Astrology undertakes to reveal the future by the position and influence of the stars, and is entirely different from any electrical theory of the sun or planets.

He says, "The subject of the sun's electric influence is of absorbing interest, but there is no solid scientific basis for a genuine theory."

From the lack of knowledge he displays of the well-known laws of electricity I am not surprised at his statement. He says and ill.u.s.trates it by a diagram: "If we grant the sun does act as a stupendous source of electro-magnetic waves, as the planets circle about the sun in nearly a common plane, and sometimes lie practically in the common plane in a straight line, in such a contingency there may be a stream of electric energy linking them all together." He seems to think this would produce confusion and settle the whole question.

He should know that the simplest law of electro-magnetism teaches that the electric attraction of every planet is the measure of its power in drawing the electric currents of the sun. Distance from or nearness to the sun or planets or their being scattered or all on the same plane or in a straight line has nothing to do with the supply of electric power from the sun.

Each receives the positive electricity from the sun, which it draws by reason of its negative polarity. He should know that twenty-eight currents of electricity may pa.s.s over the same wire at the same time, fourteen one way and fourteen the other way, and do not interfere with one another, and each go to their separate destinations. The sun may send a different electric current or vibration to each planet and nothing in the universe could prevent it from reaching that planet. It would pa.s.s through or go round any other planet or substance in its way.

Wireless electricity is founded on the basic principle that an electric current goes only to the opposite electric polarity and vibration which draws and attracts it or is attuned to it.

Prof. Serviss says: "If I examined this subject with a show of interest, it draws upon me sour and suspicious looks from my scientific friends."

He should remember that all great truths have had to struggle with "sour and suspicious looks," ever since man began to investigate, and that we must look not to authority for truth, but _to truth for authority_.

He said, in the summer of 1901, the sun was a furnace and the black spots the open door of the furnace, and we would have four years of torrid heat on account of those black spots; but he proved himself a false prophet, like the rest. But he is not to blame; he only followed the old traditions and scientific authority, and they proved to be a broken reed on which he leaned. I mention him because he is an able and recent writer on astronomy.

That science is at present unintelligible and almost chaotic to the ma.s.ses of fairly educated people is too true for superfluous argument.

The old farmer's definition of bacilli is a fair sample of the nebulous condition of many minds on scientific subjects. He said they were "little critters from the back cellar that floated in the air, called germs in Germany, parasites in Paris, and microbes in Ireland." Many intelligent people deplore the prolific use of useless technical terms and dry statistics of most scientific works, and their use makes them exclaim with Portia, "My little body is aweary of this great world."

I find a very sensible editorial in the New York American of April 18th, 1903, ent.i.tled "Science Needs Another Interpreter." It says: "Science is moving too fast for the ordinary layman, who would like to keep pace with its theories and discoveries.... Chemistry and physics needs a man who will do for them what Huxley did for biology--a man who has not only a scientific mind but a literary capacity.... Vaguely the layman knows there have been all sorts of discoveries since the X-rays showed him there was a way of seeing through a grindstone.

"But he had the idea of X-rays only partially digested when science came on him with the cathode rays and crowned the confusion by discovering radium. With a mind dazzled by light rays that are invisible, and invisible rays that are not light, and bewildered by being told of a substance that gives off terrific energy without loss of bulk or power, he lays away the natural philosophy of his college days and reaches blindly for what the new men have written of these things.

"He is then confronted with what reads like a catalogue of fossil insects diversified by stepladder algebraic formulas, the mere parenthesis of which are enough to make a school teacher shudder. The wretched seeker after knowledge is confronted with measurements of light waves until sunbeams are powerless to illuminate the day. Similarly he gathers from the fugitive words he understands among the ma.s.s that has no meaning for him, that Prof. Loeb has been putting salt on eggs and creating sea-urchins, to the utter distraction of the rules of nature's game as he has learned them.

"Somewhere there must exist the man whose skill with the pen and whose appreciation of knowledge are equal to the task of acting as interpreter between scientists and the world.... The world is hungrier for knowledge than it is for amus.e.m.e.nt, and the sales of the books of the man who succeeds in making science readable will make the returns of even the most popular novelist small in comparison."

This splendid editorial states facts graphically and truly, and portrays the real condition of things. It shows a scientific chaos, which portends a transition state, and a rapid evolution from the old traditions to a new and more perfect science. Without meaning to be egotistic or to a.s.sume any superior knowledge, or to have any of the qualities suggested in the editorial, I am impelled to suggest that if there are persons befogged scientifically, if they will read The Cities of the Sun, I think their minds will be clarified on many points and many of the old scientific traditions will fade into the nothingness from which they came.

I am glad to welcome so able a champion of the electrical theory as Mr.

