When my theoretical exposé is finished and brought out, I shall be ready for the attacks that will be made upon it, and able to demonstrate what I assert. One would think that modern physicists, knowing the lesson taught by the disastrous overthrow of the primitive system of astronomy, would be somewhat cautious in reference to jeering at any announcement of scientific research, however preposterous, without first carefully weighing its claims. It is my belief that there are many to-day who occupy positions as professors in our colleges and in universities abroad, who for bigotry and ignorance can discount the opinion of the religionists of the dark ages; but those to whom has been given mental force to boldly investigate new truths in science may congratulate themselves upon the fact that there are investigators of truth who are not afraid to acknowledge its claims, in whatever garb it may appear, welcoming whatever new message it may have to deliver ….
Professor Rücker, in closing his address read at the meeting of the British Association in 1891, said:—
“In studies such as these we are passing from the investigation of the properties of ordinary matter to those of the ether, which may perhaps be the material of which matter is composed. We may some day be able to control and use it, as we now control and use steam.”
For nearly fifteen years, Keely constructed engines of various models, with this end in view, before he discovered that it is impossible to use the ether in any other way than as a medium for the energy that he is now experimenting with; and which he defines, in its present operation, as a condition of sympathetic vibration associated with the polar stream positively and negatively.
Should Keely succeed in controlling and directing this subtle energy, we shall then be able to “hook our machinery on to the machinery of nature.” A writer in the Nineteenth Century says,—“Whether the molecules or particles of what we know as matter are independent matter, or whether they are ether-whirlpools; we know that they keep up an incessant hammering one on another, and thus on everything in space. Professor Crookes has shown that the forces contained in this bombardment are immensely greater than any forces we have yet handled …. It has also been found that the vibrations keep time in some unknown way with the vibrations of solid matter.”
Thus it is seen that Keely is not the only man of science who is trying to effect a passage over the untrodden wild lying between acoustics and music: “that Siberian bog where whole armies of scientific musicians and musical men of science have sunk, without filling it up.” Helmholtz, it is said, has, by a series of daring strides, made a passage for himself; while Keely stands alone in seeking to build a solid causeway; over which all the nations of the earth may pass in safety, to the “new order of things,” that lies in this “land of promise.”
[1] The steam engines of the world now represent the work of 1,000,000,000 men, or more than double the working population of the earth, whose total population is about 1,500,000,000 inhabitants. Steam has accordingly trebled man’s working power, enabling him to economize his physical strength while attending to his intellectual development. Our race, which seems to have reached its limit of physical development, is ready to enter upon the foretold stage of psychical evolution. [↑]
[2] Carried out in the taking of the forts one after another during our civil war, which other generals had been unable to do. [↑]