The error of our century in questions of research seems to have been in the persistent investigation of the phenomena of matter (or material organization) as the sole province of physics, regarding psychical research as lying outside. The term physics is derived from a Greek word signifying “nature.” Nature does not limit herself to matter and mechanism. The phenomena of spirit are as much a part of Nature as are those of matter. The psychological theories of our physicists display a decided leaning towards materialism, disregarding the manifestations of the vital principle,—the vis motrix,—and refusing to investigate beyond the limits which they have imposed upon themselves, and which, if accepted by all, would take us back to the belief of the pagans, as echoed by Voltaire:

Sympathetic philosophy teaches that the various phenomena of the human constitution cannot be properly comprehended and explained without observing the distinction between the physical and material, and the moral and spiritual nature of man. It demonstrates incontrovertibly the separate existence and independent activity of the soul of man, and that the spirit governs the body instead of being governed by the body. As Spenser has said,—

Huxley tells us that science prospers exactly in proportion as it is religious, and that religion flourishes in exact proportion to the scientific depth and firmness of its basis. “Civilization, society, and morals,” says Figuier, “are like a string of beads, whose fastening is the belief in the immortality of the soul. Break the fastening and the beads are scattered.”

Now, as Nature nowhere exhibits to our visual perceptions a soul acting without a body, and as we do not know in what manner the spiritual faculties are united to the organization, psychology is compelled to investigate the operations of the intellect as if they were performed altogether independently of the body; whereas they are only manifested, in the ordinary state of existence, through the intermediate agency of the corporeal organs.

The accumulation of psychological facts and speculations which characterize this age appears to have made little or no permanent impression upon the minds of our scientists and our philosophers. Bishop Berkeley asks, “Have not Fatalism and Sadducism gained ground during the general passion for the corpuscularian and mechanical philosophy which hath prevailed?” Buffon, in writing of the sympathy, or relation, which exists throughout the whole animal economy, said, “Let us, with the ancients, call this singular correspondence of the different parts of the body a sympathy, or, with the moderns consider it as an unknown relation in the action of the nervous system, we cannot too carefully observe its effects, if we wish to perfect the theory of medicine.” Colquhoun, commenting upon Buffon’s statement, says that far too little attention has been paid to the spiritual nature of man,—to the effects of those immaterial and invisible influences which, analogous to the chemical and electrical agents, are the true springs of our organization, continually producing changes internally which are externally perceived as the marked effects of unseen causes, and which cannot be explained upon the principles of any law of mechanism.

These unseen causes are now made clear to us by the truths which Vibratory Physics and Sympathetic Philosophy demonstrate and sustain. The prophecy of Dr. Hufeland (made in connection with an account of certain phenomena arising from the unchangeable laws of sympathetic association) is soon to be fulfilled, and the door thrown open to “a new world” of research. Professor Rücker in his papers on “Molecular Forces,” William Crookes in his lecture on “The Genesis of Elements,” Norman Lockyer in his book on “The Chemistry of the Sun,”—all these scientists have approached so near to this hitherto bolted, double-barred and locked portal that the wonder is not so much that they have approached as that, drawing so near, they have not passed within.

Professor Rücker, in his papers (read before the Royal Institution of Great Britain) explaining the attractive and repulsive action of molecules, found himself obliged to apologize to scientists for suggesting the possibility of an intelligence by which alone he could explain certain phenomena unaccounted for by science; but do we not find proof in ourselves that the action of molecules is an intelligent action? For we must admit the individuality of the molecules in our organisms, in order to understand how it is that nourishment maintains life. Try as we may to account for the action of aliment upon the system, all is resolved into the fact that there must be some intelligent force at work. Do we ourselves disunite and intermingle, by myriad channels, in order to rejoin and replace a molecule which awaits this aid? We must either affirm that it is so, that we place them where we think they are needed, or that it is the molecules that find a place of themselves. We know that we are occupied in other ways which demand all our thoughts. It must, therefore, be that these molecules find their own place. Admit this, and we accord life and intelligence to them. If we reason that it is our nerves which appropriate substances that they need for the maintenance of their energy and their harmonious action, we then concede to the nerves what we deny to the molecules. Or, if we think it more natural to attribute this power to the viscera,—the stomach, for example,—we only change the thesis.

