The Universe a Vast Electric Organism

While the world, like an enormous battery, had in itself enough energy to hold the planet in its spherical form and to stimulate to activity the secondary forms of life, had not the sun come into more vigorous activity with its electric life-giving energy the earth could not have gone above the primitive forms of life. With this greater influx of power from another sphere of causative energy, the dark age of animality passed and the monstrous types faded out, and in the place of them the world began to bear a class of beings that could reflect the power and principles of light and beauty. And under the pulsations of the sun's electrical and magnetic energy the earth started on its marvelous career of organic growth and development.

The sun, as an immense electrical reservoir battery, must radiate in all directions its electric vibratory power over the surging elements in its own environment and from thence through electric atomic transfer to bodies in space. So that whenever a body was in direct line with the magnetic centers of the sun, the arrest of the electric current and atomic motion coming from the sun's center by another magnetic center, as the earth or any other planet, would instantly change the rate of the environment of the planet magnet to a grade of intensity that would give light and heat. In this manner light, heat and greater vital force was born upon the earth, when its dark clouds lifted and its atmosphere became translucent, so that the sun's electric currents could affect the earth through electric transfer. Thus the influx of external light upon planetary life was positive and marvelous, introducing a new power upon the forming organic life in the vegetable and animal world, and working great changes in all organic structures. And in response to this new power the eye began to form and a new and distinct organ of sense was perfected. It was slowly developed at first, for the light radiated from the sun penetrated the mists of earth dimly, for it was almost midnight gloom in some sections and dusky twilight in others.

So far I have said nothing of excessive heat, for the earth began in excessive cold. But as the earth magnet or dynamo increased its electric power it increased its heat.

We now come to the dawn of instinct or rationality in the primitive types of life. There we find a basis for the first principles of instinct or animal rationality in the balancing of one sense by the exercise of another, and the combined results of the two. Seeing and feeling gave a higher type of brain power, and raised that organ to a higher grade of perception and a newer type of intelligence.

Then another faculty added its powers to the sense of sight and feeling, for the atmosphere in which the reptilian tribes were living half the time or more were sending out sound waves which touched the nervous filaments of the central battery of the brain, and as the eye had formed to respond to the waves of ether caused by the electric currents of the sun, so a new organ began its formation in response to the incoming waves of power the atmosphere brought to the brain-cells, and the ear began to gather in concentric circles around the brain-center, and a new sense—that of hearing—was formed. Thus there was an additional increase of the power of perception or instinct. Thus were evolved all types of animal form and animal instinct. They were the result of electric energy, sense perception, and long ages of growth, comparison and environment.

Then came man, the highest type of animal organism. Man may have passed the successive changes and transmutations of form that the shifting vibratory rates of the planet responded to in the long period of world building. He may have attained to the grade of animal activity as a mind of the highest order in bodily form before he received the spiritual powers and intellectual force which he has exhibited all along the ages, after all animal forms had battled with the elements in the struggles to keep in equilibrium between the surging tides of electrical dispersion and magnetic concentration. Certain it is man holds his own by virtue of his steady rise in mental power which has no limit of evolution in the present stage of physical life and psychic life. And there are no known boundaries of his power to penetrate all mysteries and explore all conditions of existence "wherever being has laid foundations, or law is working out the problems of infinite destiny." Man came as a spiritual creation.

Many scientists discard the religious or Mosaic concept of a special creation of man and a divine revelation, and hold that the revelations of science are the only revelations of God that the world can regard as reliable.

I cannot agree with them that man was evolved from the animal creation. I hold he was a special creation, as Moses says he was; but that special creation was not his body—that may have been evolved from the lowest forms of animal life through many ages, and is no part of the real man. It was woven by electric law and energy as an overcoat of atoms for his earthly habitation. Man's body is not man, but the house in which he lives for a time, the earthly temple of the soul. Moses affirms this when he says "God breathed into man the breath of life, and man became a living soul." It is the breath of God, the atom of Deity, the living soul that constitutes man, and that was a special creation. This I have discussed at length in "Invisible Light." I hold no law of evolution could bridge the gulf between man and the animal creation. The fixity of brute instinct, and the boundless expansion of mental and psychic force in man forbid such a conclusion and confirm Moses, who says he was made lord over the earth and all animal creations. Man has three bodies—a spiritual, an electric and a physical body. Animals have only two—an electric and physical body. And both the electric and physical bodies of men and animals came from the same source and are governed by the same laws. Animal instinct is not spirit, is not a part of Deity, it cannot dream of God or heaven, or comprehend the universe or weigh suns and worlds.

