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BODY AND SOUL 
 
 A COURSE OF LECTURES 
 
 DELIVERED IN THE TRANCE 6TATE 
 
 THROUGH THE MEDIUMISTIC ORGANIZATION 
 
 OF 
 
 J. OLEGG WRIGHT. 
 
 ji-^ 
 
 PUBLISHED BY 
 
 J. CLEGG WRIGHT, 
 
 Amelia, Ohio, 
 
 1902, 
 
THE LIBRARY eF 
 
 GONG«eSS, 
 Two Coi^ies Receives 
 
 FEB. I! 1902 
 
 CLASS ^^ XXck Mcs. 
 
 COPY a 
 
 
 K^ 
 
 Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1902, by 
 
 J, CLEGG WRIGHT, 
 in the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 
 
:f :e^ E IF .A_ o E . 
 
 This volume is given to the public in the hope that it 
 may be a small contribution to the great study of the soul 
 and the real functions of the mind. The extraordinary 
 phenomena presented by Modern Spiritualism have drawn 
 much attention to their cause and value in estimating the 
 possibilities of conscious continuance of life after the death 
 of the body ; they throw light on the subject of immortality 
 and the conditions of life in the future state, and will more 
 and more, as time goes on, become the serious study of those 
 who are seeking for a scientific basis for the belief in immor- 
 tality, and a future life for the children of the human race. 
 
 Metaphysical thinkers have become so wedded to the 
 deductive method that they have ignored all inductive 
 process of the mind being applied to the problems of the 
 soul, its existence and future continuance ; they have 
 simply contented themselves with a speculative philosophy 
 of the mind, and dogmatized in fields where their knowl- 
 edge could not go. With the great advancement of mod- 
 ern science and its methods has arisen a desire to apply 
 the same formula of investigation and reason to the prob- 
 lems of the soul. The truth is, science is the great con- 
 queror of all truth, and nature is the field in which man 
 must look for the foundation of all his facts and laws for 
 and on which he can postulate the great principles of 
 Being and Power. The different states of consciousness 
 seen presented in the processes of action and change to the 
 human mind are within the range and grasp of a correct 
 scientific examination and study. Philosophy must walk 
 
iv Preface. 
 
 in the path of facts, and give to them order, plan and law. 
 It must cease to be the product of unsupported general- 
 izations and postulates. Science demands that the facts 
 be the basis of correct philosophy, and it must ever con- 
 cede truth to demonstration, and the hopes and dreams 
 of ages must go before the revelations of nature under the 
 eye of science. The powers of the soul must be studied in 
 the same manner as we study other phenomena presented 
 by nature. The strangest of facts must be noted with care, 
 and their full value taken. Those who have old theories 
 and beliefs to save from destruction cannot easily enter into 
 these investigations. The past has made man a slave to 
 error, and superstition has been the bond and thrall of the 
 human race for ages. The truly scientific man follows the 
 light of reason : the dictates of truth must be obeyed. 
 
 It is obvious that if evidence can be found anywhere 
 tending to prove the immortality of the soul, it must be 
 found in the domain of mental action called the abnormal. 
 Sometimes we call that abnormal which is only elemental 
 in its power and nature as a function of mind. There are 
 often seen degrees of clairvoyance that are so close to the 
 condition of hallucination that it is difficult to separate 
 the two conditions. The facts of the dream-state some- 
 times come so close to the waking-state that it is hard to 
 separate one state from the other. There are difficulties 
 in all studies. The dream consciousness, the trance con- 
 sciousness, and the clairvoyant consciousness are different 
 phases or planes on which we see presented the evidence 
 of a soul, its power of independent thought, ability to 
 transcend the reach of organic function and common 
 mental action, as presented in the sense consciousness. 
 
Preface. v 
 
 The lectures collected and published in this volume 
 were most of them given in the city of Washington, D. C, 
 and reported by Mr. F. WiiiLiAMS, and to his great kind- 
 ness I am obligated for the lectures as they stand here as 
 delivered by me while in the trance state. This state, as 
 seen in me, is a state of perfect sleep, that is, the conscious, 
 normal mind is suspended, and the trance mind, with a 
 changed personality, appears and becomes the possessor 
 of the organism for the time being. 
 
 The trance consciousness is always accompanied with a 
 changed personality. The personality on its own plane 
 of action is complete. The consciousness has a separate 
 field of knowledge and perception. It has also the power 
 to give and take from the normal organic personality. 
 The knowledge of the medium in this state can be drawn 
 upon and used, and knowledge that is not in the organic 
 normal mind can be given to it, and, under suitable con- 
 ditions, this knowledge will be retained after the manner 
 that dreams are recollected and remembered after as facts 
 of consciousness. 
 
