SCIENTIFIC ABERRATIONS.

503. planets rotate because they are made to rotate . . . . . and the modern physical system of the universe is a physical impossibility." (Soirees.) For did not Herschell say the same thing when he remarked that there is a will needed to impart a circular motion, and another will to restrain it? (Discours, 165.) This shows and explains how a retarded planet is cunning enough to calculate so well its time as to hit off its arrival at the fixed minute. For, if Science sometimes succeeds with its great ingenuity in explaining some of such stoppages, retrograde motions, angles outside the orbits, &c., &c., by appearances resulting from the inequality of their progress and ours in the course of our mutual and respective orbits, we still know that there are others, and " very real and considerable deviations," according to Herschell, "which cannot be explained except by the mutual and irregular action of those planets. and by the perturbing influence of the Sun."

We understand, however, that there are, besides those little and accidental perturbations, continuous perturbations called "secular "— because of the extreme slowness with which the irregularity increases and affects the relations of the elliptic movement—and that these perturbations can be corrected. From Newton, who found that this world needed repairing very often, down to Reynaud, all say the same. In his Ciel et Terre (p. 28), the latter speaks of—

The orbits described by the planets as being very far from immutable; "on the contrary, subject to a perpetual mutation in their position and form,"—all prove gravitation and the peripatetic laws to be as negligent as they are quick to repair their mistakes. The charge as it stands seems to be that "they (the orbits) are alternately widening and narrowing, their great axis lengthens and diminishes, or oscillates. at the same time from right to left around the Sun, the plane itself, in which they are situated, raising and lowering itself periodically while pivoting around itself with a kind of tremor. . . ."

To this, De Mirville, who believes in intelligent "workmen " ruling invisibly the solar system—as we do—observes very wittily*. "Voila certes, a voyage which has little in it of mechanical rigour; at the utmost, one could compare it to a steamer, pulled to and fro and tossed on the waves, retarded or accelerated, all and each of which impediments might put off its arrival indefinitely, were there not the intelligences of a pilot and engineers to catch up the time lost, and to repair the damages"

The law of gravity, however, seems to be becoming an obsolete law in starry heaven. At any rate those long-haired sidereal radicals, called comets, appear to be very poor respecters of the majesty of that law,

* Deuxième mémoire, "Manifestations Historiques," p. 272.

and to heard it quite impudently. Nevertheless, and though presenting in nearly every respect "phenomena not yet fully understood," comets and meteors are credited by the believers in modern Science with obeying the same laws and consisting of the same matter, "as the Suns, stars and nebula," and even "the earth and its inhabitants." (Laing's "Modern Science and Modern Thought.")

This is what one might call taking things on trust, aye, even to blind faith. But exact Science is not to be questioned, and he who rejects the hypotheses imagined by her students—gravitation, for instance—would be regarded as an ignorant fool for it; yet we are told by the just cited author a queer legend from the scientific annals. The comet of 1811 had a tail 120 millions of miles in length and 25 millions of miles in diameter at the widest part, while the diameter of the nucleus was about 127,000 miles, more than ten times that of the earth." He tells us, "in order that bodies of this magnitude, passing near the earth, should not affect its motion or change the length of the year by even a single second, their actual substance must be inconceivably rare. . . . It must be so indeed, yet :—

". . . . . The extreme tenuity of a comet's mass is also proved by the phenomenon of the tail, which, as the comet approaches the sun, is thrown out sometimes to a length of 90 millions of miles in a few hours. And what is remarkable, This Tail is Thrown Out Against The Force Of Gravity by some repulsive force, probably electrical, so that it always points away from the Sun (!!!) And yet, thin as the matter of comets must be, IT OBEYS THE COMMON LAW OF GRAVITY (! ?), and whether the comet revolves in an orbit within that of the outer planets, or shoots off into the abysses of Space, and returns only after hundreds of years, its path is, at each instant, regulated by the same force as that which causes an apple to fall to the ground." (Ibid, p. 17.)