It knows only the electric impulses of the material senses and reasons from these alone, and, by balancing one sense by another, attains an experience which in time becomes an automatic habit or force of nature under the law of its electric organism. It feels all sensations, like hunger, passion or fear, as an electric impulse on the sensitive tissues of the brain and responds from natural habit. It does not think, reason or soar into the boundless fields of ideality. It cannot feel the spiritual touch of human souls, or the divine impulse of God and love, of music, poetry, language, art and religion, as does the human soul.

Man is as much above the animal creation as the animal is above the vegetable and the vegetable above the mineral.

We have seen that the mineral is created by aggregations of atoms solidified under the law of magnetic attraction and brought to rest by balanced forces into crystalline form, and thus incorporated into the foundation elements of the earth magnet. They are simply electric and atomic forces and atoms balanced and at rest. They have no organic existence. Vegetable life, which is next above them, have organisms, and are sun engines breathing in nitrogen and giving out carbonic acid or oxygen to sustain animal life. The vegetable organism furnishes food for all animal life.

There can be no evolution of plant life into animal life. It is not scientific to search for such an irrational order of development. Vegetable, plant and tree in their organic life structure, never become animals. They have no independent existence separate from the sun's rays and the earth's soil except as latent in seed life. Cut off the sun currents from their leaves and the electric earth currents from their roots, and they are at once weakened and destroyed.

Animals are a higher order of life which have an independent existence in atmosphere and water—electric elements—separate from earth dust, and which evolve and give forth in their own organism the electric instinct and impulse which controls their own actions and habits.

They have no psychic or intellectual force, and can never be evolved into human souls or organisms. Man is as far above the animal creation as the heavens are above the earth. He is not the descendant of a monkey or any other animal creature except possibly in his bodily organism. He is a soul and belongs to the Spiritual Kingdom of God.

The scientists say there are three kingdoms in nature—mineral, vegetable and animal. I say there are four—mineral, vegetable, animal and man, or the spiritual Kingdom of God. Man is a soul or spiritual body which is from God and a part of God. He can think, reason, aspire, analyze, and soar into the psychic realms of the spiritual world and commune with angels and Deity, and is a spirit monarch of the universe.

And his longing, heaven-bound nature cries out to Deity: "Thou hast made us for thyself, and our souls are restless till we rest in thee!"

The vegetable has the elements of the mineral, with a material organism added; the animal has the elements of the mineral and vegetable with a material organism and an electric body and instinct added. The animal may possibly live hereafter in his electric body or secondary form. Man has the elements of the mineral and vegetable, the material body and the electric body of the animal, and added to all these he has a psychic or spiritual body, which links him to Deity, and makes him the epitome of all creation, the child of God and the universe, and the sovereign of eternal life, love and destiny.

The recent discovery of a man's skull at Lansing, Kansas, found sixty feet below the earth's surface, under many stratas of rock formation in the ooze at the bottom of a sea that existed in the glacial period, shows a cranial or brain development equal to the average man of the present day. This skull, estimated by scientists to be from thirty to forty thousand years old, with such a splendid head formation, shows conclusively that man was never evolved from the animal creation, but is a separate and superior being above the animal, and lord over all the animal creation.

This Lansing skull is one of the greatest discoveries of the age and confirms man's high lineage and ancient residence on this revolving planet, and supports Moses and the Bible.

Also the recent discoveries in the ruins of Ninevah, Babylon, Nipur, and other ancient cities of Asia Minor, and also in Egypt, reveal written leases and other documents eight thousand years old, which show that man has possessed superior knowledge and intelligence from the earliest periods of the world's history, and tend to support the biblical theory that man was a special creation, and not an evolution in his psychic nature from the lower animals.

Man and human history, while complicating, does not alter the real force and nature of evolution. While it is said "the history of the world is the biography of great men," yet if Alexander, Cæsar, Napoleon, Frederick the Great, William the Conqueror and other great men were eliminated, it would have had little effect in disturbing the steady onward course of the world's development.

Great men are the images, symbols and instruments taken at random by the constant and mighty forces of their age and times which stood behind them and swept them onward in their great careers. They were the pens of Fate used in her writing, the weather vanes of destiny which turned the way the currents and tides of invisible forces were blowing.

Humanity of the past and present is not final but progressive. Man's marvelous discoveries in science, his aesthetic culture and spiritual growth makes the future of the race the most persistently fascinating question of the age.

Man is not a mere animal, but is one with Deity, and a part of that unseen spiritual power which directs the stars in their infinite courses, gives electric brilliancy to the all-dazzling sun, paints the dawn and the aurora, colors the gorgeous wings of the butterfly, and guides insensate matter to do the will of Omnipotence.

CHAPTER V

MAN IS A SOUL CLAD IN AIR, A SPIRIT IN AN ELECTRIC ORGANISM

My claim that man is an electric organism is confirmed by Professor Loeb and Dr. Mathews in their recent experiments at the Chicago University.

