Planets
and plants
[George Adams, MA (Cantab)]
https://books.google.de/books?id=uz0KovScWK8C&pg=PA191&lpg=PA191&dq=the+astronomer+Kepler+and+the+mystical+philosopher+Pascal&source=bl&ots=7cF0VLugyf&sig=ACfU3U1WyHySuloPReIYF3ma_5skdn-w3g&hl=de&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjL4tTm4ZHjAhWq1aYKHQ4lAsAQ6AEwAHoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=the%20astronomer%20Kepler%20and%20the%20mystical%20philosopher%20Pascal&f=false
Introduction
Protective Geometry and Amnesia
One of the minor pleasures of studying homeopathy is its sense of
history, which contrasts so sharply with the ahistoricity of mainstream
medicine.
Most doctors feel that there was no real medicine before the discovery
of Penicillin (but this is little more than a feeling, for there is virtually
no teaching of medical history in medical schools).
Before Penicillin all seems to have been darkness, pierced only by an
occasional brilliant shaft of light associated with a great name -a Harvey,
Virchow or Pasteur- but since 1940 all is clarity and reason. This is, of
course, a highly distorted image.
In homeopathy, we have a much greater sense of continuity, indeed we
rest too much on our laurels, accepting far too readily the opinions of famous
teachers of the past.
Yet while every word of Hahnemann or Kent is treated with exaggerated
reverence, other important historic discoveries originating in homeopathy are
almost forgotten.
Hering introduced nitrates into medicine
(Glonoine)—a fact which was recalled recently in the journal Circulation, but
almost forgotten by his heirs in homeopathy.
Reilly, in researching his recent work on hayfever, discovered that
hayfever was first correctly attributed to pollen allergy by Blackley, a
British homeopath.
Many other episodes of intellectual amnesia among homeopaths could be
cited.
This seems to be mainly a short-term memory loss; more recent
contributions are less likely to be remembered than older ones! It is for this
reason that I make no apology for reprinting, from time to time, classical but
neglected pieces of work.
The paper which follows, “Potentization and the Peripheral Forces of
Nature” by George Adams, is based on a lecture given at the 1961 British
Homeopathic Congress.
To judge from the congress report, and the recollections of those who
were present, it aroused great excitement at the time.
Certainly it has important implications for the nature of extreme
dilutions, implications which are not widely recognized,
*Reprinted by permission from the
British Homeopathic ]oumal, Vol. 78, No. 2 April 1989
It is well to remember this when reading Hahnemann’s forms of
expression, which as I shall hope to show are scientifically important to this
day.
For the vitalism, inevitably abandoned in its old philosophic form, the
vagueness of which stood in the way of true research, can now be reborn on a
clear and scientific basis.
Hahnemann’s vitalism underlies his use of the
word ‘dynamic’ and the noun ‘dynamis’ which he adopts, or coins for him self.
“From the beginning,” says Tischner, “his notion of the vital force prevailing
in the living body was essentially spiritual.”
He attributes illnesses to immaterial, dynamic causes, and in his essay
of 1801 describes the medicinal effects of high dilutions as ‘dynamic’ rather
than ‘atomic’—a contrast the literal significance of which will, I hope, emerge
in the course of this lecture.
We also have to remember that the clear distinction of energy and matter
and the law of conservation of energy were not yet current in Hahnemann’s day.
The ‘mechanical equivalent of heat’ was discovered by Mayer and Joule
almost exactly at the time of his death (1842–1845).
Heat, light and other energies—bio- and psychological as well as
physical, even including ‘animal magnetism,’ for example—were until then still
being thought of as tenuous if not imponderable substances.
The supposed substance of warmth was called ‘caloric.
’ Lavoisier in 1789 still included heat and light among the chemical
elements.
Rumford’s experiment was widely supposed to have released the ‘caloric’ from
the iron made hot by friction.
Even in 1824, when in his Puissance motrice du
feu Carnot in effect discovered the second law of
thermodynamics, soon to become a cornerstone
of physics, he still interpreted it in terms of ‘caloric’.
’ Perhaps this idea of imponderable essences is in the light of
present-day ideas no longer quite so wide of the mark as it might have seemed
sixty years ago.
It should at any rate be borne in mind when reading Hahnemann’s
expressions, when for example he describes as feinstofflich,
‘delicately substantial,’ or as ‘virtual’ or
‘well-nigh spiritual’ the medicinal effects set free from the material
during the rhythmic processes of dilution, trituration and succussion.
I have deliberately drawn attention to these aspects.
The history of science is not the unidirectional process which neatly
finished textbooks lead one to suppose.
Many streams run side by side; the most essential discoveries,
experimental or theoretical, may lie unnoticed for decades till a fresh aspect
emerges to reveal their importance.
