If then there is a substance so refined that it will take up the human voice, and send it in every direction so that every human being who is equipped with the proper mechanism may receive the message, is it not possible that the same substance will carry a thought just as readily and just as certainly? Most assuredly. How do we know this? By experimentation. This is the only way to be certain of anything. Try it. Make the experiment yourself.

Sit right where you are. Select a subject with which you are fairly familiar. Begin to think. The thoughts will follow each other in rapid succession. One thought will suggest another. You will soon be surprised at some of the thoughts which have made you a channel of their manifestation. You did not know that you knew so much about the subject. You did not know that you could put them into such beautiful language. You marvel at the ease and rapidity with which the thoughts arrive. Where do they come from? From the One Source of all wisdom, all power. and all understanding. You have been to the source of all knowledge, for every thought which has ever been thought is still in existence, ready and waiting for someone to attach the mechanism by which it can find expression. You can therefore think the thoughts of every sage, every artist, every financier, every captain of industry who ever existed, for thoughts never die.

Suppose your experiment is not entirely successful; try again. Few of us are proud of our first effort at anything. We did not even make a very great success in trying to walk the first time we tried. If you try again, remember that the brain is the organ of the objective mind, that it is related to the objective world by the cerebro-spinal or voluntary nervous system; that this system of nerves is connected with the objective world by certain mechanism or senses. These are the organs with which we see, hear, feel, taste, and smell. Now, a thought is a thing which can neither be seen, nor heard; we cannot taste it, nor can we smell it, nor can we feel it. Evidently the five senses can be of no possible value in trying to receive a thought. They must therefore be stilled, because thought is a spiritual activity and cannot reach us through any material channel. We will then relax both mentally and physically and send out an S. O. S. for help and await the result. The success of our experiment will then depend entirely upon our ability to become receptive.

Scientists like to make use of the word Ether in speaking of the substance “In which we live and move and have our behaving,” which is Omnipresent, which impenetrates everything, and which is the source of all activity. They like to use the word Ether because Ether implies something which can be measured and so far as the materialistic school of scientists is concerned, anything which cannot be measured does not exist; but who can measure an electron? And yet the electron is the basis for all material existence, so far as we know at present.

It would require 500,000,000 atoms placed side by side to measure one linear inch. A number of atoms equal to twenty-five million times the population of earth must be present in the test tube for a chemist to detect them in a chemical trace. About 125 septillions of atoms are in an inch cube of lead. And we cannot come anywhere near even seeing an atom through a microscope!

Yet the atom is as large as our solar system compared to the electrons of which it is composed. All atoms are alike in having one positive central sun of energy around which one or more negative charges of energy revolve. The number of negative electrons each atom contains determines the nature of the so-called “element” of which it is a part.

An atom of hydrogen, for instance, is supposed to have one negative electron as a satellite to its positive center. For this reason chemists accept it as a standard of atomic weight. The atomic weight of hydrogen is placed at 1.

The diameter of an electron is to the diameter of the atom as the diameter of our Earth is to the diameter of the orbit in which it moves around the sun. More specifically, it has been determined that an electron is one-eighteen-thousandth of the mass of a hydrogen atom.

It is clear therefore that matter is capable of a degree of refinement almost beyond the power of the human mind to calculate. We have not as yet been able to analyze this refinement beyond the electron, and even in getting thus far have had to supplement our physical observation of effects with imagination to cover certain gaps.

The building up of Matter from Electrons has been an involuntary process of individualizing intelligent energy.

Food, water and air are usually considered to be the three essential elements necessary to sustain life. This is very true, but there is something still more essential. Every time we breathe we not only fill our lungs with air which has been charged with magnetism by the Solar Orb, but we fill ourselves with Pranic Energy, the breath of life replete with every requirement for mind and spirit. This life giving spirit is far more necessary than air, food, or water, because a man can live for forty days without food, for three days without water, and for a few minutes without air; but he cannot live a single second without Ether. It is the one prime essential of life, and contains all the essentials of life, so that the process of breathing furnishes not only food for body building, but food for mind and spirit as well.

The Chemist

Universal intelligence leaves its source to become embodied in material forms through which it returns to its source as an individual or entity. Mineral life animated by electro-magnetism is the first step of intelligence upward, toward its universal source. Universal energy is intelligent, and this involuntary process by which matter is built up, is an intelligent process of nature which has for its specific purpose the individualization of her intelligence.

Stockwell says: “The basis of life and consciousness lies back of the atoms, and may be found in the universal ether.” Hemstreet says: “Mind in the ether is no more unnatural than mind in flesh and blood.” Stockwell says: “The ether is coming to be apprehended as an immaterial superphysical substance, filling all space, carrying in its infinite, throbbing bosom the specks of aggregated dynamic force called worlds. It embodies the ultimate spiritual principle, and represents the unity of those forces and energies from which spring, as their source, all phenomena, physical, mental, and spiritual, as they are known to man.” Dolbear, in his great work on the ether, says: “Besides the function of energy and motion, the ether has other inherent properties, out of which could emerge, under proper circumstances, other phenomena, such as life or mind or whatever may be in the substratum.”

