In our endeavour to find a modern way of overcoming the conception of matter developed and held by science in the age of the onlooker-consciousness, we shall be helped by noticing how this conception first arose historically. Of momentous significance in this respect is the discovery of the gaseous state of matter by the Flemish physician and experimenter, Joh. Baptist van Helmont (1577-1644). The fact that the existence of this state of ponderable matter was quite unknown up to such a relatively recent date has been completely forgotten to-day. Moreover, it is so remote from current notions that anyone who now calls attention to van Helmont's discovery is quite likely to be met with incredulity. As a result, there is no account of the event that puts it in its true setting. In what follows pains are taken to present the facts in the form in which one comes to know them through van Helmont's own account, given in his Ortus Medicinae.

Since it could not have been the gaseous state of matter in the form discovered by van Helmont, what particular condition of nature was it to which the ancients pointed when using the term Air? Let us see how the scriptures of past human cultures speak of air.

The spiritual significance of these fires cannot be expressed better than by the meaning of the very term 'needfire'. This word does not derive, as was formerly believed, from the word 'need', meaning a 'fire kindled in a state of need', but, as recent etymological research has shown, from a root which appears in the German word nieten - to clinch or rivet. 'Needfire' therefore means nothing less than a fire which was kindled for 'clinching' anew the bond between earthly life and the primal spiritual order at times when for one reason or another there was a call for this.

If this realm of events is more intimately related than any other to our intuitive experience, it has also the characteristic of remaining closed to any research by external means. Much of what lies beyond the scope of external observation, however, reveals itself all the more clearly in the realms where nature is active on the widest scale. Certainly, we must school ourselves to read aright the phenomena which come to light in those realms. And once more we must look to the way of introspection, previously mentioned, for aid in investing our gaze with the necessary intuitive force. If we succeed in this, then the heavens will become for us a text wherein secrets of human nature, hidden from mere introspection, can be read; while at the same time the introspective way enables us to experience things which we cannot uncover simply by observing the outer universe.

In this way it will become increasingly clear that in levity we have to do with something which, despite its manifesting characteristics of a 'force' not unlike gravity and thereby resembling the latter, differs essentially from anything purely physical. It is only by its interactions with gravity that levity brings about events in the physical world-events, however, which are themselves partly of a physical, partly of a superphysical kind. Seeing things in this aspect, we are naturally prompted to ask what causes there are in the world which make gravity and levity interact at all. This question will find its answer in due course. First, we must make ourselves more fully acquainted with the various appearances of the gravity-levity interplay in nature.

For reasons which need not be described here, van Helmont studied with particular interest the various modifications in which carbon is capable of occurring in nature - among them carbon's combustion product, carbon dioxide. It was his observations of carbon dioxide which made him aware of a condition of matter whose properties caused him the greatest surprise. For he found it to be, at the same time, 'much finer than vapour and much denser than air'. It appeared to him as a complete 'paradox', because it seemed to unite in itself two contradictory qualities, one appertaining to the realm of 'uncreated things', the other to the realm of 'created things'. Unable to rank it with either 'vapour' or 'air' (we shall see presently what these terms meant in van Helmont's terminology), he found himself in need of a special word to distinguish this new state from the other known states, both below and above it. Since he could not expect any existing language to possess a suitable word, he felt he must create one. He therefore took, and changed slightly, a word signifying a particular cosmic condition which seemed to be imaged in the new condition he had just discovered. The word was CHAOS. By shortening it a little, he derived from it the new word GAS. His own words explaining his choice are: 'Halitum ilium GAS vocavi non longe a Chaos veterum secretum.' ('I have called this mist Gas, owing to its resemblance to the Chaos of the ancients.')²

In all older languages, the words used to designate the element bound up with breathing, or the act of breathing, served at the same time to express the relationship of man to the Divine, or even the Divine itself. One need think only of the words Brahma and Atma of the ancient Indians, the Pneuma of the Greeks, the Spiritus of the Romans. The Hebrews expressed the same idea when they said that Jehovah had breathed the breath of life into man and that man in this way became a living soul.

This explanation of the 'needfire' throws light also on the Roman custom of re-kindling annually the sacred fire in the Temple of Vesta. For the Romans this was a means of reaffirming year by year the connexion of the nation with its spiritual leadership; accordingly, they chose the time when the sun in its yearly course restores - 're-clinches' - the union of the world-spirit with earthly nature, for the rebirth of the fire which throughout the rest of the year was carefully guarded against extinction.

Apart from these methodological considerations, there is a further reason for our choice. Among the instances mentioned earlier in this chapter as symptoms of a greater 'youthfulness' prevailing in nature, and particularly in the element Fire, at a comparatively recent date, were the manifestations of the Divine-Spiritual World to man reported in the Bible as the event on Mount Sinai. There, thunder and lightning from above and volcanic action from below form the setting for the intercourse of Jehovah with Moses. To-day the function of these types of phenomena, though metamorphosed by the altered conditions of the earth, is not essentially different. Here, more than in any other sphere of her activities, nature manifests that side of her which we are seeking to penetrate with understanding.

¹ In this sense Ruskin's description of the working of the spirit in the plant as one that 'catches from chaos water, etc., etc., and fastens them into a given form' points to magical action.