 The portrait accompaning this volume was made by 
 the late and lamented Henry J. Newton, of New York 
 city, so long and so deservedly known as a supporter of 
 all truth as presented by modern science, and the facts 
 and phenomena of modern spiritualism in particular. 
 
 With dutiful respect to my readers I leave the lectures 
 to speak for themselves, asking a kind generosity in judg- 
 ment, as the themes treated lie so far away from the 
 ordinary tracks of common thought and investigation. 
 Yours in good faith, 
 
 J. CLEGG WRIGHT. 
 
 Amelia, O., January 8th, 1902. 
 
MY STRUGGLE, 
 
 Long did I toil amid the sand. The stones 
 
 Oft cut my feet, but I went onward to the goal. 
 
 The nights were dark, the skies were black, 
 
 But on I went, with seldom a star to light my path. 
 
 Stumbling I often fell, yet in pain went on. 
 
 For voices bade me rise and walk, and labor to complete 
 
 my task ; 
 And charming dreams did lure me to fancied paradise. 
 
 I tarried oft and sought the waters, for I was athirst, 
 But there was none, the river bed was dry ; 
 And thus I toiled and wandered far to find the end. 
 Oh, could I have but seen how long and hard the road 
 I would have fainted long before the goal was reached. 
 A solitary star of night shone out, and then the bars of 
 
 night gave 
 Way before the birth of the lordly morn that 
 Led to the greater glories of the day. 
 
 Then spirits came, and with their glorious breath 
 breathed 
 Into my torpid brain the thought of other spheres. 
 
 Lo, like a current of warm air, I spoke 
 The thoughts as though the force of heaven 
 Directed me to speak. 
 
 The thought was trained to meet the wants of heart 
 and brain. 
 
 And so I labored. 
 
 My labor then was so to live 
 That I might be a perfect channel for the souls 
 Walking the ethereal plane and loving man. 
 And so I struggled on — am struggling still- 
 To be the instrument atuned with harmonious strings 
 Whereon spirits can play their truthful psalms of life, 
 And give through me a legacy of thought to man. 
 
J. CLEGG WRIGHT AND HIS INSPIRATIONS. 
 
 Touring in Florida and other South-lands last winter, 
 to avoid the intense cold of Michigan, it was my good 
 fortune to have the privilege of listening to a course of 
 J. Clegg Wright's special lectures — lectures adapted 
 to thinkers, students, historians, metaphysicians, and ad- 
 vanced occultists. 
 
 The hereditary fortune of Mr. Wright was cranial 
 rather than financial. It is brains that tell, and especially 
 so when touched by the promethean fires of heaven. 
 Gifted naturally with a nervo- organization and a high 
 order of intellect, Mr. Wright presented to the open 
 vision of the spirit world the grand opportunity for sue* 
 cessful mediumistic infiuence in the interest of humanity. 
 
 A brilliant, invisible intelligence, known on earth as 
 George Rushton, of high English ancestiy, and whose 
 identity has been abundantly established, discovering the 
 sensitive, highly-tuned organization of Mr. Wright, with 
 its deep far-reaching, yet comparatively undeveloped 
 possibilities, made him his intermediary instrument for 
 teaching to the world the higher truths of the spiritual 
 philosophy. 
 
 During the last fifty years and over I have seen in this 
 and foreign lands at least three thousand mediums con- 
 
viii J. Clegg Wright and his Inspirations. 
 
 trolled, some consciously and others unconsciously by 
 discarnate spirits, and others still psychically touched by 
 angel fingers, but I never saw two influenced precisely 
 alike. 
 
 The subject of this writing, richly gifted with trance, 
 impressional and inspirational mediumship, takes in, when 
 in his superior state, a wide horizon of history, its found- 
 ers of nations, governments and institutions ; its patriots, 
 martyrs, poets, sages, statesmen, metaphysicians and savi- 
 ours, enriched with the wisdom of the spheres as now 
 enunciated by those coronated lords in the heavens. 
 
 Inspiration is both universal and special. It is a divine 
 inbreathing, which Plato pronounced "the source of all 
 that is sublime and beautiful in man." Pythagoras com- 
 pared it to suggestions coming from the "gods and 
 revealing hidden things." Anaxagoras, 500 B. C, main- 
 tained that inspiration was the work of invisible spirits. 
 Homer said it came direct from heaven. Cicero pro- 
 nounced it "the divine breath." "It is not ye who 
 speak," said Jesus, "but the spirit within you." So it is 
 not our worthy brother Wright that speaks, but rather 
 the divine breath, the inspiration of philosophers, sages 
 and the spirits of our ascended loved ones. 
 
