the theosophists with their yogi powers had effectively opened a win-
dow from the world of matter into the world of spirit.
Prompt and committed approval of Phillips's conclusions had al-
ready come from the noted biochemist and Fellow of the Royal Soci-
ety, E. Lester Smith, discoverer of vitamin BI2. At home in both the
mathematical language of physics and the arcane language of theoso-
phy, Smith spelled out his support in a small volume, Occult Chemistry
Re-evaluated. And Professor Brian Josephson of Cambridge University,
a Nobel Prize winner in physics, was sufficiently impressed by Phillips's
radical thesis to invite him to lecture on the subject at the famous
Cavendish Laboratory in 1985.
Yet few in the ranks of orthodoxy had the courage to risk their po-
sitions by supporting anything so wild as the notion that psychics
could see better into the basic constituents of matter than could physi-
cists armed with billion-dollar supercolliders.
Already at the 'end of the last century when the theosophists first
directed their clairvoyant vision upon the atoms of the chemical ele-
ments, they had found themselves up against contemporary physicists
who still thought of atoms as the "solid, massy, impenetrable, movable
particles" about which Newton had conjectured two centuries earlier
and which the Greek philosopher Democritus had envisaged as tiny,
hard, indivisible balls that no one but God could dissect.
The most that the renowned French chemist Antoine Lavoisier
could realize-before losing his head to the guillotine in 1794-was
that the same element could exist in three states: solid, liquid, and
"vapeur. "
Newton's view was only slightly improved upon in 1808, three years
after Nelson defeated Napoleon at Trafalgar, when the Englishman
John Dalton declared the atom to be the basic unit of all chemical el-
ements-uch as hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen-and that each element
had its own particular weight. In Dalton's day, some forty elements
were known, though no one had a clue as to the size or makeup of an
atom.
By 1831, as Louis-Phdlippe ascended the French throne in the guise
of a citizen king, physicist Michael Faraday in England produced an
joyce
(Joyce)
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