Volume 2

Hypnotism and the doctors / [Richard Harte].

Harte, Richard.

Date:: 1902-1903

Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Hypnotism and the doctors / [Richard Harte]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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“make out of nothing,” which is an absurdity. Adam was “created” out of the dust:— “ I, therefore, contend that all things were made out of elec- tricity, which is not only an invisible and imponderable substance, but is primeval and eternal matter. It contains the invisible and imponderable properties of all things in being.” All the chemical elements exist in electricity in the electrical condition, and they are then in their invisible and positive state ; when they become materialised they are solid and negative, and are then known to us. All things are, in fact, at first held in solution, as it were, in this primeval matter, which Dods calls “ electricity,” and which is un- commonly like the “ prakriti ” or “ muluprakriti ” of the Brahmins ; and it is exceedingly curious to find that in a recent lecture at Burlington House Sir William Crookes described the latest scientific novelty, the “ electrons,” as “ disembodied discharges of electricity, which were possibly the basis of matter itself,”* and said that “we have almost reached the stage where matter and force seem to merge into one another.” Force, of course, would come under “ the involuntary powers ” of the Infinite Mind—- science leaves its “voluntary powers” strictly alone. Dods thought that the sun is pure electricity, and that it continually throws a stream of electricity on the earth, which causes all growth and development, as well as the earth’s motions ; but he does not seem to have quite grasped the recent idea of the universal circulation of force—that the circuit must necessarily be “ closed ” by the passage of some compensatory element from earth to sun in the * What a pity it is that the “electrons,” like the “ ions ” and “ neurons,” are purely hypothetical !