Invisible force

“ Worlds, like atoms, rest on the invisible, on immaterial force; everything moves, urged on by attraction, and as if in search of that fixed point which flies as it is pursued, and which does not exist, since in the infinite the centre is everywhere and nowhere. ”

“ To us, who seek the truth with no jealousy of system, it seems that the essence of matter remains as mysterious as the essence of force; the visible universe not being in the least what it appears to be to our senses. In fact, that visible universe is composed of invisible atoms ”

“ That is the fact: what is the best hypothesis to explain it? 1. Is it the medium who herself acts, in an unconscious manner, by means of an invisible force emanating from her? 2. Is it an intelligent cause apart from her, a soul that has already lived upon this earth, who draws from the medium a force which it needs in order to act? 3. Is it another kind of invisible beings? Nothing authorizes us to affirm that there may not exist, side by side with us, living, invisible forces. ”

“ These forces are not discontinuous, connected with this temporary world, and liable to cease when it fails. They belong to the permanent, invisible order of things. Suppose one loses his body. Then there is no force whereby earth can hold its child any longer to its breast. It flies on at terrific speed, dwindling to a speck in unknown distances, and leaving the man amid infinitudes alone. But there are other attractions. There was One uplifted on a cross to draw all men unto him. Love has finer attraction for souls than gravitation has for bodies. ”

“ I take the point of view solely of the physicist whose business is to observe, and I say, whatever may be the explanatory hypothesis you may adopt, there exists an invisible force derived from the organism of the medium, and having the power to emerge from him and to act outside of him. ”

“ Another argument is, that being unable to account, for what is, by any thing visible, we must have recourse to something invisible, and that invisible power is what he calls God. Apply this argument to gravity, and the external force that is said to cause every stone to fall is God. But if nothing visible can to us account for the operations of nature, why must we have recourse to what is invisible? ”

“ But there certainly emanates from the medium an invisible force; and the participants, by forming the psychic chain and by uniting their sympathetic wills, increase this force. This force is not immaterial. It may be a substance, an agent emitting radiations of wave-lengths which make no impression on our retina, and which are nevertheless very powerful. In the absence of light rays it is able [Pg 82] to condense itself, take shape, affect even a certain resemblance to the human body, to act as do our organs, to violently strike a table, or touch us. ”

“ Besides, travellers succeeded one day in voyaging all round the globe, and nowhere was this imaginary pillar discovered.
The modern conception of force in contrast with the ancient idea of matter has a philosophical import without precedent in the whole history of the science. It teaches, proves to us, and convinces us that the visible, palpable, material universe rests on the invisible and the immaterial, on imponderable force. ”

“ III. But there is in space what there was before the world began. Philosophy asserts that the invisible universe is a perfect fluid in which not even atoms exist, and atoms are produced therefrom by the First Great Cause by creation, not by development. This conception is full of difficulties to thought. We cannot even agree whether creation was in time or eternity. But all agree in this, that the invisible is rapidly absorbing all the force at least of the visible universe, and that when force is gone the corpse will not remain unburied. ”

“ See Diman, Theistic Argument, 380—“As physical science has brought us to the conclusion that back of all the phenomena of the material universe there lies an invisible universe of forces, and that these forces may ultimately be reduced to one all-pervading [pg 802] force in which the unity of the physical universe consists; and as philosophy has advanced the rational conjecture that this ultimate all-pervading force is simply will-force ”

“ THE LIFE FORCE IS NOT GOD
So it is that comprehensive setting of the universe presents itself to the modern mind. It is altogether outside good and evil and love and hate. It is outside God, who is love and goodness. And coming out of this veiled being, proceeding out of it in a manner altogether inconceivable, is another lesser being, an impulse thrusting through matter and clothing itself in continually changing material forms, the maker of our world, Life, the Will to Be. It comes out of that inscrutable being as a wave comes rolling to us from beyond the horizon. ”

“ We know absolutely nothing concerning the Force we call God; and, assuming such an intelligent ruling force to be in existence, permeating this universe of millions of stars and (no doubt) tens of millions of planets, we do not know under what conditions and limitations It works. We are quite entitled to assume that the end of such an influence is intended to be order out of chaos, happiness and perfection out of incompleteness and misery ”

“ We have been speaking of ether as an avenue of forces, a word which conveys no meaning to the average mind, because force is invisible. But to an occult investigator the forces are not merely names such as steam, electricity, etc. He finds them to be intelligent beings of varying grades, both sub and superhuman. What we call “laws of nature,” are great intelligences which guide more elemental beings in accordance with certain rules designed to further their evolution. ”

“ To such a Divine Force as we postulate, the whole development and perfecting of life on this planet, the whole production of man, may seem little more than to any one of us would be the chipping out, the cutting, the carving, and the polishing of a gem; and we should feel as little remorse or pity for the scattered dust and fragments as must the Creative Force of the immeasurably vast universe feel for the DISJECTA MEMBRA of perfected life on this planet. ”

“ Somewhere at the top of the pyramid in the invisible government are a few sinister people who know exactly what they are doing: they want America to become part of a worldwide socialist dictatorship, under the control of the Kremlin.
Some may actually dislike communists, but feel that one-world socialism is desirable and inevitable. They are working with a sense of urgency for a "benign" world socialist dictatorship to forestall the Kremlin from imposing its brand of world dictatorship by force. ”

