Occult Chemistry 69electric current by rotating a copper disk between the poles of a mag-
net. To define a unit of this nonstatic electricity, the Irish physicist
George Johnstone Stoney coined the name electron-not that either
Faraday or Stoney had any idea what an electron might look like or
what size it might be, let alone what electricity might be.
Only in 1898, three years after the theosophists had begun their
psychic investigation of the atom, did Professor Joseph John Thomson,
experimenting in his laboratory at Cambridgz University, suddenly
conclude that the luminous rays emitted by his cathode ray tube did
not consist of charged molecules of gas but of fundamental particles
that must be part of all matter. Nailing this first truly elementary par-
ticle, separable from Democritus's uncuttable atom, Thomson called it
after Stoney's "electron," thereby inaugurating the science of particle
physics.
Meanwhile, Leadbeater and Besant, approaching matter from their
own point of view, using their siddhi powers to peer into the heart of
chemical atoms, had entered a mysterious world std pluperfectly invis-
ible to orthodox physicists. Their method had been described in the
second century B.C.E. by the Indian sage Pantanjali in his Yoga Sutras,
where he explained how to "obtain knowledge of the small, the hid-
den or the distant by directing the light of a superphysical faculty." Ever
since, Eastern yogis have been using this siddhi form of perception de-
scribed as "magnifiing clairvoyance."The trick consists not in actually
magnifiing a small object but, conversely, in "making oneself [or rather
one's viewpoint] infinitesimally small at will."
Phillips, analyzing the theosophists' claims, concluded they could
vary the size of the images at will and that there appeared to be no
limit to the level of magnification attainable, although a practical limit
was set by the ability of the viewer and by the strain felt when viewing
magnified objects. Unlike other forms of extrasensory perception, this
particular state, though taxing, says Phdips, could be induced or ter-
minated at will.
Among the first elements investigated by the two psychics was hy-
drogen, considered the lightest and simplest. As Leadbeater reduced
his viewpoint to a subatomic level, he was able to describe to Annie