Chapter 6

In our sense of hearing we can only appreciate up to 40,000 vibrations in a second as a musical sound, whereas, with Light and other electrical phenomena, as we shall see in a later View, we can appreciate sympathetic frequencies of not only many millions, but indeed millions of millions in a second, and yet it is possible that, in the sense (of insects) we are now examining of life appreciating life, we may be in the presence of frequencies as far removed from light as light is from sound. If, then, we may follow the analogy from our highest senses, we seem to get a clear explanation of the mystery of insect discrimination. The insect, in her then state, could have no pleasure in the presence of certain plants, their modes of frequency being out of sympathy with that particular Insect Life, and, it may be conceived that, not only is there no inducement for the insect to alight on that plant, but that even in its near proximity that insect would feel discomfort or restlessness; when, however, a plant is reached which is near akin to the one required, less antipathy or unrest would be felt, and, when the true species of plant is reached, all would be harmony, pleasure, and rest, the functions of Insect Life would be vivified, and its life-work accomplished under the influences of sympathetic action.

I have made several other investigations on this subject, but I must only give one more to illustrate the higher form of Animal Life appreciating Animal Life. There is a large class of insects, called Ichneumonidae, which lay their eggs in the bodies of caterpillars, and, as in the case of a moth laying its egg on the special food plant upon which its caterpillar can feed, so does each species of these insects unerringly lay its eggs in the body of a particular kind of caterpillar. It must be a wonderful sense which can enable an Ichneumon Fly to do this; it has never seen that caterpillar before, as the egg, from which its own caterpillar was hatched, was laid inside the body of one of those caterpillars, and the caterpillar upon which it fed had been eaten up and disappeared at least six months before the Ichneumon Fly had even made its way out of its own cocoon; and yet this insect is not only forced, by some mysterious power, to lay its egg in the body of a caterpillar, but there is only one species which will serve its purpose, and it has to hunt up this particular caterpillar from among thousands of other different species.

Let me put before you what is, perhaps, the most mysterious illustration which we have under this heading, wherein the Ichneumon Fly cannot even get sight of its prey, nor employ any sense similar to our own for its detection. There are several species of moths whose caterpillars live in the very heart of trees. We will take the case of the caterpillar of Zeuzera Aesculi, the Leopard Moth; the egg of this Moth is laid in a crevice of the bark, and, when first hatched, the small larva penetrates through the bark into the centre of an apple, pear, or plum tree, and then commences to eat its way upwards, forming at first a very small tunnel, but gradually increasing it, as the caterpillar grows larger, into a passage of about half an inch in diameter. In such a position, surrounded as it is by solid wood, the thickness of which would probably not be less than one and a half or two inches, we might suppose that the caterpillar would be safe from its enemies, but it is not: there is a large Ichneumon Fly which cannot propagate its species unless it can lay its eggs in the body of this particular caterpillar. This Ichneumon Fly can, from outside, not only tell that inside the stem of that tree there is a caterpillar, but can locate the exact spot, and, still more wonderful, is able to determine whether or not that caterpillar is the particular species it is in search of. There are numerous other species of moths whose caterpillars feed in the centre of trees, and yet this female Ichneumon is able to mark down as her prey, although far out of reach of any sense known to us, that one species which alone can serve her purpose. As soon as she has located the exact position of the caterpillar, she unsheathes a long delicate ovipositor, with which she is provided, and drills it right through the intervening solid wood until it pierces the body of the caterpillar; she then lays an egg down that long tube into its body and repeats the process two or three times. The caterpillar itself does not appear to feel any inconvenience from this process and continues to feed and grow larger; but it has the seeds of death within itself, and the two or three little caterpillars, which hatch out of the eggs of the Ichneumon, are also growing rapidly inside it. At last, when the time comes that the large caterpillar should have been full fed, and it has eaten its way outwards until it rests close under the bark, preparatory to turning into a chrysalis, its enemies finish their destructive work, and, if the tree is then opened, the empty skin and cartilage skeleton of the large caterpillar is found, together with two or three large cocoons. These cocoons, if kept, will produce in due time specimens of the Ichneumon Fly, and these will in their turn go about their murderous work as soon as their proper hunting season comes round again.

