The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars | Page 6

and gazing intently at my upturned face which I am sure reflected his own in its enthusiasm and delight, continued: "You, my son, and I, will put this before us as a possible achievement and work incessantly for that end. Prof. Hertz has generated these magnetic waves; we will; and by means of some sort of a receiver endeavor to find out a clue to wireless telegraphy." These closing remarkable words were actually used by my father, and in view of the marvellous realization of Marconi's hopes in that direction, as well as my own stupendous success in reaching the inhabitants of Mars, was a distinct prophecy.
It was a few months later that my father completed all of his arrangements in regard to the disposition of his investments, and perfected the necessary arrangements for being constantly supplied with funds by his bankers in New York. He also had agreed upon the apparatus to be forwarded, expecting to be largely supplied at Sydney in new South Wales, as it was from this point he intended to sail or steam to New Zealand. Much of the equipment for his observatory was to come from Paris, and he relied upon intelligent assistance both in Sydney and Christ Church, in New Zealand, for the erection and furnishment of his various houses.
He finally concluded to place his station on Mount Cook at an elevation of 1,000 feet upon a well protected plateau, which was described to him by a Mr. Ashton who had extensive acquaintance and some five years' experience in New Zealand. We found this position ideal, and in the perfection of all the conditions necessary for our experiments possessed by it, made the realization at that time utterly unsuspected by either of us, of our final designs, commensurately more simple.
I left New York with my father filled with a curious expectancy. I seemed to cherish no regret at leaving my childhood's home. I only felt a vague wondering delight to go abroad and see strange and new things. My seclusion with my father had developed in me a singular inaptitude for companionship with boys of my own age, and furthermore from the influence of his rather poetic and dreaming nature, I began to show a half wistful intensity of interest in things occult, mysterious and difficult. We left New York in 1882, and it was then that I read for diversion in my long ride to California, Colonel Olcutt's Esoteric Buddhism.
The whole central fancy of reincarnation affected me deeply. But I modified the idea as displayed by Blavatsky and Theosophists generally. From a long familiarity with the stars, in conjunction with the inevitable creative and anthropomorphic sensibility of youth, I began to think that this reincarnation did not occur on the earth, but had its stages of transmutation placed elsewhere. In short, I amused myself incessantly with placing the poets in one star, the novelists in another, the scientists in a third, the mechanicians in a fourth, and in each I imagined a Utopia. A very little mature thought and the most ordinary observation of plain men, men who at 20 have far more practical sense than I possess to-day, would have demonstrated the hopelessness of this arrangement, and the deplorable social chaos it would have led to.
I think, however, that along this line of feeling I grew more and more in sympathy with my father's dimly expressed hopes to achieve something tangible in the way of interstellar or planetary communication. So that gradually he, by reason of a desire that slowly invaded every emotional recess of his being, and I, through the vagaries of an imaginative mind reached successively an intense conviction that we should work in this direction.
There was much in our scientific work also that encouraged a certain high mindedness and liberty of speculation, a careless audacity before the most difficult tasks. The resolution of matter into a phase of energy, the interpretation of light as an electric phenomenon, the mysteries of the electric force itself, the peculiar hypotheses about the force of gravitation, lead men, studying these subjects, and endowed with speculative tendencies to conceive, moved also by a quasi sensational desire to reach new results, that the most extravagant achievements are possible to science.
With us, regarding the physical universe as a unit, recognizing the notes of intelligence of a deep coercive and comprehensive plan involved throughout, feeling that our human intelligence was the reflex or microcosmic representation of the planning, upholding mind, that if so, no conceivable limitation could be placed upon its expansion and conquests, that further it would be incomprehensible that the colonizing (so to speak) of the central mind occurred only on one sphere, when it doubtless might be embodied in other beings, on hundreds or thousands or millions of other spheres; that continuance of