Electricity and the resurrection

Front matter

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

ELECTRICITY

AND THE

Chapter I. A Synopsis

Dreams — Intuitions — Personal magnetism — We are bits of God — Resurrection is not immortality — Definition of soul — Ethereal substance — Reflex powers of morals — Soul is primal — The luminiferous ether is the body of God — Electricity is the motion of ether — The ethereal body is the spiritual body — Matter and mind connate and inseparable — Will force is material force — The soul is an organism — Copula of the resurrection.

When we awake from holy dreams and there are

yet lingering with us their fragrance, delightful music

that never was heard, inspiring poetry that never was

written, and angelic companions who for the time

cheered and consoled us, we are loath to return from

those rapt illusions to unwelcome earth, wondering in

disappointment and longing if they were parts of a

permanent nature, and whether they show us that the

soul when unshackled of the body may immediately

take wings to other realms and finally walk in groves of complete rest and peace. Do the visions of dying saints, of those who have returned from the gates of death, or of babes who ''see something" point us onward to another land ? If we patiently follow out this common experience, aided by science, shall we some day find a rational assurance of its reality and continuance? Let us make use of what we really know to solve this supremest problem for ourselves, for the wayfaring man and woman, and, too, for the people of mammon and satiety.

Now, more than ever, the question is before the matter of fact world. "If a man die shall he live again?" We hear it upon the streets and see it in the daily newspapers. The pulpit is gradually losing its influence because of its perpetual and unchanging demands upon blind credulity ; and plain people are asking: ''Do science and reason cast a ray beyond the grave ?" Let us see if by common sense we can get a clue to Paul's ^'spiritual body'' within us that is a thing apart from the physical body, is of ultimate ethereal matter and therefore indestructible in its essence, and is kept together and pushed forward by the conserving forces of Love, Hope and Moral Purity.

We will not speak of Immortality, because that is too great a subject for the finite mind to grasp, but we will speak of the Resurrection from this changing, earthly condition into one of security, permanence and happiness. Along the paths of Eternity, under the highest states of blessedness, we have a vague in-

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stinct that we might get tired of it all. But this earth does not tire all of us, and just as we are fit to live we die ; so we want another chance.

We say soul is matter, a refined and ethereal matter that thinks, and by reason of that matter being homogeneous, simple and ultimate, exists onward when it escapes the body. The universal luminiferous ether is the conscious God. Our souls are detached bits of that essence, from and in the first protoplasm-in-embryo, up. As matter and cohesion are eternal, so too are ether and mind.

We must also start with the assumption that the universe is composed of mind and matter as two separate and distinct qualities, conditions or things, antithetical in character, although inseparably united. There can be no mind without matter and no matter without mind. How they are united we need never inquire, for we can never find out any more than we can find out how matter attracts. We shall waste no time in trying to learn what matter is, but will regard it as we commonly understand it; i. e., as a realism adapted to our physical senses and the opposite of mind. Ether is the body of our minds, as the cosmic universal ether is the body of God. If the ether is imperishable, then the soul is imperishable, and its continuity is an easy result of will power and moral fitness. Let us study phenomena and see.

The main proposition here will be, necessarily, often repeated, like a student's reviews, to keep it in mind through all the analyses of various phenomena. We have taken the position that mind cannot exist but with something else that is not mind, in the future state as here.

'There is nothing but substance and its modes of motion." — Spinoza.

From this text we proceed. I think, therefore I exist. To think, there must be something else beside the thought to do the thinking. We cannot conceive of a thought existing alone — ^by itself. It must have a location and that location implies that it is a spatial thing of length, breadth and thickness, and has form and substance in the disembodied state as well as here. So there can be no mind without some other thing for it to be hitched to. That other thing is material substance. But what kind of substance?

Assuming with all religious cults that there is a God who made and is now controlling the universe, the human mind cannot comprehend Him as a vacuum, as an unsubstantial thing, as a consciousness that is absolutely unconnected with any kind of substance. And assuming, too, that we are to live after death as spirits, we can form no idea that those spirits will be mere floating or abstract dreams without spacequalities, without form, features or surroundings. If God and our spirits are substance, then they relate to and persist with all other substances in the universe, and are subjects of science and of rational proof.

By this word substance we mean some kind of matter, thinner than the Hghtest gas, unatomized. Although we cannot know what matter is, or how the atom is put together from the ether, we know that it is not consciousness, but rather is that class of outward appearances like wood, stone, flesh, gas, etc. Some will say we cannot prove the real separate existence of matter. Well, we will go ahead as we commonly understand matter to be, according to universal instinct. We will suppose that mind and matter are two separate qualities united as the human soul.