Science is like Cæsar's wife, and must not be suspected—this is evident. But it can be respectfully criticised, nevertheless. At all events, it may be reminded that "the apple" is a dangerous fruit. For the second time in the history of mankind, it may become the cause of the FALL—this time, of "exact" Science. A comet whose tail defies the law of gravity right in the Sun's face can hardly be credited with obeying that law.

In a series of scientific works on Astronomy and the nebular theory, written between 1865 and 1866, the present writer, a poor tyro in Science, has counted in a few hours, no less than thirty-nine contradictory hypotheses offered as explanations for the self-generated, primitive rotatory motion of the heavenly bodies. The writer is no astronomer, no mathematician, no scientist; but was obliged to examine these errors in defence of Occultism, in general, and what is still more

THE PARADOXES OF SCIENCE.

505

important, in order to support the occult teachings concerning astronomy and Cosmology. Occultists were threatened with terrible penalties for questioning scientific truths. But now they feel braver; Science is less secure in its "impregnable " position than they were led to expect, and many of its strongholds are built on very shifting sands.

Thus, even this poor and unscientific examination of it was useful, and it was certainly very instructive. We have learned a good many things, in fact, having studied with particular care especially those astronomical data that would be the most likely to clash with our heterodox and "superstitious" beliefs.

it

So, for instance, we have found there, concerning gravitation, the axial and orbital motions, that synchronous movement having been once overcome, in the early stage—it was enough to originate a rotatory motion till the end of Manvantara. We have also come to know in all the aforesaid combinations of possibilities with regard to incipient rotation—most complicated in every case,—some of the causes to which may have been due, as well as some others to which it ought and should have been due, but, in some way or other, was not. Among other things, we were informed that incipient rotation may be provoked with equal ease. in a mass in igneous fusion, and in one that is characterised by glacial opacity ("Heaven and Earth"). That gravitation is a law which nothing can overcome, but which, nevertheless, is overcome in and out of season by the most ordinary celestial or terrestrial bodies—the tails of impudent comets, for instance. That we owe the universe to the holy creative Trinity, called Inert Matter, Senseless Force and Blind Chance. Of the real essence and nature of any of these three, Science knows nothing, but this is a trifling detail. Ergo, we are told that, when a mass of cosmic or nebular matter—whose nature is unknown (entirely so), and which may be in a state of fusion (Laplace), or dark and cold (Thomson), for "this intervention of heat is itself a pure hypothesis" (Faye)—decides to exhibit its mechanical energy under the form of rotation, it acts in this wise. It (the mass) either bursts into spontaneous conflagration, or it remains inert, tenebrous, and frigid, both states being equally capable of sending it, without any adequate cause, spinning through space for millions of years. Its movements may be retrograde and they may be direct, about a hundred various reasons being offered for both motions, in about as many hypotheses. Anyhow, joining the maze of stars, whose origin belongs to the same miraculous and spontaneous order—for "the nebular theory does not profess to discover the origin of things, but only a stadium in material history" (Winchell: World-Life)—those millions of suns, planets, and satellites, composed of inert matter, will whirl on in most impressive and majestic symmetry around the firmament, moved

and guided only, their inertia notwithstanding, "by their own internal

motion."

Shall we wonder after this if learned mystics, pious Roman Catholics, and even such learned astronomers as were Chaubard and Godefroy,* have preferred the Kabala and the ancient systems to the modern dreary and contradictory exposition of the Universe? The Zohar makes a distinction, at any rate, between "the hajaschar (" the light Forces"), the hachoser ("Reflected Lights "), and the simple phenomenal exteriority of their spiritual types." (See Kabala Denudata, 11, 67.)