"Electrical charges in the atoms of the bodily tissue are responsible for all the active phenomena of life. In other words, electricity is the basis of life." This is the sweeping conclusion with which Dr. Jacques Loeb amazed the physiologists gathered in their last annual meeting at the Chicago University.

Hitherto it has been taken for granted by men of science that the food we eat nourishes us by furnishing the tissues and muscles of the body with thermo or heat energy. This, according to Professor Loeb, is totally wrong. Instead of the food furnishing the muscle with heat energy, it supplies electrical energy, which, after being converted into mechanical energy, is responsible for all the muscular contractions and organic processes of living organisms.

He has arrived at this conclusion after many years of intricate and difficult experiments along the line of reproduction of animals, of determining the effect of salt on the heart-beat and its rythmic motion, and on other muscles, and of the destructive processes at work in the eggs of simple unicellar animals. They have been the means of determining the answer to the one great question, "What is life?" and he regards all his previous discoveries subsidiary to this one. He received his first hint of this new theory of life through the fact that electricity is able to affect protoplasm in a more universal and effective way than any other form of stimulus. And he drew the inference that if electricity is able to affect protoplasm in the form of currents, it ought to do so in the form of ions, which is an electrically charged atom or group of atoms.

In experimenting to determine the toxic and antitoxic of ions on protoplasm, which is the basic substance of all physical life, he discovered that any one salt will act as a poison on the eggs of a sea urchin, but by adding one or more, or certain other salts, he found it was able to counteract the effects of this toxic effect. From which he concluded that the toxic and antitoxic effect of the salts were due to the manner in which its atoms are electrically charged.

He found that when a salt whose atoms are positively charged come in contact with the eggs of the sea urchin, they interfered with the life processes, while salts whose atoms were negatively charged stimulate contraction; and the presence of both positively and negatively charged atoms were necessary, and the phenomena of life is due to the play between the different charges of electricity in the molecules. The energy of foodstuffs and motions of the heart and other muscles of the body are not due to the production of heat, but to the chemical energy in electrically charged molecules.

He says: "A part of the chemical energy of foodstuffs is transformed into electric energy, which gives energy to the body. In one experiment I put a jelly-fish in contact with a solution of electrically charged substances, and it immediately responded by muscular contraction. I then put it in a substance that was a non-conductor and there was no response. In this way I concluded it was the electric charges which effected the muscular contraction, that a pure salt always acts as a poison to the egg, and in order not to have toxic effects it is necessary that the positive and negative electric charges should easily balance. A muscle is stimulated by electro-negatively charged particles, and prevented from contracting by electro-positively charged particles.

"I have experimented with eggs of different low forms of animal life, with single protoplasmic cells, and with muscles. Professor Mathews has shown that my results hold true for nerves. I took the eggs of the fundulus and found that after they were fertilized they will develop in sea water.

"In a sodium-chloride solution I found they will not develop, but by adding a trace of calcium as many eggs will develop as in the sea water. This is due to the electrically charged atoms of the calcium. Artificial parthenogenesis, or life artificially produced, has been of interest only as it leads me to learn how the electric charges of ions affect life phenomena. You can bring about parthenogenesis only by positive ions. I have come to two conclusions: First, rythmical contraction occurs only in the presence of electrically charged substances. Second, the efficiency of the charges depends upon the number of the charges or the different ions. Professor Mathews has arrived at a third conclusion, which is, that the negatively charged ions are those which stimulate, and the positively charged ions are those which hinder contraction."

Dr. Loeb's paper created a sensation among the assembled scientists, as also did that of Professor A. P. Mathews, on "The Nature of the Nerve Stimulation and Alteration of Irritability." "Dr. Loeb's discoveries have revolutionized the basic principles of physiology," declared one of the scientists. "A greater part of the text-books on this subject will have to be rewritten to accord with the results of these new views of life phenomena." And Dr. G. N. Stewart, who presided at the meeting, eulogized Dr. Loeb and said, "He has given us an insight into the mechanics of living tissue which we never before have had. He has brought forward the science of electro-physiology, which has hitherto been despised, but which will now be accorded a respectable position."

Professor Garrett P. Serviss says: "This discovery of Dr. Loeb and Prof. Mathews comes closer to the solution of the mystery of life than physiologists have ever before been able to approach, and is so fundamental and far reaching as to warrant the hope that we shall soon know what are the conditions and the limits of man's power to prolong his own life.

"The whole foundation of physiology and medicine may be reconstructed, and we may find that we possess a control over the phenomena of life more masterful than anybody has yet dared to dream. Briefly, it has been discovered that our nerves consist of what is called a colloidal solution—that is, matter resembling gelatin held in solution in water before it is jellied, and these colloidal particles in the nerves carry charges of positive electricity. When the nerve particles pass from the colloidal condition into the state of gelation, or become jellied, the nerve experiences a stimulation or becomes active. This is produced by the action of atoms or ions bearing charges of negative electricity.