Now, it is pretty well settled that there is pervading the universe a subtile substance called the Ether. This is supposed to be the parent of all physical matter. This ether has the omnipresence of God. It, or something like it, is probably the immediate body of God per se, without any figure of speech. Why should not God have a body as well as man? Why may not the one cosmic mass of ether be the one personal God, just as well as the one mass of flesh can be the one intelligent man? By regarding the universe as a material entity, why may not the spirit of God be immanent in that, just the same as intelligence is immanent in the atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and sulphur, all of which are but the results of ether and compose the temple of the Holy Ghost, i. e., man's body? "And God created man in his own image/' that is, the ethereal soul of man, the fleshy body being of no more permanence or fixity than a thistledown or jet of water. We can illustrate the durability of the soul-substance in this way: The motion of the ether is electricity. The minute segment of an electric car pulley conducts a material force that will crash tons of iron through the streets, which material force is none other than the direct and immediate presence of the body and the soul of Almighty God. To move a ponderous thing requires a ponderous thing to be the mover. The whirling of the ether — God's body — ^by the will of God, as a man whirls his own body, forms the atoms, as the whirl of wind or water makes the powerful whirlpool or cyclone; and the mutual bombardment of these atoms by the direct will of God makes physical matter by molecules. ("An atom is a clot of ether." — Prof. J. S. McKay.) And the clot is only the motion of the ether by the indwelling will of God. Of this cosmic ether our souls were made. Therefore, the substance of the soul is like that of God's, imperishable, non-atomic, immortal. We are detached particles of God. Our physical bodies finally dissolve in spite of the will because they are atomic and molecular ; but were they ethereal and ultimate, we could make them live on as long as it would be our pleasure. The soul is an ethereal, non-atomic organism, perfectly related to an unchanging ethereal environment, and maintains its ethereal body by choice.

A

Even with the tendency of the earthly body to dispersion, the will power keeps it together to the limit of its natural composition, the same as the will of God keeps the atoms together.

When the fiery earth cooled off, God's enveloping will, in the oxygen and sunshine, detached itself into various living organisms in the thin surface crust, the fittest of which detachments survive the changes of matter as God survives. This is all there is about creation, organic life and the resurrection.

The ether penetrates all physical matter between the atoms, as water penetrates a sponge or flows through cracked ice, the water and the ice being one thing in different conditions of chemical stress, the same as ether and^atter are one thing in different sjtress. Thus a steel rapier would penetrate a ghost only in appearance ; the more solid ether of the ghost would really penetrate between the atoms of the steel rapier. So the soul being invulnerable to all physical conditions and attacks, lives on by its own desire and the inherent inertia of the ego. It does not dissolve back into God's substance because it has personal selflove and His permission to live as one of His angels so long as it does not destroy itself from within by vice and sin. All that a soul needs for resurrection is a good moral constitution of hope, love, purity, integrity, justice, which qualities by their nature give the soul-body a reiUx propulsion across the coma of death, the same as we, by predetermination, can awaken ourselves at any fixed time out of sleep.

"Immortality is a fact in man's nature." — Theo. Parker.

The ether, or electricity, being such a mighty force as to crush and dissipate physical matter, is substantial enough to form and maintain a spiritual or ethereal body in the future life, and this without any violence to physiological analogy. Man, to be annihilated with his fleshly body, would be an unfinished work. The recognition of the Ether as the future realm of humanity, opens up a scope and liberty of soul as much above our present enthrallment as the free and resplendent butterfly is above the helpless, earth-bound grub it once was.

"There fields of light and liquid ether flow, Purged from pond'rous dregs of earth below."

— ^John Dryden.

Let US gradually adapt the understanding to a material substance and force that is not atomic. A horseshoe magnet will pass physical force undiminished through a thick plate of glass and attract a piece of iron on the other side. What is the substance of that penetrating physical force ? There is no physical force except from physical substance. Force must have some real thing back of it. Is it a stream or whirl of

THE RESURRECTION.

