Keely and His Discoveries: Aerial Navigation

by Mrs. Bloomfield H. Moore

Religious and scientific reformation have always gone hand in hand, says Dr. Lowber. In fact, religious science is superior to any other science. As Christianity is the pure religion which contains the truth of all the rest, so it is the highest of the sciences, for it represents the development of the highest faculty of the human nature. Religion develops manhood as nothing else will, and Christianity represents the highest culture to which it is possible for man to attain ….

The system, now being evolved and worked out to demonstration by Keely, restores, by religious science, the faith of which materialistic science has been robbing the world, thus confirming Dr. Lowber’s assertions that materialists will never be able to reduce all natural and spiritual forces to mere vibratory action of matter; and that the reformatory movement in philosophy, which characterizes our age, will continue until all the sciences point to God and immortality.

A writer in Galignani’s Messenger, March 2, 1892, says: “When the nineteenth century closes, the most marvellous period ever known to man will be stored away in Time’s granary. Can the twentieth century by any possibility be more productive, more fertile, more prolific of wonders than its predecessor? The face of the world has been changed; space has been annihilated; science puts ‘a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes.’ We may be almost excused if we are tempted to believe that the serpent’s promise is fulfilled in our persons, and we are as gods. Alas for human complacency! Perhaps our descendants a thousand years hence will look upon us as pigmies. Be that as it may, the past and the present are ours, with their achievement, and we believe we shall hand down to posterity a goodly heritage.”

The New York Home Journal, of the week before Christmas, 1892, points out, in its leader, the road on which this advance in the cause of humanity may be made. The writer, Mr. Howard Hinton, says: “The spirit of the salutation, ‘A Merry Christmas,’ lies in the desire that peace and goodwill shall reign among men, nor, if we may trust the intimations of the latest science, will this universality of good wishing be without avail in effecting its own accomplishment. For, as we are told by the wise men of science, every thought, every mental impulse of ours, sets in motion, in that realm of ether which it is said interfuses all coarser forms of matter, certain vibrations, corresponding in force to their cause, which have power to communicate themselves to other minds favourably conditioned to receive them, and so excite in them like thoughts and impulses.

“And are not common observation and individual experience in accord with this suggestion of science? Do we not say at times that a certain thought is in the air, revealing itself contemporaneously to many widely separated minds without any recognizable means of communication? And do we not sometimes find a noble, or it may be an ignoble, impulse breaking out in a community with a suddenness and universality that would seem to transcend all the ordinary forms of the contact of mind with mind? Perhaps, too, this theory of vibratory communication through an ethereal medium may explain, in part at least, that ‘Welt-Geist,’ that ‘Spirit of the Age,’ of which the philosophers discourse so bravely.

“Again, there are times—if the experiences and observations of sensitive minds have any worth—when a general spirit of expectancy seems to be awakened, as if the world were on the eve of some new and epoch-making revelation of science, or some new enthusiasm of regenerative impulse. Are we not now, at this hour, in this mood of silent expectancy, thrilled with an indefinable awe of what the brooding life of the world is maturing for the sons of men?—sensitive, perhaps, to ethereal vibrations that have not yet accumulated force for expression in conscious thought or for the definite determination of our hearts’ desires?

“This may be fanciful. It may be simply that we are beginning to perceive that physical science has reached a stage of development when some new and more central truth, some profounder generalization, is needed to give further impulse to its essential progress. It may be that we are becoming aware that the conditions of society are such that some new unifying motive, some new enthusiasm of humanity is needed for its salvation; and that therefore we wait in expectancy for what—knowing that there can be no let nor hindrance in the onward movement of life—we feel in our hearts must come.

“And yet does not this sense of expectancy seem to communicate itself from mind to mind by some other means than that of oral or written expression, and to touch with more or less force even minds that are free from these intellectual anticipations? Are there not certain intellects at the fore-front of the world’s progress, and certain hearts filled above the ordinary measure with the love of mankind, who are thus centres of power, from whom spread ever widening circles of vibratory emanations that gradually involve all minds in a common thought and all hearts in a common purpose? ‘Many men of many minds.’ Yes, truly; but there is the one mind of humanity that thinks and thinks, and alone has the power to externalize its thought as part of the world’s history, while all purely individual thought is blown finally into the abyss of the Absolute Nothing.

“But it is not only the great souls that thus move and shape the world. We are all, in various degrees, centres and distributors of the ethereal force, so far as we are in touch with its waves of vibration. We can all make our thoughts, if they are one with the thought of humanity, and our desires, if they are one with the heart of humanity, felt by our fellows in extending circles of effluence till finally the very clods of human kind know the stirrings of a new life and wake to the higher reality as from a dream.

“And if individually we can thus set in movement this ethereal medium, how must not this movement be quickened and extended when collectively we give utterance to some great thought and heart’s desire, announcing it in song and prayer and merry-making. Hence the use and potency of the great festivals, the best and sweetest of which is the Christmas festival that we are now about to celebrate—the Evening Star of the year that is passing, the Morning Star of the new.”