HPB-SB-11-351

H. P. Blavatsky Scrapbooks

from Adyar archives of the International Theosophical Society

T i

vol. 11, p. 351

vol. 11

page 351

 

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A Philosophy of Materialisation

part iii

Work which has been done on a working substance, when there is complete reversibility, may be done by the same substance during the reverse action of the same engine, all conditions remaining as before. But between the two operations there may be a pause during which the temporary work done may be directive, though not constitutive, as regards more permanent changes in the world around, for the part played by the working substance may be supposed to be the lifting of a wire or even the casting of a shadow, which may thus indirectly render actual any amount of energy from extraneous sources. Thus, in the case of physical mediumship, any figure or instrument visible or invisible constructed by the establishment of tensions, (or otherwise) on which work is expended, whether during the act of extrusion or reabsorption, and which serves as a temporary link between the central nervous system and the work done external to the body, on resolution, may be lawfully supposed to return to the body a useful form of energy; possibly, and very probably in part, as heat, if the temperature of the body is below the standard, or otherwise almost certainly in great part as a tension related to ordinary functions of nutrition and motion. I would be inclined to advance the notion, but with great caution, that the stuff of which I speak as a real energy bearing substantial reality is the representative of the residual stock of energy, which is believed in by all physiologists. In any case we cannot avoid the belief that if it be derived from the blood it must go back to the blood, or as is even more probable, go direct to the tissues to which it was due before the process of diversion was effected by changes in the nervous system of the medium, at which I can only guess.

Reasoning from mediumship as a fact, and the inviolability of natural laws, it would appear that the tension I speak of was normally a residual phenomenon consequent upon will realized, and so would be, as it were, a link between events, for that which was residual becomes the necessary antecedent to the next similar act, and so becomes a moment in the physical sequence.

An illustration of my meaning is afforded by the case of rebounding locks, when one discharge prepares the gun for the next. In the gun the operating agent acts directively through the mainspring: so, according to the proposed view, does the will in the sense of deter mining influence, express itself through the intervention of our supposed mode of potential energy, which is thus being always expended and as constantly replaced under healthy conditions, when it may be supposed to be frittered down into animal heat, should it not be required, or should it tend to accumulate unduly. The constancy of its supply would depend on the completion of the circle of communication between the motor and sensory centres, into which muscle loops need not necessarily enter; for the practical application of the theory would appear to demand only direct communication between different centres of the brain and nervous system to the exclusion of any absolute claim on the part of their ordinary instruments of realisation.

I suggest this hypothesis as one which without violating any fixed canons would do more to account for the various, apparently different but intimately related facts of physical mediumship and mesmeric influence, than any with which I am acquainted. We have only to suppose this tension to increase and to be transferred in the case of mesmerism, healing or otherwise, to account for numberless facts. Given, that one will can deal directly with it as the necessary antecedent to realised effort, so may we assume that another can, when its related brain is in a condition to complete the motor-sensory circle; for the tension or substance of which I speak being unorganised, but plastic, we have, without overstepping the bounds of continuity, a rational explanation of the possible communication between several distinct brains, inasmuch as in such a purely physical conception, all analogy permits us to suppose lines of force along which tensions may be exerted and along which chemical changes may be directed from brain to brain.

It must be remembered that an animal engine is far more economical than an artificially constructed one, and that part of its economy can be considered as depending upon the fact that the expenditure of the work contained in the food supplied is not immediately represented by heat and mechanical work. Some of it is stored up and accumulated in a potential form within the body, to be used at a future time, and I am forced to the conclusion that all this potential energy is not represented by organised matter. Tensions such as I suggest above must always be accounted for in summing up the potential energy of the material consumed or otherwise introduced into the body from without (as in transfusion of blood and perhaps too in mesmerism) and they in their turn may be accounted for as heat in abnormal states of the nervous system, such as fever or prolonged abstinence when little external work is done and the patient continues to live on his reserve of energy. In the cases of nervous exhaustion so frequently met with and so often relieved by mesmeric treatment we have instances of the absence of this tension and its immediate return under the action of a brain stimulus, derived from another, which thus, as it were, plays the part of the clock which will set another in motion, when vibrations can be conveyed from one to the other. Many curious phenomena such as sympathy, antipathy, “willing,” can find an appropriate place in this physiological projection. The exuberance of a natural secretion, the influence of which on others is the counterpart of the function it performs in the individual, is, I think, the simplest base to mesmerism I have seen advanced, and it tallies very well with my experience in that field as well as with my observations as a practical physician. Its essence is, continuous existence in time during the life of the individual by a process of replacement.

I think the name life-stuff, or sensori-motor substance, would not be altogether inappropriate: I may call it so provisionally. This substance we must, if we grant it at all, allow to permeate the entire body, and to be in common relation with organs and instruments the most diverse. I daresay it is the blood in one of its dynamic aspects of which I speak, but I don’t exactly see how to trace the identity. Some would say that it was protoplasm in disguise —perhaps it is. Others might see its physical analogue in the tail of a comet—I should be inclined to agree with them.

I may here quote a passage with a certain bearing upon this idea of life-stuff, which I have recently read in Herman's Physiology, translated by Dr. Gamgee, Ed. 1878. At page 124, treating of the chemical process of secretion it is said that “The formation of specific constituents appears in the case of many glands to be a process consisting of true stages. The first stage of the process consists in the continual synthetical formation of a mother substance—‘zymogen;’ the second in a decomposition of this zymogen which takes place at the time of secretion, and which results in the liberation of the active ferment. This process, which had already, from analogy with the process going on in muscle, been assumed to occur (Hermann), has lately been proved in the case of the pancreas (Heidenhain).”

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Editor's notes

Sources

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  London Spiritualist, No. 488, December 30, 1881, pp. 317-18