1: The Ether and its Vibrations

The vast interplanetary and interstellar regions will no longer be regarded as waste places in the universe. . . . We shall find them to be already full of this wonderful medium; so full that no human power can remove it from the smallest portion of space, or produce the slightest flaw in its infinite continuity.
---CLERK MAXWELL.

WHAT fills empty space ? What is there between the worlds? Not air: the atmosphere soon stops, and beyond there seems nothing---nothing appreciable, only intense cold.

"The wind that blows between the worlds, it cut him like a knife,"

says Rudyard Kipling concerning one Tomlinson. Well, that is the Ether; it is absolutely cold. We on the comfortable earth are five hundred degrees Fahrenheit warmer. Five hundred degrees hotter would melt some metals: five hundred degrees colder is the temperature of Space. Space is full, not of matter, but of Ether. The Ether is other than matter; and it fills all space in the most thorough manner: there is nothing so omnipresent and so efficient in the physical universe.

We enter on some explanatory talks about the Ether of Space, describing its various functions or uses, emphasising its importance in the understanding of the Universe, and showing how essential it is to all Reality.

We employ the Ether every day and every minute of our lives; it is the very breath of our material existence; but we usually think little about it. Some few even deny its existence. This is ungrateful: the result of a temporary uncertainty which can be removed.

It is commonly said that we have no sense organ for the appreciation of the Ether; and we have not any means of appreciating it directly, but we are very much accustomed to appreciate the phenomena which go on in it, or in other words to apprehend its modifications. It might almost equally well be said that we have no sense directly to appreciate the air we breathe; and I suppose that children have to be taught that an atmosphere really exists round the earth. We can however appreciate its modifications, as when there is a wind; or if we remove some air from a vessel, making a partial vacuum---say by throwing in a bit of burning paper---and close the orifice with our hand, we can feel the atmospheric pressure; which is very great, though so uniform that we usually ignore it, and it had to be discovered by Galileo, Torricelli, and Pascal. Apart from experiment however we can appreciate the vibrations of the air, for they are what we call noise or sound or music; but of course children of many ages could hear music without knowing that the atmosphere had anything to do with it: just as they can look at pictures without recognising the mediation of the ether.

Probably a wind is the most direct method of apprehending the air. Many attempts have been made to detect a wind in the Ether: the Earth is moving through it at a tremendous pace, and therefore, relatively, it must be streaming past us; but we can feel nothing of it: and, what is more, our most delicate instruments, specially designed to that end, can exhibit or detect nothing of it. Consequently it has been possible to doubt the existence of such a medium.

Again, we have no means of making a vacuum in the Ether and feeling its pressure: we have reason to think that that pressure is enormous. The air pressure is a ton to each square foot: an ordinary barometer demonstrates this; it is an instrument for measuring the pressure of the atmosphere. But there is no instrument for measuring the pressure of the Ether, which is probably millions of times greater: it is altogether too uniform for direct apprehension. A deep-sea fish has probably no means of apprehending the existence of water, it is too uniformly immersed in it: and that is our condition in regard to the Ether.

But we can feel its vibrations. Hold your hand in front of a blazing fire! It is not hot air that we feel; the air remains cool: it is not heated by radiation. What we feel is due to Ether vibrations: they excite the nerves of the skin, and give us the tingling sensation which we call heat or temperature. It is really the temperature of the skin that we feel, but it is excited by the tremors in the Ether. Again, if we sit in the sunshine we can realise, if we attend, that we feel all round us a quiver of the Ether: it may actually bronze our skins, and on the top of a mountain may raise blisters: it may produce an effect which overpowers the automatic temperature regulation of the body, and may thus cause what is called sunstroke. All these skin sensations are directly due to the Ether and its vibrations. The vibrations originated in the Sun, and have travelled 92 million miles of cold empty space, taking eight minutes on the journey before they reach us. They achieve many results on arrival:---Photographic chemicals are blackened by the vibrations. Leaves of trees make use of them: every green leaf elaborates crude sap by aid of solar energy and turns it into feeding material or vegetable tissue. All vegetation grows at the expense of the Ether tremors in which it is immersed: plants extract energy from the Ether and store it in their substance: store it, it may be, for hundreds or thousands of years; so that when you make a wood or a coal fire you liberate the stored or dormant energy, the ether recovers it and gets it back again in perceptible form.

Every part of the skin is sensitive to the Ether quiver; but a particular region is localised in nearly all animals so as to be especially sensitive, and is called an eye. Yet "seeing," though it tells us about objects, tells us nothing about a medium and its vibrations, nothing about the machinery and vibrations by means of which we see. It is quite possible to live amongst such vibrations and to know nothing about them: most people take the phenomenon for granted and do not analyse the cause. Only a few of the human race began to detect what was happening; and those few lived in the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. Late in time the knowledge came. After that, it was either ignorance or else some opposition theory which enabled people to ignore or deny the Ether. But when, later on, we began to make experiments in electricity and magnetism and use them for ordinary purposes, the ignoration of the Ether was more difficult. We are using it now in radio telegraphy: but before that we used it to drive our tramways and machinery: in America they use it for judicial killing. It seems madness now to deny the existence of a thing which is all round us, which we daily utilise, and which is constantly exerting influence upon us.

Perhaps I may be allowed a parable, and say that similarly it is customary to ignore or to deny the existence of a spiritual world. As with the Ether, so we are painfully unaware of such an influence, we are blind and deaf to its reality: we are really stupid in our self-satisfaction and narrowness of outlook. Most of us apprehend little more than the animals: we go on with no more knowledge than is necessary for daily life and it is rather the fashion to despise those who seek to enlighten us. There has always been a tendency to deny and contemn the pioneers of knowledge: all knowledge has to make its way slowly and painfully against a mass of prejudice and inertia. To a certain degree this may be wise: to accept things too readily and prematurely would be rash: unbalanced and enthusiastic credulity is always to be deprecated: it is better to be slow in accepting the truth than to be ready to accept falsehood. A certain amount of opposition is salutary; though there comes a point at which opposition to truth ceases to be beneficial and becomes mere obscurantism. Opinions may differ as to when that stage is reached in any given case.

Meanwhile our theories or our lack of theory, our perception or our blindness, do not alter facts. The facts are there all the time, and are independent of what humanity thinks about them. For ages people were ignorant that the stars were other suns, and not mere appendages to the Earth. We are constantly closing our minds to Reality, or rather we are living among realities of which we have no apprehension. Open our eyes that we may see! Should we not ask this? Some things in this age of science we are beginning to learn which were unknown to the Ancients; but in time we too shall be Ancients, and our descendants will wonder at our blindness and stupidity. Especially perhaps at the blindness and stupidity of some of the learned---some of the scribes.

Revelation has not ceased, though it takes many forms; and those to whom perception has come must relieve their minds by utterance, and not expect to be fully understood in their day and generation. Their own knowledge, so far as it is sound, is but a step in advance; and they must have faith that humanity will take it in due time. Meanwhile they must possess their souls in patience; they need not strive nor cry; in quietness and confidence shall be their strength .