iron-ether from and of the magnet, passing through the glass, or is it a corkscrew whirl of intervening matter without any substance leaving the magnet ? So can electricity pass through glass or a stone wall without any wire or apparent conductor and produce a light or other physical phenomena on the other side. A person holding an iron bar, without friction, magnetizes the bar so that it will impart separated magnetism to other bars and to iron filings. What is this force or animal magnetism ? Is it mere animal vitality alone passing into the bar, or is it a part of the will and soul? Are they different substances or are they one substance? The scientists tell us that ma gnetism and electricity are a ''mode of motion /' Mode of motion of what? The magnet has no motion while it attracts; the trolley wire has no motion while it gives motion. We have noticed that the approach of another person is heralded by some occult objective influence. What is that invisible stream of force, substance, or mode of contact that precedes us ? Is it a transit, emission or detachment of our mind-substance, or is it a mode of motion of our souls upon intervening substance? May it not be mere bodily radiation? Our minds are all connected by this universal ethereal medium.. Through it shall we ever, when distant from one another, practically connect by our finer development, without wire of physical appliance? Are ) we all the time in electric or spiritual touch but too dull to feel it ? From such simple, natural and related facts may yet evolve new systems of psychology and of religious and social philosophy.

"I believe it is possible for people hundreds of miles apart to signal to one another without wires. Between you and the person there must be a common feeling. It most frequently makes itself felt in the hour of trouble and is often a call for help. The correspondence here is between heart and heart, and the medium through which the message passes is love." — Dr. Dwight Hillis.

All mental action is the action of matter, but not necessarily of brain matter. It is of an ethereal matter that is within but separate and discrete from, brain, flesh and blood. There is within us, as we shall see, an electrical or ethereal body, independent of and controlling the animal body. Materialism is reversed ; the body is the product and agent of the soul, and not its origin.

The intent of this essay is to popularize, by simple scientific analogy, from facts which everybody can become familiar with, the theory that the soul is a self-continuing material entity, not an abstract consciousness ; that it operates beyond the body, dominates the body and is, like all substance or material element, indistructible, immortal and a part of science.

, "For of the soul the body form doth take, \ For soul is form and doth the body make."

— Spenser.

Many things are inserted here as intuitions, or analogies, as a natural outcome of a mind's harmony with nature. The animal instantly at birth knows how to feed and protect itself, and afterwards its progeny, without teaching. This is by intuition, which is an inherited knowledge or direct inspiration from God.

"The actual discoveries of science render everything credible that can be proved to come within the compass of analogy." — Dr. Isaac Taylor.

The corroborative quotations herein were found, in every instance, after their contexts were penned for this work, and are used to lend force to the present argument. If the author is an enthusiast he has found himself in good company. Many disconnected people concurring are likely to be on the right road. In the middle of the ocean one morning, under a narrow dome of mist, several officers of a ship were with sextants peering in different directions for the sun. None could determine where it was, but they struck an average of their conjectures, guided the ship by that, and in the afternoon w^hen the surrounding vapor was dispelled they found that the course taken was correct.

''We are surer we see a star when we know that others see it also." — Henry George.

Most of the world believe that what they cannot see cannot be. Men say that they will not believe that which they cannot know, yet they beheve they know their own children. In the realm of psychology we must look whither our intellectual parallaxes point. Even in physical discovery with microscope, telescope, measure and crucible, we do not always agree as to what is sensibly right before us without long, painstaking and mutual effort. The mind as well as the eye has to be trained to recognize very apparent things. The eyes of the blind suddenly restored to perfection cannot see without gradual practice.

In the New York City of desert pavement, thundering, grinding, gritty, soulless, one tiny green oat-sprout in a curbstone joint showed that the living God was even there. Along those streets rushed a mass of humanity fighting hard for a livelihood, with as little concern for spiritual philosophy as brutes. What for honor care the thousands of those daughters of Eve, from basement and garret, hurrying along poorly clad, sandwich and dime novel in hand, to their sweatshops and task masters, or to worse where they can find a warm heart though in the guise of sin? What for honesty care those desperate men and boys ? They tell us these moral sentiments will do to put into books, but they are not a part of practical life. A new garment, a square meal, a theater ticket, a horse race, a ball game, are to them the first blessings. Any stray word of inspiration coming to their ears is scoffed at, and society is to blame more than they. But might not some plain and secular reasoning: as to the natural science of a future life, the science of a proud and immortal soul in each of them, and of a surrounding God demonstrated as near to them, be dropped like that oat seed into some crevice of their sterile hearts, to become a sprout of living hope, to show them that God is even there, and that Elysian fields are waiting for even them?

And in the more pretentious grades of society there is the same blank indifference and ignorance as to the essence of the soul. King, judge, scientist, broker, society man, mechanic, laborer, scholar, dilettante — all are Ptolemaic as to the beyond. Some, from early influences, vaguely believe that they have a soul, but they stop there and are content, like Caesar and Cicero, that the earth is flat. We have as narrow a Mediterranean world spiritually as the ancients did geographically.

