Macrocosm

“ The winds and elements of the outer universe, the macrocosm, become in Hildegard’s later schemes intimately related to structures and events within the body of man himself, the microcosm, the being around whom the universe centres. ”

“ MICROCOSM and MACROCOSM. The belief of the ancients that the world or cosmos was animated, or had a soul, led to the notion that the parts and members of organic beings must have their counterparts in the members of the cosmos. The natural philosophers of the 16th century—Paracelsus at their head—took up this notion anew in a somewhat modified shape, and considered the world as a human organism on the large scale, and man as a world, or cosmos, in miniature ”

“ The macrocosm has aërial animals; man has gnats and other winged insects. The macrocosm has volatile spirits, such as winds, thunders, and lightnings; man has internal gases and pordas of diseases. The macrocosm has two luminaries, the sun and moon; man has also two luminaries, the right eye representing the sun, and the left eye the moon. The macrocosm has mountains and hills, man has bones and skin. The macrocosm has heavens and stars, man has a head and ears. The macrocosm has twelve signs of the zodiac; man has them also from the lobe of the ear to the feet, which are called the fishes. ”

“ The terms macrocosm and microcosm are not employed by her, but in her last great work, the Liber Divinorum Operum, she succeeds in most eloquent and able fashion in synthesizing into one great whole, centred around this doctrine, her theological beliefs and her physiological knowledge, together with her conceptions of the working of the human mind and of the structure of the universe. The work is thus an epitome of the science of the time viewed through the distorting medium of this theory. ”

“ As the chapters of the preceding book carried us out into a macrocosm of inconceivable magnitude, our present studies are to reveal a microcosm of equally inconceivable smallness. As the studies of the physicist attempted to reveal the very nature of matter and of energy, we have now to seek the solution of the yet more inscrutable problems of life and of mind. ”

“ Everything in nature has intellectual significance, and relation as utterance to the Thought out of which the universe was born, and we, whose minds were made in its image, who are the microcosm of the macrocosm, have in ourselves the key to unlock the meaning of that utterance. ”

“ Hermes calls man the microcosm, because the man, or the small world, contains all that which is included in the macrocosm or great world. Thus the macrocosm has small and large animals, both terrestrial nd aquatic; man, on the other hand, has fleas and lice—these are the terrestrial animals; he has also intestinal worms—these are aquatic animals. The macrocosm has rivers, springs, and seas; man has internal organs—intestines, veins, and arteries. ”

“ I know that the macrocosmic mechanism moves with mathematical exactitude, and that we, in comparison, are mighty only in our arrogance; that, in fact, we are but microscopic specks in the drift of worlds.
Nature seems to care little for individuals, but very much for races and species; little indeed for a person, very much for a people. ”

“ These systems of atoms that we call molecules have been frequently compared to the solar system, and cited as evidence that man occupies an intermediate position in creation, with a microcosmos beneath, as far removed from the order of his perceptions as is the macrocosmos above him. To one who realizes what must be the complex dynamical relations as well as the order of magnitude of these molecular systems, the diagrams of molecular structure which may be seen in any work on organic chemistry can not but appear as crude and childish as the figures of constellations on a celestial globe ”

“ I have here a body in which I believe you will see a change taking place in its condition of cohesion at the moment it is made. It is at first yellow; it then becomes a fine crimson red. Just watch when I pour these two liquids together—both colorless as water. [The lecturer here mixed together solutions of perchloride of mercury and iodide of potassium, when a yellow precipitate of biniodide of mercury fell down, which almost immediately became crimson red.] Now there is a substance which is very beautiful, but see how it is changing color. ”

“ When we are able to ascertain the nature of a substance by both these methods, so that the result of one confirms that of the other, we obtain the most complete knowledge of it that we are capable of acquiring. This is the case with water, with the atmosphere, with most of the oxyds, acids, and neutral salts, and with many other compounds. But the more complicated combinations of nature, even in the mineral kingdom, are in general beyond our reach, and any attempt to imitate organised bodies must ever prove fruitless; their formation is a secret that rests in the bosom of the Creator. ”

“ The analysing principle cannot be a something internal residing in the planet itself. But all that it is, it is through antagonism with the sun. This antagonism is light. This it is that divorces or separates the elements from their matrix; it is light, which has sundered the æther into the twofold air, and the air again into the denser elements, water and earth, separating the oxygen from the nitrogen and later on from the carbon, which must be taken up in water as an oxide. ”

“ The coarse food necessary for you in order to keep up the crude materiality of which your physical make-up is composed, is not needed by the denizens of Mars. In the composition of your physical bodies is a representative of all the material elements in nature—iron, calcium, wood, earth, etc.—and it is easily demonstrated by microscopic inspection and chemical analysis, that in every drop of blood in the human system all these varied and numerous elements are represented. Hence man may be safely considered a microcosm, or nature in her vast domain, reflected in miniature. ”

“ The transparency, or opacity of bodies, does not, I conceive, depend so much upon their intimate nature, as upon the arrangement of their particles: we cannot have a more striking instance of this, than is afforded by the different states of carbon, which, though it commonly appears in the form of a black opake body, sometimes assumes the most dazzling transparent form in nature, that of diamond, which, you recollect, is carbon, and which, in all probability, derives its beautiful transparency from the peculiar arrangement of its particles during their crystallisation. ”

“ The reader will now begin to understand the sense in which polarity applies to these complex conditions of an advanced evolution.
To return, however, from this digression to the [91] point at which it began, viz. the origin of life, we have to show how the law of polarity prevails in the organic as well as in the inorganic world. In the first place the material to which all life is attached, from the speck of protoplasm to the brain of man, is strictly a chemical product of atoms and molecules bound together by the same polar laws as those of inorganic matter. ”

