About two years have elapsed, since I erroneously sanctioned Farraday’s explanation of the manifestations, in ascribing them to involuntary muscular action. This arose from my being, no less than that philosopher, so utterly incredulous and intolerant of any idea of spiritual agency in any of the phenomena of nature, excepting those which I ascribed to God, that I did not take the possible agency of spirits into view; but having been obliged to admit the facts conceded by Dr. Bell, ([287],) and having received interesting and intellectual communications of which he has not been informed, I cannot, with him, stop half-way: nor could he, were he to have the interesting communications with his spirit friends which I have had with mine.
There has been a time when religion repressed science; and it would seem that at the present era science is to revenge itself by repressing religious truth, by sanctioning indirectly the alleged manifestations of antiquity, while deriding those of the present time; believing on miracles told by no one knows who, yet denying the allegations of eye-witnesses known to be truthful; while straining at spiritual gnats, swallowing scriptural camels.
With high esteem, your well-wisher,
Robert Hare.
FARRADAY’S SPECULATION.
Speculation touching Electric Conduction and the nature of Matter. By Farraday.
Having expressed my objections to Farraday’s inferences respecting matter, &c., I feel that justice requires that I should submit the article which drew forth my strictures. At this time, when electricity and matter are scrutinized with a view to understand the analogous, but different, entities of the spirit world, the ideas of an experimental investigator so eminently successful, must be of interest to readers:
Light and electricity are two great and searching investigators of the molecular structure of bodies, and it was, while considering the probable nature of conduction and insulation in bodies not decomposable by the electricity to which they were subject, and the relation of electricity to space contemplated as void of that which, by the anatomist, is called matter, that considerations, something like those which follow, were presented to my mind.
If the view of the constitution of matter, already referred to, be assumed to be correct, and I may be allowed to speak of the particles of matter and of the space between them (in water, or in the vapour of water, for instance) as two different things, then space must be taken as the only continuous part, for the particles are considered as separated by space from each other. Space will permeate all masses of matter in every direction like a net, except that, in place of meshes, it will form cells, isolating each atom from its neighbours, and itself only being continuous.
Then take the case of a piece of shellac, a non-conductor, and it would appear at once, from such a view of its constitution, that space is an insulator, for if it were a conductor, the shellac could not insulate, whatever might be the relation as to conducting power of its material atoms; the space would be like a fine metallic web penetrating it in every direction, just as we may imagine of a heap of siliceous sand having all its pores filled with water, or as we may consider of a stick of black wax, which, though it contains an infinity of particles of conducting charcoal diffused through every part of it, cannot conduct, because a non-conducting body (a resin) intervenes and separates them one from another like the supposed space in the lac.