This is only an isolated case out of thousands of similar occurrences in every locality; in fact, if you walk along any palings in the country in the early summer, you will see at every few steps the evidence of similar tragedies. Those of you who live in the country must often have seen on palings little heaps containing a dozen or more of the small yellow Microgaster Cocoons, and if these are examined carefully they will be found to be surrounding the skin of a caterpillar. These minute cocoons may be kept under a wine glass and, from each a minute Ichneumon Fly, with (if a female) its sharp ovipositor, will emerge in due time. It is curious what mistakes can be made even by intelligent persons. I have had the skin of the caterpillar and this little heap of yellow Microgaster Cocoons sent me to examine, and have been seriously asked whether this was not a true case of Parthenogenesis; the suggestion being that the caterpillar had actually laid eggs, instead of waiting until it had become a moth, and that its efforts, to alter the course of nature, had been too much for its constitution and it had died in the act! There are other illustrations I should have liked to give but space will not permit, the most remarkable being, perhaps, the knowledge a Queen Bee possesses of the proximity of another Queen, even when that other is still in the pupa state, sealed up in a waxen cell. I have made numerous experiments with Queens of the common black English Bee (_Apis mellifica_), and also the yellow-striped Italian Bee (_Apis ligustica_), which belong to the same order (_Hymenoptera_) as the Ichneumon Flies, and the same marvellous sense of life appreciating life at a distance, and through solid matter, is experienced.

If we now follow the same Thought by examining the Inorganic, we make the extraordinary discovery that this power to influence, based on sympathetic action, is the very mainspring by which physical work can be sustained, and upon it depends entirely the very action of our physical senses. Our senses are based upon the appreciation of Vibration, in the Air and Ether, of greater or less rapidity, according to the presence in our organs of processes capable of acting in sympathy with those frequencies. The limits within which our senses can thus be affected are very small; the ear can only appreciate thirteen or fourteen octaves in sound, and the eye less than one octave in light; beyond these limits, owing to the absence of processes which can be affected sympathetically, all is silent and dark to us. This capacity for responding to vibration under sympathetic action is not confined to Organic Senses; the physical forces, and even inert matter, are also sensitive to its influences, as I will now demonstrate to you.

In wireless telegraphy it is absolutely necessary that the transmitter of the electro-magnetic waves should be brought into perfect harmony with the receiver--without that condition it is impossible to communicate at a distance; again, a heavy pendulum or swing can, by a certain force, be pushed, say an inch, from its position of rest, and each successive push will augment the swing, but only on one condition, namely, that the force is applied in sympathy with the pendulum's mode of swing; if the length of the pendulum is 52 feet, the force must be applied only at the end of each eight seconds, as, although the pendulum at first is only moving one inch, it will take four seconds to traverse that one inch, the same as it would take to traverse 10 feet or more, and will not be back at the original position till the end of eight seconds; if the force is applied before that time the swing of the pendulum would be hindered instead of augmented. Even a steam engine must work under this influence if it is to be effective; there may be enough force in a boiler to do the work of a thousand horse-power, but, unless the slide valve is arranged so that the steam enters the cylinder at exactly the right moment, namely, in sympathy with the thrust of the piston, no work is possible.

To understand the next example I want you first to recognise that, apart from its physical qualities, every material body has certain, what may be called, traits of character, which belong to it alone; there is generally one special trait or "partial," namely, the characteristic which it is easiest for the particular body to manifest, but I shall show you that by sympathetic action others can be developed. I have several pieces of ordinary wood, used for lighting fires, each of which, according to its size and density, has its special characteristic; if you examined each by itself you would hardly see that they are different from one another except slightly in length, but if I throw them down on the table, you would hear that each of them gives out a clear characteristic note of the musical scale: to carry this a step forward, I have a long, heavy, iron bar, about 4 feet long and 2 inches thick, so rigid that no ordinary manual force can move it out of the straight, and, from mere handling, you would find it difficult to imagine that it would be amenable to soft influences. But I have studied this inert mass, and, as each person has special characteristics, some being more partial than others to, say, Literary pursuits, Athletics, Music, Poetry, Engineering, Science, or Metaphysics, so I am able to show that this iron mass has not only a number of these "partials," some of which are extraordinarily beautiful and powerful, audible over long distances, but that by the lightest touch of certain small generating rubbers, not more than an ounce in weight and tipped with cork or leather, each of which has been put into perfect sympathy with one of those traits, I can make that mass demonstrate them both optically and audibly; but, without those special sympathetic touches, it is silent and remains an inert mass. This result is obtained by physical contact between the instrument and the mass, but we will now carry this another step forward and deal with the subject of the action of Influence at a distance, or what may be called Prayer, between two of these rigid masses. From what we have already seen, it is clear that the Soul of man could not possibly pray with efficacy to a graven image; there is nothing in sympathy between them, and, without sympathetic action, influence is impossible; but it is quite possible for Matter to pray with efficacy to Matter, provided the material soul, if we may use the analogy, is brought into perfect sympathy with the material god, and I can now put before you an experiment showing this taking place.