When we assert that soul is a separate and immortal substance we do not expect it to be believed all of a sudden. The world moves slowly. Conviction is a growth. Even true logic and facts are not readily persuasive. ''With what body do they come?" is a question that theologians must answer in the concrete if they expect to arrest increasing agnosticism. The world is becoming too materialistic and sharp for ipsedixits, mysticism and supernaturalism. If the resurrected dead come with a body at all it can be demonstrated as a natural fact. There is no other way to make good the mansions in the skies, the New Jerusalem, Beulah Land and all the rest of Christian metaphor. The world is showing more and more that pulpiteers must come down to science. The common mind will always refuse to take hold of a mere sentiment future or a metaphysical soul. The "spiritual body" of St. Paul's discovery is the vital core or focus of Christianity, and its rationale must be expounded before his revelation will be accepted.

By this argument we may not quite demonstrate immortality, but we can detect some light ahead — where the sun is. The theory of a conscious soul corporeity, of ether or some other substance that is remotely related to physical matter, and which is the body of God, will revolutionize society^, will produce a new religion, if by some pat formula or popular treatment it can be forced through the opaque shuck and shell of materialism that envelops us.

It is not necessary to state that this book is not written for scholars ; it is for men and women at work at the bench, in the street, on the farms, or those maniac brokers who would appear like convicts if their clothing were as streaked as their souls. Simple language and illustration, as well as repetition in new dress, will suit the plain people and lift them out of their abstract idealism on the one hand or gross materialism on the other.

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The Roman masters of the world might have known that the world was round if they had only studied the sphericity of the raindrops and carried their figuring beyond the dip of their sails upon the Mediterranean. But later men who did so were put into jail. And we, if we put wings to analogy, may yet find the soul and its resurrection demonstrable from our present bodies, as we might count upon the butterfly, before ever seeing one, by reading the inside of the caterpillar — watching the progressive development of the pupa.

"Frcm this inert mass shall suddenly spring, like well clad Minerva from the head of Jove, a creature with no apparent kinship either with the case that enwrapped it or the lowly worm that preceded the chrysalis, a creature with soft elastic body as the air in which it floats, with spreading feelers and broad spreading wings, clothed with jeweled dust and silken hair which reflect the colors of the rainbow and in their delicate combinations defy the painter's pallette." — Scudder (Butterflies.)

'The grub contains the whole of the future butterfly, not by generation but by development." — Grindon.

We cannot conceive of the extinction of sentience, which is a basilar quality of the universe. Wherever there is the ether, which is the body of God, there is sentience. We plume ourselves too grandly and conceitedly upon our poor little physical combination of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, phosphorus, sulphur, etc. ; but there are in the universe plenty of good organizations with all that left out. Break a magnet into pieces, and each piece will remain a distinct and polarized magnet. Pulverize it, and each particle of its dust remains a perfect magnet. Reduce it to atoms, and each atom will be a magnet. Reduce it to either and the attraction and life are still there. So it is with soul substance. The ether cannot be destroyed, and mind co-exists within and of it the same as its attraction does.

Various philosophers have tried to prove immortality, the most rational of them linking the mental ego with ^'A fine- material vehicle which is its immediate sensorium in this world and the seat of its recollections in the next/' (Ency. Britannica.) But some have made confusion by calling this ethereal vehicle of the mind an immaterial substance, deeming the word immaterial to mean simply not physical, or ''whatever is not cognizable by the physical senses." Now add to the above mentioned theory of a ''fine material vehicle" the new theory of the persistence of matter, ether and electricity, and also the persistence of mind and morals, and the theory that the whole universe has been made out of one fine homogeneous element, unparticled and unatomic, then we can easily understand the theory that the soul substance is existent before and after bodily life in the sense that the essence of the soul is identical with the body and substance of the ever-living God, of whom we are scintilations.

If we are to live after this fleshly career it will be only by the law of connected cause and effect, and there is that within us now which scientifically predicates it. The ancients were wise, dominant and great like ourselves, but their notion of the earth beyond a few weeks, march or sail was as confined as our spiritual fancies now are of what is beyond the grave. Let us boldly pass the Pillars of Hercules out into the mysterious ocean of the soul world and discover, beyond, the real and glowing continent of Hope for mankind.

CHAPTER 11.

THE SUBSTANCE OF THE SOUL.

God and soul are not supernatural — Mental dynamics — Positive and passive people — Napoleon and Pitt — Personal radiation — Soul, mind and spirit synonymous — Will power is a material power — Powers of command — Free agency — Governing children — Political power — Vibratory laws — Hypnotism, fluidic and suggestive.

