Occult Chemistry: Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements

DETAILS OF THE EARLY RESEARCH.

The physical world is regarded as being composed of between sixty and seventy chemical elements, aggregated into an infinite variety of combinations. These combinations fall under the three main heads of solids, liquids and gases, the recognised substates of physical matter, with the theoretical ether scarcely admitted as material. Ether, to the scientist, is not a substate or even a state of matter, but is a something apart by itself. It would not be allowed that gold could be raised to the etheric condition as it might be to the liquid and gaseous; whereas the occultist knows that the gaseous is succeeded by the etheric, as the solid is succeeded by the liquid, and he knows also that the word “ether” covers four substates as distinct from each other as are the solids, liquids and gases, and that all chemical elements have their four etheric substates, the highest being common to all, and consisting of the ultimate physical atoms to which all elements are finally reducible. The chemical atom is regarded as the ultimate particle of any element, and is supposed to be indivisible and unable to exist in a free state. Mr. Crookes’ researches have led the more advanced chemists to regard the atoms as compound, as a more or less complex aggregation of protyle.