I have another heavy bar of iron, not so long but of the same thickness as the one already described, and have found its strongest characteristic; I have another small rubber, fashioned so that its characteristic is in perfect sympathy with that of the bar, namely, that the number of vibrations, in a second, of the instrument are exactly equal to those of the iron mass, and it is, therefore, as we saw in the last experiment, able by contact to influence the bar sympathetically. The slightest touch throws the bar into such violent vibration that a great volume of sound is produced, which can be heard a quarter of a mile away. The result of this sympathetic touch is far from being transient, in fact, the bar will continue to move, audibly, for a long time. This movement in the mass of iron was started by physical contact, but having once started the bar praying, willing, or thinking, whichever you like to call it, that bar now has the power to affect, without contact, another rigid bar of iron even when removed to great distances, provided the second bar possesses a similar characteristic, and that that characteristic has been brought into perfect _sympathy_ with that of the first bar. I have a second bar which fulfils these conditions, and, although, at the outset, it had no power whatever to respond, it has been gradually, as it were, educated, namely, brought nearer and nearer into sympathy with the first bar, until it is now able to respond across long distances; it has acted across the whole length of one of the largest halls in London so strongly that it could be heard by all present. We will now reverse the process of bringing these bars into sympathy, and I will throw the first out of harmony by slightly changing its characteristic; the change is extremely small, quite inappreciable to the human ear, the bar giving out as full and pure a note as it did before the alteration was made; in fact, the change is so slight that it can still, with a little force, be stimulated by the same generator, and yet the whole power to influence has been lost; the first bar, although it is praying with great force, gets no response from the second bar, and, even if the bars are now brought on to the same table and put within a few inches of each other, there is still no reply, there is no sympathetic action, the efficacy of prayer between the two has been completely destroyed.

Do we not then see the principle upon which the efficacy of Prayer depends, that the whole object of a Human Soul, when using the words "Thy Will be done," is to bring itself closer and closer into perfect sympathy with the Absolute? When that is accomplished, we may understand, from our simile, that not only shall we and our aspirations be influenced by the Will of the Deity, but that then our wishes, in their turn, must have great power with God, and it becomes possible for even "Mountains to be removed and cast into the midst of the sea."

How truly the Philosopher Paul at the beginning of our Era recognised that the knowledge of God, which Christ Himself tells us is Everlasting Life, may be gained by the study of the material creation; His words were sadly overlooked by many who, half a century ago, were afraid that the discoveries of Science were dangerous to belief in the Divine. He says: the unrighteous shall be without excuse because "The invisible things of Him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even His everlasting power and divinity" (Romans i. 18 to 20, R.V.).

We have seen the truth of this wonderful statement, we have traced the reflection of the greatest attribute of the Deity, Divine Love, on the material plane. What has been the result of our investigation? We find that throughout the whole of Nature the one great universal power is Sympathy.

'Tis verily "love that makes the world go round." What a marvellous conclusion to our investigation! Let us see where it leads us. The whole of creation is the materialisation of the Thoughts of the Deity; we have, therefore, in the forces of Nature, the impress of the very Essence of God. Our Innermost Self is an emanation from Him, and Prayer, which, at the beginning, is only a striving to bring ourselves into harmony with the Deity, must, as the Soul grows in strength and knowledge, become a great power working under the wonderful principle of Sympathy. True prayer, indeed, becomes "_Love in Action_," and, under certain conditions, Prayer may actually be looked upon as the greatest physical force in Nature. But let us carry this one step further: can we, by our analogy of Matter praying, understand why "the knowledge of God is Everlasting Life"? Look at the first iron bar, and watch how, as long as it keeps on vibrating, the second bar, _because it is in sympathy_, will be kept in motion. If it were possible for the first bar to vibrate for ever, the second bar would, speaking materially, have everlasting life, through its being in perfect sympathy with the first bar; without this connection the bar would be lifeless. Now apply this to our Transcendental Personality; it is being nourished, the knowledge of God is increasing, it is at last pulsating in perfect harmony with the Deity, and when, for it, the Material Universe disappears, its _affinity_ to Infinite Love must give it Everlasting Life. Everything that has not that connection is but a shadow which will cease to be manifest when the Great Thought is completed, the volition of the Deity is withdrawn, and the Physical Universe ceases to exist; nothing can then exist except that which is perfected, that which is of the essence of God--namely, the Spiritual. Perfect harmony will then reign supreme, such happiness as cannot be described in earthly language nor even imagined by our corporeal senses; hence, in the many passages referring to that wondrous Life hereafter, we are not told what Heaven is like but only what is not to be found there:

"Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, Neither have entered into the heart of man The things that God hath prepared for them that love Him."--1 COR. ii. 9.

