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CHEMISTRY AND OCCULT SCIENCE. 635
certainh' as material as is electricity itself. And if electricity is not
material, if it is only a "mode of motion," how is it that it can be stored
up m Faure's accumulators Helmholtz says that electricity must be
as atomic as matter; and Mr. W. Crookes, F.R.S., supported the view
in his address at Birmingham, in 1886, to the Chemical Section of the
British Association, of which he was President. This is what Helm-
says:
If we accept the hypothesis that the elementary substances are composed of
atoms, we cannot avoid concluding that electricity also, positive as well as negative,
is divided into definite elementary portions, which behave like atoms of electricity.*
Here we have to repeat that which was already said in Section VIII,
that there is but one science that can henceforth direct modern research
into the one path which will lead to the discovery of the whole, hitherto
Occult, truth, and it is the youngest of all—Chemistr>% as it now stands
reformed. There is no other, not excluding Astronomy, that can so
unerringly guide scientific intuition, as can Chemistry.
Two proofs of
this are to be found in the world of Science—two great Chemists, each
among the greatest in his own country, namely, Mr. Crookes and the
late Professor Butlerof: the one is a thorough believer in abnormal
phenomena; the other was as fervid a Spiritualist, as he was great in
the natural sciences. It becomes evident that, while pondering over
the ultimate divisibility of Matter, and in the hitherto fruitless chase
after the element of negative atomic weight, the scientifically trained
mind of the Chemist must feel irresistibly drawn towards those evershrouded
worlds, to that mysterious Beyond, whose measureless depths
seem to close against the approach of the too materialistic hand that
would fain draw aside its veil. "It is the unknown and the everunknowable,"
warns the Morist- Agnostic. "Not so," ansv/ers the
persevering Chemist. "We are on the track and we are not daunted,
and fain would we enter the mysterious region which ignorance tickets
unknown."
In his Presidential Address at Birmingham Mr. Crookes said:
There is but one unknown—the ultimate substratum of Spirit [Space]. That
which is not the Absolute and the One is, in virtue of that very differentiation,
however far removed from the physical senses, always accessible to the spiritual
human mind, which is a coruscation of the undifferentiable Integral.
Two or three sentences, at the very close of his lecture on the Genesis
of the Elements, showed the eminent Scientist to be on the royal road
• Faraday Lectures, 1881.