Excerpts from

The Life Magnet Vol. 4
by Robert Collier




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Chapter 1

The Secret of Matter

"For He looketh to the ends of the earth, and seeth under the whole heaven."—Job 28:24.

"TELL me not in mournful numbers," goes the first line of a poem we used to recite in my school days, and ends with—"and things are not what they seem."

Truly, they are not. Not in these days of black rays and violet rays which give up the innermost secrets that Nature has concealed from man for so many thousands of years.

With the aid of the "invisible light" or "black light" of the ultra-violet ray, Dr. Herman demonstrated to the Illuminat­ing Engineering Society in Washington that many things were very far from being what they seem. Under the power­ful ray of this lamp, things otherwise not distinguishable to the human eye stood out as bodly as in black-face type. Coun­terfeit money took on an entirely differ­ent color. Otherwise invisible erasures were instantly seen. Even ink manufac­tured by the same company, but of slightly different age, changed its color entirely under the "black" rays. False teeth stood out like lumps of chocolate. False hair was easily distinguishable. Invisible ink became legible. It was even possible to read the printing on the opposite side of a newspaper.

To quote the New York Sun of Octo­ber 3rd—

"In a world that always has loved a good paradox, what more delightful one could be imagined than that of seeing things by invisible light? It has long been known that such light existed and that objects could be photographed in its rays, but it is only recently that investi­gators have discovered a way to make it reveal its presence directly to our eyes.

"During an electrical convention in Colorado Springs the other night the gar­den of a hotel, flooded with beams from powerful searchlights which to human sight seemed absolutely dark, was turned into a ghostly picture in which strange and unnatural colors glowed upon shrub­bery, fountains and costumes of men and women amid an enveloping atmosphere of gloom.

"The invisible light employed in ex­periments such as this is the ultra violet. If the human eye be compared to a radio receiving set, the ultra-violet rays may be likened to short-wave transmission which the ordinary set is incapable of picking up. If our eyes were constructed differ­ently we might see ultra-violet; as it is, this light is blackness to our limited vision.

"In noctovision, the invention of the Scot Baird, dark rays of a different kind are used—the long-wave indra red at the opposite end of the spectrum. Baird's apparatus does not disclose objects in a dark room to the observer's eye, but transmits an image to a screen which may be many miles away."

For thousands of years, philosophers have been telling us that there are around us such entities as "things in themselves"—things we could not see or smell or touch. Now we can believe them.

For the first time, actual pictures of the air are being made—by the Schlieren process, perfected in Germany. The study of air pockets, which have cost so many aviators their lives, is thus made possible. Air currents, air "holes," all bow to this new method of research.

In certain German towns, the police have been furnished with ingenious de­vices which enable them to sound alarms unheard by any but each other. These devices are whistles which blow—not sounds, but ultra-sounds. Just as the ultra-violet ray produces light rays of such high frequency that they do not reg­ister upon the human retina, so the ultra­sound waves from these whistles produces sound waves of such high frequency that the unaided ear cannot detect them. Yet the Police Post with proper "detectors" can get them at once.

As Charles Lordman says in Le Matin:

 "Our senses are tiny receptacles of very small dimensions, not adapted to hold all the vibratory riches of the surrounding universe. An interesting tale, a la Wells, could be written—or several of them—about imaginary men provided with sense organs whose limits of action were dif­ferent from ours.

"If our ears were sensitive to ultra­sounds and not to sounds, we should hear—if I may use the word—the ultra-whis­tles of the German policemen. If they were sensitive to 'infra-sounds'—that is to mechanical waves slower than the lowest audible sounds, we should perceive at a distance the swaying of trees in the wind, the oscillations of barometric pres­sure and the slow movements of the earth beneath our feet.

"If our eyes were sensitive to the infra­red rays, we should see and discern at a distance, even in the dark, other men and animals, and we could even distinguish many objects which emit only the heat-rays of the spectrum.