Cope Whitehouse, who achieved fame by discovering that the depression in the Egyptian desert could be used for irrigation, and which the English Government is now utilizing.

This New York scientist says, in an interview in the Kansas City Star of Dec. 2d, 1902: "The English scientists have partially reduced our solar system to a machine, and a.s.signed to Deity little less than the duty of squeezing heat from the sun or stoking it with aerolites. Such theories are made for sale and not for science. When Newton suggested that gravity might swing the moon as well as attract an apple to the ground, he knew nothing of electricity. He might have observed however, that a comet never enters the sun and therefore could not have been attracted by it.

"A comet, as it closely approaches its supposed goal, changes its direction and darts away, tail foremost, in a curved path due to a resistance too feeble to obstruct its pa.s.sage. No allowance is made for the attraction of gravitation in wireless telegraphy, and the most superficial observations in ozology, or the science of smell, show that there is a force in odors which ignores gravitation.

"We have reason for supposing that gravitation is a purely local affair, and heat and light do not emanate from the sun. Heat comes from the earth, and the light from the atmosphere, precisely as the film in an incandescent lamp is heated by the resistance it offers to the electric current, and light is produced by the vibration of the motes in the air."

"The only fact established beyond doubt regarding the sun and planets is their revolution on their axes, and this is all that is needed to generate light and heat. They are arc dynamos and each in turn transmits what it receives to its neighbors on the circuit." This accords with my theory published five years previously. He continues: "We do not see the stars, nor even the sun.

"The astronomer who claims that his eye penetrates s.p.a.ce billions, trillions and decillions of miles stultifies himself in the next breath by declaring that worlds and solar systems are being formed of cosmic dust. Was the polestar ever obscured by the interposition of a world in formation? Yet the film formed by the breath of the observer on the eyepiece of a telescope would obscure Jupiter. Evidently, therefore, we no more see a star than we see a distant power house that supplies electricity to trolley lines. We only see the end of the stellar or solar ray where it enters the bubble of which the earth is the center.

"It is strange that no astronomer has ever heretofore observed that the magnifying power of a lens, two inches in diameter could have no appreciable effect on an object as remote as Saturn. Yet the ring and the satellites of this planet are thus made visible. In short, there is a kind of screen which presents the image of stars, as on a sheet between the observer and the magic lantern at an exhibition. The image can be magnified but their distance is perhaps scarcely fifty inches."

In regard to the eruptions of Mont Pelee he says: "Within twenty miles of the earth there is a cold as intense as liquid air. Differences of temperature can be converted into an electric flash, as electricity can be converted into heat. The so-called eruption of Mont Pelee was purely electrical. The sympathetic eruption of La Soufriere was partly due to an interrupted circuit and partly an induced current. There was no flow of lava, but can any one imagine the crater discharging what was said to have issued from it?... When there is an accurate statement of facts it will be found that neither dust nor gas came from the volcano. Really, only mud, hot water, smoke and stones were ejected. This material descended as a thin covering of uniform thickness. And this blanket was the dust precipitated by the electrical vibration still warm from crystallization. Had it been otherwise there would have been about one hundred million tons of frozen mud falling in the neighborhood.

"What Pere Mary saw was the cloud of decomposed matter caused by the electric discharges. It is as absurd to speak of all this coming out of the volcano as it would be to say that the smoke and stifling gases in a fire caused by an electric wire came from the power house. As a fuse burned out in the circuit, Pelee simply sparked.

"It set fire to everything between its summit and the sea, and the surface of the water itself was made warm. Now you see how mastodons are found, with hair and flesh intact, imbedded in Siberian ice. If the uprush of an air current would disturb the cold stratum above a chimney, what would be the effect of the upheaval of a mountain ma.s.s with or without a volcano? It is unnecessary to suppose that the axis of the earth has changed.

"The ice crop of the Antarctic is much larger than that of the North Pole, but the volcanoes of Erebus and Terror are in violent activity.

There are scores of terrestrial and celestial phenomena, from the double tide to the cold moon, that can be _explained only by the electrical theory_."

Thus I could fill a book with the recent proofs and statements of scientists which sustain the electric theory.

The dropping of an icicle into a barrel of unslaked lime once caused a great disaster in one of our cities. The slaking of the lime caused a fire. The firemen came and the more water they used the greater was the heat generated, until an explosion wrecked the neighborhood. In like manner, water in the fissures of the earth act chemically upon various minerals and produce similar results. Two or three layers of different metals in the earth produce a galvanic battery and results in the disaster of a volcanic explosion or an earthquake.

A silver dollar, a twenty-dollar gold piece, and a piece of copper of similar size, placed one on top of the other, with pieces of moist paper blotter between them, will generate sufficient electricity to send a telegram. Two iron tablespoons tied together with a piece of copper wire and their ends dipped in water will generate an electric current sufficient to send a cablegram across the Atlantic Ocean. So says Prof.

