Part 10 (1/2)

It is necessary for us to get familiar with some of the protean metamorphoses of matter. Up at New Almaden, above the writer, is a vast ma.s.s of porous lava rock into which has been infiltrated a great deal of mercury. How shall we get it out? You can jar out numberless minute globules by hand. This metal, be it remembered, is liquid, and so heavy that solid iron floats in it as cork does in water. Now, to get it out of the rock we apply fire, and the mercury exhales away in the smoke. The real task of scientific painstaking is to get that heavy stuff out of the smoke again. It is changed, volatilized, and it likes that state so well that it is very difficult to persuade it to come back to heaviness again.

Take a great ma.s.s of marble. It was not always a mountain. It floated invisibly in the sea. Invisible animals took it up, particle by particle, to build a testudo, a traveling house, for themselves. The ephemeral life departing, there was a rain of dead sh.e.l.ls to make limestone ma.s.ses at the bottom of the sea. It will not always remain rock. Air and water disintegrate it once more. Little rootlets seize upon it and it goes coursing in the veins of plants. It becomes fiber to the tree, color to the rose, and fragrance to the violet. But, whether floating invisibly in the water, sh.e.l.l of infusoria in the seas, marble asleep in the Pentelican hills, const.i.tuting the sparkle and fizz of soda water, claiming the world's admiration as the Venus de Milo, or giving beauty and meaning to the most fitting symbol that goes between lovers, it is still the same matter. It may be diffused as gas or concentrated as a world, but it is still the same matter.

Matter is worthy of G.o.d's creation. Astronomy is awe-full; microscopy is no less so. Astronomy means immensity, bulk; atoms mean individuality. The essence of matter seems to be spirit, personality.

It seems to be able to count, or at least to be cognizant of certain exact quant.i.ties. An atom of bromine will combine with one of hydrogen; one of oxygen with two of hydrogen; one of nitrogen with three of hydrogen; one of silicon with four of hydrogen, etc. They marry without thought of divorce. A group of atoms married by affinity is called a molecule. Two atoms of hydrogen joined to one of oxygen make water. They are like three marbles laid near together on the ground, not close together; for we well know that water does not fill all the s.p.a.ce it occupies. We can put eight or ten similar bulks of other substances into a gla.s.s of water without greatly increasing its bulk, some actually diminis.h.i.+ng it. Water molecules are like a ma.s.s of shot, with large interstices between. Drive the atoms of water apart by heat till the water becomes steam, till they are as three marbles a larger distance apart, yet the molecule is not destroyed, the union is still indissoluble. One physicist has declared that the atoms of oxygen and hydrogen are probably not nearer to each other in water than one hundred and fifty men would be if scattered over the surface of England--one man for each four hundred square miles.[2] What must the distance be in steam? what the greater distance in the more extreme rarefactions? It is a.s.serted that millions of cubic miles of some comets tails would not make a cubic inch of matter solid as iron. Now, when earth and oceans are ”changed” to this sort of tenuity creations will be more easy. We shall not be obliged to hew out our material with broadaxes, nor blast it out with dynamite. Let us not fear that these creations will not be permanent; they will be enough so for our purpose. We can then afford to waste more worlds in a day than dull stupidity can count in a lifetime.

We are getting used to this sort of work already. When we reduce common air in a bulb to one one-thousandth of its normal density at the sea we get the possibility of continuous incandescent electric light by the vibration of platinum wire. When we reduce it to a tenuity of one millionth of the normal density we get the possibility of the X rays by vibrations of itself without any platinum wire. The greater the tenuity the greater the creative results. For example, water in freezing exerts an expansive, thrusting force of thirty thousand pounds to the square inch, over two thousand tons to the square foot; an incomprehensible force, but applicable in nature to little besides splitting rocks. On the other hand, when water is rarefied into steam its power is vastly more versatile, tractable, and serviceable in a thousand ways. Take a bit of metal called zinc. It is heavy, subject to gravitation, solid, subject to cohesion. But cause it to be burned, to pa.s.s away, and be changed. To do this we use fire, not the ordinary kind, but liquid that we keep in a bottle and call acid. The zinc is burned up. What becomes of it? It becomes electricity. How changed!

It is no longer solid, but is a live fire that rings bells in our houses, picks up our thought and pours it into the ear of a friend miles away by the telephone, or thousands of miles away by the telegraph. Burning up is only the means of a new and higher life. Ah, delicate Ariel, tricksy sprite, the only way to get you is to burn up the solid body.

