Since life can come only from life, biological science, in thus placing the centrosome at the center of “a sphere of attraction”, places it in a surrounding field of what can only be *incorporeal living substance, from which alone could it attract the wherewithal to construct the cell and endow it with the functions of organization growth and reproduction.
As the active agent and center of attraction of the centrosome is a medium, standing between the field of life on the one side and the field of matter on the other side, acting under the law of attraction or affinity, by means of which vital force is drawn from the surrounding vital field and converted or transformed into the physical or chemical force which acts directly upon the matter of which the cell is composed. The centrosome also, like the central nervous system, may be compared in this respect to a dynamo, which acts in a similar manner in the conversion of mechanical energy into electric energy or current.
Biological science as yet is neither explicit nor comprehensive in this matter. It places the centrosome “at the center of a field of attraction”, but does not define or enumerate all the contents of that field. Enumerating only the physical or chemical forces and the various forms of matter of which the cell is composed, it implies that these are all the field contains. Biology, the science of life and living things, thus evades the acknowledgment of Life as a specific power, principle or substance, and defines it merely as *a state of the organism, *a condition; or as arising out of physical and chemical elements and forces acting so as to result in some unexplained way in the evolution of the individual living beings and the development of the species.
Such a definition fails to explain some of the most important phenomena of living organisms, such as growth, reproduction self- repair and constant changes with continued identity (not to speak of consciousness, feeling and thought) because it leaves out Life, the most important element of all. It is like the play of Hamlet with Hamlet left out.
It is an axiom of biological science that life comes only from preceding life.
The surrounding field of “the sphere of attraction”, at the center of which biology places the centrosome, must therefore contain the life substance as well as the matter of which the cell is composed upon which the attraction is exerted.
Attraction is force exercised mutually upon each other by two or more bodies, particles or substances, tending to make them approach each other, or to prevent their separating.
As the active agent or center of attraction the centrosome is a medium, standing between life on the one side and matter on the other side.
The central nervous system, made up of innumerable cells, with their nuclei and centrosomes, has already been compared to a dynamo. So each individual cell with its nucleus and centrosome may be called a dynamo in miniature. A dynamo is essentially a converter of one form of energy into another. Standing at the center of the field of attraction and acting in all directions under the law of attraction, the centrosome, through the agency of induction from the surrounding vital field, converts the chemical energy derived from nutrient matter into vital energy.
In no other way and from no other source could the centrosome attract that ruling element by which the living human body and brain are endowed with their peculiar properties and functions of organization, growth, self-repair, reproduction, intelligence, reason, feeling and will.
Electrical science, in its theory of electro-magnetic induction and conversion, has thus paved the way for a clearer understanding of the *modus operandi of the life principle.
Physics and biology are in harmony with homoeopathics, the science of homoeopathy. Their basic principles are identical. The respective scientific explanations of the origin, constitution and transformation of matter and the laws governing the same agree perfectly as far as they go.
The explanations of physics and biology serve equally well for homoeopathy in its physical and biological aspects. Ionization, for example, the breaking apart of electrolytes into anions and cations by solution or other process, chemical or mechanical (the theory of electrolytic dissociation) is an adequate physical explanation of what occurs in the preparation by trituration, solution and dilution according to scale of homoeopathic high potencies. The much-derided and discussed “infinitesimals” of homoeopathy are found at last in the farthest advance of science, to be “common property”, under the general mathematical “Theory of Infinitesimals”, Physicists and biologists, as well as homoeopathists, have been led to the adoption of the theory of the infinitesimal to explain their phenomena, and of the infinitesimal quantity to accomplish their ends.
The amazing achievements of modern physical chemical and electrical science have been made possible only by knowledge of the powers, properties and laws of the infinitesimal.
Mathematics, greatest and most ancient of the sciences, opened the way with its Infinitesimal Differential and Integral Calculus, and laid the foundation upon which later coming sciences were built-homoeopathy among them.
