The Universe a Vast Electric Organism. Warder George Woodward
were the pens of Fate used in her writing, the weather vanes of destiny which turned the way the currents and tides of invisible forces were blowing.
Humanity of the past and present is not final but progressive. Man's marvelous discoveries in science, his aesthetic culture and spiritual growth makes the future of the race the most persistently fascinating question of the age.
Man is not a mere animal, but is one with Deity, and a part of that unseen spiritual power which directs the stars in their infinite courses, gives electric brilliancy to the all-dazzling sun, paints the dawn and the aurora, colors the gorgeous wings of the butterfly, and guides insensate matter to do the will of Omnipotence.
CHAPTER V
MAN IS A SOUL CLAD IN AIR, A SPIRIT IN AN ELECTRIC ORGANISM
My claim that man is an electric organism is confirmed by Professor Loeb and Dr. Mathews in their recent experiments at the Chicago University.
"Electrical charges in the atoms of the bodily tissue are responsible for all the active phenomena of life. In other words, electricity is the basis of life." This is the sweeping conclusion with which Dr. Jacques Loeb amazed the physiologists gathered in their last annual meeting at the Chicago University.
Hitherto it has been taken for granted by men of science that the food we eat nourishes us by furnishing the tissues and muscles of the body with thermo or heat energy. This, according to Professor Loeb, is totally wrong. Instead of the food furnishing the muscle with heat energy, it supplies electrical energy, which, after being converted into mechanical energy, is responsible for all the muscular contractions and organic processes of living organisms.
He has arrived at this conclusion after many years of intricate and difficult experiments along the line of reproduction of animals, of determining the effect of salt on the heart-beat and its rythmic motion, and on other muscles, and of the destructive processes at work in the eggs of simple unicellar animals. They have been the means of determining the answer to the one great question, "What is life?" and he regards all his previous discoveries subsidiary to this one. He received his first hint of this new theory of life through the fact that electricity is able to affect protoplasm in a more universal and effective way than any other form of stimulus. And he drew the inference that if electricity is able to affect protoplasm in the form of currents, it ought to do so in the form of ions, which is an electrically charged atom or group of atoms.
In experimenting to determine the toxic and antitoxic of ions on protoplasm, which is the basic substance of all physical life, he discovered that any one salt will act as a poison on the eggs of a sea urchin, but by adding one or more, or certain other salts, he found it was able to counteract the effects of this toxic effect. From which he concluded that the toxic and antitoxic effect of the salts were due to the manner in which its atoms are electrically charged.
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