There are several other phenomena which I might have examined, but I chose this particular aspect of the Reality, as best illustrating the subject I am trying to elucidate in these Views, though it was probably the most difficult one to bring home to the general reading public. There are, I know, from personal knowledge, many of my readers who will have been able to follow and appreciate what I have attempted to demonstrate, but to those who have not grasped the connection between the Infinite and Finite, the Transcendental and the Physical Ego, the Real and its Shadow, a few more words of explanation may be helpful.

It is easy to see that the negatives, Cold, Ignorance, Falsehood, Ugliness are manifestations of their positives, as given in my list in View One, and it is also not difficult to show that Evil or Sin is dependent upon Good in the same way as the Shadow depends upon Light for its manifestation. Do not let me be misunderstood; I have never suggested that these negatives or negations have not the appearance of realities to us, under our present conditions of existence; they indeed have to be dealt with by us as realities, but they are only manifested as phenomena on the physical plane, because our Senses, and therefore Thoughts, are limited by Time and Space and therefore dependent upon _relativity_.

Let me put the case of Good and Evil before you, as analogous to, say, Light and Shadow. Moral laws and responsibility thereto are dependent upon the existence of Goodness; the purely animal Homo was, as I have pointed out, free from sin or responsibility until the advent of the Spiritual made manifest, in that animal, the physical Ego and raised him far above all other animals. Man thus became a responsible moral being, a living soul, aware of Right, and therefore of Wrong, and certain acts then became for him sin that were not sin before. Thus the advent of Christ, and, in a less degree, the coming into the world of every good man, so raised, and is raising, the level of moral rectitude that things become sin that were not sin before; St. Paul himself specially recognises this when he says that without law there is no sin. The Goodness, then, brought into the world by Christ, did not create sin but made it manifest, and gave it the appearance of reality under our present conditions of life and thought. How well the Mystic Paul understood that the Invisible is the Real, and that the Visible--namely, the phenomena of nature--is only dependent upon Time for its manifestation. His words are: "For the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are Eternal."

I have tried in these Views to use only simple everyday language, and am fully aware how inadequate are the words I have employed; but my readers will have, I hope, recognised how difficult, and in many cases impossible, it is, in treating these metaphysical subjects, to find words to express the exact meaning; we have to describe the Infinite in terms of the finite, and by use of imperfect finite analogies to get a glimpse of the otherwise unthinkable, and even then it requires a mystical sense, or what St. Paul called spiritual discernment, to see beyond the physical mists. If the whole of the phenomena of Nature must be looked upon as the manifestation of the Divine Noumenon, it follows that Matter is as divine as the Spiritual, though not as real; it is His shadow, or the outline of His very image, thrown upon the material plane of our sensations; and the principle of sympathetic action, upon which, as we have seen, the whole power to influence depends throughout the Universe, becomes surely the best symbol we can use for understanding the efficacy of prayer and the connection between our Transcendental Self and the All-loving. Realise that the Transcendental Ego is a Spirit, and therefore akin to the Great Spirit, not only in essence, but in "loving and knowing communion," then look at my last experiment, where we saw two material bodies (remember they are shadow manifestations of the Reality) which could influence each other from the fact that they were akin, not only in substance, but in perfect sympathetic communion.

If now we watch the shadows of two human beings thrown upon a wall, and see those shadows shaking hands and embracing each other, are we not justified in concluding that those images give us a true explanation of what is really taking place? and is not that exactly what I have done? have I not shown, as I proposed to do, that it is possible by examining the phenomena of Nature (the shadows of the Reality) to reach that point where we may even feel that we are listening to, or having divulged to us, some of what may be called the very thoughts of the Great Reality?

VIEW FIVE

THE PHYSICAL FILM

We have seen in former Views that the whole Phenomenal Universe, as perceived by our senses, and all intellectual thoughts or concepts based on those perceptions, are, in reality, only mists or shadows; they have no existence apart from our physical senses, and may be likened to a thin film, which at death is pricked and passes away like a scroll, leaving us face to face with the Reality. We thus seemed to grasp that all phenomena, including our Physical Egos, are but the shadows or outline of the Reality, as depicted on our limited plane of consciousness; but these phenomena, having Motion for their basis, are none the less real to us under our present outlook, limited as it is by conditioning in Time and Space, and we have to deal with them as realities in our everyday life. I want to make this distinction clear in the present View.