The microscopic cell, a minute speck of matter that is to become man, has in it the promise and germ of mind. May we not draw the inference that the elements of mind are present in those chemical elements--carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulphur, phosphorous, sodium, potassium, chlorine--that are found in the cell? not only must we do so; but we must go further, since we know that each of these elements, and every other, is built up of one invariable unit, the electron, and we must therefore assert that mind is potential in the unit of matter--the electron itself.”

Atoms of mineral matter are attracted to each other to form aggregates or masses. This attraction is called Chemical Affinity. Chemical combinations of atoms are due to their magnetic relations to each other. Positive atoms will always attract negative atoms. The combination will last only so long as a still more positive force is not brought to bear on it to break it apart.

Two or more atoms brought into combination form a molecule, which is defined as “the smallest particle of a substance that can maintain its own identity.” Thus a molecule of water is a combination of one atom of hydrogen and two atoms of oxygen (H2O).

In building a plant, nature works with colloid cells rather than with atoms, for she has built up the cell as an entity just as she built the atom and the molecule as entities with which to work in mineral substance. The vegetable cell (colloid), has power to draw to itself from earth, air, and water whatever energies it needs for its growth. It therefore draws from mineral life and dominates it.

When vegetable matter is sufficiently refined to be receptive to still more of the universal intelligent energy, animal life appears. The plant cells have now become so plastic that they have additional capacities--those of individual consciousness, and also additional powers; those of sensational magnetism. It draws its life forces from both mineral and plant life, and therefore dominates them.

The body is an aggregate of cells animated by the spiritual magnetic life that tends toward organizing these cells into communities, and these communities into co-ordinated bodies which will operate the entire mass of the body as a conscious entity able to carry itself from one place to the other.

Atoms and molecules and their energies are now subordinated to the welfare of the cell. Each cell is a living, conscious entity, capable of selecting its own food, of resisting aggression, and of reproducing itself.

As each cell has its individual consciousness, intuition, and volition, so each federated group of cells has a collective individual consciousness, intuition, and volition. Likewise, each co-ordinated group of federations; until the entire body has one central brain where the great co-ordination of all the “brains” takes place.

The body of an average human being is composed of some twenty-six trillions (26,000,000,000,000) of cells; the brain and the spinal cord by themselves consist of some two billion.

The biogenic law proves that every vertebrate, like every other animal, evolves from a single cell. Even the human organism, according to Haeckel, is at first a simple nucleated globule of plasm, about 1.125 inch in diameter, barely visible to the naked eye as a tiny point. The ovum transmits to the child by heredity the personal traits of the mother, the sperm-cell those of the father; and this hereditary transmission extends to the finest characteristics of the soul as well as the body. What is plasm? What is this mysterious living substance that we find everywhere as the material foundation of the wonders of life? Plasm or protoplasm, is, as Huxley rightly said, the physical basis of organic life; to speak more precisely, it is a chemical compound of carbon that alone accomplishes the various processes of life. In its simplest form the living cell is merely a soft globule of plasm, containing a firmer nucleus. As soon as it is fertilized, it multiplies by division and forms a community or colony of many special cells.

These differentiate themselves, and by their specialization, or modifications, the tissues which compose the various organs are developed. the developed, many-celled organisms of man and all higher animals resemble, a social, civil community, the numerous single individuals of which are developed in various ways, but were originally only simple cells of one common structure.

All life on this earth, as Dr. Butler points out in “How the Mind Cures,” began in the form of a cell which consisted of a body animated by a mind. In the beginning and long afterward the animating mind was the one we now call the subconscious. But as the forms grew in complexity and produced organs of sense, the mind threw out an addition, . . . forming another part, the one we now call the conscious. While at first all living creatures had but one guide that they must follow in all things, this later addition to mind gave the creature a choice. This was the formation of what has been termed Free Will.

Each cell is endowed with an individual intelligence, that helps it carry on, as by a miracle, its complex labours. The cell is the basis of man, and this fact must be constantly borne in mind in dealing with the wonders of mental chemistry.

As a nation is made up of a large number of living individuals, so the body is made up of a large number of living cells. The citizens of a country are engaged in varied pursuits--some in the work of production, in field, forest, mine, factory; some in the work of distribution, in transportation, in warehouse, store, or bank; some in the work of regulation, in legislative halls, on the bench, in the executive chair; some in the work of protection--soldiers, sailors, doctors, teachers, preachers. Likewise in the body some cells are working on production: mouth, stomach, intestines, lungs, supplying food, water, air; some are engaged in distribution of supplies and elimination of wastes: heart, blood, lymph, lungs, liver, kidneys, skin; some perform the office regulation: brain, spinal cord, nerves; some are occupied in protection; white blood corpuscles, skin, bone, muscle; there are also cells to which are entrusted the reproduction of species.

As the vigour and welfare of a nation depend fundamentally on the vitality and efficiency and co-operation of its citizens, so the health and life of the body depend upon the vitality, efficiency and co-operation of its myriad cells.

We have seen that the cells are gathered into systems and groups for the performance of particular functions essential to physical life and expression, such as we see in organs and tissues.