Let us consider for a moment in a human and historic spirit what it was
that gave the orthodox scientific outlook its strength, accounting too for the
intolerance with which the claims of homeopathy have only too often been met.
It was the combination of an instinctive and robust materialism with the
mathematical clarity and cogency of theories supported by experiment and
observation.
The instinctive materialism is well illustrated by the story of Dr.
Johnson’s angry reaction after listening to a sermon in which Bishop Berkeley
put forward his idealistic theory of the world. ‘I refute it thus,’ the learned
doctor exclaims, kicking his foot against a stone.
In scientific atomism until the close of the Nineteenth Century,
Johnson’s stone -vastly reduced in spatial but proportionately grown in
spiritual dimensions- became the
highly satisfying football, better perhaps the baseball, of science. For
it is this intuitive feeling of the ultimate reality of tangible material
things which underlies the older forms of scientific atomism. It is a very
genuine element in the consciousness of Western man throughout the Seventeenth
to Nineteenth Centuries, inseparable from the age of exploration, the growth of
natural history and of artistic naturalism, the dawn of industrialism.
Nor is it out of harmony with the patriarchal, simply believing,
strongly Old Testament forms of religion then prevailing.
Yet the instinctive materialism is reinforced by another, more ideal
factor -and this alone accounts for the spiritual tenacity of a materialistic
science- namely, the confidence born of the intellectual clarity and probity of
mathematical thinking.
It is too apt to be forgotten how many purely ideal, in other words
spiritual, elements are built into the resulting scientific system.
Mathematics is an activity of pure thought, and in the past (if not in
the extreme formalism and empty nominalism which is now the fashion) was never
quite remote from philosophical and even religious thinking.
Certainly Isaac Newton, whom we may justly think of as the founder of
modern physics, was in his own dominant interests a philosopher, even a
theologian, as for example his correspondence with Henry More and the Cambridge Platonists
reveals.
For all the scientific care and scepticism sincerely voiced in his
‘Hypotheses non fingo’ he –who was afterwards to
describe his Universal Space as ‘the sensorium of God’-
built into his Principia, in formal quality if not in intention, an
almost theological masonry of thought.
The implications of it were but inverted by the French atheists and
rationalists! Over a century later, other Englishmen of philosophic and
religious disposition brought a like clarity of geometrical imagination and
mathematical analysis into the rising science of electric and magnetic forces.
I refer, of course, to Faraday and Clerk Maxwell.
It is this mathematical element in physics which gives it strength and
power—power for technical uses, strength in its influence upon our mental
outlook.
There is an element of tragedy in this, for the resulting system becomes
a rigid framework barring access to the more spiritual aspects of reality, of
which the truths of homeopathic medicine are an example.
But the spiritual power of geometrical and mathematical thinking which
has helped build this framework can also help in the much needed release.
Of this I am about to tell.
Till about half a century ago -the time of Einstein and Minkowski- the space in which the real events of the universe
were supposed to be taking place was that of Euclid,
the geometry of which we learn at school. It is the space measured in
finite and rigid lengths, or areas and volumes based on the measurement of
length.
It is determined by the well-known laws of parallelism and of the right
angle, as in the theorem of Pythagoras or in the statement that opposite sides
of a parallelogram are equal. The same type of space was held to prevail down
to the smallest and up to the largest dimensions.
Inward and outward, the identical scale of length leads to the millimicrons of atomic science and to the parsecs and
light-years of astronomical speculation.
What happens when a straight line is extended to the infinite, was held
to be an idle question, of philosophic interest perhaps, but beyond the
effective range of science.
Occasionally, scientists of the Nineteenth Century -W.K. Clifford, for
example- reflected that cosmic space might after all be ‘non-Euclidean,’ its
structure differing from
the Euclidean to so slight an extent as to escape our instruments of
measurement.
But neither this nor Einstein’s four-dimensional space-time did more
than modify the profoundly Euclidean –I might also call it earthly- way of
thinking about space and the realities it contains.
This is so taken for granted as to be difficult to describe; few people
realize that there is any other way.
Space is conceived as a vast empty container -the Irishman’s box without
sides, top or bottom- populated (in some regions more and in others less densely)
by point-centered bodies sending their forces and radiations to one another.
It becomes a field of manifold potential forces, but the real sources of
activity are, once again, point-centered -material or
at least quasi-material- bodies.
Apart from these, there would be emptiness, mere nothing.
That, surely, is a fair description, both of the popular idea and of the
mathematical analysis.
As against this, I now have to tell of what opens out quite new
possibilities, both of pure thought and of insight into the realities of
nature.
For in the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries, while physicists and
astronomers were busily applying to their problems the ancient geometry of
Euclid -rendered more handy and more elegant but in no way altered by the new
analytical methods of Descartes, Leibniz and Newton- among pure mathematicians
a new form of geometry was arising.
