Keely and His Discoveries: Aerial Navigation

by Mrs. Bloomfield H. Moore

The problem of the origin of life would become a matter of easy analysis, writes Keely, if the properties governing the different orders of matter could be understood in their different evolutions. Disturbance of equilibrium is the prime mover, aggregator and disperser of all forces that exist in nature. The force of the mind on matter is a grand illustration of the power of the finer over the crude, of the etheric over the molecular. If the differential forces of the brain could become equated, eternal perpetuity would be the result. Under such a condition the physical would remain free of disintegration or decomposition. But the law, laid out by the Great Master, which governs the disturbance of equilibrium, making the crude forms of matter subservient to the finer or higher forms, forbidding anything molecular or terrestrial to assimilate with the high etheric, the law that has fixed the planets in their places, is an unknown law to the finite mind, comprehended only by the Infinite One ….

Some of our men of science once settled the problem of the origin of life to their own satisfaction, only to learn that “speculation is not science;” for a substance which, when dissolved, crystallizes as gypsum, cannot produce vital force; and it is like groping among the bones of a graveyard to look for spontaneous generation in a shining heap of jelly on the floor of the sea.

When our learned men are forced to admit that “all motion is thought,” that “all nature is the language of One in whom we live, and are moved, and have our being,” the attempts to evolve life out of chemical elements will cease; the Mosaic records will no longer be denied, which tell us that the Creator’s law for living organisms is that each plant seeds, and each animal bears, after its kind; not that each seeds and bears after another kind. The doctrine of evolution, as made known to us in Geology, is a fundamental truth; proving that “there has been a plan, glorious in its scheme, perfect in system, progressing through unmeasured ages, and looking ever toward man and a spiritual end.”

The Rev. John Andrew, in his “Thoughts on the Evolution Theory of Creation,” mentions that Haeckel gives the pedigree of man from primeval moneron in twenty-two stages. Stage twenty is the man-like ape; stage twenty-one is the ape-like man; stage twenty-two is the man; but he confesses that the twenty-first stage—the ape-like man—is entirely wanting in all the records.

There is no missing link in the evolution theory, as laid down in Keely’s pure philosophy. Inasmuch as the Father of all is Himself a Spiritual Being, cosmical law leads us to expect that the type of created being, His offspring, shall be spirit also. Nor can Being in any object be so attenuated, or so far removed from Him who filleth all in all, but it must surely retain an aura of His spiritual nature. The corner-stone of this philosophy is one power, one law; order and method reigning throughout creation; spirit controlling matter, as the Divine order and law of creation that the spiritual should govern the material—that the whole realm of matter should be under the dominion of the world of spirit. Nor is this a new truth. According to Diogenes Laërtius, Thales taught that souls are the motive forces of the universe. Empedocles affirms that spiritual forces move the visible world. Virgil asserted that mind animates and moves the world; that the spiritual realm is the soul of the universe. The universe is not a mass of dead matter, says Gilbert (in his work, “De Magnate”), but is pervaded with this soul, this living principle, this unseen cause of all visible phenomena, underlying all movements in the earth beneath and in the heavens above. Joseph Cook affirms that as science progresses it draws nearer in all its forms to the proof of the spiritual origin of force—that is of the Divine immanence in natural law: and that God was not transiently present in nature—that is in a mere creative moment; nor has He left the world in a state of orphanage, bereft of a deific influence and care, but He is immanent in nature, as the Apostle Paul and Aratus and Spinoza declared. As certainly as the unborn infant’s life is that of the mother, so is it divinely true that somehow God’s life includes ours; and we shall understand the nature of that relationship when, in due time, we have been “born again” into the life of the spirit. “The economy of creation is not regarded in this philosophy as a theory of development all in one direction; but as a cycle in which, after development, and as its fruit, the last term gives again the first. Herein is found the link by which the law of continuity is maintained throughout—the link which is missing in the popular science of the day; with this very serious consequence that, to keep the break out of sight, the entire doctrine of spirit and the spiritual world is ignored or altogether denied.” Science admits that nature works with dual force, though at rest she is a unit. “Nature is one eternal circle.” Keely’s discoveries prove that the doctrine of the Trinity should be set down as an established canon of science—the Trinity of force. All nature’s sympathetic streams—cerebellic, gravital, electric and magnetic—are made up of triple currents. The ancients understood this dogma in a far deeper sense than modern theology has construed it. The great and universal Trinity of cause, motion and matter—or of will, thought and manifestation—was known to the Rosicrucians as prima materia. Paracelsus states that each of these three is also the other two; for, as nothing can possibly exist without cause, matter and energy—that is, spirit, matter and soul (the ultimate cause of existence being that it exists), we may therefore look upon all forms of activity as being the action of the universal or Divine will operating upon and through the ether, as the skilled artificer uses his tools to accomplish his designs; making the comparison in all reverence.

“The existence of an intelligent Creator, a personal God, can to my mind, almost be proved from chemistry,” writes Edison; and George Parsons Lathrop, in commenting upon Edison’s belief, says:—“Surely it is a circumstance calculated to excite reflection, and to cause a good deal of satisfaction, that this keen and penetrating mind, so vigorously representing the practical side of American intelligence—the mind of a remarkable exponent of applied science, and of a brilliant and prolific inventor who has spent his life in dealing with the material part of the world—should so confidently arrive at belief in God through a study of those media that often obscure the perception of spiritual things.” Edison, it seems, like Keely, has never been discouraged by the obstacles which he meets with, in his researches, nor even inclined to be hopeless of ultimate success.

Unlike Keely, Edison through all his years of experimental research has never once made a discovery. All the work of this great and successful inventor has been deductive, and the results achieved by him have been simply those of pure invention. Like Keely he constructs a theory, and works on its lines until he finds it untenable; then, he at once discards it and forms another theory. In connection with the electric light, he evolved or constructed three thousand successive theories; each one reasonable and apparently likely to be true; yet, only in two cases was he able to prove by experiment that his theories were correct. Of such a nature is the “dead-work” which all researchers on scientific principles must toil through to attain success.

They must keep their minds open to every suggestion or idea, no matter how fanciful it may seem to others, and they must never let go their hold of it until it has been tested in all its possibilities. The same words which Lathrop uses, in describing Edison’s characteristics, are equally applicable to Keely, who, in addition to his native endowment of a genius for science and mechanics, brings to bear vast patience in logical deduction, careful calculation, unlimited experiment, a ceaseless industry, and a persistence which refuses to be discouraged.

Edison has said that he does not philosophize. Like General Grant, he is a man of action. When asked what theory he held upon a subject under discussion, General Grant replied, “I never theorize: when there is anything to be done, I do it.”[2] Edison is always doing something which the public can see and appreciate, but, unlike Keely, he has no system to work out and transmute into the pure philosophy which is now revealing to the world “the further link in the chain of causation,” “the cause of the cause,” which hitherto has rather been assumed than demonstrated.

“If we believe,” says Professor Sir G. G. Stokes, “that what are called the natural sciences spring from the same supreme source as those which are concerned with morals and Natural Theology in general, we may expect to find broad lines of analogy between the two; and thus it may conceivably happen that the investigations, which belong to natural science, may here and there afford us hints with respect even to the moral sciences, with which at first sight they might appear to have no connection. And if such are to be found, perhaps they are more likely to be indicated by one whose studies have lain mainly in the direction of those natural sciences than by one whose primary attention has been devoted to moral subjects.”