 Extensive as my travels and exhaustive as my studies 
 have been in the line of psychic science, with its varied 
 intertwining branches of research, I say deliberately that 
 I never listened to such profundity of thought and radiant 
 overflow of wisdom and science as streamed in golden 
 sentences from that exalted spirit, Rushton, through the 
 lips of J. CijEGG Wright. Conscientious mediumship is 
 the gateway to immortality. 
 
J. Clegg Wright and his Inspirations. ix 
 
 True, in the midst of his uplifting discourses, he would 
 sometimes be sympathetically approached by perhaps 
 Humbolt, Shelley, Dalton, — or by Proctus, some Egyptian 
 Hierophant, or some Assyrian sage, correcting some old 
 historical mistake, or giving a true version of some ancient 
 nation's downfall, crowned with a Jefferson's warning con- 
 cerning our own country. 
 
 The references of Rushton to Confucius, Socrates, Jesus, 
 Plotinus, Epictetus, Bruno, and other great moral heroes, 
 were not only historic, poetic and scholastic, but they 
 were revelations of and from a mighty soul long summer- 
 ing in the heavens. This inspiring spirit is also an adept 
 in the highest sense of science, grasping atoms, molecules, 
 cells, laws of vibration, and the methods of worlds' form- 
 ations. 
 
 These lectures of Mr. Wright are not a set of cut-and- 
 dried platitudes, that Rushton, parrot-like, repeats through 
 him from camp to camp. No, they are comparable to a 
 living, bubbling fountain, whose crystal drops are seem- 
 ingly innumerable. This invisible spirit Rushton is cer- 
 tainly very exalted, and in sympathetic touch with the 
 royal-souled reformers and martyrs of the olden ages. The 
 choicest elements and the best value of all literature, 
 ancient or modern, lie in the ideal of the spiritual world. 
 Homer was beggared when shorn of his draft on the 
 spiritual; Tasso, uninspired, could not have delivered his 
 "Jerusalem;" Dante failed when he had no vision of the 
 hells; Bunyan abandoned his "Pilgrim" when his angel 
 left him ; Milton was shut away from Paradise when the 
 heavenly messenger withdrew ; but Shakespear's ghost 
 would not down. Hamlet alone saw his father's ghost, 
 
X J. Clegg Wright and his Inspirations. 
 
 and Macbeth that of Banqo. Hamlet and Horatio waited 
 to lay the ghost of the murdered King : 
 
 '■'■Ham. What hour now? 
 Hor. I think it lacks of twelve. 
 
 ENTER GHOST. 
 
 Ham. Angels and ministers of grace defend us ! 
 Be thou a Spirit of health or goblin damned; 
 Bring with thee airs of heaven or blasts of hell ; 
 Be thy intents wicked or charitable ; 
 Thou comest in such questionable shape 
 That I will speak to thee: 
 Why has the sepulcher unlocked 
 His ponderous and marble jaws 
 To cast thee up again ? 
 
 Ghost. I am thy father's spirit, 
 , Doomed for a certain time to walk the night, 
 
 And, for the day, confined to fast in fires 
 Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature 
 Are burnt and purged away." 
 
 Personally knowing J. Clegg Wright's industry, men- 
 tal capacity, devotion to truth and adaptation as teacher, 
 under Rushton^s inspiration, to the demands of the day 
 and the hour, I take very great pleasure in recommending 
 all seekers after the truth — and I feel to add, the higher 
 truths involved in science, philosophy and religion^ — to 
 patronize his lectures, and furthermore, to purchase his 
 book, for books, enlarging and enriching libraries, live 
 long after the fingers that wrote them lie crumbling 
 
 in dust. 
 
 J. M. PEEBLES, M. D. 
 
 Battle Creek, Mich. 
 
LECTURE I. 
 
 THE BRAIN AND THE TRANCE STATE. 
 
