Spiritualism and the New Psychology

Spiritualism and the New Psychology - An Explanation of Spiritualist Phenomena and Beliefs in Terms of Modern Knowledge

The body of man is made up of an infinite number of cellsminute masses of living substancegrouped into organs subserving particular functions, and held together by skeletal structures, bones and containing membranes such as the horny layer of the skin which are formed by the living cells. The whole is comparable to citizens grouped in farms and factories subserving one or other function necessary for the commonweal; and just as the city has its transport connecting the whole, distributing food and the various products of the factories, a drainage and scavenger system taking away the waste material, and a telephone system through which operations can be ordered and co-ordinated according to the needs of the commonweal, so has the body its blood circulation, digestive and excretive systems, and a co-ordinating nervous system. How small are the cells, how infinite their number is shown by the fact that each drop of blood the size of a pin's head contains five million red corpuscles; there are five or six pints of blood in the body! The living substance, e.g. of a nerve cell, appears as a watery substance crowded with a countless number of granules, which are so small that only the light dispersed around each is visible under the highest power of the microscope when illuminated[Pg viii] by a beam of light against a dark ground, just as the halo of each dust particle in the air is made visible by a beam of light crossing a dark room, and just as these dust particles are in dancing motion due to the currents of air, so are the particles in the living substance ceaselessly kept dancing by the play of inter-molecular forces. From the dead substance of the cells the chemist extracts various complex colloidal substances, e.g. proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and various salts, and these in their turn he can resolve into chemical elements. The interplay of energy between the multitude of electrically charged granules inside the cell, and the environment outside keeps up the dance of life, the radiant energy of the sun, and the atomic energy of the elements being the ultimate source of the energy transmutations exhibited by both living and non-living matter. In the living cell there is an interplay of the energy of masses of molecules forming the granules, of single molecules in watery solution, of atoms which compose the molecules, and of electrons, the various groupings of which compose the atoms of the elements. The elements themselves are now recognised to be transmutable through simplification and rearrangement of their electronic structure, and to be evolved out of one primordial electronic unit, a unit of energy, unknowable in nature, out of the groupings and transmutations of which arise all manner of living and non-living forms, the apparently indestructible stable materials being no less in a state of flux and evolution than the most unstable. The complexity of the transmutations of energy and ultimate unknowableness and mystery of their cause are no less in the case of a drop of water or a particle of dirt than in that of a living cell. The scientific[Pg ix] conception of the universe, the very opposite of materialism, approaches pantheism. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 36908
Author: Culpin, Millais
Release Date: Jul 30, 2011
Format: eBook
Language: English