Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-40.djvu/317

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THE KEELY MOTOR SECRET
303

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 antagonistic 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," "corpuscules," "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 con-