 Friends, in presenting to you so exalted a theme 
 in a scientific manner it will be necessary, in the 
 first place, for me to explain certain terms which 
 go to constitute a scientific terminology. The first 
 word that I want to define is " cell." The word 
 cell, in its first form, gives you the idea of a sack. 
 In the days of Harvey, the demonstrator of the 
 circulation of the blood, a cell meant a sack, but in 
 the present condition of the cellular hypothesis it 
 does not mean exactly a sack, but a negative and a 
 positive polarity of energy. You can see when you 
 take the stopper out of your bath tub a whirling 
 motion made by the water in passing into the pipe, 
 that is vortex motion ; and the ratio of atomic 
 motion is in proportion to the polarities of the 
 energy. That will be very difiicult for some of you 
 to understand, but if you closely observe the water 
 you will see that some parts of it are moving at a 
 higher ratio of speed than other parts, and in the 
 formation of a cell some of the atoms being (atoms 
 being vortex motion) moved at a higher ratio of 
 vibration than others, and the combination of the 
 
10 The Brain and the Trance State. 
 
 ratios of atomic motion constitute the molecular 
 cell. Now that is technical, but it is necessary for 
 you to understand what I mean when I say cell, for 
 there are life cells, there are germ cells, and there 
 are nerve cells, and this evening it is with nerve 
 cells, for a few moments, that I want you to linger 
 attentively. 
 
 If I could present to you an actual medulla 
 oblongata (a name given by the anatomists of the 
 seventeenth century to an organ located at the 
 summit of the spinal marrow) it might serve to 
 illustrate this lesson. This organ is discharging the 
 functions of nervous action which Plato attributed 
 to the animal soul. Indeed its functioning capa- 
 bility is to regulate, not to make, the action of the 
 vital organs generally, and it is automatic ; that is 
 to say, the nerve cells of the medulla oblongata act 
 without consciousness. They are a co-ordinating 
 power without consciousness. The life in the womb 
 is an automatic life, and the building of the organic 
 and nervous constitution is the work of the auto- 
 matic processes of nervous action, and this auto- 
 matic nervous action is co-ordinated by the soul 
 entity, hence the soul is an automatic and a con- 
 scious force through and in the physical body. 
 
 The largest area of the soul's function is auto- 
 matic. Plato's explanations made the animal soul 
 — the automatic soul — a distinct, a mortal, soul, but 
 at that period of time the philosophers made attri- 
 
The Brain and the Trance State. 11 
 
 butes into entities. It is one soul, not seven. In 
 Platonic idealism seven souls were represented. 
 One soul out of the seven was the immortal soul 
 called the nous to know, the " knowing soul," 
 
 In the process of body building, according to the 
 order of evolution, life appeared first in a simple 
 cell, and cell succeeded cell until the most compli- 
 cated organization was the result. Organ was 
 added to organ, according to the surrounding con- 
 ditions, changing conditions changed the needs and 
 the function of the organization, but the soul could 
 only express its powers according to the character 
 of its organization. Before consciousness appeared 
 there was a vegetable consciousness — a form of 
 consciousness that did not know that it was plan- 
 ning, designing, or adapting — there was no self- 
 consciousness. The soul has two attributes of con- 
 sciousness : First, the unconsious power to co-ordi- 
 nate; second, the self-conscious power to co-ordinate 
 — knowingly design and plan. 
 
 The soul built the body under a long influence 
 of an automatic heredity, a purely vegetable act of 
 the soul. The soul proceeded to work on the auto- 
 matic lines of life, following the idea of past form 
 as far as possible. New conditions introducing 
 change of structure and function. The function 
 created the faculty according to the law of adap- 
 tation. I am using the word "faculty" in its 
 legal sense — power. It acquired a power, and that 
 
12 The Brain and the Trance State. 
 
 power had, fn organic expression, an organ; hence 
 the soul of man had to pass through the automatic 
 stage before any self-consciousness was attained. 
 It was a co-ordinating mechanical consciousness. 
 This mechanical consciousness is the Life Function. 
 You see it in its most elemental expression in the 
 chemical action of atoms. The selective capability 
 of oxygen in relation to hydrogen is as one to 
 two ; that is, oxj^gen will polarize with hydrogen 
 when there are two atoms of hydrogen and one of 
 oxygen, and in no other way. That is mechanical 
 selection, and it is elemental mind ; it is co-ordi- 
 nating intelligence without consciousness. This 
 elemental state the soul attained and expressed in 
 its evolution through inferior organic forms, and 
 built the medulla oblongata out of the necessities 
 of its existence. All the faculties of mind have 
 been built out of the necessities of existence. 
 
 This automatic nervous relativity is retained in 
 the animal organism for wonderful purposes. I 
 will now illustrate where it comes in. If I could 
 show you an optic nerve you would see a little 
 white cord stretching from the back of the eye 
 to the optic thalami. The optic thalami are two 
 glands lying at the base of the brain, or nearly so, 
 and about the size of a hazelnut in an adult. The 
 constitution of the optic nerve is a wonderful con- 
 stitution ; it is as wonderful as the eye. The eye 
 of man will successfully interpret vibrations that 
 
The Brain and the Trance State. 13 
 
 range between six hundred and six hundred and 
 fifty millions per second. These words have no 
 meaning to you. The amplitude and marvelous 
 character of the vibrations. 
 
