The human soul is a principle of force. Thought is a dynamic act. Psychical force acts upon the matter composing our bodies, and actuates all our members to fulfil their tasks. Like all forces, psychical force can transform itself, can become electricity, heat, light, motion; for these are all modes of motion. Psychical force is itself in motion.
It can act outside the limits of the human organism, and can temporarily animate a table. I place my hands on a round table, with a firm desire to see it obey my will. I communicate to it a certain heat, a certain electricity, a certain polarization, or a certain other something we have not yet discovered. The stand becomes, so to speak, an extension of my body, and submits to the influence of my will. I look at a person. I take his hand. I thus act upon him.
More than this. If the brain of another person vibrates in unison with mine, or has at one in harmony with the keynote of my own brain, I can act upon him, even from a distance.
If I emit a sound a few yards from a piano, those piano-strings which are in harmony with my utterance will vibrate, and themselves send forth a kindred sound, easily distinguishable.
A telegraph wire transmits a despatch: A neighboring wire is influenced by induction; and it has been possible, by the aid of this second and separate wire, to read messages sent over the first.
There is still more to be said. The principle of the transformation of force to-day opens to us new views which might well be called marvellous. We every day make use of the telephone, without thinking that it is, in itself, more astonishing than all the occult facts considered in this paper.
You speak. Your voice is transmitted ten or twenty thousand kilometers, from Paris to Marseilles, and even farther away. You think it is your own voice which is heard and recognized at the other end of the wire; but it is not; your voice has not made the journey. Sound of itself, in its ordinary state, is not transmitted with anything like the rapidity attending this flight over the copper wire. If it were otherwise, we should have to wait seven hours and twenty-four seconds for a response, whereas there is no appreciable delay in the telephonic passage of sound. The usual vocal velocity becomes electric velocity, and the interval between the terminal stations of the wire is traversed instantaneously. On reaching its destination, the current again transforms itself into sound through its encounter with a medial, an environment like that at its starting-point.
Is the conductive wire indispensable? By no means! Is there a connecting wire between the sun and the earth? Yet the spots on the sun occasion rebounds in the variations of terrestrial magnetism. In the photophone the conductive wire has already been dispensed with, and a ray of light is used in its place. You speak behind a mirror, and thus cause it to vibrate. These vibrations modify the reflection of light from the vibrating mirror, which thus bears along your voice, with which it becomes charged. Selenium, the chemical element used in the operation, transmits the sound to the telephone, and your spoken word is reproduced.
The principal of the transformation of forces is undoubtedly one of the most prolific in modern physics. Heat can be transformed into mechanical motion; mechanical motion may be transformed into heat. Electricity is transformable into magnetism; and, reciprocally, magnetism may change into electricity, into light. The motion of the mill-wheel serves to illuminate your house. From Paris you can light a lamp in Brussels. When you act from afar upon another mind, it is not your thought which travels, as a mental condition; but your thought traverses the intervening ether through a series of vibrations as yet unknown to us, and only becomes thought again when brought into contact with another brain, because the last transference brings the impulse into a medium akin to that from which it started. It is therefore necessary that this second brain should be in sympathy with yours; that is to say, using one of Doctor Ochorowiez’s expressions, that “the dynamic tone” of the receiver should be in accord with your own. It is, moreover, noticeable that there are periods when veritable thought-currents affect thousands of brains at the same moment. At the bottom of all this there is but one principle, and that is identical with the relation existing between the magnet and the iron, between the sun and the earth,—namely, the transmission and transformation of motion. Herbert Spencer has said:—
The discovery that matter, so simple in appearance, is wonderfully complicated in its vital structure,—and that other discovery, that its molecules, oscillating with a rapidity almost infinite, convey their impressions to the surrounding ether, which, in turn, transmits them over inconceivable distances, in an inconceivably short space of time,—these discoveries lead us to the even more marvellous discovery, that any kind of molecules are affected in a special manner by molecules of the same kind, though situated in the most distant regions of space.