there has been discovered a method of abolishing the dead weight of the train, leaving only aerial resistance to be contended with. If this can be done, as Mr. Albertson asserts, half of the battle is won, and the world may yet be able to travel on the earth's surface with the much-dreamed-of speed of hundreds of miles an hour. For many years the great principle of magnetism has been known to electricians and used in practical work by laymen. Steel companies have found the magnet useful in lifting huge metal girders. At one end of their lifting apparatuses they have placed a magnet which, when charged, grips the steel bars and lifts them, no matter how great their weight. It has been noticed that a magnet would move to come in contact with the steel bar as soon as it arrived within the drawing radius, carrying any amount of weight with it which happened to be attached at the time.
"It is this principle which Doctor Albertson sought to make use of—the lifting power of a magnet when attracted to a fixed rail of steel. He arranged a series of magnets under a miniature car running on a steel railway track. The magnets were insulated and attached to the bottom of the car so that they came under the rail and about an inch below it. Then he turned on enough electricity to make the magnets active. They rose upward toward the rail, lifting the car bodily in the air. The weight of the train was thus simply overcome!"
The electro-magnetic train has demonstrated its principle to the satisfaction of scientific engineers. Professor Roberts, in charge of the chemical works at Niagara Falls, says of it:—
"It is the electrical discovery of the age, and so simple in application that the marvel is that it has escaped us so long. The lightening power of magnetism has been known for years, the greatest saving power to overcome gravity, but it seems it had to wait for Doctor Albertson to discover it."
The air-ship promises, however, to eclipse the greatest and swiftest of latter-day steamers. The air, rather than the ocean, is to be navigated.