Many social and personal phenomena show the spiritual body; they convince us that the mind has a direct, dynamic and material power over other minds, inducting its conditions, character and desires, suffusing and impressing them by both voluntary and involuntary force, without speech, sign or any bodily or physical media whatever ; that the will force of man is an independent and substantial force, and that its laws and methods of action are like those of physical forces. Mental conditions and characteristics are infectious like diseases, or are vibratory like light, heat and magnetism. They have a mechanical action aside from moral or logical influence. Whether that dynamic force of one mind upon another is an emission of its substance, or is a vibration or mode of motion upon the intervening ether, will be discussed laten

"It is certainly agreeable to reason to believe that there are some slight effluxions from spirit to spirit where men are in each other's presence, the same as from body to body." — Lord Bacon.

"Quite ordinary phenomena seem to indicate that the will of an individual does at times affect the ether or nerve atmosphere about him." — Hyland C. Kirk.

"And I experienced that extraordinary emotion which, like the magnetic fluid, surrounds extraordinary destinies." — George Sands.

Napoleon radiated his spirit upon his armies and the world as directly as any physical eflfect is produced, and without the aid of the ordinary sensible media. There had been poured into his organism from the sources of space, independent of heredity, a quantity of soul force that was as phenomenal as any physical fact. Outward nature supplied him, contemporaneously and directly.

"The seed of genius falls directly from God's hand.'* — Gen. Lew Wallace.

Some thinkers have attributed this involuntary and magical personal influence to mere bodily causes, such as tone of voice, look of the eye, or self-confidence or an overbearing manner. The materialists believe mind to be only the result of the molecular motion of physical matter in the body, and they endeavor to account for many of the so-called mesmeric, telepathic and clairvoyant phenomena wholly by physical law, or by a joint action of mind or body upon the etheric medium that exists everywhere, connecting us all. While we incline to believe that the mind or soul is an organized body, super-physical, and has a direct effect upon other minds by laws wholly psychic or separate from physical law, involving in no degree the mediumship of physical or animal matter, yet if the body were incidentally brought in part into the relationship of a medium of transmission, there still is a central and independent origin of pyschic power, a fountainhead or a seat of will, an interior soul-body that is as independent of the animal body as a man is independent of his house, or as a foetus becomes independent of its parent, or as a snail is of its shell. The will and soul-body may be utterly free of, and yet be temporarily allied to, a physical body, and be influenced or reacted upon thereby, automatically when not under its own free volition and judgment. Bodily appetites, which are blind, temporal and without will, may sometimes overcome a weak and ignorant soul-will, but the latter is eternal and may dominate when it maintains its own most secret delicate poise upon its own throne.

Men's characters and wills are strong precisely like their bodies, not morally but substantially and physically, as one electric or air current is stronger than another. It takes quantity and fibre of muscle to make physical strength ; so it requires quantity of soul-substance to make strength of soul and will. There is the same difference between the density and fibre of souls that there is between the density and fibre of basswood and hickory, pewter and steel, or gold and brass. The exercise of authority requires material strength of will, using "material" in its common meaning, not moral or intellectual strength. To command, where moral force is of no avail and interests are not a moving consideration, one needs volume of soul-substance, the same as in physical force. Muscular force can only be exerted by will force. Willing is not material, but it is associated naturally with ether that is material, as cohesion is associated with miatter. Intellect and morals are not alone sufficient for power over other men. A human being's character works out from him involuntarily and mechanically, as a stove gives out heat. If a man be not pure gold no building up will give him the value of gold; if he be not steel no whetting will make him cut ; if he be bad no art will conceal his badness ; if he be good his goodness will be felt without effort. All soul conditions radiate themselves involuntarily as a flower does its fragrance or a lamp its light or magnet its force.

''If a teacher has an opinion that he wishes to conceal, his pupils will become as fully indoctrinated into that as into any which he publishes. If you would not be known as doing a thing, never do it." — Emerson.

"Curse not the king, no, not in thy thought; and curse not the rich in thy bed chamber; for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter." — Ecc. lo, 20.

The soul cannot conceal any more than the sun can. No lie was ever fully believed. Nor can ambition backed by energy and courage supply a want of inborn power. Dearth of natural pride, of gravity or dignity cannot be made up by affectation. Human beings pass on sight as coins do, for their intrinsic worth, although dull people are deceived by manners. A little man soulfully cannot be a big man no matter how hard he tries, any more than brass can feel itself to be gold. A babbling brook, however clear, active or ambitious, cannot be a Niagara. We can emit no tone but just in correspondence to our metal.