It will be said that it is pantheism to assert that matter, under all the forms which it presents, is only groups of aggregates of sympathetic molecules, of a substance unalterable in its individualities; a thinking, acting substance. Let us not deny what we are unable to explain. God is all that is, without everything that is being individually God. Etheric force has been compared to the trunk of a tree, the roots of which rest in Infinity. The branches of the tree correspond to the various modifications of this one force,—heat, light, electricity, and its close companion force, magnetism. It is held in suspension in our atmosphere. It exists throughout the universe. Actual science not admitting a void, then all things must touch one another. To touch is to be but one by contiguity, or there would be between one thing and another something which might be termed space, or nothing. Now, as nothing cannot exist, there must be something between “the atomic triplets” which are, according to the Keely theory, found in each molecule. This something in the molecule he affirms to be “the universal fluid,” or molecular ether. One thing touching another, all must therefore be all in all, and through all, by the sensitive combination of all the molecules in the universe, as is demonstrated by electricity, galvanism, the loadstone, etc. If we account for the intelligent action of molecules by attributing it to what has been variously called “the universal fluid,” “the electric fluid,” “the galvanic fluid,” “the nervous fluid,” “the magnetic fluid,” it will only be substituting one name for another; it is still some part or other of the organization which discerns and joins to itself a portion of one of the fluids referred to, or one of these fluids which discerns and mingles with the material molecules; it is still the life of the part, the life of the molecule, life individualized in all and through all.

Admitting, then, that there is a universal fluid, it must exist in and through all things. If void does not exist, everything is full; if all is full, everything is in contact; if everything is in contact, the whole influences and is influenced because all is life; and life is movement, because movement is a continual disunion and union of all the molecules which compose the whole. The ancient philosophers admitted all this. Under the different names of “macrocosm,” “microcosm,” “corpuscles,” “emanations,” “attraction,” “repulsion,” “sympathy,” and “antipathy,”—all names which are only one,—their various propositions were merely the product of inductions influenced by their modes of observing, as the deductions of scientists are influenced in our day.

Balzac tells us that everything here below is the product of an ethereal substance, the common basis of various phenomena, known under the inappropriate names of electricity, heat, light, galvanic and magnetic fluid, etc., and that the universality of its transmutations constitutes what is vulgarly called matter. We cannot take up a book on physics (written with true scientific knowledge) in which we do not find evidence that its author acknowledges that there is, correctly speaking, but one force in nature. Radcliffe tells us that what is called electricity is only a one-sided aspect of a law which, when fully revealed, will be found to rule over organic as well as inorganic nature—a law to which the discoveries of science and the teachings of philosophy alike bear testimony,—a law which does not entomb life in matter, but which transfigures matter with a life which, when traced to its source, will prove only to be the effluence of the Divine life.

Macvicar teaches that the nearer we ascend to the fountain-head of being and of action, the more magical must everything inevitably become; for that fountain-head is pure volition. And pure volition, as a cause is precisely what is meant by magic; for by magic is meant a mode of producing a phenomenon without mechanical appliances,—that is, without that seeming continuity of resisting parts and that leverage which satisfy our muscular sense and our imagination and bring the phenomenon into the category of what we call “the natural;” that is, the sphere of the elastic, the gravitating,—the sphere into which the vis inertiæ is alone admitted.

There is in Professor Crookes’s “Genesis of the Elements” an hypothesis of great interest,—a projectment of philosophical truth which brings him nearer than any known living scientist to the ground held by Keely. Davy defines hypothesis as the scaffolding of science, useful to build up true knowledge, but capable of being put up or taken down at pleasure, without injuring the edifice of philosophy. When we find men in different parts of the world constructing the same kind of scaffolding, we may feel fairly sure that they have an edifice to build. The scaffolding may prove to be insecure, but it can be flung away and another constructed. It is the edifice that is all-important,—the philosophy not the hypotheses. The science of learning, says Professor Lesley, and the science of knowledge are not quite identical; and learning has too often, in the case of individuals, overwhelmed and smothered to death knowledge. It is a familiar fact that great discoveries come at long intervals, brought by specially-commissioned and highly-endowed messengers; while a perpetual procession of humble servants of nature arrive with gifts of lesser moment, but equally genuine, curious, and interesting novelties. From what unknown land does all this wealth of information come? Who are these bearers of it? And who intrusted each with his particular burden, which he carries aloft as if it deserved exclusive admiration? Why do those who bring the best things walk so seriously and modestly along as if they were in the performance of a sacred duty, for which they scarcely esteem themselves worthy?

