The Universe a Vast Electric Organism

Here spirit, matter, and electricity—the three great basic entities of creation—work together in full accord in evolving and fashioning all material growth and material structures. In natural growth protoplasm gives the material conditions of life without which there could be no food supplies.

They contain grouped elements of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen and carbon out of which living structures are reared. Life is dependent upon food supplies of matter, which supplies must be raised to radiant conditions by electric forces to secure its assimilation into living organic forms. Life, therefore, like light, seeks through magnetic action a radiant plane of matter where it can reveal its working presence. Upon such a plane all forms of life come to birth from a common parentage—from electric force and radiant matter, each form endowed with personality, and powers of reproduction that make them factors of life and growth upon the radiant plane of creative potencies.

Prof. G. F. Wright of Oberlin says in a recent article: "Evolution does not solve the mysteries of the universe. It simply pushes them one step further back. The mystery of the acorn is greater than the mystery of the oak, for it has compressed in it all the 'power and potency' of the oak. It is no explanation of a chick to say it is hatched from an egg. The wonder and the mystery is simply carried back to that infinitesimal point in the egg which conceals within itself the power of producing the feathered biped with all its marvelous instincts and adapted organism." I hold that the infinitesimal point in the egg and the acorn is its electric center of life-force, or magnetic core, which, under the law of organic affinity, develops by nutrition and respiration, which are electric processes, into the chick and the oak. He says: "So, of all the processes of nature, man's vision sees only the surface. We do not see causes but only effects. We plant a seed, and all that we see is that under certain conditions it springs up and produces the blade, then the ear, and last the full corn in the ear. No one knows how it comes about that two seeds which look alike under the same conditions produce different colored flowers and different qualities of fruit. The beginning of everything is a mystery. If one affirms that things have no beginning he but increases the mystery. The difficulty with all theories of evolution is to get a starting point. The time was when philosophers could speak of the universe as eternal. The geologists fifty years ago could do so, but the demonstration of the conservation of energy has put an end to any such easy-going speculation."

All this is well stated and very true, except that by treating all things as electro-magnets, drawing positive and negative atoms or ions from air, food and water, we see how by nutrition and accretion animal and vegetable organism may be evolved by the law of magnetic attraction and organic affinity. This is the only rational solution and is in accord with all the processes of nature and with the conservation of energy. Elsewhere I have endeavored to explain how, by the constant renewal of matter and electric energy in the sun and in space, the universe may be eternal and no waste or deterioration occur and, while always changing, is virtually changeless.

Newton in his theory of gravitation discovered one phase of electric energy, and his law of gravitation is in reality simply the law of electrical attraction. But he never knew the cause of it and never discovered the other and dual phase of electric energy—the law of electrical repulsion, he never even suspected it. For he held that the balancing force of gravitation of the other planets kept each planet from falling into the sun, which it otherwise would have done under the law of gravitation, which says large bodies attract smaller ones. This position was untenable, as I have shown in "The Cities of the Sun."

Newton thought that an apple was attracted to the earth because the earth was larger, and that any larger body would attract a smaller one. But I hold that size is not what controls attraction; it is electrical conditions. An amount of substance from the sun would have more attracting power than the same amount from the earth, because the sun has more electrical power. A lodestone has more attracting power than the same amount of ordinary substance. A pound of iron has no attracting force until it is magnetized; then it will lift many times its weight. So size, weight, or gravity is no test of attracting power.

I therefore repudiate the law of gravity and adopt electricity, with its dual force of action and reaction, attraction and repulsion, as the supreme cosmic evolving force of the universe, creating all light, heat and life and producing all the varied and wonderful phenomena of nature.

I hold that by the law of electric energy the sun is not a thermal or heating engine as the astronomers proclaim, but is an electric generator and is not hot, and that the sun's rays, neither where they originate or where they act are hot, but they come to the earth as cool currents of electricity, which generate heat near the earth's surface by coming in contact with an opposite electricity and the resistance and friction of its atmosphere. Proof of this is found in the snow-covered peaks of the tropics and the glaciers of the torrid zone.

I have waited six years for objections to the electric theory of creation and have found only one recently stated. This first and only objection is that electricity is a derivative force.

Prof. G. F. Wright, of Oberlin, in an article in the Chicago Record, Dec., 1902, says: "Many of the speculations concerning the unlimited use of electricity overlook the fact of its derivative origin. Electricity is but transformed force. It is not a producer of force but a consumer of force. It merely directs the force to its specific end. The electricity which propels and warms the street cars of Buffalo, and furnishes power to its small factories and illuminates its streets is merely force diverted from the Falls of Niagara; in other words, it is transformed gravitation."

True, but gravitation is simply electric attraction, and the electricity that propels, lights and warms the cars is electric attraction diverted from the Falls and used on the cars. It is not derivative force, but the original and only force—electric force transferred from the Falls to the cars.

