414 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



science has rejected this conception of Aristotle, and substituted force and molec- 

 ular action in its stead. 



In the history of knowledge, however, we find the occult to be but a rela- 

 tive term. What was so in a former age is known in this, and what was occult 

 yesterday is manifest to-day. It is in this sense we propose to deal with the 

 word and the idea. The world had the occult in astrology, alchemy, magic, and 

 the lightning and thunder. To-day they are knowledge, under the names of 

 astronomy, chemistry, magnetism and electricity. The occult is now only as to 

 the nature of these things. And this is so only, as modern thought apprehends, 

 because thinking is fettered by fundamental conceptions as to premises, that 

 obtained when all these were occult. The modes of thought have not been re- 

 vised with the facts. Or, in other words, the basic conception of nature has 

 not changed with the observed facts of investigation. When we go back to the 

 time when astronomy, chemistry, magnetism and electricity were hidden from 

 man, or obscured, we can readily grasp the theories resulting. But when we 

 come to interpret phenomena by the light of what is now revealed we find the 

 old systems inadequate and irreconcilable. This fact, lying at the very bottom 

 of the discussion, accounts for the confusion of what we call the science and 

 ethics of the time. 



We are gradually changing the old form, from the occult and manifest, to a 

 definition more in harmony with our own idioms — the seen and the unseen. 

 Metaphysicians tell us that things as we see them are not real, only apparent or 

 relative ; that this being so, we cannot really know anything. Or, that beyond 

 what is material and tangible is unknowable. But this is again because of the 

 old mistake as to fundamental conceptions — or a mistake as to what is real. Our 

 senses are for objective uses — to guard and protect the body. How then can 

 they be the sum of knowing, or the only vehicle of knowledge. They but con- 

 vey forms of knowledge to the real knower. We now recognize that the unseen 

 governs the seen in all things. We can never attain to true wisdom by searching 

 for the secrets of nature through matter, or for the causes of things in the physi- 

 cal realm. Man ought to know that it is the unseen part of himself that rules the 

 seen. Why, then, cannot knowledge accept this fact for all as well as for self? 

 Science calls these things the "imponderable forces." Is there any force that 

 is ponderable ? Is not, then, the unseen the real ? Without the presence of the 

 unseen everything is dead. Why then beat over the old straw of matter which 

 when the unseen is absent is nothing ? 



Monotheism has been but in part developed. It reached the plane of one 

 God, took the form of a personality distinct and apart from all else, and has so 

 remained for thousands of years. This personaHty, thus dwarfed, ruled the uni- 

 verse and managed it as will or caprice determined. But monotheism itself now 

 feels the impulse of the newer thought, and is unfolding as a universal principle, 

 the conception of which is to be interpreted from universal nature. Or, in 

 other words, the one God pervades every atom of nature as one force, one prin- 



