Contragravity

“ Three days later, Conn hitched a ride on a freight-scow to Litchfield. From the air, he could see a haze of bonfire smoke over High Garden Terrace, and a gang of men at work. There were more men at work on the Mall and along the streets on either side. He went up from the yard below the house, where the scow was being unloaded, and found his mother in the living room watching a screen play with one eye and keeping the other on a soulless machine like a miniature contragravity tank, which was going over the carpet with a vacuum cleaner and taking swipes at the furniture with a rotary dustmop. ”

“ Of all things which move, some have the cause of their motion within themselves, others receive it from without: and all those things only are moved from without which are without life, as stones, and pieces of wood, and whatever things are of such a nature as to be held together by the constitution of their matter alone, or of their bodily substance. [357] That view must indeed be dismissed which would regard the dissolution of bodies by corruption as motion, for it has no bearing upon our present purpose. ”

“ The result of law violate is imperfection, wrong, positive pain. Through the impediments afforded by the number, complexity, and substantiality of the laws of organic life and matter, the violation of law is rendered, to a certain extent, practicable. Thus pain, which in the inorganic life is impossible, is possible in the organic.
P. But to what good end is pain thus rendered possible?
V. All things are either good or bad by comparison. A sufficient analysis will show that pleasure, in all cases, is but the contrast of pain. Positive pleasure is a mere idea. ”

“ This force, however, exists—is governed by natural laws and exerts its influence for good or evil between every man and woman in the universe; and the man who marries in ignorance of this force, or who violates its laws, is as foolish as he who tempts the law of gravitation by jumping from the brow of a precipice without calculating the distance to the ground beneath. This force is an emanation from the body according to temperament, it is identical with gravitation in its phenomena, and I introduce it to-night to your consideration under the name of Sexual Magnetism. ”

“ This contravention of the natural order has produced, as such contravention always must produce, a certain confusion and false movement, of which we are now beginning to feel, in almost every direction, the inconvenience. ”

“ Even in the seemingly most uniform and universal law, where do we find the inevitable or the irresistible? Is there not in Nature a perpetual competition of law against law, force against force, producing the most endless and unexpected variety of results? Cannot each law be interfered with at any moment by some other law, so that the first law, though it may struggle for the mastery, shall be for an indefinite time utterly defeated? The law of gravity is immutable enough: but do all stones veritably fall to the ground? Certainly not, if I choose to catch one, and keep it in my hand. ”

“ As the attraction of gravitation differs under different circumstances, although the law of gravitation always remains the same, so can a falsehood, according to circumstances, be a greater or lesser wrong—be a so-called white lie of society, be the business lie of the dishonest tradesman, or the criminal lie of the perjurer—and still the law, It is wrong to lie, would remain unassailed. ”

“ A Compromise.—There will be many, the vast majority, perhaps, who will not bring their minds to accept the truth which nature seems to teach, which would confine sexual acts to reproduction wholly. Others, acknowledging the truth, declare "the spirit willing" though "the flesh is weak." Such will inquire, "Is there not some compromise by means of which we may escape the greater evils of our present mode of life?" ”

“ The Law of Gravity is a universal edict which enslaves, in a sense, every particle of matter in the cosmos. The man who attempts to defy the "injustice" of that law by ignoring the consequences of its enforcement will find himself punished rather severely. ”

“ But—in this case,—this strange and terrible case"—and he uttered the words with marked gravity,—"It is Nature's own force that has wrought the damage,—some powerful influence which the man has been testing has proved too much for him—and it has taken its own vengeance." ”

“ Here is a boundless field in which caprice may riot. It is not strange if some look with distrust for the result of such an experiment. But the farther we advance, the more evident it becomes that this too is a realm subject to law. ”

“ The philosophers are still as ignorant as ever respecting the intrinsic nature of gravitation; but regarded simply as a force, how many enigmas has it not served to unlock! And that moral gravitation towards evil, manifested by the only two classes of responsible beings of which there is aught known to man, and of which a degradation linked by mysterious analogy with a class of facts singularly prominent in geologic history is the result, occupies apparently a similar place, as a force, in the moral dynamics of the universe, and seems suited to perform a similar part. ”

“ Or was it that the frame once charged with its marvellous virtue could bear no more, so that were the process repeated—it mattered not at what lapse of time—the two impregnations neutralised each other, and left the body on which they acted as it was before it ever came into contact with the very essence of Life? ”

“ III. If it be in the present life, and from the ordinary coursed of nature, not purposely modified by the interposition of these will of any human being, nor by any extraordinary interposition of any superior invisible being, that the pleasure or the pain takes place or is expected, it may be said to issue from or to belong to the physical sanction. ”

“ I concluded my last chapter with the momentous question, What happens if we go counter to the generic law of Spirit? What happens if we go counter to any natural law? Obviously, the law goes counter to us. ”

“ Yes, they prove how common and pitifully uniform the mass are: are we to call the operation of gravity, of stupidity, of blind imitation, of love, and of hunger, laws? Well, suppose we do; but if so, it also holds good that so far as there are laws in history, the laws are worth nothing and the history is worth nothing." [5] Effect, permanence, success are no real argument. ”

“ The law may, in some cases, baffle our scrutiny by the complexity of the elements in the problem, or it may be qualified by fresh conditions, but it is always there, working in every point of plasma, every fibril of nerve, every vibration of force. ”