“ This is the place to assert, not to prove, that this visible world has always been subject to the forces of the invisible world. It does not matter whether these forces are personal or personally directed. Its waters divide, gravitation at that point being overcome; they harden for a path, or bodies are levitated; they burn by a fire as fierce as that which plays between two electric poles. These forces are not the ordinary endowments of matter; they step out of the realm of the greater invisible, execute their mission, and, like an angel's sudden appearance, disappear. ”

“ Through all aeons since all the worlds were made it is at least not unthinkable that in all the worlds of which our own atom is one, there has ruled a Force illimitable, unconquerable and inexplicable and whichsoever its world and whatsoever the sign denoting or the name given it, the Force—the Thing has been the same. ”

“ What reason have you for accepting that, to other forms unknown and yet transparent to this energy, your sunshine may not be as intangible as the ether of space is to man? What reason have you to believe that a force torrent is not circulating to and from the sun and earth, inappreciable to man, excepting the mere trace of this force which, modified by contact action with matter appears as heat, light, and other force expressions? ”

“ Everything that exists is a dull, latent explosive; but whatever the index of its inertia may be, it represents only an insignificant fraction of its explosive power. Everything which takes place, the movement of the stars, tellurian work, entropy, active and insatiable life itself, all this is only on the surface, while invisibly and incalculably there is gnawing beneath it that explosive force which is called matter. ”

“ Now, we know that every effect must also be a cause, and that every cause must be an effect. The atoms coming together did produce an effect, and as every effect must also be a cause, the effect produced by the collision of the atoms, must as to something else have been a cause. Then we have matter, force, law, order, cause and effect without a being superior to-nature. Nothing is left for the supernatural but empty space. His throne is a void, and his boasted realm is without matter, without force without law, without cause, and without effect. ”

“ Within the confines of the conceivable universe one element alone is all-potential, all-pervading,—Force. Throughout the realms of space, in and round all forms of matter, binding minutest atoms, balancing systems of worlds, rioting in life, rotting in death, under its various aspects mechanical and chemical, attractive and repulsive, this mighty power is manifest; a unifying, coalescing, and flowing power, older than time, quicker than thought, saturating all suns and planets and filling to repletion all molecules and masses. ”

“ When, therefore, we suddenly feel the ground move beneath us, a mysterious and natural force, with which we are previously unacquainted, is revealed to us as an active disturbance of stability. A moment destroys the illusion of a whole life; our deceptive faith in the repose of nature vanishes, and we feel transported, as it were, into a realm of unknown destructive forces. Every sound — the faintest motion in the air — arrests our attention, and we no longer trust the ground on which we stand. ”

“ This Universe, ah me—what could the wild man know of it; what can we yet know? That it is a Force, and thousandfold Complexity of Forces; a Force which is not we. That is all; it is not we, it is altogether different from us. Force, Force, everywhere Force; we ourselves a mysterious Force in the centre of that. 'There is not a leaf rotting on the highway but has Force in it: how else could it rot?' Nay surely, to the Atheistic Thinker, if such a one were possible, it must be a miracle too, this huge illimitable whirlwind of Force, which envelops us here ”

“ Indeed, as we saw, that which is indestructible in matter and motion, is the force they present. And, as we here see, the truth that Force is indestructible, is the obverse of the truth that the Unknown Cause of the changes going on in consciousness is indestructible. So that the persistence of consciousness, constitutes at once our immediate experience of the persistence of Force, and imposes on us the necessity we are under of asserting its persistence. ”

“ Here was our hero, in full possession of all his powers, suspended in mid-air, and seemingly absolutely powerless to budge a single inch in any direction; for it is one of the first laws in physics that a body cannot be set in motion without the action of some force, and no force is possible without some point of resistance against which to act. ”

“ And here, indeed, we see even more clearly than before, how inevitable is that transfigured realism to which sceptical criticism finally brings us round. Getting rid of all complications, and contemplating pure Force, we are irresistibly compelled by the relativity of our thought, to vaguely conceive some unknown force as the correlative of the known force. Conditioned effect and unconditioned cause, are here presented in their primordial relation as two sides of the same change ”

“ But, granting that matter has always existed, and originally had motion, and consequent power, still, if the tendency is to expend and exhaust this power in producing effects, by collision or otherwise, or, admitting the conservation of force, if its tendency is to become merely potential, then the force which it originally had, in virtue of being in motion, must, in the infinite period of its existence, have been either wholly exhausted or reduced to an infinitesimal, requiring the intervention of some active power to again give it any practical force. ”

“ But a miracle should be a violation not merely of the known but of all the laws of nature, and until you know all those laws, how can you tell what is a miracle? The lifting of iron by a magnet—I suppose you have iron and loadstones here as we have on Earth—was, to the first man who witnessed it, just as complete a violation of the law of gravity as now appears my voyage through space, accomplished by a force bearing some relation to that which acts through the magnet. ”

“ In other words, is the application of extrinsic power required to keep it in motion, or is such application required to stop it? Having no power to move itself when once at rest, it could have no power to act, but could only be acted upon, and, if it has inertia, it would be a means of exhausting other force. ”

“ Absolutely we know only forces—pure ghostliness. The individual substance is but a force combination,—its changes are force combinations,—the powers outside are but force combinations,—the universe is a force combination—and we can know nothing more than vibrations. ”

“ Slowly it dawned upon the mind that force is indestructible—that we cannot imagine force as existing apart from matter—that we cannot even think of matter existing apart from force—that we cannot by any possibility conceive of a cause without an effect, of an effect without a cause, of an effect that is not also a cause. ”