Modern Physicists are Playing at Blind Man's Buff

Occultism puts to Science the question: Is light a body, or is it not?

Occultism shows that the current, most eminent Physicists have no real knowledge on the subject.

To know what light is, and whether it is an actual substance or a mere undulation of the “ethereal medium,”

Science has first to learn what Matter, Atom, Ether, Force, are in reality.

But it knows nothing of any of these, and admits its ignorance.

It has not even agreed what to believe in. There are dozens of hypotheses on the same subject from Scientists who are antagonistic to each other and often self-contradictory.

But being radically inconsistent with each other, they must finally end by mutually destroying themselves.

The author of Concepts of Modem Physics writes:

The eminent Physicist, G. A. Hirn says the same thing in the 43rd Volume of the Mémoires de l’Académie Royale de Belgique:

The “pre-requisite of that incessant play of the ‘scientific imagination’,” which is so often found in Professor Tyndall’s eloquent discourses, is vivid indeed, as is shown by Stallo, and for contradictory variety it leaves far behind it any “phantasies” of Occultism.

However that may be, if physical theories are confessedly “mere formal, explanatory, didactic devices,” and if, to use the words of a critic of Stallo, “atomism is only a symbolical graphic system,”794 then the Occultist can hardly be regarded as assuming too much, when he places alongside of these “devices” and “symbolical systems” of Modern Science, the symbols and devices of Archaic Teachings.

“An Lumen Sit Corpus, Nec Non?”

Most decidedly light is not a body, we are told. Physical Sciences say light is a force, a vibration, the undulation of Ether. It is the property or quality of Matter, or even an affection thereof—never a body!

Just so. For this discovery, the knowledge, whatever it may be worth, that light or caloric is not a motion of material particles, Science is chiefly, if not solely indebted, to Sir William Grove. It was he who in a lecture at the London Institution, in 1842, was the first to show that “heat, light,795 may be considered as affections of matter itself, and not of a distinct ethereal, ‘imponderable,’ fluid [a state of matter now] permeating it.”796

Yet, perhaps, for some Physicists—as for Œrsted, a very eminent Scientist—Force and Forces were tacitly “Spirit [and hence Spirits] in Nature.” What several rather mystical Scientists taught was that light, heat, magnetism, electricity and gravity, etc., were not the final Causes of the visible phenomena, including planetary motion, but were themselves the secondary effects of other Causes, for which Science in our day cares very little, but in which Occultism believes; for the Occultists have exhibited proofs of the validity of their claims in every age. And in what age were there no Occultists and no Adepts?

Sir Isaac Newton held to the Pythagorean corpuscular theory, and was also inclined to admit its consequences; which made the Comte de Maistre hope, at one time, that Newton would ultimately lead Science back to the recognition of the fact that Forces and the Celestial Bodies were propelled and guided by Intelligences.797

But de Maistre counted without his host. The innermost thoughts and ideas of Newton were [pg 526]perverted, and of his great mathematical learning only the mere physical husk was turned to account.

According to one atheistic Idealist, Dr. Lewins:

When Sir Isaac, in 1687 … showed mass and atom acted upon … by innate activity … he effectually disposed of Spirit, Anima, or Divinity, as supererogatory.

Had poor Sir Isaac foreseen to what use his successors and followers would apply his “gravity,” that pious and religious man would surely have quietly eaten his apple, and never have breathed a word about any mechanical ideas connected with its fall.

Great contempt is shown by Scientists for Metaphysics generally and for Ontological Metaphysics especially. But whenever the Occultists are bold enough to raise their diminished heads, we see that Materialistic, Physical Science is honey-combed with Metaphysics;798 that its most fundamental principles, while inseparably wedded to transcendentalism, are nevertheless, in order to show Modern Science divorced from such “dreams,” tortured and often ignored in the maze of contradictory theories and hypotheses.

A very good corroboration of this charge lies in the fact that Science finds itself absolutely compelled to accept the “hypothetical” Ether, and to try to explain it on the materialistic grounds of atomo-mechanical laws.