The question of "gravity" may now be dismissed, and other hypotheses examined. That physical Science knows nothing of "Forces" is clear. We may close the argument, however, by calling to our help one more man of Science—Professor Jaumes, Member of the Academy of Medicine at Montpellier. Says this learned man, speaking of Forces:—

"A cause is that which is essentially acting in the genealogy of phenomena, in every production as in every modification. I said that activity (or Force) was invisible. . . . To suppose it corporeal and residing in the properties of matter would be a gratuitous hypothesis. . . To reduce all the causes to God. . . . would amount to embarrassing oneself with a hypothesis hostile to many verities. But to speak of a plurality of forces proceeding from the Deity and possessing inherent powers of their own, is not unreasonable. . . . and I am disposed to admit phenomena produced by intermediate agents called Forces or Secondary Agents. The distinction of Forces is the principle of the division of Sciences; so many real and separate forces, so many mother-Sciences. No: Forces are not suppositions and abstractions, but realities, and the only acting realities whose attributes can be determined with the help of direct observation and induction." (“Sur la distinction des Forces," published in the Mbnoircs de I'Academic dcs Sciences de Montpellier, Vol. II., fasc. I., 1854.)

VI.

THE MASKS OF SCIENCE.

PHYSICS OR METAPHYSICS?

If there is anything on earth like progress, Science will some day have to give up, nolens volens, such monstrous ideas as her physical, self-guiding laws—void of soul and Spirit,—and then turn to the occult teachings.

* L'Univers expliqué par la Revélation, and Cosmogonie de la Revélation. But see De Mirville's Deuxiême Mémoire. The author, a terrible enemy of Occultism, was yet one who wrote great truths.

ACADEMICAL MISNOMERS.

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It has done so already, however altered are the title-page and revised editions of the Scientific Catechism. It is now over half a century since, in comparing modern with ancient thought, it has been found that, however different our philosophy may appear from that of our ancestors, it is, nevertheless, composed only of additions and subtractions taken from the old philosophy and transmitted drop by drop through the filter of antecedents. This fact was well known to Faraday, and other eminent men of Science. Atoms, Ether, evolution itself—all comes to modern Science from ancient notions, all is based on the conceptions of the archaic nations. "Conceptions" for the profane, under the shape of allegories; plain truths taught during the Initiations to the elect, which truths. have been partially divulged through Greek writers and have descended to us. This does not mean that Occultism has ever had the same views on matter, atoms and ether as found in the exotericism of the classical Greek writers. Yet, if we believe Mr. Tyndall, even Faraday was an Aristotelean, and an Agnostic more than a materialist. In his "Faraday, as a Discoverer" (p. 123) the author shows the great physicist using "old reflections of Aristotle" which are "concisely found in some of his works." Faraday, Boscovitch, and all others, however, who see, in the atoms and molecules, " centres of force," and in the corresponding element force, an Entity By Itself, are far nearer the truth, perchance, than those, who, denouncing them, denounce at the same time the "old corpuscular Pythagorean theory" (one, by the way, which has never passed to posterity as the great philosopher really taught it), on the ground of its "delusion that the conceptual elements of matter can be grasped as separate and real entities."

The chief and most fatal mistake and fallacy made by Science, in the view of the Occultists, lies in the idea of the possibility of such a thing. as inorganic, or dead matter, in nature. Is anything dead or inorganic capable of transformation or change? Occultism asks. And is there. anything under the sun which remains immutable or changeless?

This fallacy is nowhere better illustrated than in the scientific work of a German savant, Professor Philip Spiller (Der Wcltather als Kosmische Kraft}. In this cosmological treatise, the author attempts to prove that "no material constituent of a body, no atom, is in itself originally endowed with force, but that every such atom is absolutely dead, and without any power to act at a distance" (p. 4).

Something dead implies that it had been at some time living. When, at what period of cosmogony? Occultism says that in all cases when matter appears inert, it is the most active. A wooden or a stone block is motionless and impenetrable to all intents and purposes. Nevertheless, and de facto, its particles are in ceaseless eternal vibration which is so rapid that to the physical eye the body seems absolutely devoid of motion;