The essential nature of vibrations

No science is ever correct because no subject is ever exhausted.

When you were on the earth plane, there was not much development of the theory of vibrations as we have it now.

Certain laws such as that of vibration have always been known.

We cannot get one colour of a certain length of vibration without having mixed with it others of a different length.

I would state that law in this way—

Wherever anything is produced as an entity formed of a combination of things, that entity can never be a pure substance.

Now the three primary colours are, as you have stated, red, yellow and blue. I think that these are named because of the practical advantage in the mixing of pigments and in the analysis and synthesis of colours rather than as being true to philosophical principles.

Sound is vibration, colour is vibration, all life is vibration. If this is firmly grasped by you, you will see one of the lines I followed in my conception of the unity of the Universe.

Are we to understand from this, Spinoza, that when you taught your philosophy, you had already realised that all life was vibration?

No, no!

Then you came to the law of vibration later. The other was a straight inspiration deduced from other lines of argument.

Yes. Colour is the sensation produced in the imagination by vibration filtered through the finest ether. I mean that the vibrations of colour are finer—infinitely so, than sound.

How about the vibrations producing colour as compared with the vibrations producing electric expressions? Which is finer?

There is never a concussion or violence in colour vibrations.

They are sometimes rather loud though, are they not?

That is Batavian wit.

Well, seriously, the vibrations that constitute thought would be finer still than those of colour, would they not?

One is length, the other concentrated intensity.

That is, the colour waves are length and the thought vibrations are intensity?

Yes, yes, yes.

So that while each is in its own scale of vibrations, there are different classes of vibration. That does not make two stuffs in the Universe, does it?

No.

Yet we must make a clear distinction between these two classes of vibration.

This may help to explain the oneness of the Universe with its infinitely varied forms. Take a flute. An ego blows through that flute seven different notes, each separate in form and size, even shape, yet all is caused by atmospheric vibration, all using the same energy exactly.

Then the distinctions are those of length, form, etc.

Yes.

And not as to the essential nature of the vibrations.

No. Now please follow me. Colour is colour, not so much because of the vibrations out of which it is composed as because of the peculiar, distinctive impact it makes when it impresses the optic nerve, the senses and, more important still, the consciousness.

Then the vibrations are really the means of expression—the instrument—whereas the sensation is the essential thing.

Yes—but realise that the whole philosophy of colour must rest for its final solution on the impact of the vibrations.

I will make this remark before I go. The questions we thought you would be curious about, you never seem to ask. Tell us, why is this?

Perhaps we like to talk about those things of which we think we know a little. We are ignorant even about our ignorance, so we do not ask the questions we should because we do not know that we do not know.

Almost like Socrates would say his say. But this is the question I expected—Are there any more colours than those known to earth ?

My thought about the number of colours was that it was infinite, if only our eyes were acute enough to detect them. You might, for instance, if we use the analogue of sound, make a chromatic scale so gradual that instead of twelve tones there would be say twelve times twelve. So we might have even more literally a very gradual chromatic scale in colours.

Yes, very well said, indeed.

I see others are waiting to speak, so I will go to the place where the speaker becomes the listener.

Goodbye.

—Spinoza In Spirit

The Twentieth Plane—A Psychic Revelation, Albert Durrant Watson, M. D., George W. Jacobs & Company, Philadelphia, 1919