“ When we were in the flesh, that is, in a carnal state, under the reigning power of sin and corruption—in the flesh as in our element—then the motions of sins which were by the law did work in our members, we were carried down the stream of sin, and the law was but as an imperfect dam, which made the stream to swell the higher, and rage the more. ”

“ You cannot break a law. It is true that many declare otherwise, that Charles Kingsley in a famous lecture declared you could break the law of gravity. "The law is," says he, [Pg 82] "that a stone should fall to the earth; but by stretching out your hand you can prevent the stone falling. ”

“ Besides, where there are places as well as principles to be surrendered on one side, there must in return be so much more of principles given up on the other, as will constitute an equivalent to this double sacrifice. The centre of gravity will be sure to lie in that body, which contains within it the source of emoluments and honors, and the other will be forced to revolve implicitly round it. ”

“ The laws of gravity were not arbitrary rules, ordained to oppress suns and systems without rhyme or reason. Order of some sort had to be preserved among the millions of blazing, rolling worlds. Nor were the Ten Commandments arbitrary lines of conduct imposed upon men at the pleasure of a great, omnipotent tyrant. Men could not live apart, out of touch and contact with one another. ”

“ I had been so turned about by my previous life, this first and indubitable law of God or of nature is so concealed in our sphere of society, that the fulfilment of this law seemed to me strange, terrible, even shameful; as though the fulfilment of an eternal, unquestionable law, and not the departure from it, can be terrible, strange, and shameful. ”

“ We will go back again to the old book, and I will ask you, or any minister, whether we read, in either ancient or modern history, of any nation in bondage becoming free without the use of physical force? ”

“ Powers, illimitable, absolute, uncomprehended, seem to hold an inimical sway over their lives and of these the most dreaded is the benign law, framed for their protection, spreading above them an unperceived, unimagined aegis. ”

“ The most subtle fallacy about causation consists in mistaking it for another property, either as force on the one hand or as thought on the other. Force, cause, and conception—or motion, space, and judgment—are disparate properties but concomitant in every particle and body of the universe. ”

“ But Christianity answers, "interference with law is of continual occurrence. You cannot stand up or walk, or so much as raise your hand without interfering with the law of gravitation or attraction. We can modify or direct the action of forces without violating their laws. ”

“ Law of Attraction.—Where this affinity—or sameness—exists between the different things, there is what we term the law of attraction, or what may be termed the disposition to unite together. Where there is no affinity existing between the nature of the different particles of matter, there is what may be termed the law of repulsion, which has a tendency to destroy the harmony which would otherwise take place. ”

“ Muddle! is it anything but a peculiar sort of transparency? Is not jolt passage? Is friction other than a kind of lubrication? Is not a chasm a filling?—a queer kind of filling, but a filling still. Why seek for a glue to hold things together when their very falling apart is the only glue you need? Let all that negation which seemed to disintegrate the universe be the mortar that combines it, and the problem stands solved. The paradoxical character of the notion could not fail to please a mind monstrous even in its native Germany, where mental excess is endemic. ”

“ Many persons of gravity and weight saw great danger in a measure of change like the first Reform Act, which left it to the Lords to assert themselves, thereafter, by an external force, instead of through a share in the internal composition of a body so formidable. ”

“ We commonly hear of bodies falling to the ground by reason of the law of gravitation, whereas that law is simply the record of the fact that, according to all experience, they have so fallen (when free to move) , and of the grounds of a reasonable expectation that they will so fall. ”

“ For, if, without the fall of a part, the rest could not be upheld, it would follow, either that none could ever be upheld, or else that it was necessary for some one to fall, in order by his punishment to uphold the rest ”

“ The former limit is reached in anguish, madness, or the agony of death, when the accidental flux of things in contradiction has reached its maximum or vanishing point, so that the contradiction and the flux themselves disappear by diremption. ”

“ Now let us suppose another being, possessing, in addition to the susceptibilities of the brute, certain other specific susceptibilities with their correlative objects, either in the sensible world, or in a future world, but that these are subjected, like the other, to the same binding and inalienable law of cause and effect. ”

“ The law of gravitation, no doubt, remains constant and unbroken, whether the stone is lying on the ground, or moving through the air, but all the laws of matter could not have brought about the particular result without the interposition of the free will of the man who throws the stone. Substitute the will of God for the will of man, and the argument becomes applicable to the whole extent of Creation and to all the phenomena which it embraces. ”

“ Nothing can be more entirely different in character than the force of gravitation and the principles of volition and self-consciousness, or than the unconscious forces of material nature and those principles which constitute our rationality. If we affirm that the forces of mind act in conformity with law, it ought to be clearly understood that they act in conformity with a law of their own, which affords free action to the principle of volition. ”

“ What one misfortune or disaster in the book of embryotic evils, that could unmechanize thy frame, or entangle thy filaments! which has not fallen upon thy head, or ever thou camest into the world—what evils in thy passage into it!—What evils since!—produced into being, in the decline of thy father's days—when the powers of his imagination and of his body were waxing feeble—when radical heat and radical moisture, the elements which should have temper'd thine, were drying up ”

“ Can it be the case that while physical contradictions are not permitted in the lower classes of unconscious objects, moral contradictions of a very monstrous kind are allowed in the highest of all earthly creatures? ”