The possibility of rare creation depends on rare material, on spirit-like tenuity. And that is what the world goes into. There is a substance called nitrite of amyl, known to many as a medicine for heart disease. It is applied by inhaling its odor--a style of very much rarefied application. Fill a tube with its vapor. It is invisible as ordinary air in daylight. But pour a beam of direct sunlight from end to end along its major axis. A dense cloud forms along the path of the sunbeam; creation is going on. What the sun may do in the thinner vapors the world goes into when burned up will be for us to find out when we get there. Standing on Popocatepetl we have seen a sea of clouds below, white as the light of transfiguration, tossed into waves a mile high by the touch of the sunbeam. Creative ordering was observed in actual process. It is done under our eyes to show us how easy it is. Would it be any less glorious if there were no Popocatepetl? A thrush among vines outside is just now showing us how easy it is to create an ecstasy of music out of silence. She has only to open her mouth and the innate apt.i.tudes of air rush in to actualize her creative wish. Not only is it easy for the bird, but she is even provoked to this love and good works by the creation of a rainbow on the retreating blackness of a storm yonder. Thunder is the sub-ba.s.s nature furnishes her, and thus invites her to add the complementary notes.

Some one may think that all this tenuity is as vaporous as the stuff that dreams are made of, and call for solid rocks for foundations.

Perhaps we may so call while we have material bodies of two hundred pounds' weight. Yet even these bodies are delicate enough to be valuable to us solely because they have the utmost chemical stability.

We are burning up their substance with every breath in order to have delicacy of feeling and thought. What were a wooden body worth?

Substances are valuable to us according to their fineness and facility of change. Even iron is mobile in all its particles. We call it solid, but it is not. We lift our eyes from this writing and behold the tumbling surf of the great Pacific sea. Line after line of its billows are charging on the sh.o.r.e and tumbling in utmost confusion and roar of advancing and refluent waves. So the iron of the telephone wire. You often hold the receiver to your ear listening, not to the voice of business or friends.h.i.+p of men, but to the gentle hum of the rolling surf in the wire's own substance. And, in order that we may know the essential stability of things that are fine, we are told that the city which hath enduring foundations is in the spirit world, not this kind of material. The whole new Jerusalem to come down ”out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband,” is as movable as a train of cars is movable here. There may still be rainbows and rivers of life if there are no more rocks. There is a real realm of ”scientific imagination.” But all our imaginings fall far short of realities. Some men do not desire this realm, and demand solid rocks to walk on. But a bird does not. He oars himself along the upper fields and rides on air. So does a bicyclist and balloonist. Some men have a sort of contempt for aeronauts and workers at flying machines.

That feeling is a testimony to their depravity and groveling tendencies. Aeronautics and nautics are an effort toward angelhood.

Men can walk water who are willing to take a boat for an overshoe. So we may air when we get the right shoe. Browning gives us a delicious sense of being amphibian as we swim. And the b.u.t.terfly, that winged rather than rooted flower, looking down upon us as we float, begets in us a great longing to be polyphibian. We have innate tendencies toward a life of finer surroundings, and we shall take to them with zest, if we are not too much of the earth earthy. We were designed for this finer life. We do take to it even now in the days of our deterioration, not to say depravity. The great marvels of the world are not so much in matter as in man. We were meant to be more sensitive to finer influences than we are. We are far more so than we think. Take your child into the street. Another child coughs at a window on the other side, and your child has three months of terrific whooping-cough. All such diseases are taken by homeopathic doses of the millionth dilution. Many people feel ”in their bones” the coming of storms days before their arrival. We knew a man who ate honey with delight till he was twenty-five years old, and then could do so no more. This peculiarity he inherited from his father. One man has an insatiable desire for drink because some ancestor of his, back in the third or fourth generation, bequeathed him that curse. In the South you can go a mile in the face of the wind and find that peerless blossom of a magnolia by following the drift of its far-reaching odor.

Who has not received a letter and knew before opening it that it had violets within? It had atmosphered itself with rich perfume, and something far richer, for three thousand miles. The first influences which came over the Atlantic cable were so feeble that a sleeping infant's breath were a whirlwind in comparison. But they were read.