The Bishop of Carlisle, in his paper on “The Uniformity of Nature,” suggests the answer to all who are prepared to approach the abyss which has hitherto divided physical science from spiritual science,—an abyss which is soon to be illumined by the sunlight of demonstration and spanned by the bridge of knowledge. To quote from the paper of the Bishop of Carlisle, “There are matters of the highest moment which manifestly do lie outside the domain of physical science. The possibility of the continuance of human existence in a spiritual form after the termination of physical life is, beyond contradiction, one of the grandest and most momentous of possibilities, but in the nature of things it lies outside physics. Yet there is nothing absolutely absurd, nothing which contradicts any human instinct, in the supposition of such possibility; consequently, the student of physical science, even if he cannot find time or inclination to look into such matters himself, may well have patience with those who can. And he may easily afford to be generous: the field of physical science is grand enough for any ambition, and there is room enough in the wide world both for physical and for psychical research.”

But does psychical research lie outside the domain of physical science? What is the supernatural but the higher workings of laws which we call natural, as far as we have been able to investigate them? Is not the supernatural, then, just as legitimate a subject of consideration, for the truly scientific mind, as is the natural? If it explains, satisfactorily, phenomena which cannot be otherwise explained, there is no good reason why its aid should not be invoked by men of science. The truth is, that the ordinary course of nature is one continued miracle, one continued manifestation of the Divine mind. “Everything which is, is thought,” says Amiel, “but not conscious and individual thought. Everything is a symbol of a symbol; and a symbol of what?—of mind. We are hemmed round with mystery, and the greatest mysteries are contained in what we see, and do, every day.”

Keely affirms, with other philosophers, that there is only one unique substance, and that this substance is the Divine spirit, the spirit of life, and that this spirit of life is God, who fills everything with His thoughts; disjoining and grouping together these multitudes of thoughts in different bodies called atmospheres, fluids, matters, animal, vegetable, and mineral forms.

Herbert Spencer says that amid the mysteries that become the more mysterious the more they are thought about, there will remain the one absolute certainty, that we are ever in the presence of an infinite and an eternal energy, from which all things proceed. Macvicar foreshadowed the teachings of this new philosophy when he wrote, “All motion in the universe is rhythmical. This is seen in the forward and backward movement of the pendulum, the ebb and the flow of the tides, the succession of day and night, the systolic and diastolic action of the heart, and in the inspiration and expiration of the lungs. Our breathing is a double motion of universal æther, an active and a reactive movement. This androgyne principle, with its dual motion, is the breath of God in man.” The writings of the ancients teem with these ideas, which have been handed down to us from generation to generation, and are now flashing their light, like torches in the darkness, upon mysteries too long regarded as “lying outside the domains of physical science.”

Twenty years ago Macvicar wrote his “Sketch of a Philosophy,” in which he advanced the above views, with other views now maintained and demonstrated by Keely, who during these twenty years, without knowing Macvicar’s views, or of his existence even, has been engaged in that “dead-work which cannot be delegated,” the result of which is not learning, but knowledge; for learning, says Lessing, is only our knowledge of the experience of others; knowledge is our own. This burden of dead-work, writes Lesley, every great discoverer has had to carry for years and years, unknown to the world at large, before the world was electrified by his appearance as its genius. Without it, there can be no discovery of what is rightly called a scientific truth. Every advancement in science comes from this “dead-work,” and creates, of its own nature, an improvement in the condition of the race; putting, as it does, the multitudes of human society on a fairer and friendlier footing with one another. And during these twenty years of “dead-work” the discoverer of etheric force has pursued the even tenor of his way, under circumstances which show him to be a giant in intellectual greatness, insensible to paltry, hostile criticism, patient under opposition, dead to all temptations of self-interest, calmly superior to the misjudgments of the short-sighted and ignoble; noble means as indispensable to him as noble ends; fame and riches less important than his honour; his joys arising from the accomplishment of his work and the love and the sympathy of the few who have comprehended him! “Only the noble-hearted can understand the noble-hearted.” Keely’s chief ambition has been to utilize the force he discovered; not for his own aggrandizement, but to bless the lives of his fellow-men. He has scaled the rocks which barricade earth from heaven, and he knows that the fire which he has brought down with him is divine.

This so-called secret is an open secret, which, after it is known, may be read everywhere,—in the revolution of the planets as well as in the crystallization of minerals and in the growth of a flower.

