Mr. Owen’s ideas and plans are stated in a book of two hundred pages, published by Jno. W. Lovell, 14 Vesey Street, New York, and sent by mail for thirty cents. It is not a systematic treatise, but a miscellaneous collection of documents which give a good deal of information.
The Topolobampo scheme is one requiring great skill and executive ability in the directors, as well as a harmonious and energetic spirit in the colonists. The climate, soil, and opportunities are no doubt the best that have ever been accorded to a scheme of co-operation, and when its success has been realized, it may be accounted the most important social event of the century, for it will be the dawn of peace to a warring world, the promise of harmony between all the restless and convulsive elements of civilized society.
Health and Longevity.
Upon these subjects the Journal of Man has a new physiological doctrine to present, which may be stated in the initial number, and will be illustrated hereafter.
In the volume of “Therapeutic Sarcognomy,” which was so speedily and entirely sold upon its publication, it was clearly demonstrated that the doctrine of vitality taught at this time in all medical colleges is essentially erroneous, and that human life is not a mere aggregate of the properties of the tissues of the human body, as a house is an aggregate of the physical properties of bricks and wood, but is an influx, of which the body is but the channel and recipient.
That demonstration need not be repeated just now, as my object is merely to state the position of the Journal. Life is an influx from the world of invisible power, aided by various forms of influx from the material world, without which it would promptly cease. If this naked statement should seem fanciful or erroneous to any reader, he may be just to himself by suspending his opinions until he shall have received the demonstration. We have all been educated into false opinions on this subject, and it is almost as difficult for the American scholar to release himself from the influence of education and habit in such matters, as for the Arab to release his mind from the influence of the Koran.
It has been only within the last ten years, and as the sequel of investigations of the seat of life beginning in 1835, that I succeeded in ascertaining the absolute falsity of the doctrines on this subject maintained by all scientific biologists at the present time, and demonstrating that the human body is only a tenement, of which life is the builder, and which drops into decay when life deserts it to meet its more congenial home in a nobler realm.
It is not therefore in the physical but in the spiritual constitution that the real basis of his character, his health, and longevity is to be found, for the primitive germ or protoplasm of man cannot be distinguished from that of a quadruped or bird. It is the invisible and incalculable life element that contains the potentiality or possibility of existence as a quadruped or a man, as a virtuous or vicious, and as a long lived or short lived, being. The life element of the germ limits the destiny of the being. That life element is invisible.
This truth, however, does not contradict the truth of development and the capacity of science to estimate the probable health or longevity of an individual from his organization, for the life force organizes a body in accordance with its own character; and the development of the entire person shows the character of the vital force as modified by the environment of food, air, motives, and education. The brain, no less than the body,—indeed, more fully than the body,—shows the elements of the life and the tendency to health and longevity, or the reverse, upon which an expert cranioscopist can give an opinion.