"If our retinas were directly sensitive to the Hertzian waves, life would be­come insupportable; for because of the formidable mixture of waves that unceas­ingly traverse the atmosphere, we should live in a chaos of sensation. We should have to blind ourselves to get any peace, or shut ourselves up in metal closets—metal being opaque to electric radiation. We should see a revival of the medieval knights in their steel shells!

"But if we could perceive the X-rays, and those alone, then indeed would the aspect of the universe become fantastic. In full daylight we should no longer see the sun; we should not suspect its exist­ence from direct evidence. And in the darkened sky, we should see only certain of the stars and nebulae—those that send us the mysterious celestial X-rays of which we have recently been hearing.

"All is appearance. The universe is to us only what we are to it"

In short, when we say that we "see" something, we merely mean that waves of light of a certain frequency and length are beating against our optic nerves and our retina is able to detect them. Mil­lions of rays of different frequency and different lengths pass by unnoticed. Just as, when a musical note is pitched too high or too low, our ear drums are not attuned to the sound waves and we fail to hear them, so the light waves have pitch (which we call color) and when the pitch is too rapid or too short, our optic nerve is unable to catch them.

So at last we are coming to agree with St. Paul that "Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath pre­pared for them that love Him."—1 Corinthians 2:9. Once the scientist said, in the same spirit as Job—"With God all things are possible," but these are things "too wonderful for me, which I knew not." Now it would be a hardy soul who would say that anything is impossible for God's image—Man.

"Say not ye," said Jesus (John 4:35), "There are yet four months, and then cometh the harvest? Behold, I say unto you, lift up your eyes and look on the fields; for they are white already to har­vest."

Doubters scoffed at such a possibility then.

Doubters still scoff at the idea now. Yet listen:

"Recent experiments with combina­tions of daylight supplemented with arti­ficial light," says Floyd Parsons in Ad­vertising and Selling, "proved beyond doubt that many plants can be grown from seed to maturity in a remarkably short time. Spring wheat has been brought to maturity in 38 days by using this method. A crop of clover was grown from seed to flower in 38 days.

"The possibilities for future experi­ments in this field are tremendous."

He then goes on to point out some of the numberless opportunities in Nature all about us, which we have scarcely be­gun to use, and ends with—

"It all goes to show how slow we are to understand and utilize even the most common of Nature's bounties."

Dr. H. J. Muller of the University of Texas has shown through experiments with flies that it is possible to speed up the reproduction process, producing evolu­tionary changes or "mutations" 150 times faster by the use of X-rays. He expects later to put that discovery to practical use with plants and larger animals.

In past ages, in the immaturity of his mental development, man dealt only with things he could see or feel or hear or taste. His five senses were the only guides he trusted. If he could not detect a thing through them, it was not. True—he believed in a vague sort of way that there was a God—but He was high up in the heavens out of reach of mortal sense.

Today, in his more mature mental de­velopment, man is concerned with ideas. Ideas that cannot be seen or heard or tasted or felt. Yet ideas that are just as real as any object detectible by the senses—in many cases, more real. Like Plato, we have come to believe that ideas are the perfect immaterial pattern of which all material things are but imperfect copies.

This is the age of ideas. Through them, man is for the first time learning the infinite powers in his hands.

"And God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth."—Genesis 1:26.

Long before they had discovered all the known elements of matter, scientists knew exactly how many there were, what the missing ones consisted of, where they belonged. How? Through mind, through ideas.

Now science has penetrated the secret of matter in the earth and the stars, and can literally do for itself in a few days what Nature has been doing for us through ages. How? Through the product of man's ideas—the X-ray. To quote Waldemar Kaempffert in the New York Times—

"It takes a million million atoms to fill the head of a pin, yet the X-rays indicate the position of every one. Atoms have ceased to be the smallest hypothetical units of matter. They have become as real as bricks—the architectural material of a new chemistry which is mimicking nature.