This attempt has led directly to the most fatal discrepancies and radical inconsistencies between the assumed nature of Ether and its physical behaviour. A second proof is found in the many contradictory statements made about the Atom—the most metaphysical object in creation.

What does the modern science of Physics know of Ether?

This concept belongs to ancient Philosophers. The Greeks borrowed it from the Âryans. The origin of modern Ether is found in, and disfigured from, Âkâsha.

This disfigurement is claimed as a refinement of Lucretius’ idea.

The existence of Ether is accepted in Astronomy, Physics, and Chemistry.

This æther to astronomers was originally regarded as a fluid of extreme tenuity and mobility. It offered no sensible resistance to the motions of celestial bodies.

The question of its continuity or discontinuity was not seriously mooted.

Its main function was to be the basis for hydro-dynamical theories of gravitation.

In physics, this fluid appeared for some time in several rôles in connection with the “imponderables” [so cruelly put to death by Sir William Grove], some physicists going so far as to identify it with one or more of them.799

Stallo then points out the change caused by the kinetic theories.

From the date of the dynamical theory of heat, Ether was chosen in Optics as a substratum for luminous undulations.

In order to explain the dispersion and polarization of light, Physicists had to resort once more to their “scientific imagination,” and forthwith endowed the Ether with (a) atomic or molecular structure, and (b) with an enormous elasticity, “so that its resistance to deformation far exceeded that of the most rigid elastic bodies.” This necessitated the theory of the essential discontinuity of Matter, hence of Ether.

After having accepted this discontinuity, in order to account for dispersion and polarization, theoretical impossibilities were discovered with regard to such dispersion.

Cauchy’s “scientific imagination” saw in Atoms “material points without extension.”

He proposed, in order to obviate the most formidable obstacles to the undulatory theory (namely, some well-known mechanical theorems which stood in the way), to assume that the ethereal medium of propagation, instead of being continuous, should consist of particles separated by sensible distances.

Fresnel rendered the same service to the phenomena of polarization.

E. B. Hunt upset the theories of both.800

There are Scientists who proclaim them “materially fallacious”.

The other “atomo-mechanicalists” cling to them with desperate tenacity.

The supposition of an atomic or molecular constitution of Ether is upset by thermo-dynamics.

Clerk Maxwell showed that such a medium would be simply gas.801

The hypothesis of “finite intervals” is thus proven of no avail as a supplement to the undulatory theory.

Besides, eclipses fail to reveal any such variation of colour as is supposed by Cauchy, on the assumption that the chromatic rays are propagated with different velocities.

Astronomy has pointed out more than one phenomenon absolutely at variance with this doctrine.

Thus, while in one department of Physics the atomo-molecular constitution of the Ether is accepted in order to account for one special set of phenomena, in another department such a constitution is found to be quite subversive of a number of well-ascertained facts; and Hirn’s charges are thus justified.

Chemistry deemed it impossible to concede the enormous elasticity of the æther without depriving it of those properties, upon which its serviceableness in the construction of chemical theories mainly depended.

This ended in a final transformation of Ether.

The exigencies of the atomo-mechanical theory have led distinguished mathematicians and physicists to attempt a substitution for the traditional atoms of matter, of peculiar forms of vortical motion in a universal, homogeneous, incompressible, and continuous material medium [Ether].802

I have no great scientific education, only a tolerable acquaintance with modern theories.

I know the Occult Sciences.

The Occult Theories have as much right to be heard as any of the so-called learned and academical hypotheses.

Thus, whether the followers of the Royal Society choose to accept Ether as a continuous or as a discontinuous fluid matters little, and is indifferent for the present purpose.

It simply points to one certainty: Official Science knows nothing to this day of the constitution of Ether.

Let Science call it Matter, if it likes; only neither as Âkâsha, nor as the one sacred Æther of the Greeks, is it to be found in any of the states of Matter known to modern Physics.

It is Matter on quite another plane of perception and being, and it can neither be analyzed by scientific apparatus, nor appreciated or even conceived by the “scientific imagination,” unless the possessors thereof study the Occult Sciences. That which follows proves this statement.

Stallo says that De Quatrefages and other Materialists in Anthropology, Biology, etc. resorted to the greatest fallacies in their efforts to support their individual hypotheses and systems.

