Thomas Henry Keely

“ Surely something is radically wrong. The scientists owe it to themselves as well as to the inventor to see to it that this condition is not allowed to continue. They should appoint a commission to investigate, and find out whether Keely is a genius worthy of the highest honours and rewards that can be bestowed, an arrant impostor, whose fittest place would be the penitentiary, or a crank that ought to be put in a lunatic asylum. ”

“ Koenig and Dr. Tuttle, a Baltimore physicist, in the presence of other men of science with the most sensitive galvanometer belonging to the University of Pennsylvania, all of whom were satisfied that no known force had been detected.
The abstract of Keely’s philosophy, written by Dr. Brinton, has made Keely’s theories intelligible for the first time. Each new discovery necessitates a new vocabulary ”

“ While Keely was hampered by mere tradesmen, who only looked to the immediate recoupment of their outlay, men more anxious for dividends than discoveries, he could do little save turn showman, and exhibit his partial control of the harmonies of nature as springs catch woodcocks, and was forced to open his crude contrivances to divert the eternal will of the cosmos to work-a-day uses, that he might coax from the greed and credulity of mere mammon-worshippers the sorely grudged means to continue his exploration of the infinite. ”

“ As a suggestion to those interested in psychological researches I will mention that Keely has copied nature in all his instruments from the Vibrophone, which is fashioned after the human ear, up to the Disintegrator, in which the neutral centre represents the human heart. With the system which Keely is unfolding to us we may well say, with Buckle, “A vast and splendid career lies before us, which it will take many ages to complete. As we surpass our fathers, so will our children surpass us. ”

“ That is the ultimate end of our science; these are the most exalted summits to which we can hope to attain. Shall we ever reach them? Will it be soon? We cannot answer.—Prof. Henri Hertz, in La Revue Scientifique, October 26, 1888.
In the long delay attendant upon the application to mechanics of the unknown force which John Ernest Worrell Keely has discovered in the field of vibration, the question is often heard, “What has Keely done?” with the remark, “He has never done anything; he is always promising to do something, but he never keeps his promises.” ”

“ At this time a number of the leading journals in various parts of the United States announced that, although Keely’s methods and his failures had combined to engender distrust and arouse ridicule, it could no longer be denied that he had discovered what no other man has discovered. ”

“ Step by step he has been led on through years of patient and persistent research, yet even now feeling that he has but lifted one corner of the veil of the goddess of nature, and that a lifetime is too short to do more than this. The physicists whom Keely, in the earlier years of his discovery, invited to confer with him as to the origin of the force which was generated by the disintegration of water, preferred rather to pronounce him an impostor, after witnessing his demonstrations, than to admit that such results should have escaped the penetration of their all-powerful methods. ”

“ Keely’s labours can alone secure to him freedom to pursue researches on his own road; a course pronounced by Professor Leidy, Professor Hertz, and Professor Fitzgerald, to be “the only proper line for him to pursue.”
The building of an engine is not in Mr. ”

“ Keely is giving birth to a system. Both are exceedingly imperfect in the expression of their views; yet in points of detail each possesses a firm dialectical grip. In their writings both seem overwhelmed by the vast extent of the realm they are exploring. Both find in harmony the object and the ending of the world’s development. Conflicting with modern science at very many points, visionary as both appear to be, powerful expression is given to an idea of life both in the macrocosm and the microcosm, the validity of which can be questioned only by materialism. ”

“ It required rare courage for a physicist to step from the serried ranks that have always been ready to point their javelins at psychologists, and to show, with the torch of science, the hand on the signpost at the cross roads pointing in the right direction. It is the great high road of knowledge; but those who would explore it must do so with cautious tread, until the system of sympathetic association is completed which Keely is bringing to birth, for the road is bordered with pitfalls and quicksands and the mists of ignorance envelop it. ”

“ God is our Father. The material structure is the mother and nurse. The hypothesis that there are no beings in the universe but those which possess molecular bodies, is the conjecture of a mind that has no conception of the illimitable power of the Almighty. The link, which connects mind with matter, gives us a higher conception of the Deity. Keely places it in the mind flow, the result of the sixth subdivision. ”

“ During this period, Keely’s discovery was only thought of in reference to its commercial value, and for a decade he made no progress: but, after his researches led up to the conviction that he was on the road to another and infinitely more important discovery, namely, the source of life and the connecting link between intelligent will and matter, his progress has been almost uninterrupted. His ambition is not only to give a costless motive power to the world, but to make clear to men of science the path he is exploring. ”

“ It was in consequence of this recommendation that Keats left his solitary lodging in Dean Street and went to live as housemate in St Thomas’s Street with three other students, the aforesaid George Cooper, one George Wilson Mackereth, and Henry Stephens, the last-named afterwards a surgeon in good repute as well as a dabbler in dramatic literature. It is from Stephens that we get much the fullest picture of Keats in these student days. ”

“ It was in this year, 1888, that a woman, interested in all branches of science, who had proved to her own satisfaction the value to humanity, as well as to science, of Keely’s discoveries, was deprived of legal and maternal rights on account of the delusions that she was very generally believed to be under. ”

“ The discovery of vibratory etheric force, even though never utilized in mechanics, brings us upon the bridge which divides physical science from spiritual science, and opens up domains the grandeur and glory of which eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, nor hath it entered into the mind of man to conceive. The few who understand the nature and the extent of Keely’s vast researches say that he is about to give a new philosophy to the world, which will upset all other systems ”