“But why does not Keely share his knowledge with others?” “Why does he not proclaim his secret to the world?” are questions that are often asked. Keely has no secret to proclaim to the world. Not until the aerial ship is in operation will the world be able to comprehend the nature of Keely’s discoveries. When the distinguished physicist, Professor Dewar, of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, goes to America this summer, he will be instructed by Mr. Keely in his dissociation processes. Every man who has passed the mere threshold of science ought to be aware that it is quite possible to be in possession of a series of facts long before he is capable of giving a rational and satisfactory explanation of them—in short, before he is enabled to discover their causes even. This “dead-work” has occupied many years of Keely’s life; and only within the last five years has he reached that degree of perfection which warranted the erection of a scaffolding for the construction of the true edifice of philosophy.

We have only to recall the wonderful discoveries which have been made in modern times, relative to the properties of heat, of electricity, of galvanism, etc., in order to acknowledge that had any man ventured to anticipate the powers and uses of the steam-engine, the voltaic pile, the electrical battery, or of any other of those mighty instruments by means of which the mind of man has acquired so vast a dominion over the world of matter, he would probably have been considered a visionary; and had he been able to exhibit the effects of any of these instruments, before the principles which regulate their action had become generally known to philosophers, they would in all likelihood have been attributed to fraud or to juggling. Herein lies the secret of Keely’s delay. His work is not yet completed to that point where he can cease experimenting and publish the results of his “dead-work” to the world.

“When will he be ready?” is a question often asked; but it is one that God only can answer, as to the year and day. It now seems as if the time were near at hand,—within this very year; but not even Keely himself can fix the date, until he has finished his present course of experiments, his “graduation” of his twenty-seventh and last group of depolar disks, for effecting change and interchange with polar force.

“But what are his hypotheses? And what the tenets of his new philosophy?” His hypotheses are as antithetic to existing hypotheses in chemistry as the Newtonian system, at its first publication, was antithetic to the vortices of Descartes. The philosophy is not of his creation; nor is it a new philosophy. It is as old as the universe. Its tenets are unpopular, heterodox tenets, but their grandeur, when compared with prevailing theories, will cause the latter to appear like the soap-bubbles that Sir William Drummond said the grown-up children of science amuse themselves with; whilst the honest vulgar stand gazing in stupid admiration, dignifying these learned vagaries with the name of science. It is the sole edifice of true philosophy, the corner-stone of which was laid at Creation, when God said, “Let there be light; and there was light.” The scaffolding which our modern Prometheus has built is not the airy fabric of delusion, nor the baser fabric of a fraud, as has been so often asserted. It has been built plank by plank, upon firm ground, and every plank is of pure gold, as will be seen in due time.

It has been justly said that we have no ground for assuming that we have approached a limit in the field of discovery, or for claiming finality in our interpretations of Nature. We have, as yet, only lifted one corner of the curtain, enabling us to peep at some of the machinery by which her operations are effected, while much more remains concealed; and we know little of the marvels which in course of time may be made clear to us.

Earnest minds in all ages and in all countries have arrived at the same inferences which Keely has reached in his researches,—viz., that the one intelligent force in nature is not a mere mathematical dynamism in space and time, but a true Power existing in its type and fulness,—deity. You may say that such an inference belongs to religion, not to science, but you cannot divorce the two. No systematic distinction between philosophical, religious, and scientific ideas can be maintained. All the three run into one another with the most perfect legitimacy. Their dissociation can be effected only by art, their divorce only by violence. Great as is the revolution in mechanics which is to take place through this discovery, it has an equally important bearing on all questions connected with psychical research. Once demonstrated, we shall hear no more of the brain secreting thought, as the liver secretes bile. The laws of “rhythmical harmony,” of “assimilation,” of “sympathetic association,” will be found governing all things, in the glorious heavens above us, down to the least atom upon our earth. Leibnitz’s assertion, that “perceptivity and its correlative perceptibility are coextensive with the whole sphere of individualized being,” will be accounted for without depriving us of a Creator. “The music of the spheres” will be proved a reality, instead of a figure of speech. St. Paul’s words, “In Him we live, and move, and have our being,” will be better understood. The power of mind over matter will be incontrovertibly demonstrated.

“The requirement of every demonstration is that it shall give sufficient proof of the truth it asserts.” This Keely is prepared to give,—mechanical demonstration; and should he really have discovered the fundamental creative law, which he long since divined must exist, proving that the universal ether which permeates all molecules is the tangible link between God and man, connecting the infinite with the finite,—that it is the true protoplasm, or mother element of everything,—we may look for a philosophy which will explain all unexplained phenomena and reconcile the conflicting opinions of scientists.