The Nature of Disease. – It has been said of homoeopathy that it is not a theory of disease, but a theory of cure. It is a taking phrase, but like many other such epigrams it embodies only a half truth, and half truths are fatal to right thinking. It can easily be proved by reference to the writings of Hahnemann that a theory of disease lies at the very foundation of homoeopathy. This theory, based upon the general philosophical conception of the unity, universality and supremacy of Life and Mind, out of which grew Hahnemann’s physio-dynamical doctrine of the life force, was an anticipation by more than eighty years of the biological theory propounded in 1897 by Virchow, the great German pathologist.
Virchow’s Cellular Pathology, in which he summed up his long lifetime of research and study, was until recently the highest medical authority on the subject. Virchow reached the conclusion that “pathology is but a branch of biology; that is, that disease is merely life under altered conditions”. This conclusion was hailed as “the most important achievement of the nineteenth century” and to Virchow, in recognition thereof, almost royal honors were granted.
Eighty-four years before Virchow published his famous dictum, namely in 1813, Hahnemann, in his “Spirit of the Homoeopathic Doctrine”. and elsewhere in his writings, used the following expressions; “To the explanation of human life, as also its two- fold conditions, health and disease, the principles by which we explain other phenomena are quite inapplicable”. Again he says; Now as the condition of the organism and its health state depends solely on the state of life which animates it, in like manner it follows that the altered state, which we term disease, consists in a condition altered originally only in its vital sensibilities and functions, irrespective of all chemical or mechanical principles; in short, it must consist in an altered dynamical condition, a changed mode of being, whereby a change in the properties of the material component parts of the body is afterward affected, which is a necessary consequence of the morbidly altered condition of the living whole in every individual case”.
“Disease will not case to be (spiritual) dynamic aberrations of our spiritlike life, manifested by sensations and actions, that is they will not cease to be immaterial modifications of our sensorial condition (health)”.
Thus, in terms almost identical with those of his great compatriot, Hahnemann stated the present accepted biological conception of disease and in so stating it anticipated, by nearly a century, one of the profoundest conclusions of modern scientific thought.
There are other subject in which Hahnemann, by marvellous foresight and intuition, anticipated the conclusions of modern science. Among them were certain of the discoveries of Koch and Pasteur.
In 1883 Koch was sent by the German government on a special mission to India to study Asiatic cholera. He discovered and was able to demonstrate the presence, in the intestines of cholera patients, of a spiral, threadlike bacterium which readily breaks up into little curved segments like a comma, each less than 1/10,000 of an inch in length. These microscopical living organisms multiply with great rapidity and swarm by the million in the intestines of such patients. Koch showed that they can be cultivated artificially in dilute gelatine broth and obtained in spoonfuls. He also showed that cholera could be produced in animals by administering to them a pure, concentrated culture of these germs, although it was only done with great difficulty after many experiments. He therefore held that the germs were the cause of cholera.
Other investigators, however, for a time failed to duplicate his results and refused to accept Koch’s conclusion. Pettenkofer, of Munich, who did not believe that the comma bacillus was the effective cause of cholera, to prove his contention, bravely swallowed a whole spoonful of the cultivated germs. His assistants did the same and none suffered any ill effect. This somewhat spectacular demonstration did not impress others, however, many of whom realized that it must be necessary for the human intestine to be in a favorable or susceptible condition, an unhealthy condition, for the bacillus to thrive and multiply in it.
Dr. Close was born November 24, 1860 and came to study homeopathy after the death of his father in 1879. His mother remarried a homoeopathic physician who turned Close's interests from law to medicine.
His stepfather helped him study the Organon and he attended medical school in California for two years. Finishing his studies at New York Homeopathic College he graduated in 1885. Completing his homeopathic education. Close preceptored with B. Fincke and P. P. Wells.
Setting up practice in Brooklyn, Dr. Close went on to found the Brooklyn Homoeopathic Union in 1897. This group devoted itself to the study of pure Hahnemannian homeopathy.
In 1905 Dr. Close was elected president of the International Hahnemannian Association. He was also the editor of the Department of Homeopathic Philosophy for the Homeopathic Recorder. Dr. Close taught homeopathic philosophy at New York Homeopathic Medical College from 1909-1913.
Dr. Close's lectures at New York Homeopathic were first published in the Homeopathic Recorder and later formed the basis for his masterpiece on homeopathic philosophy, The Genius of Homeopathy.
Dr. Close passed away on June 26, 1929 after a full and productive career in homeopathy.