But Prof. Wright himself destroys his own argument when he says: "In other cases the electricity is derived from the heat of consuming coal, while the coal is the product of the sun's rays, chemically sealed up in the coal deposits of the early geological ages. Indeed it is easy to see that all the available force in the world is the product of the sun's rays." In this we fully agree, for I say the heat of the coal and the heat of the sun is electricity. The sun's rays, which he says "is all the available force in the world," is electricity, and the sun is the great electric heart of the solar system. Thus we differ only in terms. While he whips electricity around the stump, and says it is a new thing every time he turns a corner, I say it is the same electricity, without any change, and proves the oneness of the universe as a vast electric organism.

Thus our great scientists befog themselves. Now that Langley says there is only one radiant matter, and light, heat and chemical changes are all one entity, perhaps he may change his view. I have tried to convince these crosseyed reasoners that all force is one force and all matter is one matter, and the scientists are now coming to that conclusion steadily.

Prof. Wright says again: "The strength and warmth of all animal bodies is traceable to carbon, and whenever we move a limb or walk, the power to do it is obtained by the consumption of carbon." Well, I say carbon is one form of stored electricity. He says: "The ox feeds upon the grass which is collected or grows through the influence of sunlight," and I say sunlight is electric currents from the great electric dynamo, the sun.

He says: "The nebular theory is faulty," and I agree with him. He says: "Gravitation is an utter mystery that has baffled all scientific explanation," and I agree with him, and go a step further and affirm that there is no such thing as gravitation and never was. Newton discovered one of the dual forces of electricity, which I call universal electric attraction, and called it gravitation.

He says: "So far as we can see, gravitation acts instantaneously, and Newton gave up the problem of defining it, and said he had no explanation except to say God so made it." This is true, but Newton knew nothing of electricity or his great intellect would likely have discovered the truth and named and explained it as electric attraction.

Newton discovered an imaginary force, an idea, a dream, "an occult force," as Leibnitz called it. Newton had an imagination which the scientific plodders who have come after him lacked. They have dug in the dirt, while he sailed through azure seas, and linked suns and worlds together by a mere sweep of the imagination, without any explanation or conceivable cause, and called it gravity. He might just as well have called it ponderosity.

Phillip Akinson, in his work on electricity, 1902, asserts that "energy manifests itself either in masses of matter or in small particles, called molecules, and thus we have two kinds—mass energy and molecular energy." But have we two kinds of energy? Mass energy and molecular energy is the same.

Mass energy is but the aggregation of molecular energy.

Large bodies attract small ones because they possess more electric energy. Gravity or weight is but another name for aggregate molecular electric attraction of the earth for everything upon its surface. The gravity or weight of a man is the pull or force with which the electric attraction of the earth holds him to its surface. In other words, the earth is a vast magnet, and man's body is a smaller magnet, and as the magnetic core of a steel magnet draws all metals towards its magnetic center, so does the earth magnet draw all things toward its center.

The same author states that, "the earth is a great thermopile generating electric currents by the difference of potential between its heated and cooled parts." In this I agree with him, but he only states one of a thousand ways to generate electric currents.

He says further: "Heat is believed to be a certain mode of molecular motion, and electricity to be another mode; but the nature of the motion of each has never been discovered." And I think never will, as long as the false notion prevails that heat and electricity are modes of motion. A mode of motion is nonsense, for motion is an effect produced by a cause—it is not a cause. And all cause of motion is electricity, and the mode of operation is the law of electro-magnetism.

There is no difference in the law or the mode of operation of electric currents in a volcano, in a cloud, in the earth, in the sun or planets, in an electric light, or in a man's body. The same law exists and the same natural results follow when one lights the gas with a flash of electricity from his finger, as when a meteor blazes, a comet flares out in space, or a sun becomes luminous. The same force that man causes to run along a telegraph wire, or through a telephone circuit, or which runs a street car line, or is taken by the brushes from a revolving dynamo, is the same force and operated under the same law or mode of force as the electric life-giving currents that come from the sun constantly in an omnipotent tide of power.

Prof. Thomson says: "The earth is generally found to be negatively electrified, and is insulated in its atmosphere, being in fact a conductor touched only by air—a strong insulator."

He says further: "The quality of non-resistance to electric force of the interplanetary ether being considered, the earth, the atmosphere and the surrounding medium may be regarded as constituting respectively, the inner coating, the dielectric and the outer coating of a large Leyden jar charged negatively."

Prof. S. P. Thomson in "Electricity and Magnetism," says: "Gilbert made the discovery that the compass points north and south because the earth is also a great magnet. Faraday said: 'All matter is in a magnetic condition.' Sir Oliver Lodge says: 'The idea that magnetism is a whirl of electricity is as old as Ampere. Perceiving that a magnet could be initiated by an electric whirl, he made the hypothesis that an electric whirl existed in every magnet.'"

