1.2 The Basic Elements of the Universe
The Knowledge of the Origin of Things
Human beings cannot, while on earth, know the full origin of things.
Not everything is permitted to be revealed to them. There are limits to what the human mind can penetrate in its present condition, and many realities remain hidden.
Yet those hidden things do not remain forever inaccessible in the same way. As beings become more purified, the veil is gradually lifted. Greater purity brings greater clarity. Still, some truths require faculties that human beings do not yet possess, and without those faculties certain mysteries cannot be fully understood.
Science has been given for human advancement.
Through scientific investigation, people can discover much about nature and make real progress in understanding the world. But science, valuable as it is, cannot pass beyond the boundaries established by God. There are limits beyond which investigation cannot go, not because inquiry is useless, but because human knowledge has an appointed measure.
The more human beings are allowed to uncover, the more reason they have to admire the power and wisdom of the Creator. Yet pride and weakness often distort judgment. The mind easily becomes the victim of illusion. People build theory upon theory, and with time they discover how often error was taken for truth and truth dismissed as error. Each correction is a humbling lesson.
There is also a higher kind of communication concerning realities that lie beyond the reach of the senses.
When God judges it useful, truths may be disclosed that science alone cannot detect. Through such higher communications, human beings may gain some understanding of their past and of their future destiny. Even here, knowledge is partial rather than complete, given according to need and readiness rather than curiosity alone.
Spirit and Matter
Matter is not presented as something whose origin can be fixed with certainty by human understanding. Whether it is eternal or had a beginning belongs to what only God fully knows. Yet reason can still grasp something important: God is never inactive. Divine action is not interrupted by idleness. However far back one tries to imagine the unfolding of creation, the idea of a God who was ever inactive is incompatible with the divine nature.
Matter
Matter is often defined, from the human point of view, as whatever has extension, affects the senses, and is impenetrable. These definitions are valid within the limits of ordinary experience, because human thought usually speaks only of what is familiar to the senses.
But matter is not confined to the forms ordinarily perceived. It may exist in states so subtle, refined, and ethereal that the senses cannot detect it. Even when it escapes perception, it remains matter.
A deeper definition presents matter as the tie that binds spirit and the instrument spirit uses while also acting upon it. In that sense, matter serves as the intermediary through which spirit produces effects.
Spirit
Spirit is the intelligent principle of the universe.
Its innermost nature is difficult to express in human language, because human language is formed around things that can be grasped by the senses. Spirit is not nothing simply because it is not tangible. What cannot be touched is not therefore unreal. Nothing truly means nonexistence, and spirit does exist.
Intelligence is one of the essential attributes of spirit. For practical purposes, they may seem identical, because intelligence is inseparable from spirit as human beings understand it.
The Distinction and Union of Spirit and Matter
Spirit and matter are distinct from one another. Spirit is not merely a property of matter, as color is of light or sound of air. Yet their union is necessary for matter to act intelligently.
For human beings, that union is also necessary for the manifestation of spirit, because human senses are not organized to perceive spirit apart from matter. Spirit in itself can be conceived through thought, just as matter can be conceived separately through thought, but ordinary human perception does not isolate spirit directly.
This distinction is crucial. On one side stands matter, which is not intelligent in itself. On the other stands an intelligent principle independent of matter. The exact origin of their relation remains beyond present knowledge, but their difference is affirmed.
The General Elements of the Universe
Two general elements may be recognized in the universe: matter and spirit. Above both is God, the Creator and source of all. Together, God, spirit, and matter form the universal trinity at the root of all that exists.
Yet the material element must be understood more broadly than dense, tangible matter alone. Between spirit and matter in the ordinary sense there is also the universal fluid, which serves as an intermediary. Matter, in its denser forms, is too gross for spirit to act upon directly. The universal fluid bridges that interval.
From one angle, this fluid belongs to the material element, but it differs from common matter by its special properties. If it were simply the same as ordinary matter, there would be no reason not to reduce spirit to matter as well. Instead, it occupies an intermediate condition between the two.
This universal fluid is described as primitive or elementary. In its innumerable combinations with matter, and under the action of spirit, it becomes the means by which an endless variety of forms and effects are produced. Human knowledge has reached only a small part of what it can become.
