Where once he scoffed. God’s great primeval plan
Is fast unfolding in the soul of man.—Ella W. Wilcox.
KEELY AND HIS DISCOVERIES.
CHAPTER I.
1872 TO 1882.
INTRODUCTORY.
Within the half-century the hypothetical ether has amply vindicated its novel claim to take its place as a mysterious entity side by side with matter and energy among the ultimate components of the objective universe …. Modern science sets before our eyes the comprehensive and glorious idea of a cosmos which is one and the same throughout, in sun and star and world and atom, in light and heat and life and mechanism, in herb and tree and man and animal, in body, soul, and spirit, mind and matter.—Grant Allen on Evolution.
The man who can demonstrate the existence of an unsuspected and unknown force has a right, in the absence of demonstrative proof to the contrary, to form his own theory of its origin, and to make it the basis of his own system. Keely is looking at physical phenomena and their explanations from a point of view so different from that of the inductive school, that we hardly know how to combine the two, or show their bearings upon each other. For myself, I think now, as I thought and said in my address, that the absolutely exclusive position, taken up by Huxley, Tyndall, and the so-called Material School, is ludicrously indefensible; and that we should be as perfectly open to evidence in any direction, as we were 2000 years ago.—The Rev. H. W. Watson, D.Sc., F.R.S.