Maxwell announced the proposition that electro-magnetic phenomena and light phenomena have their origin in the same medium and are identical in nature. Hertz, by actually producing, detecting and controlling electric waves, caused the discovery of wireless electricity. And it is by the wonderful wireless telegraphy of light that man is put in communication with every considerable body in the universe, including even the invisible. By it the goings on in Sirius and Algol, Orion and the Pleiades are reported across enormous stretches of millions of millions of miles of space. And by the vibratory motion of the invisibly small, all things are revealed; the infinitely little has enabled us to conquer the inconceivably big. I hold seeing and hearing are the simplest examples of wireless telegraphy.

Elihu Thomson, the great electrician, says: "Hertz proved that all luminous phenomena are in essence electrical. Wireless electricity is the outcome of Hertz's experiments on electric waves, and electrical conditions and actions are more fundamental than hitherto regarded."

William Ramsey, the distinguished chemist, says: "It is a primary assumption that atoms of elements or in certain cases groups of atoms are themselves electrified, and atoms possess positive and negative poles, and combinations ensue between such oppositely electrified bodies."

Mr. Francis Grierson, a prominent scientist of London, in a recent London periodical, says: "So far as we know electricity is the soul of visible form. What we call brain waves have an analogy to electric waves. The discoveries and inventions of the last ten years have made child's play of every previously known system of philosophy. The simple but amazing facts disclosed during the past five years, render the dreams, speculations and guesswork of the past absurd. The little we know in a practical way is more than all the philosophers of the past knew from Aristotle to Leibnitz."

Prof. Langley, in his address at the 1902 session of the American Association of Science, stated that, "up to 1872 it was almost universally believed that there were three different kinds of energy—actinic, luminous and thermal—represented in the spectrum;" but he affirmed: "There is only one radiant energy which appears to us as actinic, luminous or thermal, according to the way we observe it.

"Heat and light are not things in themselves, but different sensations in our bodies, or different effects in other bodies. They are merely effects of this mysterious thing we call radiant energy." He thus sustains my position and the electric theory of creation, which is, that there is but one universal and ultimate energy which he calls radiant and I call electric energy, and which are the same thing.

It is said that an Italian physicist wrote in 1843: "Light is merely a series of colorific indications, sensible to the organs of light, or vice versa; the radiations of obscure heat are veritable invisible radiations of light." This Langley, by his elaborate researches, more refined and complex than all preceding ones, proved to be true. Since so orthodox a scientist as Langley has proven there is but one energy, the other scientists may stumble over it awhile and then accept it, because he is high authority.

Sir Oliver Lodge, in the "Electrical World," of February 21st, 1903, sustains the electrical theory strongly. He says: "All matter is electrical in its nature. The difference between one kind of matter and another lies in the physical and chemical properties of the atoms; but the difference between the atoms is merely due to the difference of the electric grouping of the atoms."

He holds that the Thompson corpuscles are all electric. Thomson's theory is that negative electricity is matter. Lodge holds that all matter down to the ultimate corpuscle is electricity or electrical substance. Thus I am sustained by the highest most recent authority.

Prof. E. L. Larkin, of the California University, said recently: "The earth has a permanent charge of negative electricity, and the atmosphere is positive. The surface potential is therefore very near zero. This permits electro-magnetic waves from the sun to act with unabated energy." Prof. Lucien I. Blake of the Kansas University said in a recent lecture: "All atoms of matter are charged with electricity. All vital actions are always connected with electricity."

I could fill a volume with recent statements of scientists showing that electricity produces all the phenomena of nature, all of which they have learned in the last few years, while as a pioneer in this field of thought I have been trying to propagate these electrical theories for many years.

Every year new facts are discovered showing that electricity is the cosmic, evolving, ultimate and only force in nature and the universe is a vast electric machine or organism moved by electric currents of measureless force and power. The earth revolves around the sun, the sun gravitates around some siderial center in motion like itself, and myriads of suns and planets with their countless population move with many times the velocity of a cannon ball. Stars that seem tranquil and motionless in the heavens are projected through space with a velocity of one hundred to two hundred miles per second. The constituent atoms of our bodies move relatively with as much velocity as the stars in heaven. Motion—electric energy—reigns everywhere, forms everything, controls, handles and evolves all suns and planets, all physical life, substance and organisms in human experience and universal nature.

The electric rays of light from suns and stars of the most distant constellations dart their beams across the universe, and centuries after, the impulse of electric energy enters the human eye, and gives sense and vision to the soul. Thus the dynamic chains of electric light binds into living unity the realms of matter and mind, "through measureless amplitudes of space and time."

