All schools of modern philosophy now agree that “life can come only from previous life”. As a scientific doctrine the theory of “spontaneous generation,” after centuries of stubbornly contested existence, has been abandoned by all except a very few stubborn persons of the materialistic school who still cling to the ancient fallacy, unaware that the ground has been cut from under them and that they have been left, like Mahomet’s coffin, suspended in midair.
Step by step, with many long periods of inactivity and sometimes of retrogression, the search for the origin of life has gone on. Repeatedly, when brought up against the logical necessity of taking the final step and acknowledging the One Infinite and Eternal Source of Life the searchers have stubbornly turned back and begun over again only to return to the same inescapable point.
Chemist, physicist and biologist alike each in his own special path, pursues it to the end, and there finds himself standing with his fellows on the brink of the great mystery which can only be solved by admitting the existence of the Supreme Being.
The chemist, guided by the law of chemical affinity and molecular attraction, reaches the sphere of Universal Attraction. He stops and turns away. The biologist, tracing life back through organism to the cell, and still further back to the formless bit of protoplasm lying, as it were, on the shore of the infinite ocean of his life, also halts and turns away rather than spread the sails of his little bark and sail by faith, if he must, into the have which is in plain view if he will be open his eyes and look.
The physicist analyses matter, divides and subdivides it until it disappears in the hypothetical inanimate, unintelligent ether of space which he conceives to be the source both of matter and force, and there he also halts. Each is unsatisfied and must ever remain so until, like Hahnemann, he yields to that innermost urge of the soul which demands of every man that he take the final step and acknowledge the Infinite Life and Mind of the Universe, the source and substance of all power, the Father Eternal, to whom he owes spiritual allegiance.
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.