SECTION XXIV. MODERN KABALISTS IN SCIENCE AND OCCULT ASTRONOMY.

There is a physical, an astral, and a super‐astral Universe in the three chief divisions of the _Kabalah_; as there are terrestrial, super‐ terrestrial, and spiritual Beings. The “Seven Planetary Spirits” may be ridiculed by Scientists to their hearts’ content, yet the need of intelligent ruling and guiding Forces is so much felt to this day that scientific men and specialists, who will not hear of Occultism or of ancient systems, find themselves obliged to generate in their inner consciousness some kind of semi‐mystical system. Metcalf’s “sun‐force” theory, and that of Zaliwsky, a learned Pole, which made Electricity the Universal Force and placed its storehouse in the Sun,(400) were revivals of the Kabalistic teachings. Zaliwsky tried to prove that Electricity, producing “the most powerful, attractive, calorific, and luminous effects,” was present in the physical constitution of the Sun and explained its peculiarities. This is very near the Occult teaching. It is only by admitting the gaseous nature of the Sun‐reflector, and the powerful Magnetism and Electricity of the solar attraction and repulsion, that one can explain (_a_) the evident absence of any waste of power and luminosity in the Sun—inexplicable by the ordinary laws of combustion; and (_b_) the behaviour of the planets, so often contradicting every accepted rule of weight and gravity. And Zaliwsky makes this “solar electricity” “_differ from anything known on earth_.” Father Secchi may be suspected of having sought to introduce _Forces of quite a new order_ and quite foreign to gravitation, which he had discovered in Space,(401) in order to reconcile Astronomy with theological Astronomy. But Nagy, a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, was no clerical, and yet he develops a theory on the necessity of intelligent Forces whose complacency “would lend itself to all the whims of the comets.” He suspects that: Notwithstanding all the actual researches on the rapidity of light—that _dazzling product of an unknown force_ ... which we see too frequently to understand—_that light is motionless_ in reality.(402)