Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 28, 2025
I choose to term it electro-vital fluid, or electro-vitality. My reasons for so designating it are the following: It is demonstrably electrical in its nature. It appears to be identified, or at least connected immediately, with the vitalization of the body. I wish, by its name, to distinguish it from mental vitality, or the vitality of spirit.
Wherever the electro-vital fluid is in excess, producing hypersthenia too much vital action the part is morbidly positive; and, excepting sometimes in the stomach and bowels, the B D current, of medium force, directed to that part under the negative pole, will produce sharp pain.
The natures of spirit and of gross matter are so totally unlike, that it seems impracticable for the mind and body to come into immediate mutual relation, or to act reciprocally, without the aid of a medium ethereal, semi-material and semi-spiritual, such as is the electro-vital fluid.
But I strongly incline to the theory that this electro-vital principle does itself, by virtue of its own nature, vitalize the system. In other words, I am disposed to think that God makes it the immediate agent of vitalization; having constituted it the vis vitæ of both the animal and the vegetable kingdoms.
This consists in his sympathy of spirit with God in respect to those pure qualities which constitute the Divine holiness. But here again there are varieties. This I have already represented as consisting in the electro-vital force. This is another modification of the same essential principle electro-vitality. But now, to return to the physical or animal life of man the electro-vital element.
And because two positives repel each other, and also because the direction of the current is always from the positive to the negative pole, carrying the electro-vital fluid with it, either I must withdraw my positive electrode, or that excess of electro-vitality in the diseased part which makes it morbidly positive, and thus produces inflammation, must give way.
When we have settled upon the position that the electricity of the heavens and of the artificial machine are identical, and that their identity is essentially one with galvanism, magnetism, the electro-vital fluid of animal and the life-force of the vegetable kingdoms, it requires no extravagant imagination, nor remarkable degree of enthusiastic credulity, to suppose that all the forms of physical attraction and repulsion are due, under God, to the diversified modifications of the same all-pervading agent ELECTRICITY. Indeed, for myself, I feel no hesitation in expressing it as my belief that electricity, in one phase or another, and controlled only by WILL, is the grand motive-power of the universe.
But, if we be making the examination with the positive pole, as we come upon any point more or less inflamed, the current, quick as lightning, rushes away from such inflamed part to the part under the stationary negative pole, carrying with it, for the time being, more or less of that excess of electro-vital fluid which was in force at the inflamed point; so that no pain, perhaps, is experienced there; and thus the disease escapes detection.
And the nerve-lines and ramifications which issue from these great nerve-centers are polarized evidently in the same way the electro-vital fluid being disposed with its negative ends to the positive surfaces of the nerve-centers, and its positive or plus ends to the "vital organs," and especially to the surfaces of the organism as a whole.
Do you not see that, by placing my negative pole on the already overcharged and inflamed eyes, I attract to them yet more of the electro-vital fluid, and so increase their positive condition and aggravate the inflammation? and that, by presenting my positive electrode to the eyes already more or less paralyzed, I repel what little electro-vitality there was there, and so make the nerves all the more negative and dead?
Word Of The Day
Others Looking