"This explains the action of certain chemical substances when introduced into the human body, some of which tend to quiet the nerves and others to excite them. The nerve-quieting ions are those that bear charges of positive electricity, such as atoms of sodium, potassium, calcium and hydrogen, and tend to keep the colloidal particles of the nerves in a state of solution, so that the nerves remain inactive. The nerve-stimulating ions are atoms of such substances as fluorine and chlorine, which carry charges of negative electricity and cause the nerve particles to coalesce or become jellied, in which condition the nerve is active, the degree of activity depending upon the intensity of the stimulation. Death appears to be the result of the stagnation of the nerves, and this discovery may enable us to oppose the process that ends in death."

This throws a flood of light on other obscure problems, and offers an explanation of the effect of anaesthetics upon the human body. Anything that tends to keep the nerve particles in a state of solution quiets the nerves. Now, nerve particles are largely composed of fat, and anaesthetics dissolve fat. Hence anaesthetics produce the effect of positively electrified ions, preventing the nerve particles from coalescing and thus quiets the nerves. The action of whiskey in arresting the progress of snake poison is explained. The alcohol counteracts the coagulating tendency and keeps the nerves in a colloidal condition. It explains many other familiar facts, as why heat tends to quiet the nerves, and that chemical stimulation is identical with electrical stimulation, and solves the long standing puzzle of muscular contractility.

Dr. H. Preston Pratt, an eminent electro-therapeutic expert, says: "Dr. Loeb's experiments have demonstrated that electricity is life—that the entire human organism is controlled by electrical forces. The twentieth century will prove electricity and not salt is the real life-giving principle.

"If this force is taken away, life ends, and, in the same manner, if this force is supplied the result is the immediate stimulation of the organic life.

"The necessary elements of life are taken into the body through the air and food, and the entrance of the essential elements into the blood sets the human battery into operation, and it continues to operate as long as the electrical forces are supplied to the blood. The human body is of elements the same as a magnet and is built of smaller magnets or molecules." This I have contended for many years. He continued: "To show the connection between human life and electricity, take an ordinary battery of chloride of ammonia or salammoniac and study its workings. You will see that by the introduction of the element zinc the electrical current is found. The zinc is of positive polarity and so is the ammonia, while the chloride is electro-negative.

"The electro-positive zinc has greater electric affinity for the chlorine than the ammonia has, and consequently the ammonia is driven off and combined with chlorine, forming chloride of zinc. The result is the difference of an electric pull between the elements.

"All admit that the force of elements forms a part of the anatomic structure, and there must be electricity. When oxygen is taken into a body it excites the elements in the same manner as the negative chlorine attacks the zinc in the battery. The electrical circuit of the body is the circulating blood, and when the oxygen and the nitrogen are taken in through the lungs the electro-negative ions go in one direction. Sulphur and oxygen are electro-negative and the other elements of the blood are electro-positive; and consequently, when the nitrogen and oxygen of the air attack the blood through the medium of the air cells, we find that oxygen and sulphur pass in one direction, while the other elements which are electro-positive pass in the opposite direction. This action is electrolytic the same as if we apply a battery to the human body."

All this accords with my theory of electrical creation, and proves, as I have contended for many years, that man's body as well as the universe is an electric organism.

In my book "The New Cosmogony," published about five years previous to these discoveries, I laid down the broad proposition that nature or the Creator has never made but one pattern or type of a thing that exists, and that is the electro-magnetic. That suns and worlds, man and all animal and vegetable organisms, are electro-magnets. That electricity was physical life, and digestion and assimilation of food were purely electrical processes; while the five senses—seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and feeling—were all electrical manifestations, seeing and hearing being a form of wireless telegraphy.

That the electric combination of positive and negative atoms weaves the visible structure that envelops the soul. The electric elements from the lungs and stomach enter into the blood, and set the human battery in organic operation and create and continue human life. Thus the beginning of life is an electric process, and the source of life is augmented and continued by absorbing electric energy from the air we breath, from the food we eat and water we drink, and not by the so-called thermal or heat digestive process, but in the same way as we extract electricity from coal and wood—by a species of electric transformation or combustion, like feeding a flame from the oxygen of the atmosphere.

The body is not only an electric machine or organism, but the exercise of every function is an electric process. And the derangement of any function, which we call sickness or disease, is an electric derangement. Prof. Loeb and Dr. Mathews have shown how the body is woven of positive and negative atoms.

Prof. Lucian I. Blake, of the Kansas University, in his lecture, "Atoms and Their Electric Charges," shows how medicine affects the human body and how life could be started in an unfertilized egg by inserting an electric current. This was done by placing the white of the egg in a vessel containing salt, calcium and water, and turning an electric current into it. Life in this way can be raised to the fourth stage, he says.