 The vibratory theory of light is not correct, but 
 the hammering processes of light, like little ham- 
 mers, is. When you have your picture taken the 
 light beats — hammers — upon the sensitive plate 
 and dissolves certain chemical elements there. 
 The eye has surrounding it cones as minute trum- 
 pets, arranged with the little ends toward the 
 center of the eye, and in round numbers there 
 are six hundred millions of these little trumpets 
 in the human eye. There are thirty-two thousand 
 strands in the optic nerve, and the hammers of 
 light cause molecular vibration in the optic nerve. 
 The atoms of the nerve do not change places, but 
 they vibrate, and the complicated vibration is sen- 
 sation. 
 
 Now, I want you to understand what I mean 
 when I say " sensation." I mean the nervous 
 mechanical action that an object has produced 
 upon the apparatus of the eye. That vibration is 
 continued to the thalami. The name, " thalami," 
 is Latin, and means beds. There are two, and 
 they are the beds of these vibrations. The larger 
 cellular volume involved in the structure of the 
 thalami give a storage battery, so to speak, for the 
 continuity and the storing of sensational energy. 
 
14 The Brain and the Trance State. 
 
 When a sensation has reached the thalami — sen- 
 sations are all very complicated — that sensation 
 passes to another gland (or glands) which has been 
 named from its appearance. It is a stratified gland 
 and is called the corpus striatum; but there are two, 
 and the plural comes in the corpus striata, and here 
 is the seat of consciousness. 
 
 It is here that the soul stands at the door of sen- 
 sation and perceives. All animals are conscious that 
 possess corpus striata; without the corpus striata 
 there is no consciousness. There is a little thread, 
 a nerve, passing between the thalami and the stri- 
 ata, and when this nerve is disconnected from the 
 thalami you are asleep. If a physician could cut 
 that nerve you would never awaken any more, your 
 life would be one continuous sleep. All that hap- 
 pens when you go to sleep is that the disconnection 
 is made between the striata and the sensory tha- 
 lami. You are cut oiF from the external world, 
 and without sensation there is no consciousness. 
 
 Consciousness is based on sensation. This is the 
 reason why the soul was unconscious before it was 
 embodied. This is the reason why you had no foetal 
 consciousness. This is the reason why you cannot re- 
 member your first year. The repeated hammerings 
 of sensation were necessary to awaken conscious- 
 ness. Sensations are awakening consciousness. This 
 is why the soul is embodied. The soul would never 
 have been conscious if it had not been embodied. 
 
The Brain and the Trance State. 15 
 
 It was embodied for the purpose of relativity, and 
 through relativity it becomes conscious. Your con- 
 tact through sensation with nature is awakening 
 knowledge, inducing knowledge. Before the soul 
 can awaken to its knowledge it must have sensa- 
 tion. There must, in other words, be something to 
 butt against, something to strike it. There must 
 be the ego and the non-ego before consciousness 
 can be attained. There must be the polarities 
 established, and these are established in the chem- 
 ical relativities of the vital sphere. Then the com- 
 plicated cells — nerves and cells — are the not-I; they 
 are the thalami of the mind — the bed of the mind. 
 The cerebral mass located in this region is com- 
 posed merely of pigeon-holes, in which sensations, 
 perceptions, and ideas are stored. 
 
 I must define the word " idea." I mean by idea 
 the sum of the diiference between two sensations. 
 Without sensations there can be no idea ; with two 
 sensations there is bound to be a thought, and that 
 thought will be one of contrast in time and place. 
 Time is intuitive ; place is intuitive. Time and place 
 are original, elemental ideas ; they belong to the 
 soul, and come into expression in the course of the 
 mechanical evolution of its heredity, hence two 
 things : you see a thing has length, breadth, and 
 thickness ; a thing is in space. The infinite is not a 
 thing because it has no parts, it has no surface, it has 
 no center. The infinite is unthinkable because it is 
 
16 The Brain and the Trance State. 
 
 not a thing. The mind can only think thought- 
 forms, and there are two thought-forms of the same 
 thing. Example ; The chair you sit upon is a 
 thought-form ; the statue a thought-form. Form is 
 the real, symbol the expression. You know that 
 it is a chair because there is a chair like that chair 
 in your mind, in your consciousness. The image 
 of the chair is molecular, it is in the thalami, and 
 the soul sees it in the thalami. The world you see, 
 the Washington you see, the buildings you see, are 
 not the buildings out there, but they are the pic- 
 tures those buildings out there have made in the 
 optic thalami, and the soul sees the world in the 
 cells of the brain. All that you know is in the 
 mind. Form is an attribute of consciousness, and 
 time an attribute of consciousness. Well, then, 
 having two excitements produced separate and 
 distinct on the optic nerve they follow one another, 
 and because they follow one another, and are 
 necessarily fated to follow one another, the distance 
 between them is time. 
 