The great law of sympathetic association, once understood, will become known as it is,—viz., as the governing medium of the universe. Herein lies the secret, the revelation of which will usher in the spiritual age foretold by the Prophets of the Old Testament and the Apostles of the New Testament. Inspiration is not confined to prophets and apostles and poets: the man of science, the writer, all who reach out after the Infinite, receive their measure of inspiration according to their capacity. We need a new revelation to turn back “the tidal wave of materialism” which has rolled in upon the scientific world, as much as Moses needed one when he sought to penetrate the mysteries of the Creation; and our revelation is near at hand,—a revelation which will change the statical “I am” into the dynamical “I will,”—a revelation which, while teaching us to look from Nature up to Nature’s God, will reveal to us our own powers as “children of God,” as “heirs of immortality.”

“Knowledge,” said Lord Beaconsfield, “is like the mystic ladder in the Patriarch’s dream. Its base rests on the primeval earth—its crest is lost in the shadowy splendour of the empyrean; while the great authors who, for traditionary ages, have held the chain of science and philosophy, of poesy and erudition, are the angels ascending and descending the sacred scale, maintaining, as it were, the communication between man and heaven.”

This beautiful imagery holds within it that seed of truth, which is said to exist in the wildest fable; for, although all great discoveries, pertaining to the material world, have been made gradually, with much starting on the wrong track, much false deduction and much worthless result, spiritual truths can be revealed to man in no other way than by that spiritual influence which maintains communication between the terrestrial and the celestial, or the material and the spiritual. “Truth is attained through immediate intuition,” say the Aryan teachers; but only by those who have educated their sixth sense; as will be seen in Mr. Sinclair’s new work, “Vera Vita; or, the Philosophy of Sympathy.” While the imaginative scientist is puzzling himself about new natural forces and the apparent suspension of old and hitherto invariable laws, Sinclair, in his writings, shows us that it is because we do not recognize the elements of nature that their influences remain mysterious to us.

Mr. Sinclair is as firm in his belief as is Mr. Keely that this element is the great connecting link between the Creator and the created, and that it is capable of rendering more marvellous services to man than all the discovered uses of electricity.

The coincidences in the theories of these two philosophers are the more remarkable, inasmuch as Mr. Sinclair’s have their origin, as set forth in his book “A New Creed,” in metaphysics; while “Keely’s wide and far-reaching philosophy” (to quote the words of a distinguished physicist) “has a physical genesis, and has been developed by long years of patient and persistent research.” But it is an undisputed fact that, in countries far distant from each other, different men have fallen into the same lines of research; and have made correspondent discoveries, at the same time, without having had any communication with each other; and never has there been a time when so many were testing all things that appear to give proof of the super-sensual element in man. There is a very general impression all over the world, says Marie Correlli, that the time is ripe for a clearer revelation of God and “the hidden things of God” than we have ever had before.

All persons who are interested in Keely’s discoveries and the nature of the unknown element discovered by Keely and Sinclair, will find in the writings of the latter a more lucid explanation of sympathetic association than Keely himself has ever been able to give in writing. The title of this remarkable book would have been more wisely chosen had its author called it “A New Element and a New Order of Things.” The Rev. Philip Schaff, D.D., says of creeds:—“The Bible is the word of God to man: the Creed is the answer of man to God. The Bible is the book to be explained and applied; the Creed is the Church’s understanding and summary of the Bible.” It is in this light that Mr. Sinclair’s new creed, human and humane, should be read.

There is no conductivity in the ether lines, writes Sinclair, for selfish desires and motives; for they are not of the soul, but are only sounds of the lips (or wishes of the material part of us), so that the established connecting-rod between the living soul and the source of life is insulated from desires that are not begotten in sympathy, and they at once run to earth. Where there is no connection there can be no communion. Without the natural sympathetic etheric connection between the source of life and the soul, there can be no communication. “A New Creed,” like the sympathetic etheric philosophy of Keely, reveals the connecting link between the finite and the Infinite, and teaches us that the primal law of evolution and of progress is slowly but surely preparing our race for the time when Christianity will be something more than a mere profession, and “the brotherhood of humanity” will no longer be the meaningless phrase that it now is. We are led to see, by this pure philosophy, that “our solar system is a type of a healthy social system; that in it each one affects, binds, controls, sustains, helps, makes free each other; that no star lives for itself alone;” that man was not made to mourn, and that our sufferings arise from our ignorance of the laws governing the innate motive power within us.