Ancient and Modern Physics | Page 7

and absolutely true. This is seen
through a glass darkly, in theology, where intuition is called inspiration and not
differentiated from reason.
The false notion that we can only learn by observation and experience, that the concept
can never transcend the observation, that we can only know what we can prove to our
senses, has wrought incalculable injury to progress in philosophy.
Because our sensual knowledge of matter begins and ends with vibration in one octave it

does not follow that this ends our knowledge of it. We may have intuitional knowledge,
and this intuitional knowledge is as susceptible to reason as if we had obtained it by
observation.
The knowledge that comes through intuition tells us of matter vibrating in another great
octave just beyond our own, which Science has chosen to name the etheric octave, or
plane. The instant our intuition reveals the cause of phenomena our reason drops in and
tells us it is the chording vibration of the matter of the two planes--the physical and
etheric--that produces all physical phenomena. It goes further and explains its variations.
This knowledge of another octave or plane of matter comes from the logical relations of
matter and its physical phenomena; but there was nothing in the observation or
experience of mankind that would have led us to infer from reason an etheric plane of
matter. It was "revealed" truth. But the flash of revelation having once made the path
apparent, the light of reason carries us through all the winding ways. Our knowledge of
the ether is not guess-work or fancy, any more than our geometry is, because it is based
on axioms our reason cannot prove. In both cases the basic axioms are obtained from
intuition; the structural work from reason. Our knowledge of the ether may be as absolute
and exact as our knowledge of prakriti, working on physical as we work on geometrical
axioms.
The recognition of the two sources of knowledge, the work of the spirit within us and of
the mind within us, is absolutely necessary to correctly comprehend the true significance
of the results of modern science and to accept the ancient.


Chapter Three
Matter and Ether
It is not worthwhile translating Homer into English unless the readers of the translation
understand English.
It is not worthwhile attempting to translate the occult Eastern physics into the language of
our Western and modern physics, unless those who are to read the translation understand
generally and broadly what our own modern physics teach. It is not necessary that they
should know all branches of our modern physics in all their minute ramifications; but it is
necessary that they should understand clearly the fundamental principles upon which our
scientific and technical knowledge of today rests.
These fundamental principles have been discovered and applied in the past fifty years--in
the memory of the living. They have revolutionized science in all its departments. Our
textbooks on Chemistry, Light, Heat, Electricity and Sound have had to be entirely
re-written; and in many other departments, notably in medicine and psychology, they
have yet to be re-written. Our textbooks are in a transition state, each new one going a

step farther, to make the change gradual from the old forms of belief to the new, so that
even Tyndall's textbook on "Sound" is now so antedated, or antiquated, that it might have
been written in darkest Africa before the pyramids were built, instead of twenty years
ago.
All this change has flowed from the discovery of Faraday that there are two states or
conditions of matter. In one it is revealed by one of our five senses, visible, tangible,
smellable, tastable, or ponderable matter. This is matter as we know it. It may be a lump
of metal or a flask of gas.
The second condition or state of matter is not revealed by either of our five senses, but by
the sixth sense, or intuition of man. This is the ether--supposed to be "matter in a very
rarefied form, which permeates all space." So rare and fine is this matter that it
interpenetrates carbon or steel as water interpenetrates a sponge, or ink a blotting pad. In
fact, each atom of "physical" matter--by which is meant matter in the first
condition--floats in an atmosphere of ether as the solid earth floats in its atmosphere of
air.
"No two physical atoms touch," said Faraday. "Each physical atom is the centre of an
etheric molecule, and as far apart from every other atom as the stars in heaven from one
another." This is true of every form of physical matter, whether it is a lump of metal, a
cup of liquid, or a flask of gas; whether it is a bronze statue or a living man; a leaf, a
cloud, or the