The Universe a Vast Electric Organism. Warder George Woodward
and evolving power and the conservation of force in their transforming energy.
Fourteenth—As all visible forms of matter are built from invisible elementary atoms, so the most efficient display of electric power finds its expression and source in the same elementary atoms. The electric power working in all atoms of matter gathered in planetary form, saturates such planetary bodies with electric energy, as the steel of the magnet is saturated with such forces, and reveals in the sun currents the source of all terrestrial power and organic life.
Fifteenth—The chemists claim to have discovered about seventy different elemental substances in matter, but they are not primary elementary substances; they are secondary, and caused by the marvelous electrical combinations of the two primary elements—atoms and electricity—and are what Herschel said they looked to be, "manufactured articles."
Sixteenth—The laws of magnetic attraction teach us that positive and negative polar forces, flowing oppositely between sun and earth, establish the bond of union between them, and the transmission of electric energy must be equal between them, and the flow through space at the low level of latent energy.
These two oppositely flowing floods of electric energy, under the great law of electro-magnetic attraction, pass through ninety-three million miles of radiant matter in eight minutes of time and enter the resisting atmosphere of sun and earth, their currents thrilling with energy at the high tension of opposite polarities beneath their atmospheric envelope. Thus the attraction known as gravitation, but which is electro-magnetism, pours a constant flood of light and heat upon both sun and planets, and thus the electric light and heat of the sun and planets evolved from their resisting atmosphere, and the contact of their positive and negative electricity, become creative potencies, deriving their vast power from each other, and from their environing space of virgin, imponderable matter, and thereby give life, motion and utility to all visible created things.
Thus we find that light, heat and vital force is created by the contact of the positive and negative electricity in the magnetic atmosphere of suns and worlds. That the electric affinities in matter proclaim an electric origin, and the invisible atom as the material basis of all material life; and by tracing their source to electrical and magnetic energy, we have reached the foundation upon which is built the eternal structures of the universe, and the bounds of all creation.
CHAPTER IV
ELECTRICAL CREATION MORE FULLY STATED CONFIRMS SCIENTIFIC EVOLUTION
I contend that electrical creation confirms scientific evolution. In the beginning the elements assumed form when they came into such a state of electrical balance as enabled them to move in uniform order. The more perfect the order the more perfect the form. The crystal is fine proof of this, for when the elements composing it are all marshaled into perfect uniformity of action the crystal becomes a perfect structure well nigh indestructible. This principle of the crystalline formation of the elements is the basis of world building.
In a small volume entitled "Planetary Evolution," the learned author, who is too modest to give his name, says: "Atoms are absolute potentialities, creative rather than created conditions of the elements, and have the power of inherent energy or life motion. All tests show the atom remains the inscrutable source of creative power, and the basis of all chemical activity, and must be the basic principle of world building, life motion and life energy.
"In all the operations of chemical transmutations no material is lost and no power wasted, and, by the law of the conservation and correlation of force, both energy and material must exist as correlatives. This places the nature of matter upon the same basis as the origin of power. The transformation of force into material is impossible. Force follows the laws of motion, and atoms the law of form obedient to the lines of motion." This is well stated.
This author says further: "The atom has the power to assume form and create form, and matter and force cannot be transformed into each other." Then this power or force must come from electricity, the primary force in nature; and it has power to assume form and create form by reason of electric energy controlled by spirit intelligence. In planetary construction the first thing that meets our vision is the arrangement of the atoms in crystalline formation, which is the foundation of all planetary structure. The atoms in space continually change their relative positions and construct world forms and organic forms of beauty and power. They settle into globular spheres with all the precision of a trained army or a disciplined mass of life and energy, forming the crystalline masses that compose the primitive foundations of the earth.
Polarity has much to do with the phenomena of crystallization. The same author says: "Polarity is the result of the transverse lines in which the atoms move previous to their comparative arrest. The planet as a globe can have only two poles, but the crystal has as many as the lines of direction in which the moving atoms cross each other's path."
In interstellar space he affirms the atomic relations of the elements are undisturbed by any power that would tend to divert the atom from its movement in a straight line; force is transmitted from atom to atom without any effect upon its motion or change of equilibrium. The power of transfer is the basic principle of the electric current, and as long as the direction of the current lies in one of the lines of atomic motion the current passes without resistance and is imperceptible; but if it chances to meet in its pathway a line of force passing from atom to atom in a different direction, there is instantly a neutralization of motion and the arrest of each atom at the point of crossing which gives polarity, and the molecule is the result. In space the electric current is the first form of creative manifestations the atoms assume.
Electricity belongs to the atomic forces, has intimate relations with organic life, and gives us a key to unlock its mysteries. Electric energy plays such an important part in cosmic construction that without some knowledge of its nature it is impossible to explain the processes which are the basis of world building.
The crystal rock under microscopic examination shows the same beautiful figures and marvelous lines of arrangement that in winter the new fallen snow-flakes exhibit, and indicate that the lines of form are essentially the same that gave the planetary rock its forms of crystalline beauty and massive structure. And the beautiful snow that falls so gently upon the wintry lap of earth is one of the best representatives of creative power acting in the primitive states of formative forces. This tends to show that the earth began its formative period in extreme cold and not heat, for the formative lines of shape and force are the same in the crystal ice and crystalline snowflake as they are in the crystalline rocks of earth's primary foundations. And they all indicate the lines of electric energy and magnetic force in atomic activity and molecular formations, which are the beginning of all visible material creations.
The shaping of the molecules of the so-called cosmic elements by electric energy into crystalline form is the second great step in world building. While magnetism (the dual force of electricity) serves to hold the form-structure in more or less enduring relations, for the magnet has the power to radiate atomic force in circles and tends to draw the elements into form and hold them there. The electric force keeps the atoms always moving; the magnetic force keeps them or would keep them in atomic balance, or at rest, but electricity keeps magnetism always on the alert, and between the action of the two, or attraction and repulsion, all visible forms are evolved and dissolved.
Thus magnetism is the centripetal force, of planetary construction, and electricity the centrifugal power of planetary changes, and upon these two depend all the complex varieties of inorganic and organic forms that exist. And so long as they exist with their powers of atomic motion so long will world building and form building continue, and must continue through the æons of creative force.
The magnetic state of the earth, with the pulsating currents of electric force in the atomic and radiant form, plays a sovereign part in the economy of nature and makes the planet itself alive with creative force and evolving power.
To demonstrate electrical power in world building and the shifting relations of the elements in the planetary combinations, watch the electric plating battery at work. There you will see the atoms in the solution flowing towards the negative pole and depositing themselves in minute crystals upon the metallic surface, if the negative pole is a metal, and adhering with great pertinacity; the metallic crystals penetrate the crystalline surface of the substance to be