The Life Radiant

by Lilian Whiting

Doctor Ostwald, a German scientist, claims that in energy he has discovered the actual bridge, the missing link, between mind and matter, between the spiritual and the physical worlds; that it is a bridge "which covers the chasm between force and substance," and "which is of a nature sufficiently manifest to embrace the totality of our experiences, the interior as well as the exterior." Doctor Ostwald claims that there is an immaterial factor, one endowed with neither weight nor mass, which in a quantitative way is just as unchangeable as the mass and weight of material substances, and which, exactly like these, can undergo qualitative transformations of all kinds. He holds that energy may be converted from every one of its forms into every other, and its power of transformation is therefore unlimited, and that every change which takes place in the outer world, and every process, may be described by a statement of the kind and amount of energy that has undergone conversion.

This conception of energy is a very clear and remarkable one, placing it as the infinite power from which any form of force, spiritual or mechanical, can be derived.

In the moral universe the true expression of this energy upon which one may draw infinitely lies in service. It is in so enlarging the personal sphere of life as to include the widest possible range of sympathy and comprehension. The mystic spirit is full of value in reaching out into the realm of spiritual forces, but when these forces are gained they must be applied. The old religious idea used to include a great deal of discussion about saving the soul; but the larger spiritual enlightenment of to-day sees that the phrase "saving the soul" implies a present condition,—the state of love, sympathy, service, by which the soul is saved to-day, and not a vague condition to be only realized in some remote eternity. Now is the day of salvation. The success of life lies not in possessions; it lies in keeping the harmonious and perfectly receptive relation with the spiritual realm of forces, and using these forces in every duty and need and opportunity that presents itself. As for always compassing desires, or achieving the possession of this thing or that, is in reality immaterial. The best things in life are often the things one does not have; but they produce effects in the visible world, and often, just in proportion as the things themselves remain in the ethereal realm, is the potency of the effects they produce in the physical realm. This other dimension of existence is one with which the final reckoning must be made. It is no longer length of days, but intensity of energy, that determines results. Not length of time, but intensity of purpose, energy of action,—in these lie the secret of achievement. The power that lies in brief moments is the power required for effective life and work. Emerson truly says that we talk of the shortness of life, but that life is unnecessarily long. Degree and not duration is the test of power in any work, and the application of this truth to the ordinary affairs of life would render it possible to have every day hold in itself the value of a week or a month as usually estimated. The entire trend of progress is toward that intensity of creative energy that fairly speaks things into being. A business man has now on his desk a long-distance telephone, connecting him with far-away cities; he answers his letters by speaking into the phonograph; his typewriting clerk copies them from this, and an hour of his morning represents as much accomplishment as by the old and slower methods would have required days; and thus time is constantly made more valuable.

The discoveries in nature are in a perfect correspondence with the advancing requirements of human life.

The deeper researches of science are revealing the absolute unity of the entire universe. The earth and the most remote stars are composed of the same matter. The wonderful discovery of spectrum analysis by Kirchoff and Bunsen in 1861 has shown that the whole stellar universe is made up of the same chemical materials as those with which we are familiar upon the earth. A part of the dazzling brilliance of the noonday sun is due to the vapor of iron floating in his atmosphere, and the faint luminosity of the remotest cloudlike nebula is the glow of just such hydrogen as enters into every drop of water that we drink....

"... The generalization of the metamorphosis of forces, which was begun a century ago by Count Rumford when he recognized heat as a mode of molecular motion, was consummated about the middle of the century, when Doctor Joule showed mathematically just how much heat is equivalent to just how much visible motion, and when the researches of Helmholtz, Mayer, and Faraday completed the grand demonstration that light and heat and magnetism and electricity and visible motion are all interchangeable one into the other, and are continually thus interchanging from moment to moment."

It is not a far cry from these scientific data to the recognition that force, in all its various forms of manifestation, proceeds from the same energy, and that the curious manifestation of it in radium is explained by the possibility that this substance is merely a remarkable conductor of this intense energy in the ether. The human organism may make itself increasingly a conductor and transmitter of this energy, and the secret of coming into perfectly harmonious relations with this energy is the secret of all achievement. "Life is a search after power," says Emerson, "and this is an element with which the world is so saturated,—there is no chink or crevice in which it is not lodged,—that no honest seeking goes unrewarded.... All power," he adds, "is of one kind; a sharing of the nature of the world."

With his characteristically marvellous insight, Emerson has, in this paragraph, recognized the truth that, in these latter days, is a matter of absolute scientific discovery.

The "life that now is and that which is to come" are no more definitely separable than are the periods of childhood and youth, or youth and manhood. The advance is by evolutionary progress, with no sudden, or visible, change from day to day. The life that now is creates and determines the life that is to come. A man is what he is to-day because of the life he lived yesterday, and last year, and a decade, or several decades, ago. That which we call life—environment, circumstances, conditions—is the sum of the expression of all its past experiences, thought, aspirations, energy, or the lack of thought, aspirations, and energy. One's life is in his own hands; it is subject to his own will power, to his own energy of aspiration. He must aspire and go forward or he will degenerate. There is no possibility of an epoch that is stationary. Both in any form of work or art, as well as in mental and spiritual life, one must constantly go forward, or he will find himself going backward. Even a pianist as great as Paderewski must keep his fingers in practice on the keyboard every day. The painter cannot long absent himself from his canvas without losing in his art. The thinker, the student, must be forever conquering new realms.

Science is demonstrating the actual existence of another world, transcending, pervading, surrounding this one; a world which interpenetrates our own,—the ethereal in the atmospheric,—and there is one part of the personality of man that dwells continually on this ethereal side. The physical body only conveys a partial expression of the entire being. The spiritual self lived long before it tenanted this present body, and it will continue to live after it has discarded this body. The life that is constantly proceeds to create the life that is to come.