< The Psychological Influence of Material Objects Upon Sensitives (continued from page 7-187) >
from our earth, and from all existences on its surface, only to take on there the self-same form as that from which it emanated here, as if every moment as it passed had borne with it in eternal fixedness, not the record merely of our thoughts and deeds, hut the actual, imperishable being, quick with pulsing life, thinking the thought, and performing the deed, instead of passing away into utter nothingness, that which is here and now for ever continuing, an eternised there and then.
“That portion of this realm which represents our earth and her history, appears to occupy that portion of space through which the earth has heretofore passed—her entire pathway since she became an independent member of the solar system. The form, however, as it looks to me now, is not that of a sphere, but that of a broad belt, or zone, endlessly waved, and gently curved in its general outline as it stretches back into the eternities, where it eventually appears divided, as if two streams which had for ages held a separate course had met at last, and mingled into one.’
“This (realm appears to me to be illuminated by the same light as that by which all things are psychometrically seen.”
There appears to be a spiritual universe as well as a material one—a universe which contains all that is, as well as all that ever has been. There are the mountains that were levelled before the Alps and the Andes left the ocean bed. All the rivers that ever ran are there—the pellucid rills dancing down from the woody hills, and the muddy streams that poured their turbid waters into lake and ocean. There are the coral-polyps that built their stony trees at the ocean-bottom, and the sea-lilies, whose stalks “bent like corn on the upland lea,” where our proudest cities are to-day. All the flowers that ever bloomed, all the birds that ever sang, every leaf that waved, and every tiny insect that crawled upon it, are there, none too insignificant for preservation.
There are the Indian tribes which have roamed over the face of this continent for ages, hunting buffalo on the plains, spearing fish in the waters, and shooting with their stone-pointed arrows the deer in the woods. The Aztecs with their bloody religious orgies, the milder Toltecs that preceded them, and formed settlements from Mexico to Lake Superior, where they mined for copper more than a thousand years before a Spaniard set foot upon the land—all are there—every tool they fabricated, every movement they executed, every word that fell from their lips.
There are Egypt, and her millions who toiled for ages to chisel out her labyrinthine tombs and rear her lofty pyramids; all the hordes that Asia sent in wave after wave from her central grassy plains to woody Europe, where they dispossessed the dark-skinned occupants, and seized their lands by the right of the strongest.
And what thus exists we can come into direct relation with. We can see the mountains, and watch the rivers run; dive to the bottom of the old Silurian oceans, and mark their ancient tenants; roam with the old Indians, sail in their canoes, and lie in their wigwams; hear the thud of the stone hammer on the copper gad in ancient mines of Superior; and know the absolute facts regarding a past that seemed lost to us forever.
By psychometry there is scarcely anything but we can learn, and by a process so much easier and more delightful than our present cumbrous methods. A personal relic of Shakespeare may in half an hour reveal more of him than his biographers have been able to dig up by dint of the severest application for two hundred years. A pebble from the streets of Jerusalem is a library containing the records of the whole Jewish nation. I have known a little dust from a copper knife reveal to a boy the story of the ancient copper-miners of Lake Superior to the very life, as far as their story is known, and, I have no doubt—from its harmony with itself, with the times, and with the statements of independent psychometers—true to the very letter where it was otherwise unknown. The most secret deeds of even the most ancient times lie in the light of the brightest sunshine; and we have only to open our spiritual eyes to discover them.
History is to be vastly enlarged, and made much more reliable.—The histories of many nations of which we have never heard or dreamed are to be written, and the histories of all others to be rewritten, that fact may take the place of the fables that have been for so long palmed upon mankind. With a fragment from Egypt no larger than a pea, we can learn more of the Pharaonic times than if all the hieroglyphics that were ever made were in our possession, and Champollion and Lepsius had bequeathed to us their Egyptian lore. A piece of a Babylonish brick can call up the ancient dwellers by the Euphrates, and make real as the life of to-day that of Assyria four thousand years ago.
Psychometry must greatly enlarge the boundaries of every science. Scientific men will at first look upon it with great distrust, if not with absolute disgust. All royal roads to learning have, say they, only proved by-paths for idlers to loiter in, without enabling them to gain one step toward any desirable station. Will psychometry prove any better? It certainly will; and a test, by any unprejudiced scientist, of some one of the multitude of sensitives that exist everywhere, would soon satisfy even the most sceptical. I have tested its value in geology during many years. When the oil excitement broke out in Pennsylvania, Mrs. Denton psychometrized a specimen of Favosites Gothlandica containing petroleum in its cells, and saw at once its animal origin, and that it had no necessary connection with coal or carboniferous beds. This I announced in my lectures and through the papers as early as 1860, at a time when, as far as I could learn, all scientists who had written and were writing upon the subject attributed its origin to vegetable matter, and generally taught its necessary connection with carboniferous beds, ideas now entirely exploded. Though petroleum is not yet regarded as the product of coral-polyps, who stored it away in those cells so frequently found supplied with it even now, opinions with regard to its origin approach nearer and nearer to the view of the psychometer as the matter becomes better understood. Hundreds of times I have had psychometers describe to me, from various specimens entirely unknown to them, scenes in the earth’s past history in harmony with the formations to which the specimens belonged. The same animals and plants have been described over and over again for specimens, also unknown, that had been previously seen by the (same persons with specimens from the same period. I have had independent psychometers describe the same animals and plants with the same specimens, without knowing that they were the same, and, in some cases, animals previously entirely unknown; and I am satisfied that some psychometers can see as clearly the forms of life that existed on this planet twenty million years ago as they can those that are on the globe to-day, and with much greater ease. Persons who have not the slightest geological knowledge can see and describe forms known only to the geologist; and children can solve some problems in a few minutes that have occupied the attention of professors for years.
In astronomy, psychometry will do as much as in geology, or more. A first-class telescope cannot be had for less than ten thousand dollars. The labour of a working man’s lifetime would hardly buy one; and, when bought, he could but faintly discern the outlines of land and water on a planet as distant as Mars. Tens of thousands possess telescopes as much better than that as sunshine is brighter than candle-light: all they need is a knowledge of their own powers, and a little instruction in the way to make use of them. With these telescopes they can not only see the outlines of land and water, but they can see water, rocks, plants, homes and people, and watch those people as they follow their daily avocations. A telescope only enables us to see; but the spiritual faculties enable their possessors to hear, smell, taste, and feel, and become, for the time being, almost inhabitants of the planet they are examining. The secrets of our solar system that scientists have sought so earnestly to penetrate are soon to be revealed; and the process by which this is to be accomplished is such a simple one it seems amazing that we had not previously discovered it.
It must be imagined that all this can be done without close investigation and careful discrimination. It is quite interesting to watch the progress of a psychometer when getting at the history of a specimen which is familiar to the listener; to <... continues on page 7-189 >