"Clutch a piece of iron. It seems substantial, dense, continuous, all that is implied by the word "solid." Look at the stars above. How remote from us, how remote from one another! Stellar distances must be measured by light-years—so empty is space. Yet the piece of iron that you clutch is relatively just as empty. Magnify it to the dimensions of the solar system, and its atoms would be separated millions of miles. Hundreds of comets have swept through the solar system without colliding with a planet. A comet far smaller than an atom might theoretically swim through a seemingly solid piece of iron just as readily. Science has compelled us to modify the traditional conception of "solid" matter.

"With the introduction of the X-rays into the chemical laboratory we have crossed the threshold of a new scientific era. Suppose a metal is wanted that can be rolled out into a sheet or drawn into a wire without cracking. The chemist draws a space-lattice in which each atom is tied to three others on either side. Thereupon he indicated how that metal is to be produced. Thus the metallurgist of the future will literally compose in his mind, or on paper, alloys to meet specific industrial requirements."

"If our planet were constantly covered with clouds," said Flammarion, "we should know nothing of the sun, nor the moon, nor the planets, and the world sys­tem would remain unknown, with the re­sult that human knowledge would be con­demned to an irremediable falsity. Illu­sion forms the unstable basis of our ideas, our sensations, our sentiments, our be­liefs."

Illusion—yet we are beginning to lose some of it. The ultra-violet ray of un­derstanding will dispel more.

"Whatsoever things are true, whatso­ever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things."—Philippians 4:8.

Our ancestors thought the earth was a fixed object. Our children today know that it moves, but only as they learn it from books. Our ancestors thought the earth was flat. We know it to be round, but only as it is proved to us. Our senses would still tell us it is a fixed body—in spite of the fact that it is rushing through space at a dizzying speed, the plaything of fourteen different move­ments, making a complete revolution every 24 hours.

We would never know from our five senses that the air we breathe has weight. We cannot sense the electricity all about us. We cannot detect more than a small part of the light or sound waves, or the odors, in the air around us. In short, if we depended on our five senses, we should be as ignorant of all that is going on about us as is the savage.

And yet people can still be found to say—I see a certain thing, or I feel a certain thing, or I hear a certain thing, so I know it to be so. Man, man, the things your five senses tell you, are the things you can be least sure of. They don't know the hundredth part of what is going on around you—and least of all do they know the things they seem surest of.

What can your ears tell you of the music and lectures and reports that are being broadcasted all about you this very minute? What can your eyes tell you of the images that are being telegraphed past you in every direction through tele­vision, or the mirages that appear on a million light waves? What reliance can you place on your unaided sense of touch? Remember, in school boy initiations, how they "branded" you by first blindfolding you, then burning a piece of bacon rind under your nose, the while they clapped a chunk of ice against the place to be "branded"? And if you had no advance information of what was really going on, the ice hurt as much as a hot iron, for the sensation of intense heat and intense cold is just the same.

Or your sense of taste? Remember how they fed you—still blindfolded—a raw oyster, telling you all manner of dreadful things? And how readily your sense of taste accepted those suggestions?

To trust the testimony of your five senses rather than the testimony of your reason is foolish in this day and age. As far as the physical senses are concerned, today is the day of uncertainty. Accord­ing to them, the moon is larger than the sun, and the earth is the center of the solar system.

Our new conception of the universe is based entirely on mind. According to the Einstein theory, we are not only somewhere in space, but somewhen. It is not events which are happening now, but our perception of them. If it takes years for light to travel from the planets to us, what we see through our telescopes is not what is happening there now, but what happened years ago. It is as though we had years ago been marooned on a remote island and a passing steamer dropped a 10-year-old newspaper giving us our first knowledge of the war. To us, with nothing by which to reckon time, that war would be now. To the world, it is past and gone.

