How the fluid works
Franz Mesmer (1766). On the Influence of the Planets on the Human Body
I have stated that between ether and elementary matter there exist series of matter succeeding each other in fluidity. By their subtlety, they penetrate and fill all interstices.
Among these fluid substances, there is one which corresponds essentially and is in continuity with that which animates the nerves of the animal body, and which exists mingled and blended with the different kinds of fluids which I have mentioned—accompanying, penetrating, and consequently participating in all of their particular movements; it becomes like a direct and immediate conductor of all the different types of modifications undergone by fluids which are destined to make impressions upon the external senses, and all of these effects, when used by the substance of the nerves themselves, are then directed to the internal organ of sensations.
With this insight one can understand how, with regard to the movements which represent colors, forms, and shapes, it is possible that the entire system of nerves becomes an “eye”; with regard to the movements which convey the degrees of oscillation of air, how it becomes an “ear”; with regard to the movements produced by the direct contact of forms and shapes, how it becomes the organs of touch, taste, and smell.
How can movement ever emerge as anything other than movement? Sellars talks about this—it must be a feature of the reductive elements. What makes the system negentropic are rules and tiny bits whose properties are very few, or maybe even single. In Conway’s Game of Life, the property is single—black or white. This binary is in fact the distinction between thing and no-thing, matter and void (or: place), being and nothing.
[This secret identity between void and place is just incredible. We believe … We say that space is behind or underneath the extension of material occupation. Matter fills space. Being is a filling-relation. There is lack of presence—something positive, felt to be possible presence. The empty possibility is present. And then something knotty replaces this place-holding pre-presence, and then there is presence, which is recalcitrance against will. And the metaphor we use for this relation is filling. But filling is actually just the change of a things’s position—it is motion, or change of position. I push or pour a thing from position X1 to position X2. But from the perspective of X2, from a point-lander who occupies only that point, what has happened is that nothing has converted to something. Filling of space is really inversion at a position. There is not nothing behind or underneath a fillage of space. Empty space still has a positive quality, and that is position.]
Moreover, reflecting upon the rarefied nature and the mobility of matter, and the exact contiguity with which it fills all space, one can understand how there can never occur any movement or displacement, even within its slightest parts, which does not reach, to some extent, the entire expanse of the universe.
The fluid, being rigid and mechanical, converts collision with the rapidity of metal bars in all directions, thereby nullifying spatial separation. (Remember, from your local Museum of Science, the metal bar lying text to the bars filled with air and water to demonstrate how the medium of propagation affects the speed of sound.)
We can therefore conclude that there is neither a being nor a combination of matter which—by the relations in which they exist with the whole—does not imprint an effect upon all surrounding matter and upon the medium within which we are immersed; it follows that everything which exists can be experienced, and that animated bodies, finding themselves in contact with all of Nature, have the faculty of being sensitive not only to beings, but also to events which succeed one another.