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When William Crookes chose as one of the titles of his paper on the newly discovered properties of electricity, ‘The Fourth State of Matter’, it was to express his belief that he had found a state of matter, additional to the three known ones, which represented ‘the borderland where matter and force seem to merge into one another, the shadowy realm between known and unknown’ for which his soul had been longing ever since the death of his beloved brother.1 All that has followed from his discovery, down to the transformation of matter itself into freely working energy, shows that he was right in thinking he had reached some borderland of nature. But the character of the forces which are thus liberated makes it equally clear that this is not the borderland he was looking for. Nature – by which we mean physical nature – has in fact two borders, one touching the realm of the intramaterial energies which are liberated by disrupting the structure of atomic nuclei, the other leading over into creative Chaos, the fountain-head of all that appears in nature as intelligent design.

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With this reversal of the relationship between cause and effect it is not, however, intended to represent the commonly accepted order of things as entirely incorrect. In the realm of life, cause and effect are not so onesidedly fixed as in the realm of mechanical forces. We may therefore admit that a reverse effect of the soil-elements upon the plant does take place. This is plainly demonstrable in the case of phosphorus which, however, by reason of its appearance in the soil in proportions hardly to be called a mere ‘trace’, represents a borderline case. What may apply within limits to phosphorus is wholly valid for the trace-elements – namely, that they are playing their essential role while they are themselves about to assume ponderable form.

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Having thus determined our standpoint with regard to the thermodynamic theory of heat and the law of conservation, we may proceed to the study, first of the phenomenon of thermal expansion, and then of the effect of heat on the various states of physical matter, by applying to them, unimpeded by any preconceived mechanistic idea, what we have learnt through our previous studies. We must start by developing a proper picture of the dynamic condition of matter in the solid state.

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Regarding the distribution of land and water on the earth’s surface, we may say that to an observer in cosmic space the earth would not look at all like a solid body. Rather would it appear as a gigantic ‘drop’ of water, its surface interspersed with solid formations, the continents and other land masses. Moreover, the evidence assembled ever since Professor A. Wegener’s first researches suggests that the continents are clod-like formations which ‘float’ on an underlying viscous substance and are able to move (very slowly) in both the vertical and horizontal directions. The oceanic waters are in fact separated from the viscous substratum by no more than a thin layer of solid earth, a mere skin in comparison with the size of the planet. Further, this ‘drop’ of liquid which represents the earth is in constant communication with its environment through the perpetual evaporation from the ocean, as well as from every other body of water.

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The method in question is associated with the school of medicine known as Homoeopathy, founded by the German doctor, Hahnemann. The word ‘homoeopathy’ means ‘healing through like’; the basic principle is to treat disease symptoms with highly diluted substances which produce similar symptoms if ingested in normal quantity. Experience has in fact shown that the physiological effect of a substance taken from external nature is reversed when the substance is highly diluted.

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It is this combination of kinship and polar opposition which led people of old to regard both lightning in the heights and seismic disturbances in the depths as signs of direct intervention by higher powers in the affairs of men. A trace of this old feeling lingers in the Greek word θειον (theion), divine, which was used to denote both lightning and sulphur. Influenced by the same conception, the Romans regarded as holy a spot where lightning had struck the earth; they even fenced it off to protect it from human contact. Note in this respect also the biblical report of the event on Mount Sinai, mentioned before, telling of an interplay of volcanic and meteorological phenomena as a sign of the direct intervention of the Godhead.

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It was Crookes’s fate to open the road which has brought man to nature’s lower border and even across it, although he himself was in search of her upper border. What he was denied, we are in a position to achieve to-day, provided we do not expect to succeed by methods similar to those of atomic physics, and do not look for similar results.

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Having in this way established the existence of certain processes of materialization and dematerialization in single organisms within the earth’s vegetable and other kingdoms, we shall now turn to the earth as a whole to find out where – organic being that she herself is – she manipulates corresponding processes on a macrotelluric scale.

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In a solid body the material substance is centred on an inner point, the so-called centre of gravity – a characteristic which such a body shares with the earth as a whole. Likewise, two such bodies exert on one another the same influence that the earth exerts on each of them: they try to assume the shortest possible distance from each other. Since the days of Faraday science has been accustomed to ascribe these phenomena to the existence of certain fields of force, connected with each body and working on one another through the intermediary space. It is to this concept of the field of force that we must now give special attention. For the field-concept, in the form introduced by Faraday into scientific thinking, is one of the few scientific concepts which have been obtained by being ‘read’ from the corresponding phenomena themselves, and which therefore retain their validity in a science which is based on the method of reading.

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This picture of the earth shows it lying under the twofold influence of the compressive force of gravity and the sucking force of levity. Wherever land meets sea, there levity tends to prevail over gravity. It is in maritime regions, accordingly, that the inner strata of the earth succumb most readily to those sudden changes in the gravity-levity tension wherein we have recognized the origin of seismic occurrences.

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