It is a form which, while including the Euclidean among other aspects,
is far more comprehensive, also more beautiful and more profound.
I refer to the school of geometry variously known as protective
geometry, modern synthetic geometry, or the geometry of position.
In the Seventeenth Century its truths began to be apprehended zy the astronomer Kepler and the mystical philosopher
Pascal, also by which this happens.
The mutual relation is literally one of expansion and contraction.
The points of contact obviously mark the eight corner-points of a cube,
which is now inside the sphere.
In the middle corner-points of a cube, which is now inside the sphere.
In the middle and right-hand pictures the size of the spheres is left
unaltered, while in imagination we have deliberately caused the cube to
contract towards the center.
The sphere preserves the mutual relation of cube and octahedron, only
the octahedron now has to expand.
For in the same proportion as the eight points of the cube recede,
inwards from the surface of the sphere toward the center, the corresponding
planes hover outward, causing the octahedron to expand even as the cube
contracts. In the right-hand picture the cube is in linear dimensions half, the
octahedron twice as big as on the left.
We can imagine the same process continued ‘to the bitter end.
’ The octahedron quickly grows outward into the spatial universe.
For when the cube is a hundred times smaller, the octahedron will be a
hundred times bigger than before. And when at last the cube disappears, its
eight corner-points merging into the single center, we must imagine the eight
planes of the octahedron coalescing in a single plane—the infinite periphery of
space.
For the infinitely distant taken as a whole in all directions—as it
were, the infinite sphere of space—being of infinite radius, is no longer a
sphere at all in the ordinary sense (just as a sphere contracted to a point is
no longer a true sphere); it is a plane. We thus arrive at another of the basic
concepts of the new geometry; namely, the single infinitely distant plane qua
infinite means of bringing into the physical world the purely spiritual
essences to which the specific virtues of living things are due. I think this,
too, is the
significance of Hahnemann’s often repeated phrase, ‘well-nigh
spiritual.’) Let us pursue the thought a little further. If crude matter alone
were concerned—if stress were laid on the domain of centric forces, expressed
in material quantity and weight—it would be natural to expect that an effect,
comparatively feeble in a dilute solution, would be enhanced with increasing
concentration. We reduce the volume; in other words, draw in towards the center.
But if the substance is the bearer of ethereal virtues of which the
origin is peripheral, experience will show -and it is equally natural to
expect, once we get used to the idea-
that the effect will be enhanced, not by concentration but by expansion.
Admittedly this notion is too simple; for it is the rhythmic sequence of
dilutions and successions or triturations which renders the potency effective.
This too, however, is understandable in terms of centric and peripheral
or physical and ethereal spaces, and our attention is thus drawn to a principle
of great importance which we could scarcely approach at all, but for these
ideas.
May I explain by a familiar comparison from physics.
Again and again we see rhythmic phenomena taking place along and about a
line stretched between two end-points—a violin string, for example, a
monochord, even
an organ pipe. Or again, between the poles of a Wimshurst machine—it is
well known that the spark is not a simple but a rhythmically alternating
discharge.
Tension between two poles begets a play of forces giving rise to rhythm.
But in these purely physical examples either pole is of point-like
centric nature.
I believe science will presently discover a deeper and more primary
source of rhythmic activity—no longer between two point-centers or the two ends
of a line, but between center and periphery, or point and plane, in concentric
spheres, of which there may be many forms. The tension is no longer between two
foci of like kind, competing with
one another as in a tug of war, but between entities polar opposite in
nature, physical and ethereal respectively—related to the polarity of point and
plane, of which the mental
picture is evoked in its simplest form by the geometrical function of a
sphere.
I would suggest that a polarity of this kind is latent in every chemical
substance, and that there is no physical material that has not ultimately
arisen from the interplay of centric and peripheral forces—forces of earthly
and cosmic origin.
The finished substance lying there in its crude and quiescent state is
the ultimate precipitation of an activity between center
and periphery—qualitatively speaking, between
earth and heaven.
I think the number-relations of valency and chemical constitution, also
the wonderful rhythms of the spectral lines, will prove to be an expression of
this fact.
The words of the poet, ‘Out of the everywhere into here,’ apply not only
to the human child but to all living things, and in its ultimate origin to the
very substance of the earth.
Even the simplest facts of science point in this direction, though one
will only see this if one’s idea of space derives from the new geometry.
Think of a body radiating light and heat, say a candle-flame, a glowing
ember.
Purely as a phenomenon—a fact of everyday experience confirmed by exact
experiment—the radiation expresses itself in concentric spheres about the
source.
In the one-sided thought forms of the old geometry and physics, the
whole activity is attributed to the visible, point-centered source of the
radiation, with the surrounding space a mere emptiness into which it spends
itself as it falls off with increasing distance.
