This shall one day be palpable to sense,
And earth at last become to heaven akin.
These four lines, from Robert Browning’s sonnet on Keely’s discoveries, read like an inspired insight into that “Age of Harmony,” which interpreters of scripture prophecies anticipate the twentieth century will usher into our world; recalling Shakespeare’s seeming knowledge, before Harvey’s discovery even, of the circulation of the blood. “All truth is inspired.”
CHAPTER VII.
THE KEY TO THE PROBLEMS. KEELY’S SECRETS.
Causa latet, vis est notissima.—Proverb.
(The cause is hidden, the power is most apparent.)
Electricity is in principle as material as water; so it appears, and Mr. Carl Hering has expressed the fact with much of clearness and force. He says, “It is a well-known fact that the quantity of electricity measured in coulombs never is generated, never is consumed, and never does grow less, excepting leakage. The current flowing out of a lamp is exactly the same in quantity as that going into it; the same is true of motors and of generators, showing that electricity of itself is neither consumed while doing work nor is it generated. After doing work in a lamp or motor, it comes out in precisely the same quantity as it entered. A battery is not able to generate quantity or coulombs of electricity; all it is able to do is to take the quantity which pours in at one pole, and sends out at the other pole with an increased pressure. Electricity, therefore, is not merely force (or a form of energy), but matter. It is precisely analogous to water in a water circuit ….—The Court Journal.
The theory of Aristotle concerning heat, viz. that it is a condition of matter, together with the dicta of Locke, Davy, Rumford, and Tyndall, have been consigned of late by many to the tomb of exploded theories, and are replaced by those of Lavoisier and Black, which make caloric an actual substance. The Rev. J. J. Smith, M.A., D.D., tells us that the only way the great problem of the universe can ever be scientifically solved is by studying, and arriving at just conclusions with regard to, the true nature and character of force. He maintains, in his paper upon “The Unity and Origin of Force,” that, as it is the great organizer of matter, it must not only be superior to it, but also must have been prior, as it existed before organization commenced, and immanent always. Newton, who scoffed at Epicurus’s idea that “gravitation is essential and inherent in matter,” asserted that gravity must be caused by an agent acting, constantly, according to certain laws. Heat, gravity, light, electricity, magnetism, chemical affinities, are all different phases of the primal force discovered by Keely, and all these forces, it is said, can be obtained from a single ray of sunlight. “The evidence of unity or oneness even between the physical, vital, mental, and spiritual is seen in the light of this law of correlation,” says Smith. “A great portion of our muscles contract and relax in obedience to our wills, thereby proving that the mental force can be, and is, in every such instance actually converted into the muscular or the physical.” Keely demonstrates the truth of this assertion, claiming that “all forces are indestructible, immaterial, and homogeneous entities, having their origin and unity in one great intelligent personal will force.”