These electric currents are not only the source of all natural phenomena, but the sea of electro-magnetism from which they come is the reservoir of life, which stands back of all the myriad manifestations of physical existence, and is the great fountain of vitality from which all life must come.

What is electricity? Tesla says it is "invisible light," Atkins says it is "molecular motion," Fleming says it is "a spiral twist of the ether," but the best definition is given in the Scriptures where it says all things were made by the "word of His power." It is the word of creative power.

CHAPTER III

ELECTRICAL CREATION, BRIEFLY STATED. IT SEEMS TO SOLVE THE RIDDLE OF THE UNIVERSE

As the nebular hypothesis and gravitation explain nothing and show neither the primary elements nor the primary energy of the universe, we should go to the dual forces of electricity which do. As we have learned little more than a name from either, I think it is time to try another hypothesis. Walking single file in dead men's shoes for two hundred years is quite long enough.

I am willing to submit the following hypothesis as my conception of electrical creation and the true theory of the universe.

First—Creation was wrought out by the agency of electrical forces, operating on invisible elementary matter, controlled by the intellectual impulse of an infinite power.

Second—These creative cosmic forces, by condensing the suns and planets into vast magnets revolving in a sea of electro-magnetic forces, evolved the marvelous machinery of the universe.

Third—This machinery of the universe became self-propelling and self-sustaining by reason of the laws of motion, growth and evolution impressed upon it, or by the joint sovereignty of two equal, correlative forces: magnetism, a form of electricity maintains the sovereignty of attraction over matter in body, while electricity, another phase of the same force, maintains the sovereignty of repulsion over matter in space.

Fourth—For these reasons electricity is a universal power joining together the two kingdoms of the heavens and the earth—of matter in body and matter in space. And these forces in their unity of harmonious work can suffer no disturbance equal "to the dust in the balance."

Fifth—These floods of electricity and magnetism affect the least and the greatest, "directly as to mass, and inversely to the square of the distance."

Sixth—The sun and planets are vast magnets because they are held in charge of electro-magnetic forces in an immense magnetic field. These forces are not from these bodies originally, but these bodies are from these forces; and these forces antedate all forms of visible matter.

Seventh—The primary state of matter is the diffused etheric, invisible state, and the building of matter into body is the work of these forces when in charge of matter under organic affinities. Magnetic lines of force fix centres and build around such centres by drawing elemental matter from the radiant sea of space by magnetic energy, into globular forms that become growing worlds, drawing their power and increase of form from the sea of invisible matter in which they are fixed by their axis and orbit lines of motion and force, constituting them working electro-magnets.

Eighth—These electro-magnetic forces are the eternal cosmic forces of perpetual motion, ever working by the law of action and reaction, attraction and repulsion, and evolving world forms and animal and vegetable forms.

Ninth—The sun having grown from the sea of invisible etheric and nebulous matter by reason of these wonderful electro-magnetic forces into an immense magnet, larger than all the lesser magnets or planets of the solar system combined, holds them in the magnetic field of his sovereign power, and is, through the flowing currents of electricity, the creating, governing force in the solar system.

Tenth—These same electric forces are condensed into smaller magnets and electric organisms or machines, which form electric centres and build up all tangible forms of matter—human, animal and vegetable. And all visible matter is but the outer shell and visible garment of these invisible forces.

Eleventh—Without the floods of electric substance or power that come to us in the electric currents of the sun that flow in currents of strength through our bodies as they propel the inflowing and outflowing floods of atomic elements of matter, that are laden with incoming supplies of daily life and outgoing wastes, by attraction and repulsion, assimilation of food, respiration and perspiration, our bodily forms would perish or be wholly unfit for the dwelling-place of our spirits.

Twelfth—Our five senses—seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, feeling—that connect us with the world of matter are entirely dependent on electricity and the invisible etheric forms of matter that surround us everywhere and constitute the connecting ties, the invisible ligaments, that pervade and bind all forms of life in nature's wondrous harmony.

Thirteenth—The boundless fountain of infinite energy in atoms in body and atoms through measureless space are superior to any mere sun form or world form of visible expression of such energy. The floods of radiant electric energy that enwrap the sun and planets in orbital lines of omnipotent strength are to these bodies the everlasting fountains from which flow their upholding and evolving power and the conservation of force in their transforming energy.

Fourteenth—As all visible forms of matter are built from invisible elementary atoms, so the most efficient display of electric power finds its expression and source in the same elementary atoms. The electric power working in all atoms of matter gathered in planetary form, saturates such planetary bodies with electric energy, as the steel of the magnet is saturated with such forces, and reveals in the sun currents the source of all terrestrial power and organic life.

Fifteenth—The chemists claim to have discovered about seventy different elemental substances in matter, but they are not primary elementary substances; they are secondary, and caused by the marvelous electrical combinations of the two primary elements—atoms and electricity—and are what Herschel said they looked to be, "manufactured articles."