 The distance between two sensations is time, and 
 their relationship to each other is place. Thus 
 the original ideas of time and place spring out 
 of the attribute of the soul's experiences in its 
 automatic relationship in the past. The difference 
 between two sensations constitutes the function of 
 induction. 
 
 Induction is that faculty of reason that distingu- 
 
The Brain and the Trance State. 17 
 
 ishes differences ; it is comparative ; it is a classifier 
 of sensations. 
 
 Deduction is that power or attribute of reason 
 which classifies ideas in relation to origin or cause. 
 It traces the parentage of ideas and sensations. It 
 identifies causes with their immediate and remote 
 efi"ects, and effects to their real causes. It is the 
 philosophical quality of the mind. 
 
 Now that is all I need to explain in an elemental 
 way this evening to cause you to rise to the 
 comprehension of the constitution of mediumship 
 in relation to what I will call the trance con- 
 sciousness. 
 
 An artificial production of sleep is entrancement. 
 Any sleep that is induced by concentration is en- 
 trancement. What is that? Concentration is the 
 fixing of attention on as simple a sensation as pos- 
 sible. Supposing you could so build a room that 
 you could look at the point of a knitting needle 
 and see nothing else in the room, that would be as 
 simple a sensation as you could produce, and by 
 steadily fixing the eye on that point there would 
 be a continuity of the same vibration in the optic 
 nerve, and the vibrations would run one after 
 another and be alike, and the monotony, long con- 
 tinued, cuts the connection between the thalami 
 and corpus striata. I do not care how lymphatic a 
 temperament may be, or how positive a will may 
 be, the person will lapse into trance consciousness 
 
18 The Brain and the Trance State. 
 
 by persistently continuing one sensation. Nature 
 is so powerfully fortified in this relation that she 
 has made provision in the nervous system to end 
 sensation when the sensation becomes too domi- 
 nant. Shakespeare did not understand the subject 
 when he said that " The beetle you tread upon 
 feels as much pain as when a giant dies." 
 
 It does not. The constitution of the nervous 
 system will only transmit a certain amount of ner- 
 vous force called pain before you are landed in 
 unconsciousness. When the pain reaches i ts maxi- 
 mum you are no longer sensible of pain. Any 
 interference with the cellular vibration of the 
 thalami will cut off sensation. This is why ether, 
 when it amalgamates with the hydrogen and the 
 oxygen forming the blood corpuscle in the lungs, 
 will so disturb normal cellular activity and suspend 
 consciousness, that you may have a very painful 
 surgical operation performed while the influence 
 holds. Gases that readily amalgamate chemically 
 with hydrogen and oxygen disturb the sensibility. 
 This is why tobacco is so restful to the nervous 
 man ; it soothes, because its chemical elements im- 
 part nervous cellular activity. If you feed your 
 child too much beyond the capacity of the pneumo- 
 gastric nerve to cause digestion pain in the child's 
 stomach will produce unconsciousness, and this is 
 a fit, a rapid contraction, expansion, and explosion 
 of nerve cells, and if the fit becomes continuous the 
 
The Brain and the Trance State. 19 
 
 nerve cells and the brain cells burst and the child 
 dies in convulsions. 
 
 Then when you have suspended consciousness by 
 concentration of the attention you are in a dream 
 state. You are not perfectly separate, not abso- 
 lutely separate from sensation, and that sensation 
 provokes activity in the pigeon holes of the cere- 
 brum, shall I say, and broken states of memory 
 overlapping each other produce a dream conscious- 
 ness. This is the dream consciousness in its most 
 elemental form. But supposing that the cell, being 
 an auric cell, that is, it is a vital cell and a mag- 
 netic cell, constituting the dual molecule, and in 
 sympathy — cells have mutual sympathies and 
 mutual antagonisms — when an independent soul, 
 either on the material plane of expression or on 
 the spiritual plane of expression, influences the 
 aura of a cell, it easily affects that cell in a state 
 of sleep. It does not easily affect that cell in the 
 waking state, because sensation dominates all the 
 cells, but in the sleeping state the cells are readily 
 influenced sympathetically by the auric sphere of 
 the spirit, as I must explain. 
 
