Keely says that "if a planet of 20,000 miles diameter, more or less, should have a displacement of all the material, with the exception of a crust 5,000 miles thick, leaving an intervening void between this crust and a center of the size of an ordinary billiard ball, it would then require a force as great to move this small center mass as it would to move the shell of 5,000 miles thickness. Moreover, this small central mass would carry the load of this crust forever, keeping it equidistant, and there could be no opposing power, however great, that could bring them together. The imagination staggers in contemplating the immense load which bears upon this point of center where weight ceases. This what we understand by a neutral center." [The Neutral Center]

"In the conception of any machinery heretofore, the medium for inducing a neutral center has never been found. If it had, the difficulties of perpetual motion seekers would have ended and this problem would have become an established fact, requiring only an introductory impulse to cause it to run for centuries. I did not seek to attain perpetual motion, but a circuit is formed that actually has a neutral center, which is in a condition to be vivified by my vibratory ether, and while under operation by said substance is really a machine that is virtually independent of the mass (or globe) and it is the wonderful velocity of the vibratory circuit which makes it so. Still, with all its perfection, it requires to de fed with the vibratory ether to make it an independent motor.

"It is well known that all structures require a foundation in strength according to the weight of the mass they have to carry, but the foundations of the universe rest on a vacuous point far more minute than a molecule, in fact, to express this truth properly, on an interetheric point, which requires an infinite mind to understand. To look down into the depths of an etheric center is precisely the same as it would be to search into the broad space of heaven's ether to find the end, with this difference, that one is the positive field, while the other is the negative field.

"In seeking to solve the great problems which have baffled me, I have to all seeming, accidentally tripped over their solution ... it requires an infinite brain to evolve infinite positions. My highest power of concentration failed to attain the results which, at last, seeming accident revealed.

"I assume that sound is a real substance of unknown and wonderful tenuity, emanating from a body where it has been induced by percussion, and throwing out absolute corpuscles of matter - interatomic particles - with a velocity of 1120 ft. per second in vacua 20,000. The substance which is thus disseminated is a part and parcel of the mass agitated, and if kept under this agitation continuously would ... become thoroughly absorbed by the atmosphere ... In my estimation, sound truly defined is the disturbance of atomic equilibrium, rupturing actual atomic corpuscles and the substance thus liberated must certainly be a certain order of etheric flow.

"As regards odor," continues Mr. Keely, "we can only get some definite idea of its extreme and wondrous tenuity by considering that a large area of atmosphere can be impregnated for a number of years from a single grain of musk, and its weight will not appreciably diminish. The great paradox attending the flow of odorous particles is that they can be held in confinement in glass. Here is a substance of much higher tenuity than the glass that holds it and yet it cannot escape, as a sieve with meshes large as marbles and yet holding fine sand within it, in fact, a molecular vessel holding an atomic substance. But tenuous as odor is, it is crude in comparison to the substance of subdivision governing a magnetic flow, or flow of sympathy. This subdivision comes next to sound but is above sound. The action of the magnetic flow coincides somewhat to the receiving and distributing portion of the human brain giving off a depreciating ratio of the amount received, gradually depreciating the physical until dissolution takes place. The magnet on the same ratio gradually loses its power and becomes inert. If the relation of mind and matter, the brain and the physical, could be equated and so held, we would live eternally in our bodies, but the physical depreciation leads to much higher development, the liberation of the pure ether from the crude molecular."

For nearly fifteen years Keely constructed engines of various models, with the end in view of controlling and using ether as we now control and use steam, before he discovered that it is impossible to use the ether in any other way than as a medium for the energy that he is now experimenting with, and which he defines as 'a condition of sympathetic vibration associated with the polar stream positively and negatively.' (His magnetic engine.)

"The concept of will," says Arthur Schopenhauer "has hitherto commonly been subordinated to that of force, but I reverse the matter entirely, and desire that every force in nature be thought of as will."

Keely writes "luminiferous ether, or celestial mind force, a compound interetheric element, is the substance of which everything visible is composed. It is the great sympathetic protoplastic element, life itself. Consequently, our physical organisms are composed of this element ... its seat in the cerebral convolutions ...This sympathetic outreach (sympathetic radiation) is mind flow proper, or will force sympathetic polarization to produce action, sympathetic depolarization to neutralize it. Polar and depolar differentiation result in motion. The true protoplastic element ... permeates all forms and conditions of matter, having for its attendants, gravity, electricity and magnetism, the triple conditions born in itself. In fact, it is the soul of matter, the element from which all forms of motion receive their introductory impulse."