It is no wonder that the old astrologers thought that men's whole lives were influenced by the stars. Every vegetable life, from the meanest flower that blows to the largest tree, has its whole existence shaped by the sun. Doubtless man's body was meant to be an Aeolian (how the vowels and liquids flow into the very name!) harp of a thousand strings over which a thousand delicate influences might breathe. Soul was meant to be sensitive to the influences of the Spirit. This capability has been somewhat lost in our deterioration. To recover these finer faculties men are required to die. And for the field of exercising them the world must be changed. Paul understood this. He a.s.sociated some sort of perfection with the resurrection, with the buying back of the powers of the body. And the whole creation waiteth for the apocalypse of the full-sized sons of G.o.d.

Does one fear the change from gross to fine, from force of freezing to the winged energy of steam, from solid zinc to lightning? Our whole desire for education is a desire for refining influences. We know there is a higher love for country than that begotten by the fanfare of the Fourth of July. There is a smile of joy at our country's education and purity finer than the guffaws provoked by hearing the howls of a dog and the explosions of firecrackers when the two are inextricably mixed. There is a flame of religious love when the heart sacrifices itself in humble realization of the joy of its adorable love purer than the fierce fire of the hating heart that applies the torch to the martyr's pyre. We give our lives to seeking these higher refinements because they are stronger and more like G.o.d.

Does one fear to leave bodily appet.i.tes and pa.s.sions for spiritual apt.i.tudes fitted to finer surroundings? He should not. Man has had two modes of life already--one, slightly conscious, closely confined, peculiarly nourished, in the dark, without the possible exercise of any one of the five senses. That is prenatal. He comes into the next life. At once he breathes, often vociferously, looks about with eyes of wonder, nourishes himself with avidity, is fitted to his new surroundings, his immensely wider life, and finds his superior companions and surroundings fitted to him, even to his finest need for love. Why hesitate for a third mode of life? He loses modes of nourishment; so he has before. He loses relations to former life; so he has before. He comes into new companions.h.i.+ps and surroundings; so he has before. But each time and in every respect his powers, possibilities, and field have been immensely enlarged.

O the hour when this material Shall have vanished like a cloud, When amid the wide ethereal All the invisible shall crowd.

In that sudden, strange transition, By what new and finer sense Shall we grasp the mighty vision, And receive the influence?

Knowledge of the third state of man is not so difficult to attain in the second as knowledge of the second was in the first. If a fit intelligence should study a specimen of man about to emerge from its first stage of existence, it could judge much of the conditions of the second. Feet suggest solid land; lungs suggest liquid air; eyes, light; hands, acquisitiveness, and hence dominion; tongue, talk, and hence companions, etc. What fore-gleams have we of the future life?

They are from two sources--revelation and present apt.i.tudes not yet realized. What feet have we for undiscovered continents, what wings for wider and finer airs, what eyes for diviner light? Everything tells us that such apt.i.tudes have fit field for development. The water fowl flies through night and storm, lone wandering but not lost, straight to the south with instinct for mild airs, food, and a nest among the rushes. It is not disappointed.

Man has an instinct for dominion which cannot be gratified here. He weeps for more worlds to conquer. He is only a boy yet, getting a grip on the hilt of the sword of conquest, feeling for some Prospero's wand that is able to command the tempest. When he gets the proper pitch of power, take away his body, and he is, as Richter says, no more afraid, and he is also free from the binding effect of gravitation. Then there are worlds enough, and every one a lighthouse to guide him to its harbor. They all seek a Columbus with more allurements than America did hers. Dominion over ten cities is the reward for faithfulness in the use of a single talent.

Man has an instinct for travel and speed. To travel a couple of months is a sufficient reward for a thousand toilful days. He earnestly desires speed, develops race horses and bicycles to surpa.s.s them, yachts, and engines. Not satisfied with this, he harnesses lightning that takes his mind, his thought, to the ends of the earth in a twinkling. But he is stopped there. How he yearns to go to the moon, the sun, and stars! But he could not take his present body through the temperatures of s.p.a.ce three or four hundred degrees below zero. So he must find a way of disembodying and of attachment to some force swift as lightning, of which there are plenty in the s.p.a.ces when the world has ceased to be a world. It is all provided for by death.

Man has an instinct for knowledge not gratified nor gratifiable in the present narrow bounds that hedge him in like walls of hewn stone. A thousand questions he cannot solve about himself, his relations to others and to the world about him, beset him here. There he shall know even as he is known by perfect intelligence.

Here he has an instinct for love that is unsunderable. But the wails of separation have filled the air since Eve shrieked over Abel.

Husbands and fathers are ever crying: