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[[First Column]] Lightning rods have ever failed to perform their claimed functions, namely--to discharge a thunder cloud silently. And when they happen to fall in the path of a thunderbolt, they too often play the part of an incendiary, by the sparks emitted from their surfaces. On the evening of this same day a thunderbolt struck the cupola of Enon Baptist Church, on the northwest corner of Oxford and Twentieth street. The building is one story high, brick front, and surmounted with a belfry containing a church bell, and the belfry surmounted by an iron spire-bar, carrying a vane and ball. There was no lightning rod on the building. The bolt struck through the belfry, shattering its wood work and penetrating the ceiling of the vestibule; it passed along the ceiling to the north side of the church, where it dislodged a piece of the weather-boarding and splintered the adjoining strips. The spire-bar was slightly scorched. On the southwest corner, the basement is occupied as a barber shop, in which Mr. August Laux, the barber, was hurled from his chair by the shock. Mr. Spencer, sitting close by, was struck blind and speechless for several minutes, and when consciousness returned, he crawled up the basement steps on hands and feet, assisted by Mr. Laux. In an adjoining chamber there stood a double gas-cooking stove, attached by a rubber hose to the gad pendent of the ceiling; it hurled the two stoves some distance apart, and dislodged the hose from the pendent. Here we have the fact of two buildings being struck by lighting on the same day, each surmounted with a cupola and bell-weather vane and ball; one defended with a lightning rod, the other not; and the further fact that the one with the lighting rod was [[not]] on fire, and the one without the rod not set on fire. Lightning rod and ignition, no lightning rod and no ignition, has been the rule of my observations of this phenomenon during the experience of fifteen years. The writer of this has abundance of positive testimony to prove that the lightning rod is as impotent to protect a building from the force of a thunderbolt as would be the attempt of a person to shield his body from the force of a descending bombshell by trying to catch it on a bodkin. J. W. Wednesday, April 2, 1873 [Reported for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin.] COSMICAL FORCE AND LIFE. A Discourse Delivered Before the Society of Philosophical Spiritualists, at Their Hall, on Sunday Afternoon. BY PROF. JOHN WISE. The Term Cosmical Force I mean to be understood in this discourse to comprehend life, and as the vis viva of nature in everything that belongs to nature, objective and subjective. It is an axiom that there is never any more nor any less of power in nature, so far as we are scientifically acquainted with cosmical force. Under the law of dynamics, as explained in the correlation and conservation of forces, every movement must find its equivalent. When we apply artificial motion as power by the intervention of mechanical enginery, we only transfer a little of cosmical force from its natural occluded condition to another place, by the breaking up of matter in some way or another. We can develop it by combustion and the abstraction of heat; also, in the substitution of gravitation, as afforded us in water that has been naturally lifted up to the cloud region, and from thence collected as water-power. Everything that asserts force is dependent on gravitation, proximately or remotely. When exercised in the mode of traction, as with the engine on the rail, it is not different in principle from that as developed by the horse harnessed to the dray, or the man walking along on his pedal cycloids, or the prisoner on the treadwheel, or the ship sailing in the wind; all are dependent on the universal law of gravitation for the exercise of force, either directly or indirectly--by action or reaction. When the tree is projected upward in the growth of its plumule, its radical is the fulcrum upon which it is poised, and over and under the force of gravitation the wood fibre is knit and joined as it springs from the trunk and branch. In all this the force is simply transferred from the earth in its motion, and from the elements of its salts, as they are broken up into stones to fit them for growth and assimilation to the new formation in accordance with the law of sympathetic aggregation. And it is so with the life-germ of the animal as it proceeds in its growth to maturity. In accordance with the matrix and its means of aggregation, so must the formation take place, under maturity of organization, and then to full stature, only to run a brief period, and then to die--fall to pieces--return to dust-- and into etherial and [[Second Column]] ultimate atoms, ready once again for the endless chain of nature, in the process of re-formation. Primordial force is all we know, and all we possibly can know, in the recognition of vital order in the creation. Without force the creation would be null and void. Indeed, there could be no conception in the human understanding of such a thing as a creation without a force. It would be nonentity--like a shadow without a substance--to produce it; or a substance without solidity, shape or form. Force is the creation, and creation is the force; and to that interpretation we must necessarily refer all and every ideas that can possibly be conjured up in the imagery of the human mind. The understanding is incapable of reasoning intelligibly outside the positive proposition of matter in motion, or motion in matter. It is labor in vain to attempt any proposition independent of those two elements as a fundamental necessity to base it on, however metaphysical the assumption may seem to be. The idea that there is a spirit without a body, capable of motion or force, is as untenable as it would be to suppose that there can be a body without a spirit. If you say the stone is a body without a spirit, you deprive it of its innate function through which it changes its condition, and without which it must continue to be a stone through all eternity, to which the constant, never-ceasing change of matter gives the contradiction. The atoms that compose the stone have within themselves the functional power of cohesion, as well as the atoms that compose our flesh and bones, and it requires an equivalent of force to overcome this functional power of cohesion in either case. The stone is a combination of motion and matter, of force and atoms. The idea of a distinct existence of soul from body, so far as life-force is concerned, finds no interpretation in the philosophy of facts. The will-power, so flippantly referred to by transcendentalists as a force of itself, is an assumption not warranted by the remotest fact. You may will to doomsday for a thing to be done, without material aid, and it will not be done. You might as well attempt to satisfy a hungry stomach with a loaf of bread made from words alone as to prove that there can be no will-power without nervous organization, or that there can be a soul without a substance. That the ultimate atoms of a body, after death and decomposition, possessed of the organic and functional affinities which had given it shape, should take on in a higher order of life, a more refined form of being, finds strong presumptive proof in the general law of sympathetic aggregation and eternal fitness of things; and this would constitute the resurrection of the body after death, as taught by the ancient philosophers as well as by those of the present day. In the search for analytical knowledge of the origin of cosmical force, we might safely assume that our finite and limited understanding could go so far and no further; that there are greatly superior beings to ourselves; that these superior beings, with more refined intellects, not necessarily different in their general organization from ourselves as to principle, are endowed with vastly superior organs of sensibility; that they can see far beyond the utmost extent of our vision, and hear, and smell, and taste infinitely beyond our limited reach, and that their superior organization and the power of intellect enable them to handle electricity and the universal ether as readily as we can handle and manipulate the gases. This view of cosmical life finds analogy in the fact that the most intelligent monkey is vastly inferior to man in the faculty of intellect, while it is not to be assumed that the Darwinian progenitor of our race reasons differently from man, but only in an inferior degree. Precisely the same kind of organs of the senses are the attributes of both. The idiotic man--idiotic from minimum cerebral development--is but a small degree removed above the mature and fully developed ourang-outang. While this line of argument would never solve the problem of cosmical force, it leads the mind to study its details as they are related to our lives and well being, and teaches us how to use the laws of nature to our best advantage. It unfolds to us new truths, and leads us on in the path of progress, and every new link in the endless chain of nature that is left out of the profound mystery of its infinite depths adds a new jewel to the intellectual diadem. Such a philosophy is not without its positive corroboration, as we behold it, in the revolution of matter as referable to growth and decay. The wood-ashes of to-day may become a fruitful tree to-morrow. The force that is excluded from the furnace may be used to build up a bed of combustible matter hereafter, or go into space ready to be appropriated in the formation of a planet or a sun. The great cauldron of evolution must be going on, and, until we are enabled to comprehend a clear definition of infinity, it is utterly useless to attempt a rational explanation of cosmical force, which is cosmical life, but it is a privilege given us to enjoy, in the following up of the chain of Nature and in the study of its profound majesty. Philosophical Spiritualism is built on nature's unerring law, and its essential creed is [[Third Column]] made of better stuff than legerdemain and trick. While table-turning and mediumistic fanfaronade answers the question of "a little humor now and then," it does not constitute an essential dogma of an intelligent and well-informed association. If spirits can be invoked successfully, let there be a call for the kind that will tell something worthy of a spiritual intelligence. The tying and untying of bed-cords and blowing of horns in the dark, come from the wrong side of reason, and are, at best, only tolerable as the farce to the drama. To return to the text of our subject, with a few thoughts on life-force, we may aptly quote, in substance if not in the precise words of the poet, that- "Life is a bubble on the sea of matter borne, To rise, to break, and to that sea return." Since the Sun furnishes the earth its force represented in the motion of its multifarious forms of living materials, we may take the sun for the sea of matter the poet refers to. In a more expanded view the sun itself becomes a bubble in the larger ocean of matter, and our great life-giving orb, after all, becomes only a speck in the mysterious cosmogony; and the seething white-hot gases of its envelope, as revealed by the telescope and analyzed by the spectroscope, are nothing more in the great creation, comparatively viewed, than a pound of boiling saltpetre in the chemist's crucible. The revelations of modern science indicate that all force, as we understand it, as related to terrestrial phenomena, comes from the sun in the mode of heat in some form or another; and that the stars, spectroscopically considered, are like our sun, possessed of the same attributes, and this leads us into a length and breadth of conception of cosmical force and cosmical change, quite sufficient for human understanding to reason upon, and investigate for millions of generations, and billions of years to come, with all the progress that evolution brings in its train. It is quite refreshing to a philosophical spiritualist to be allowed to roam into the vast regions of space, although his telescopes and spectroscopes and his electrometers and compass needles should in the end prove no better solution of the problem of nature than does the divining rod of the well-digger the exact locality and direction of the underground water course. Each one is wedded to his idol, and that which seems most meet to his understanding, be it positive or representative, objective or subjective, is the line of reason he prefers to pursue, and if nature is looked up to as the schoolmaster, with a clear conviction that order is its law, and that adaptation and obedience to its law is reward, and that violation and disobedience of its law is punishment, we may safely study cosmical life in cosmical forces to our advantage. In the question of spirit force, as generally understood in "manifestations," is it not in accordance with common sense, and is it not vastly preferable to receive nothing as positively proved, until it is proved by and under the ordinary processes of the human sense? We have yet to learn and be convinced by that method of reasoning, that individual spirits - invisible men and women-- men and women who have died in the flesh and become individualized in a spirit-body, have come back into manifest contact with corporeal men and women, and communicated to them a little hasty poetry, too often more trifling things. I am not arguing that there is no individual spirit-- an intelligent and refined soul being-- a being which springs up from the representative corpuscles of the decomposed body,for I verily believe that there is such, but that this etherial being ever comes into physical and corporeal contact with a human, earthly body, is not sufficiently demonstrated in the so-called phenomena of "Spiriual manifestations." I know, and you know, that the world is full of that kind of belief. Mecca has its tomb of Mahomet-- the Yellow Empire has its Josh-- Hindoostan its Juggernaut-- Dahomey its Fetische,and Jerusalem its Sepulchre. But the living light-- the light of the day and the hour-- the age we live in, is demonstration, veritable facts, patent to the common understanding; for we have yet to learn that nature manufactures a privileged few, an exception to its rule, who are chosen to hold intercourse with spirits, while the mass of mankind are to be merely lookers-on, to hear, to see, and swallow every thing said, for truth, by these favored oracles. CHESAPEAKE STEAM TOW- -rges towed between Philadelphia -e-Grace, &c. Captain THOMAS -t. -s solicited. Barges supplied. -WM. P. CLYDE & CO., -nagers of all the above lines, -UTH WHARVES, Philadelphia -cellaneous. [[Miscellaneous]] -W-CASES.-A LARGE -er left over from Centennial -ow, Steam Factory, ELEVENTH W.H. GROVE. 115 North FOURTH Street.