“ We have, then, this certain truth,—all things visible around us are but aggregations of atoms. From particles of dust, which under the microscope could scarcely be distinguished one from the other, are all the varied forms of nature created. This grain of dust, this particle of sand, has strange properties and powers. Science has discovered some truths, but still more are hidden within this irregular molecule of matter which we now survey, than have yet been shadowed in the dreams of our philosophy. ”

“ What is meant by the "unseen universe?" Matter, according to the authors is made up of molecules, which are supposed to be vortex-rings made of the luminiferous ether; the luminiferous ether is in turn supposed to be made of much smaller molecules which are vortex-rings of a second ether. These smaller molecules with the ether in which they float constitute the unseen universe. The authors see reason to believe that the unseen universe absorbs energy from the visible universe and vice versa ”

“ This is the process of all judgment.
The crude notion of "body" can no more stand the test of analysis than can the art of the Egyptians or that of our little children. The physicist who sees a body flexed, stretched, melted, and vaporised, cuts up this body into smaller permanent parts; the chemist splits it up into elements. Yet even an element is not unalterable. Take sodium. When warmed, the white, silvery mass becomes a liquid, which, when the heat is increased and the air shut out, is transformed into a violet vapor, and on the heat being still more increased glows with a yellow light. ”

“ Metals are not only opaque to light and heat, but also to electrical energy, which passes through both iodine solution and glass almost as though they were not interposed. And so on.
Now all known substances are “transparent” to gravitation. You can use screens of various sorts to cut off the light or heat, or electrical influence of the sun, or the warmth of the earth from anything; you can screen things by sheets of metal from Marconi’s rays, but nothing will cut off the gravitational attraction of the sun or the gravitational attraction of the earth. ”

“ The living substance, e.g. of a nerve cell, appears as a watery substance crowded with a countless number of granules, which are so small that only the light dispersed around each is visible under the highest power of the microscope when illuminated [Pg viii] by a beam of light against a dark ground, just as the halo of each dust particle in the air is made visible by a beam of light crossing a dark room, and just as these dust particles are in dancing motion due to the currents of air, so are the particles in the living substance ceaselessly kept dancing by the play of inter-molecular forces. ”

“ Materiality is not the only determinant of refraction, but also the density of the element, the earth refracting light more than water, and this more than air.
345. The density also is not the only determinant, but the quality also of the matter; the Basic or Planetary must refract more than the Oxygenic or Solar.
346. As translucency is not a dead transmission of light, but a continued propagation of tension; so must it be viewed as a process of light in matter, but one excited from without. Translucency is a co-illumination, like the concord of equally attuned instruments. ”

“ In the heavens we discover by their light, and by their light alone, stars so distant from each other that no material thing can ever have passed from one to another; and yet this light, which is to us the sole evidence of the existence of these distant worlds, tells us also that each of them is built up of molecules of the same kinds as those which we find on earth. A molecule of hydrogen, for example, whether in Sirius or in Arcturus, executes its vibrations in precisely the same time. ”

“ But certainly in these two one of the most general consents in nature does seem to be observable. For there is [p. 243] consent between sulphur, oil and greasy exhalation, flame, and perhaps the body of a star. So is there between mercury, water and watery vapours, air, and perhaps the pure and intersidereal ether. Yet these two quaternions or great tribes of things (each within its own limits) differ immensely in quantity of matter and density, but agree very well in configuration; as appears in numerous cases. ”

“ I have already informed you what a great change chemistry has undergone since it has become a regular science. Within these thirty years especially, it has experienced an entire revolution, and it is now proved, that neither fire, air, earth, nor water, can be called elementary bodies. For an 8 elementary body is one that has never been decomposed, that is to say, separated into other substances; and fire, air, earth, and water, are all of them susceptible of decomposition. ”

“ That is sometimes the case; but, in general, the stronger affinity destroys the weaker; and it seldom happens that the attraction of several substances for each other is so equally balanced as to produce such complicated compounds.
CAROLINE.
But, pray, Mrs. B., what is the cause of the chemical attraction of bodies for each other? It appears to me more extraordinary or unnatural, if I may use the expression, than the attraction of cohesion, which unites particles of a similar nature. ”

“ If we call to our recollection the history of the primitive formation of the rudiments of organic bodies in the green matter of Priestley, and see in this the conditions of this formation,—whilst, under the influence of light and gravitation, some particles of the original fluid attain the nature of individual beings, as well as a tendency to internal unity, and consequently a globular form,—it becomes clear that this development cannot occur without a separation of those particles from the rest, without an individual limitation in form of a spherical surface ”

“ And we do not see that anything is gained, even in the matter of scientific nomenclature, by merely substituting "molecular force" for "vital force," in the explication of vital phenomena. Even granting that molecular changes do take place during the development of the vital units in their necessary plasmic environment; it by no means follows that these changes are not dependent on the vital principle as it acts, rather than on the molecules as they act, [34] The higher force should always subordinate the lower in all metamorphic, as well as other processes, of nature. ”

“ In this transformation of sulphurous substance from a higher material state, nearer to levity, to that of the solid crystal, we may behold an image of the generation of matter. For every physical substance and, therefore, every chemical element, exists originally as a pure function in the dynamic processes of the universe. Wherever, as a result of the action of gravity, such a function congeals materially, there we meet it in the form of a physical-material substance. ”