All mysteries are said to be either truths concealing deeper truths, or errors concealing deeper errors; and thus, as the mysteries unfold, truth or error will show itself in a gradually clearer light, enabling us to distinguish between the two. It is now left for men of science to decide as to the nature of the mysteries which Keely is slowly unfolding, and whether his demonstrations substantiate his theories. They have been invited to follow him in his experimental research, step by step; to bestow upon him sympathy and encouragement, so long withheld, until he reaches that stage where he will no longer need their protection. Then, if science is satisfied that he has gained a treasure for her, in his years of dead-work, she must step aside and wait patiently until he has fulfilled his obligations to those who organized themselves into a company to aid him, long before she came forward to interest herself in his behalf. Those men of science who have refused to countenance this great work, even by witnessing experiments made to prove the discovery of an unknown force, are men who attempt no explanation of the miracles of nature by which we are surrounded, assuming that no explanation can be given; but, as Bacon has said, he is a bad mariner, who concludes, when all is sea around him, that there is no land beyond.
If the multitude of so-called laws of nature could be resolved into one grand universal law, would it not be considered a great step in the progress of scientific knowledge? This is what our pioneer claims for his discoveries, one law working throughout nature, in all things; for, as Macvicar says, the productive and conservative agency in creation, as it exists and acts, does not consist of two things, “idea” and “power”; but of a unity embracing both, for which there is no special name. The relation between the Creator and the Creation, the First Cause and what he has effected, is altogether inscrutable; but intelligence acting analytically, as it cannot be kept from doing, insists on these two elements in the problem, viz. idea and power.
“The law of the universe is a distinct dualism while the creative energies are at work; and of a compound union when at rest.”
The hypothesis that motion can only be effected mechanically, by pressure or traction or contact of some kind, is an utterly helpless one to explain even familiar movements. Gravitation itself, the grandest and most prevailing phenomenon of the material universe, has set all genius at defiance when attempting to conceive a mechanism which might account for it. The law of sympathetic association, or sympathetic assimilation, between two or more atoms, or masses of atoms, explains this grand phenomenon; but Roscoe, in theorizing on the atomic theory, says that from purely chemical considerations it appears unlikely the existence of atoms will ever be proved. It never could have been proved by mechanical physics nor by chemistry. The law which locks the atoms together would have remained an unknown law, had not Keely opened the door leading into one of nature’s domains which was never entered before, unless by the fabled Orpheus, who, mythology tells us, was killed because he revealed to man what the gods wished to conceal. Certainly, whether Orpheus ever existed or not, the principle which Pythagoras promulgated as the teaching of Orpheus is disclosed in one of Keely’s discoveries.
In the great fresco of the school of Athens, by Raphael, Pythagoras is represented as explaining to his pupils his theory that the same principle underlies the harmonies of music and the motion of heavenly bodies. One of these pupils holds in his hand a tablet, shaped like a zither, on which are inscribed the Greek words, Diapason, Diapente, Diatessaron. Of the diapason, or concord of all, Spenser writes, in The Faerie Queen:—
Nine was the circle set in heaven’s place,
All which compacted made a goodly diapase.
Here we have a clue to the Thirds, Sixths and Ninths of Keely’s theories, in the operation of his polar negative attractor. The conception of the Pythagoreans of music, as the principle of the creation’s order, and the mainstay and supporter of the material world, is strictly in accordance with the marvellous truths which are now being unfolded to science. Rightly divined Browning when he wrote of
… music’s mystery, which mind fails
To fathom; its solution no mere clue;