 There is what has been called magnetism con- 
 nected with the expression of every soul. Magnet- 
 ism is a molecular force ; remember that. It is not 
 spirit, for spirit is not molecular, but magnetism is 
 molecular, and forms a link between matter and 
 spirit. It is extremely sensitive to sympathy, it is 
 
' 20 The Brain and the Trance State. 
 
 mechanically sympathetic, hence when a soul in 
 form or a soul in spirit impinges upon the magnetic 
 cell, it transfers its expression to that cell, and the 
 most sensitive cell will express. So it gains an 
 entrance to the consciousness — the trance consci- 
 ousness of the soul. This consciousness is awakened 
 by the excitement of the spirit through the aura of 
 a cell, and this is the jointure, this is the plane 
 of relativity between the controlling spirit and the 
 soul of the medium. 
 
 The soul of the medium is awakened to the 
 thought, not sensationally awakened, but awakened 
 to the trance consciousness, and carries that awake- 
 ning to the medulla oblongata, where it gains an 
 automatic expression. It is automatic talking now, 
 but I am talking through the trance consciousness 
 of the medium. The only way that I can get con- 
 sciously at you is to articulate, and I borrow — under 
 the constitution of nature I am capable of borrow- 
 ing — an organization that I may become a con- 
 scious environment to you, and awaken your con- 
 sciousness to the thoughts that I am giving ex- 
 pression to, and the truths that I am revealing 
 to you. 
 
 Thus there is a connection, shall I call it a tele- 
 graphic connection, between the cells of the me- 
 dulla oblongata and the corpus striata. There is a 
 little strand in the nerve that is independent, and 
 because that strand is independent of the thalami 
 
The Brain and the Trance State. 21 
 
 trance mediumship is naturally possible. Without 
 that strand there could be no spiritual communica- 
 tion through the trance-consciousness. I will show 
 you now where this nerve in another way operates, 
 and you will readily recognize the function. Sup- 
 posing you stood on the car track, and a car was 
 rapidly coming toward you, and you were not con- 
 scious of its coming, you were looking the other 
 way and thinking on another subject, and a person 
 on the sidewalk shouted to you. You immediately 
 jumped. Now, this wonderful apparatus which 
 enables you to jump out of the way of a street car 
 before you have time to reflect on the cause of 
 danger, the automatic action of sensation on the 
 muscular apparatus, apart from the dictation of the 
 mind, it follows that spirits can operate the muscles 
 without calling into action the faculties of the 
 mind. 
 
 Suppose you were fighting and a blow was com- 
 ing to your eye. The mind has no time to act. 
 Before the mind can co-ordinate an action the eye- 
 lid has closed. There is a strand in the optic nerve 
 that passes directly to the medulla oblongata and 
 co-ordinates muscular motion with motor nerves. 
 You are indebted for this discovery to science. 
 Modern physiological and anatomic science have 
 demonstrated the existence of the apparatus through 
 which spirits can communicate with mortals. Never 
 permit it again to be said by ignorant opponents of 
 
22 The Brain and the Teance State. 
 
 the phenomena of the trance-consciousness and 
 the influence of spiritual power that such manifes- 
 tations are not consistent with known physiological 
 science. It is perfectly in harmony with physiolo- 
 gical and anatomical science, demonstrated as a 
 fact in organization every day in your medical 
 colleges. 
 
 You are indebted for this exposition to a spirit 
 who, while in the form, was very critical, and much 
 in doubt as to the genuineness of the physical 
 phenomena of mediumship. Dr. Carpenter has 
 furnished you these facts. He wrote his learned 
 work on physiology many years ago, but I would 
 recommend those of you who want to know more 
 of unconscious cerebral action to read it, for it was 
 he who created the phrase, " unconscious cerebra- 
 tion," — unconscious thinking. 
 
 Let me for a little while fall into the retrospec- 
 tive consciousness. I can distinctly recollect, as I 
 pass over the field of my retrospective memory 
 the great sensation made in London when Edward 
 Irving came there to deliver his marvelous sermons 
 — we call them sermons. Irving was a few years 
 older, and a friend of Thomas Carlyle, born in the 
 same town in Scotland, Annan, in the vale of 
 Annandale. I think, if I am not mistaken, it was 
 about the year 1826 when Edward Irving com- 
 menced his work in London. A large tabernacle 
 was built for him and he spoke until 1835 in that 
 
The Brain and the Trance State. 23 
 
 tabernacle, and spoke always in the trance state. 
 Probably, I think, you will be able to find those 
 sermons in your wonderful library here. Marvel- 
 ously eloquent, he was controlled by spirits that 
 had the intent of building the reformation of his 
 work at that time. Later the subject excited great 
 attention throughout Europe and America. 
 