But in the light of modern geometry, the figure of concentric spheres
only has meaning as a mutual relation between center
and infinite periphery.
The center is the answering point or ‘pole’ of
the infinitely distant plane; spheres are concentric if this point is the same
for them all.
It is only by virtue of their common relation to the cosmic periphery
that the spheres are concentric.
Thus in the simple phenomenon of radiation nature is bearing witness to
the fact that in some way the periphery is an active partner.
Incidentally, something like this appears to have been known in earlier
times; perhaps it is only waiting to be re-established in a more scientific
form.
I spoke of Newton’s relation to the Cambridge Platonists.
Another of Newton’s contemporaries who also moved in these circles was
Thomas Vaughan, brother of the better-known poet Henry Vaughan.
Like Newton himself, Vaughan was an alchemist and wrote books not very
easy for us today to understand.
In his Lumen de Lumine he tells of a
‘spiritual fire-earth,’ by which he evidently means something of the quality of
a circumference, a cosmic periphery enveloping the earth.
He who attains to the great secret, says Vaughan, will come to know “how
the fire-spirit hath its root in the spiritual fire-earth and receives form it
a secret influx.
” Nay, more, he will know “why all influx of fire descends—against the
nature of fire—coming downwards from heaven and why the same fire, having found
a body,
ascends again towards heaven and grows upwards.
” Such paradoxical ideas as are suggested to us by the clear and cogent
thought forms of the new geometry seem here to be expressed as an immediate out
come of mystical
communion with nature.
Admittedly the thought I have put to you concerning radiation is purely
geometrical to begin with: Nature alone can show whether and how it is relevant
to the real play of forces.
Yet in the light of your own experiences, ladies and gentlemen, this is
precisely the suggestion which I now venture to put forward.
In homeopathic remedies, insofar as rhythmic potentization
plays an essential part in their preparation, you are already dealing with a
realm to which this kind of thought applies.
The substance you are potentizing was
originally formed from the cosmic periphery inward, by an individually
rhythmic, not to say musical, relation between the cosmic
periphery and the earthly center.
True, it has come to rest in the earthly place where it abides—in root
or leaf of plant, in metal or crystal mineral, or even in the bottle on the
apothecar’s shelves.
But this is only its last resting place.
In the precise earthly locality where it was first precipitated, it came
into being through a specific and individual relation between the earth-planet
and the vast spheres of the cosmos.
In this relation lies the secret of its chemical individuality qua
substance, and of its vital nature if still embedded in the living realm.
The formative rhythm is still latent in it, and when the careful hand of
the pharmacist, guided by experience and inspired by the will to help, subjects
it to the rhythmic process of expansion, mingling it by trituration or succussion
with the spatial medium which is to receive it, an opportunity is given for the
formative rhythm of its origin to be
reborn and for its latent connection with the healing essences of the
cosmos to be restored.
One is reminded of the saying of Novalis: “Every disease is a musical
problem and every cure a musical resolution”
Moreover is not the picture I have been giving in harmony with
Hahnemann’s own words quoted above, when he speaks of the spirit-like
individuality of the substance
which in the crude material lies latent and concealed?
If I am right in the main thesis I have put before you, a new chapter
will be opened out, tending to bring our science nearer to life—to human life
above all.
Work in the new direction is progressing, both in its biological aspects
and in its bearing on the facts of chemistry and physics.
The concept of ethereal space as the natural field of action of living,
formative forces, which I have had to put forward all too briefly in this
lecture, can be worked out with
all mathematical precision. And as so often happens when an idea is
really fertile, in doing this one finds that one is not alone; that what is
seemingly new has been divined
and adumbrated and was implicit in much of the specific work that has
gone before.
The seemingly insurmountable division between an orthodox scientific
outlook and realms of human skill and experience which find no place in the
accepted system of the day, is overcome without injustice to either party when a
fresh aspect springs into focus.
This I believe is about to happen, and in it your professsion
too, ladies and gentlemen, will find new life and vindication.
Planets and metals
1.Stellung der 7 Planetenmetalle in der Natur und zum menschlichen Organismus
PlanetMetallOrganbildungProzessErfolgsortFunktiondes ProzessesSaturnBleiMilzMineralisierungNervensystemBegrenzungKnochen, FestesJupiterZinnLeberPlastik, FormungKnorpel, Gelzustand“Kopf”bildungMarsEisenGalleAktivität, UmbildungBlut, AtmungSonneGoldHerzHarmonieHerz-KreislaufGleichgewichtVenusKupferNieren/Hingabe, ReifungErnährungsstromNebennieren-EntkrampfungBlutbildungSystemMerkurQuecksilberLungeWeiterführungLympheVerbindungStrömendesMondSilberGehirnBelebungWässrigesGenitalfunktionRegeneration
Vorwort/Suchen. Zeichen/Abkürzungen. Impressum.