Trobridge of Harvard. If this is true, what a fearful volcano or earthquake may be produced by water moistening the clay or substance between the thousands of acres of different mines or metals one above the other in the outer crust of the earth?

These things are marvelous to contemplate and paralyze the imagination.

CHAPTER X

ELECTRICAL CREATION EXPLAINS NATURAL PHILOSOPHY

Herbert Spencer says: "Science is partially unified knowledge; philosophy is completely unified knowledge," and the first knowledge obtained by primitive man was that of sense and inference from such experience. Later there arose a disposition to speculate as to that which lies beyond sense and known only by its effect on sensible things.

This speculative propensity is worthy of the highest consideration as a means of knowledge. It has developed all of the numerous systems of philosophy which have flourished in the history of the human race.

First in the order of development comes the knowledge of things through the direct experience of physical sense, then comes imagination, reasoning, theoretic science and speculative philosophy.

The object of all systems of philosophy is to comprehend and teach the truth about the world around us, especially that part supposed to exist beyond the range of our senses, and to prescribe what is right and good in the life of man.

In modern times the attempt to unite all the sciences into a general system has been made by August Comte in France, and Herbert Spencer in England. According to Comte, it was time wasted and labor lost to attempt to explain the cause of gravity, chemical affinity, and electric and magnetic attraction and repulsion.

The atomic theory of the const.i.tution of matter, the conception of an interstellar ether, the undulatory theory of light and heat were all cast aside as useless and unworthy of notice because they were not directly observable and the senses unaided could not apprehend them.

According to Comte, the only object of science and philosophy is to observe, record and cla.s.sify sensible phenomena. What could not be observed by the senses could not be known and did not exist. It is said the only open road to the advance of philosophy was thus forbidden by the man who made the first valuable contribution to its advancement.

Herbert Spencer first undertook the great task of discovering the unifying principle of nature. He recognized all possible phenomena as parts of one great whole, and held that all were united by natural law.

He differed from Comte in that he recognized the imperceptible as a reality, but made no attempt to explain it or to bring it into harmony with the phenomena of sense, but designated it the unknowable. He divided his system into two general divisions--the knowable, which includes all things of sense, experience, and the unknowable, which includes everything else, or the invisible and imperceptible.

He held the knowable is the proper sphere of man's knowledge or philosophy, and the unknowable the legitimate domain of G.o.d and religion. And while he held that G.o.d and religion were imperceptible and unknowable, he held they were none the less a truth of the highest degree of certainty. It is therefore well said that all who fear the downfall of religion as a result of the encroachments of science or philosophy may thank Herbert Spencer for placing it where neither science or philosophy can touch it.

Upon the law of relativity he places the basis of that which can be known, and that which cannot be known. He says: "We think in relations.

This is truly the form of all thought.... On a.n.a.lyzing the process of thought we found that cognition of the absolute--the unknowable--was impossible because it presents neither relations nor its elements--difference and likeness. Further we found that not only intelligence but life itself consists in the establishment of internal relations in correspondence with external relations. And lastly, it was shown by the relativity of our thought we are eternally debarred from knowing or conceiving absolute being, yet that this relativity of our thought necessitates that vague consciousness of Absolute Being which no mental effort can suppress."

It is apparent that these propositions contradict each other. For, if from the relativity of thought we are eternally debarred from knowing or conceiving Absolute Being, how is it that we have a vague consciousness of this same Absolute Being which cannot be suppressed? Consciousness is one form of knowledge. Spencer, thus recognizing the reality of the unknowable, regards that which is or can be known as different manifestations of the unknowable.

These manifestations he claims, as they appear in consciousness, pa.s.s through a double series. First, a vivid series which includes all sense experience, and second, a faint series which includes thought, as in speculation and deliberation. Force, he contends, is the ultimate and deepest truth of the universe. All forms of consciousness, he says, are derived as experiences of force. All sense experiences as in the objective series, all subjective feeling or thought, everything known or knowable, is a manifestation of the one universal force or energy. This universal force, I contend, is, first, spirit or mind force; second, electric force controlled by mind force.

He says: "Contemplating pure force, we are irresistibly compelled by the relativity of our thought to vaguely conceive some unknown force as the correlative of the known force." This unknown or imperceptible force I contend is electricity and the mental force back of it. All our ideas of matter and motion, he says, are ideas of force. The demonstrated fact of the indestructibility of matter is but another name for the indestructibility of force.

The persistency of force means also the persistency of motion. All forms of physical energy--as light, heat, sound, electricity, magnetism, chemical action, gravity and sensible motion--he says, are different manifestations of force. In this I fully agree with him and claim these are all manifestations of the one fundamental force in nature--electricity.