More and more we live in a world of mind's making. Just as, in many industries, the profits now lie in the things that formerly were thrown away, so the future of the race lies in the fields that heretofore have been not only unexplored but undreamed of. "For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being un­derstood by the things that are made."—Romans 1:20.

Quoting Floyd Parsons again—

"Although the most abundant of all na­ture's elements, air still offers the inquisi­tive scientist unmeasured opportunities for investigative work. Oxygen is found in the air in a perfectly free state and yet we have not perfected a way to utilize this most common element on a large scale in concentrated form. Eventually cheap oxygen at a dollar a ton will revo­lutionize all of the metal industries as well as gas manufacture. Laboratory practices in chemistry and medicine will likewise be materially improved.

"For years science has discussed the possibility of the development of a safe explosive; one that would reduce the hazards of industry, be unworkable in the hands of assassins and yet would be abundant and low in cost. Liquid oxy­gen would seem to be the substance sought."

Dr. J. F. Norris, President of the American Chemical Society sees the power in the atom changing our whole life. He sees the synthesis of food with­out the slow process of passing through the vegetable kingdom. He sees our knowledge of matter so broadened that what we know today is but the fore­ground of the great picture that is to come.

"Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath He set a taber­nacle for the sun. His going forth is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it; and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof."—Psalms 19:4,6.

Dr. Umberto Pomilio, the noted Ital­ian chemist, visions the emancipation of mankind from the use of coal and other energy-producing materials, and atomic energy heating the world.

An English engineer, John L. Hodgson, told the British Association for the Advancement of Science that the internal fires of the earth could be made to supply fuel for the world's needs for centuries to come, and proceeded to suggest a plan for utilizing this boundless heat.

"For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.

"But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

"For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known."—I Corinthians 13: 9-12.

Dreams wilder than the wildest of Jules Verne's stories are becoming every­day realities now. Why? Because man no longer puts a limit upon himself or his powers. He knows that anything is pos­sible to him, and thereupon proceeds to turn the seemingly impossible into every­day reality.

Remember, in The Mysterious Island, how Captain Nemo killed the pirates with a gun that used no bullets, but shot a mysterious ray, fatal to anything it touched? A wild dream of the imagination, we thought then. But Dr. Robert W. Wood of Johns Hopkins found that sound waves of a high frequency can be directed in a well-defined beam. And when testing them in the water, a fish happened to swim through the path of the rays. The next moment that fish was a dead fish!

In chemistry, they have what they call catalytic agents. Take a little potassium chlorate, as an instance. Heat it. Noth­ing happens. But add just a touch of manganese dioxide—and the chlorate gives up oxygen, while the manganese remains unchanged. The manganese is a catalytic agent. It releases the con­stituent parts of the potassium chlorate, while itself remaining unaffected.

Mind is the great catalytic, but we are only beginning to learn how to use it. It brings out the real from under all the forms which appear to our naked senses. It shows us the substance beneath.

Do you know where we get the word substance? From sub and stare—to stand under. Substance is the real that stands under all its visible forms. When you look at an object, you do not see the substance—you see only what corresponds to that substance to your eyes. You get only a small and unimportant number of the light rays it refracts.

"While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal. But the things which are not seen are eternal.

—II Corinthians 4:18.

When you look at yourself in the glass, you do not see your real self—you see only your idea of it, the idea you have been accustomed to accept because it is all your physical senses have been able to grasp.

The real substance you have never seen.

The millions of protons and electrons of which it is made—each a miniature solar system—are entirely beyond the ken of our ordinary senses. The perfect im­age of God in which the real body is made—we can't see this with our eyes.

These are mental concepts. They must be grasped mentally. They must be controlled mentally. But once we do grasp them, once we do control them, our body becomes the servant instead of the master—it becomes the image and like­ness of its Creator.

It is only this real substance that mat­ters. And it is to help you to find this real substance that "stands under" all the imperfect outer forms, that this book is written.

"I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee."—Job 42:5

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