Keely and His Discoveries: Aerial Navigation

by Mrs. Bloomfield H. Moore

Admitting, then, that there is a universal fluid, it must exist in and through all things. If void does not exist, everything is full; if all is full, everything is in contact; if everything is in contact, the whole influences and is influenced because all is life; and life is movement, because movement is a continual disunion and union of all the molecules which compose the whole. The ancient philosophers admitted all this. Under the different names of “macrocosm,” “microcosm,” “corpuscles,” “emanations,” “attraction,” “repulsion,” “sympathy,” and “antipathy,”—all names which are only one,—their various propositions were merely the product of inductions influenced by their modes of observing, as the deductions of scientists are influenced in our day.

Balzac tells us that everything here below is the product of an ethereal substance, the common basis of various phenomena, known under the inappropriate names of electricity, heat, light, galvanic and magnetic fluid, etc., and that the universality of its transmutations constitutes what is vulgarly called matter. We cannot take up a book on physics (written with true scientific knowledge) in which we do not find evidence that its author acknowledges that there is, correctly speaking, but one force in nature. Radcliffe tells us that what is called electricity is only a one-sided aspect of a law which, when fully revealed, will be found to rule over organic as well as inorganic nature—a law to which the discoveries of science and the teachings of philosophy alike bear testimony,—a law which does not entomb life in matter, but which transfigures matter with a life which, when traced to its source, will prove only to be the effluence of the Divine life.

Macvicar teaches that the nearer we ascend to the fountain-head of being and of action, the more magical must everything inevitably become; for that fountain-head is pure volition. And pure volition, as a cause is precisely what is meant by magic; for by magic is meant a mode of producing a phenomenon without mechanical appliances,—that is, without that seeming continuity of resisting parts and that leverage which satisfy our muscular sense and our imagination and bring the phenomenon into the category of what we call “the natural;” that is, the sphere of the elastic, the gravitating,—the sphere into which the vis inertiæ is alone admitted.

There is in Professor Crookes’s “Genesis of the Elements” an hypothesis of great interest,—a projectment of philosophical truth which brings him nearer than any known living scientist to the ground held by Keely. Davy defines hypothesis as the scaffolding of science, useful to build up true knowledge, but capable of being put up or taken down at pleasure, without injuring the edifice of philosophy. When we find men in different parts of the world constructing the same kind of scaffolding, we may feel fairly sure that they have an edifice to build. The scaffolding may prove to be insecure, but it can be flung away and another constructed. It is the edifice that is all-important,—the philosophy not the hypotheses. The science of learning, says Professor Lesley, and the science of knowledge are not quite identical; and learning has too often, in the case of individuals, overwhelmed and smothered to death knowledge. It is a familiar fact that great discoveries come at long intervals, brought by specially-commissioned and highly-endowed messengers; while a perpetual procession of humble servants of nature arrive with gifts of lesser moment, but equally genuine, curious, and interesting novelties. From what unknown land does all this wealth of information come? Who are these bearers of it? And who intrusted each with his particular burden, which he carries aloft as if it deserved exclusive admiration? Why do those who bring the best things walk so seriously and modestly along as if they were in the performance of a sacred duty, for which they scarcely esteem themselves worthy?

The Bishop of Carlisle, in his paper on “The Uniformity of Nature,” suggests the answer to all who are prepared to approach the abyss which has hitherto divided physical science from spiritual science,—an abyss which is soon to be illumined by the sunlight of demonstration and spanned by the bridge of knowledge. To quote from the paper of the Bishop of Carlisle, “There are matters of the highest moment which manifestly do lie outside the domain of physical science. The possibility of the continuance of human existence in a spiritual form after the termination of physical life is, beyond contradiction, one of the grandest and most momentous of possibilities, but in the nature of things it lies outside physics. Yet there is nothing absolutely absurd, nothing which contradicts any human instinct, in the supposition of such possibility; consequently, the student of physical science, even if he cannot find time or inclination to look into such matters himself, may well have patience with those who can. And he may easily afford to be generous: the field of physical science is grand enough for any ambition, and there is room enough in the wide world both for physical and for psychical research.”

But does psychical research lie outside the domain of physical science? What is the supernatural but the higher workings of laws which we call natural, as far as we have been able to investigate them? Is not the supernatural, then, just as legitimate a subject of consideration, for the truly scientific mind, as is the natural? If it explains, satisfactorily, phenomena which cannot be otherwise explained, there is no good reason why its aid should not be invoked by men of science. The truth is, that the ordinary course of nature is one continued miracle, one continued manifestation of the Divine mind. “Everything which is, is thought,” says Amiel, “but not conscious and individual thought. Everything is a symbol of a symbol; and a symbol of what?—of mind. We are hemmed round with mystery, and the greatest mysteries are contained in what we see, and do, every day.”

Keely affirms, with other philosophers, that there is only one unique substance, and that this substance is the Divine spirit, the spirit of life, and that this spirit of life is God, who fills everything with His thoughts; disjoining and grouping together these multitudes of thoughts in different bodies called atmospheres, fluids, matters, animal, vegetable, and mineral forms.

Herbert Spencer says that amid the mysteries that become the more mysterious the more they are thought about, there will remain the one absolute certainty, that we are ever in the presence of an infinite and an eternal energy, from which all things proceed. Macvicar foreshadowed the teachings of this new philosophy when he wrote, “All motion in the universe is rhythmical. This is seen in the forward and backward movement of the pendulum, the ebb and the flow of the tides, the succession of day and night, the systolic and diastolic action of the heart, and in the inspiration and expiration of the lungs. Our breathing is a double motion of universal æther, an active and a reactive movement. This androgyne principle, with its dual motion, is the breath of God in man.” The writings of the ancients teem with these ideas, which have been handed down to us from generation to generation, and are now flashing their light, like torches in the darkness, upon mysteries too long regarded as “lying outside the domains of physical science.”

Twenty years ago Macvicar wrote his “Sketch of a Philosophy,” in which he advanced the above views, with other views now maintained and demonstrated by Keely, who during these twenty years, without knowing Macvicar’s views, or of his existence even, has been engaged in that “dead-work which cannot be delegated,” the result of which is not learning, but knowledge; for learning, says Lessing, is only our knowledge of the experience of others; knowledge is our own. This burden of dead-work, writes Lesley, every great discoverer has had to carry for years and years, unknown to the world at large, before the world was electrified by his appearance as its genius. Without it, there can be no discovery of what is rightly called a scientific truth. Every advancement in science comes from this “dead-work,” and creates, of its own nature, an improvement in the condition of the race; putting, as it does, the multitudes of human society on a fairer and friendlier footing with one another. And during these twenty years of “dead-work” the discoverer of etheric force has pursued the even tenor of his way, under circumstances which show him to be a giant in intellectual greatness, insensible to paltry, hostile criticism, patient under opposition, dead to all temptations of self-interest, calmly superior to the misjudgments of the short-sighted and ignoble; noble means as indispensable to him as noble ends; fame and riches less important than his honour; his joys arising from the accomplishment of his work and the love and the sympathy of the few who have comprehended him! “Only the noble-hearted can understand the noble-hearted.” Keely’s chief ambition has been to utilize the force he discovered; not for his own aggrandizement, but to bless the lives of his fellow-men. He has scaled the rocks which barricade earth from heaven, and he knows that the fire which he has brought down with him is divine.

This so-called secret is an open secret, which, after it is known, may be read everywhere,—in the revolution of the planets as well as in the crystallization of minerals and in the growth of a flower.