Most of them reject action at a distance.

—one of the fundamental principles in the question of Æther or Âkâsha in Occultism—while, as Stallo justly observes, there is no physical action “which, on close examination, does not resolve itself into action in distance”; and he proves it.

Metaphysical arguments, according to Professor Lodge,803 are “unconscious appeals to experience.”

If such an experience is not conceivable, then it does not exist. In his own words:

If a highly-developed mind or set of minds, find a doctrine about some comparatively simple and fundamental matter absolutely unthinkable, it is an evidence … that the unthinkable state of things has no existence.

And thereupon, toward the end of his lecture, the Professor indicates that the explanation of cohesion, as well as of gravity, “is to be looked for in the vortex-atom theory of Sir William Thomson.”

It is needless to stop to inquire whether it is to this vortex-atom theory, also, that we have to look for the dropping down on earth of the first life-germ by a passing meteor or comet—Sir William Thomson’s hypothesis.

But Prof. Lodge might be reminded of the wise criticism on his lecture in Stallo’s Concepts of Modern Physics.

Noticing the above-quoted declaration by the Professor, the author asks

Whether … the elements of the vortex-atom theory are familiar, or even possible, facts of experience? For, if they are not, clearly that theory is obnoxious to the same criticism which is said to invalidate the assumption of actio in distans.804

And then the able critic shows clearly what the Ether is not, nor can ever be, notwithstanding all scientific claims to the contrary.

Thus he opens widely the entrance to our Occult Teachings:

The whole vortex-atom theory replaces the “metaphysical theory” of action at a distance. It rests on the hypothesis of the existence of a material medium which is utterly unknown to experience, and which has properties somewhat different805 from those of ordinary matter.

Hence this theory, instead of being, as is claimed, a reduction of an unfamiliar fact of experience to a familiar fact, is, on the contrary, a reduction of a fact which is perfectly familiar, to a fact which is not only unfamiliar, but wholly unknown, unobserved and unobservable.

The alleged vortical motion of, or rather in, the assumed ethereal medium is … impossible, because “motion in a perfectly homogeneous, incompressible, and therefore continuous fluid, is not sensible motion.”…

It is manifest, therefore … that, wherever the vortex-atom theory may land us, it certainly does not land us anywhere in the region of physics, or in the domain of veræ causæ.806

The hypothetical undifferentiated 807 and undifferentiable medium is clearly an involuntary reïfication of the old ontological concept pure being. And so, that theory has all the attributes of an inapprehensible metaphysical phantom.808

It is a “phantom” which can be made apprehensible only by Occultism.

From such scientific Metaphysics to Occultism there is hardly one step. Those Physicists who hold the view that the atomic constitution of Matter is consistent with its penetrability, need not go far out of their way to be able to account for the greatest phenomena of Occultism, now so derided by Physical Scientists and Materialists. Cauchy’s “material points without extension” are Leibnitz’s Monads, and at the same time are the materials out of which the “Gods” and other invisible Powers clothe themselves in bodies. The disintegration and reïntegration of “material” particles without extension, as a chief factor in phenomenal manifestations, ought to suggest themselves very easily as a clear possibility, at any rate to those few scientific minds [pg 531]which accept M. Cauchy’s views. For, disposing of that property of Matter which they call impenetrability, by simply regarding the Atoms as “material points exerting on each other attractions and repulsions which vary with the distances that separate them,” the French theorist explains that:

From this it follows that, if it pleased the author of nature simply to modify the laws according to which the atoms attract or repel each other, we might instantly see the hardest bodies penetrating each other, the smallest particles of matter occupying immense spaces, or the largest masses reducing themselves to the smallest volumes, the entire universe concentrating itself, as it were, in a single point.809

And that “point,” invisible on our plane of perception and matter, is quite visible to the eye of the Adept who can follow and see it present on other planes. For the Occultists, who say that the author of Nature is Nature itself, something indistinct and inseparable from the Deity, it follows that those who are conversant with the Occult laws of Nature, and know how to change and provoke new conditions in Ether, may—not modify the laws, but work and do the same in accordance with these immutable laws.