So far back as 1856, a man considered a savant in his days—Dr. Jobard of Paris,—had certainly the same ideas as the authors of the _Unseen Universe_, on ether, when he startled the press and the world of science by the following declaration: “I hold a discovery which frightens me. There are two kinds of electricity; one, brute and blind, is produced by the contact of metals and acids;” (the gross purgation) ... “the other is intelligent and CLAIRVOYANT!... Electricity has bifurcated itself in the hands of Galvani, Nobili, and Matteuci. The brute force of the current has followed Jacobi, Bonelli, and Moncal, while the intellectual one was following Bois-Robert, Thilorier, and the Chevalier Duplanty. The electric ball or globular electricity contains a thought which disobeys Newton and Mariotte to follow its own freaks.... We have, in the annals of the Academy, thousands of proofs _of the_ INTELLIGENCE _of the electric bolt_.... But I remark that I am permitting myself to become indiscreet. A little more and _I should have disclosed_ to you the key which is about to discover to us the universal spirit.”[316] The foregoing, added to the wonderful confessions of science and what we have just quoted from the _Unseen Universe_, throw an additional lustre on the wisdom of the long departed ages. In one of the preceding chapters we have alluded to a quotation from Cory’s translation of _Ancient Fragments_, in which it appears that one of the _Chaldean Oracles_ expresses this self-same idea about ether, and in language {189} singularly like that of the authors of the _Unseen Universe_. It states that from æther have come all things, and to it all will return; that the images of all things are indelibly impressed upon it; and that it is the storehouse of the germs or of the remains of all visible forms, and even ideas. It appears as if this case strangely corroborates our assertion that whatever discoveries may be made in our days will be found to have been anticipated by many thousand years by our “simple-minded ancestors.” At the point at which we are now arrived, the attitude assumed by the materialists toward psychical phenomena being perfectly defined, we may assert with safety that were this key lying loose on the threshold of the “chasm” not one of our Tyndalls would stoop to pick it up. How timid would appear to some kabalists these tentative efforts to solve the GREAT MYSTERY of the universal ether! Although so far in advance of anything propounded by contemporary philosophers, what the intelligent explorers of the _Unseen Universe_ speculate upon, was to the masters of hermetic philosophy familiar science. To them ether was not merely a bridge connecting the seen and unseen sides of the universe, but across its span their daring feet followed the road that led through the mysterious gates which modern speculators either will not or _cannot_ unlock.