“ Keely is dealing with lies so close to the spiritual realm of things, and brings us so near to the point at which the Almighty is in immediate touch of His Creation in His unceasing upholding of it, that all Christian men might be expected to take a deep interest in researches which promise so much. ”

“ We trust Keely will continue to bombard his corpuscles until he accomplishes it. And when he does, all other scientific men of this or any other age will sink by comparison into insignificance. Let no man say he cannot do it. ”

“ Keely’s theories known, as it would be to publish a treatise to prove that two and two make five. Scientific men reject all theories in physics in which there is not an equal proportion of science and mathematics, excluding all questions of pure metaphysics. [196] They are right; for, until the world had undergone a state of preparation for another revelation of truth, the man who demonstrated all that Keely is now prepared to demonstrate would have been burned alive as a wizard. ”

“ The force discovered by Keely—no, the force revealed to him—will rule the earth with an influence mighty in the interests of humanity. The completion of his system for science and commerce will usher in the dawning of a new era. ”

“ Had Keely been better understood, science might have been marching with giant strides across this unknown realm during the many years in which men of learning have refused to witness the operation of the dissociation of water, because one of their number decided, in 1876, that Keely was using compressed air. Fixing bounds to human knowledge, she still refuses to listen to the suggestion that what she has declared as truth may be as grossly erroneous as were her teachings in the days when the rotation of the earth was denied ”

“ The writer of this article in the Chicago Tribune has expressed the prevailing sentiment of our time, in regard to Keely, as far as those are concerned who are in ignorance of the fact that Keely has discovered an unknown energy, and is working out a system which he must himself first learn, by researches into the laws of nature governing it, before he can apply it to mechanics, or make it even so much as understood by others. ”

“ It is this principle which has been discovered by Keely. Let his theories be disputed as they have been, and as they still may be, the time has come in which his supporters claim that he is able to demonstrate what he teaches; is able to show how superficial are the foundations of the strongholds to which physicists are clinging; and able to prove purity of conditions in physical science which not even the philosophers and poets of the past have so much as dreamed of in their hours of inspiration. ”

“ But in his labours Keely finds a recompense that, as yet, [287] “the world knows not of;” for day by day he sees the once, to him, obscure domain lit up with ever-increasing glory; a domain the boundaries of which are the boundaries of the universe: the entrance into which promises the fulfilment of the hopes of those who look forward to “a time when we shall no longer go to the blind to lead the blind in our search to make life worth living ”

“ Lilly says, “This is what physical law means. Reason and will are inseparably united in the universe as they are in idea. If we will anything, it is for some reason. In contemplating the structure of the universe, we cannot resist the conclusion that the whole is founded upon a distinct idea.” Keely holds to the harmony of this “distinct idea” throughout creation, and he demonstrates by vibratory machinery that all forces are indestructible, immaterial, homogeneous entities, having their origin and unity in one great intelligent personal will-force. ”

“ No scientist who witnessed the production of the force, displayed by Keely, in a proper spirit, but would have been welcomed by him to further experiments in its operations, as were Professor Leidy and Dr. ”

“ Science, in the modern doctrine of conservation of energy, and the convertibility of forces, is already getting something like a firm hold of the idea that all kinds of forces are but forms or manifestations of some one central force, issuing from some one fountain-head of power.” It is Keely’s province to prove to materialists—to the world—that this one fountain-head is none other than the Omnipotent and all-pervading Will-Force of the Almighty, “which upholds, guides, and governs, not only our world, but the entire universe. ”

“ Keely may prove, AS FROM LATE DEVELOPMENTS HE IS LIKE TO DO, that the hidden spirit of the Cosmos, which men call Deity, First Cause, Nature, and other sonorous but indefinite names, has manifested itself to him; that the music of the spheres is a truth, not an imagination, and that vibration, which is sight, hearing, taste and smell, is in serious verity, all else. ”

“ We can apprehend what we cannot comprehend.’ If Keely should die, I fear no one could understand his writings. Every day we read of distinguished men dying. The other day a man carried with him into the grave his secret for the cheap production of aluminium. No one man entrusted by Providence with high interests has a right to allow a possibility of their sinking back, perhaps for ages, into the void of the unknown. ”

“ Watson’s views that the time seems to have arrived, in which the theories of Keely will receive, from those who are competent to judge of their value, the attention that they deserve. Before entering upon their merits, or setting them down for others to judge of their worth, the way must be prepared by showing the claims which they possess from their correspondence with some of the most advanced ideas of the present day, as well as with the teachings of the wisest men in past centuries. ”

“ Keely might have a clue to such an addition we did not dispute on the mere ground that it was new or strange, or because experts pronounced it impossible; for many stranger things have happened. Mankind, even those who are illumined by the highest human knowledge and intelligence, do not yet know all that is to be known, as we are reminded almost every day by the strides of scientific and mechanical progress. We would rather have found Mr. Keely less inclined to be mysterious ”

“ Keely’s experiments in what he terms sympathetic vibration, I am satisfied that he has made new and important demonstrations in physical science. He has made manifest the existence of natural forces that cannot be explained by any known physical laws, and has shown that he possesses over them a very considerable control. ”

“ Working thus entirely in the dark, with an intangible, imponderable, invisible something whose nature and attributes are all unknown, and whose characteristics differ essentially from those of any other known force, what wonder if the inventor’s progress is slow and his disappointments many? Mr. Keely may be deceived, or he may have discovered an actual force which he is unable to harness; but the fact that he is very slow in perfecting whatever discovery he may have made is no proof that he has not made a very great one. ”