natural philosophy

42:9.1Re­li­gion is not alone dog­matic; nat­u­ral phi­los­o­phy equally tends to dog­ma­tize. When a renowned re­li­gious teacher rea­soned that the num­ber seven was fun­da­men­tal to na­ture be­cause there are seven open­ings in the hu­man head, if he had known more of chem­istry, he might have ad­vo­cated such a be­lief founded on a true phe­nom­e­non of the phys­i­cal world. There is in all the phys­i­cal uni­verses of time and space, not­with­stand­ing the uni­ver­sal man­i­fes­ta­tion of the dec­i­mal con­sti­tu­tion of en­ergy, the ever-pres­ent re­minder of the re­al­ity of the sev­en­fold elec­tronic or­ga­ni­za­tion of pre­mat­ter.

42:9.2The num­ber seven is ba­sic to the cen­tral uni­verse and the spir­i­tual sys­tem of in­her­ent trans­mis­sions of char­ac­ter, but the num­ber ten, the dec­i­mal sys­tem, is in­her­ent in en­ergy, mat­ter, and the ma­te­rial cre­ation. Nev­er­the­less the atomic world does dis­play a cer­tain pe­ri­odic char­ac­ter­i­za­tion which re­curs in groups of seven—a birth­mark car­ried by this ma­te­rial world in­dica­tive of its far-dis­tant spir­i­tual ori­gin.

42:9.3This sev­en­fold per­sis­tence of cre­ative con­sti­tu­tion is ex­hib­ited in the chem­i­cal do­mains as a re­cur­rence of sim­i­lar phys­i­cal and chem­i­cal prop­er­ties in seg­re­gated pe­ri­ods of seven when the ba­sic el­e­ments are ar­ranged in the or­der of their atomic weights. When the Uran­tia chem­i­cal el­e­ments are thus ar­ranged in a row, any given qual­ity or prop­erty tends to re­cur by sev­ens. This pe­ri­odic change by sev­ens re­curs di­min­ish­ingly and with vari­a­tions through­out the en­tire chem­i­cal ta­ble, be­ing most markedly ob­serv­able in the ear­lier or lighter atomic group­ings. Start­ing from any one el­e­ment, af­ter not­ing some one prop­erty, such a qual­ity will change for six con­sec­u­tive el­e­ments, but on reach­ing the eighth, it tends to reap­pear, that is, the eighth chem­i­cally ac­tive el­e­ment re­sem­bles the first, the ninth the sec­ond, and so on. Such a fact of the phys­i­cal world un­mis­tak­ably points to the sev­en­fold con­sti­tu­tion of an­ces­tral en­ergy and is in­dica­tive of the fun­da­men­tal re­al­ity of the sev­en­fold di­ver­sity of the cre­ations of time and space. Man should also note that there are seven col­ors in the nat­u­ral spec­trum.

42:9.4But not all the sup­po­si­tions of nat­u­ral phi­los­o­phy are valid; for ex­am­ple, the hy­po­thet­i­cal ether, which rep­re­sents an in­ge­nious at­tempt of man to unify his ig­no­rance of space phe­nom­ena. The phi­los­o­phy of the uni­verse can­not be pred­i­cated on the ob­ser­va­tions of so-called sci­ence. If such a meta­mor­pho­sis could not be seen, a sci­en­tist would be in­clined to deny the pos­si­bil­ity of de­vel­op­ing a but­ter­fly out of a cater­pil­lar.

42:9.5Phys­i­cal sta­bil­ity as­so­ci­ated with bi­o­logic elas­tic­ity is pres­ent in na­ture only be­cause of the well-nigh in­fi­nite wis­dom pos­sessed by the Mas­ter Ar­chi­tects of cre­ation. Noth­ing less than tran­scen­den­tal wis­dom could ever de­sign units of mat­ter which are at the same time so sta­ble and so ef­fi­ciently flex­i­ble.