By serving as the agent upon which spirit acts, this fluid is the principle without which matter would remain dispersed and would never acquire the conditions necessary for organized existence, including the properties associated with gravitation.
What are called electric and magnetic fluids may be understood as modifications of this one universal fluid. Properly speaking, it is a subtler and more perfect matter, which in some respects can be considered independent of matter in its denser forms.
Language and Human Limits
Many disputes arise from words rather than realities. Human language is incomplete whenever it tries to describe things that do not directly affect the senses. Because of that limitation, alternative expressions may be proposed for the two general elements, but changing the terms does not resolve the underlying mystery.
What remains clear is this: matter and intelligence appear to us as two distinct principles in the universe. Whether they share a common origin in a way not yet understood, whether intelligence is wholly independent, or whether deeper relations exist beyond present understanding, these questions remain open.
God Above Spirit and Matter
Above matter and spirit stands a supreme intelligence governing all others. This intelligence is distinguished by essential attributes that set it beyond every created principle. It is this supreme intelligence that is called God.
Thus, the universe may be understood through a fundamental order: matter, spirit, and the mediating universal fluid within creation, all under the sovereignty of God, who is the Creator and sustaining source of all things.
The Properties of Matter
Ponderability is an essential attribute of matter only in the sense in which human beings ordinarily understand matter. It does not belong in the same way to matter considered as the universal fluid.
The subtle and ethereal matter that composes this universal fluid is imponderable to human perception, yet it is the very principle from which ponderable matter proceeds.
Weight, therefore, is not absolute. It is a relative property. Outside the gravitational attraction of worlds, there is no weight, just as there is no up or down.
Matter does not consist of many ultimate elements in the strictest sense. There is one single primitive element. Bodies commonly regarded as simple are not true first principles, but transformations of that one primitive matter.
The different properties of matter arise from the modifications undergone by elementary molecules when they combine under certain conditions. Variety in the material world comes from the changing arrangements and states of one underlying substance.
Flavors, odors, colors, sounds, and even the poisonous or healing qualities of bodies belong to these modifications of the same primitive substance. They also depend on the disposition of the organs meant to perceive them.
Perception itself confirms this. Different people do not always experience the qualities of things in the same way. What one finds pleasant, another may find repulsive. What appears one color to one observer may seem different to another. A substance harmful to some may be harmless, or even beneficial, to others.
The same elementary matter is capable of undergoing all possible modifications and acquiring all possible properties. In this sense, everything is in everything: the diversity of bodies does not require many original substances, but many states and combinations of one substance.
Oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, and the other elements treated as simple in ordinary science are only modifications of the one primitive substance. Since that primitive substance cannot yet be directly reached by observation and can only be conceived by thought, these elements may still be treated as elements for practical purposes.
Matter may therefore be understood in a way that gives primacy to force and movement, provided this is completed by another idea: the arrangement of molecules. The secondary properties of bodies vary not only with the intensity of force and the direction of movement, but also with molecular disposition.
A familiar comparison helps make this clear. An opaque body may become transparent, and a transparent one opaque, not because its underlying substance has ceased to be what it is, but because the arrangement of its parts has changed.
Molecules do have a defined form, even though that form cannot be directly discerned by human beings.
This form is constant in primitive elementary molecules, but variable in secondary molecules, which are only aggregations of the first. Even what is ordinarily called a molecule remains far removed from the true elementary molecule.
Behind the changing appearances of bodies lies a deeper unity. The multiplicity seen in nature is produced by transformations, combinations, and arrangements within a single primitive matter, governed by laws that connect substance, force, movement, and perception.
Universal Space
Universal space is infinite.
If space had a boundary, reason would immediately ask what lies beyond it. However far thought may place such a limit, something must still exist beyond that supposed edge, and beyond that again without end. For that reason, space cannot be conceived as truly bounded.
This stretches human understanding. The mind does not easily grasp the infinite from its narrow range of experience. Yet reason still points toward it. A finite space would always imply something outside it, and that very implication carries thought onward indefinitely.
There is also no absolute void anywhere in universal space.
What appears empty is not truly empty. Regions that seem vacant are occupied by forms of matter that human senses cannot perceive and human instruments cannot detect. Apparent emptiness is therefore only a limitation of perception, not an absence of substance.
Space is infinite, and what seems to be void is filled in ways not yet accessible to ordinary observation.