 The contributions of Braid to the study of Mes- 
 merism led to the establishment of many broad 
 principles, or, shall I say laws, regulating the in- 
 ducement of the sleep. Between 1836 and 1850 a 
 rapid development of knowledge was attained on 
 the subject of entrancement. Braid demonstrated 
 that it was attention, concentration, monotony. 
 
 It pains me at this moment to have to contradict 
 the French school of hypnotists who have declared 
 that the hypnosis is produced by suggestion. The 
 hypnosis is not produced by suggestion, but it is 
 produced by monotony, hence a monotonous con- 
 tinuity of tone will produce the quiet state. It 
 was for this reason that the Druids intoned their 
 speeches, their addresses, their sermons. It is for 
 this reason that you have in the Koman Catholic 
 Church intoning to-da3^ It has come down the 
 ages from the Druidical period, because it induced 
 sensitiveness in the early and primitive forms of 
 Druidical mediumship. I could talk to you a great 
 deal about that, but I want you to understand, and 
 not to confound your attention, because of the 
 
24 The Brain and the Trance State. 
 
 extension and horizon of the field of facts on which 
 I can draw. When suggession is monotonous like 
 this, " Go-to-sleep," acquiring the art of having 
 but one tone in the voice, the monotony of tone 
 and not suggestion produces the sleep; hence, 
 music, rythmical music; I mean music, for exam- 
 ple, like " Down upon the Suwanee River," " Home, 
 Sweet Home," those sweet harmonious forms of 
 musical expression are conducive to the modifica- 
 tion of the action of conscious imagination, and 
 readily cause a cultured organism to lapse into the 
 trance state. But such music as " Pop goes the 
 Weasel " dance music will have the opposite efi"ect, 
 will rather tend to prevent entrancement than 
 make it. 
 
 As I have covered the physiological form of 
 entrancement I will lift the inspiration a step higher 
 and deal with the relativity of mind and soul, that 
 is, with the connection between the mind and the 
 soul. The mind is that portion of conscious expres- 
 sion that organization has awakened in the soul. 
 The mind is the conscious sum of all awakened 
 sensations, and it is constitutional in its limitations. 
 This mind stands only in a secondary way in rela- 
 tivity with the spirit, the spirit becoming the not-I 
 of the medium's consciousness. The spirit ap- 
 proaches the molecular magnetic cell, and just as 
 the wind will form a snow bank around the corner, 
 so that cell takes the photograph of the thought 
 
The Brain and the Trance State. 25 
 
 sent, and it is really an automatic photograph of a 
 thought expressed on the aura of the cell, and the 
 cell immediatel}'" utters it in two conditions : it 
 utters it in the motor nerve centers and it utters 
 it in the trance consciousness. There is not a 
 thought that has ever been uttered in thirty-four 
 years through this medium but what is in the 
 soul's latent consciousness, and some condition will 
 awaken that consciousness and throw it into the 
 objective; it may not be in this life, but it will be 
 in the order of the life which is to come. Then, 
 any thought that is thrown does not generate a cell 
 in the medium's cerebrum, that is, it does not go 
 to the formation of his mind, because it does not 
 get into the channel of the mind, but it gets into 
 the automatic channel, and being there for so long 
 a period of time the mediumship builds automatic 
 cells, and the result is, after years of work, it be- 
 comes automatic trance. 
 
 Every thought that is awakened in consciousness 
 creates for itself a brain cell, and you are creating 
 brain cells every day. You are losing brain cells 
 every day because your mind is forgetting, but 
 your soul is not forgetting. Your mind is forgetting 
 and you are forgetting and forgetting, and you are 
 building, and if you can build thought cells you 
 prolong life. 
 
 The continuance of physical life largely depends 
 upon your ability to build thought cells. If you 
 
26 The Brain and the Trance State. 
 
 can continue the operation of building, if you can 
 mentally keep growing, if you can make mind, you 
 will live, but when you cannot make mind the body 
 dies. Now, I want you to understand this truth, 
 for it constitutes all that there is in all these ditt'er- 
 ent systems of mental healing, the thought force 
 creating new cells, evolutional capability making 
 new cells. 
 
 I had better explain, while here, that mysterious 
 process of crystallization of tissue. Cut your linger 
 and the wound will heal. Down through the capii 
 laries rush the blood corpuscles and they come to 
 the bleeding point, there they crystallize and build 
 a bridge across the wound. Crystallization is the 
 basis of life, of life form or expression, and this 
 process touches the thought sphere, and when it 
 comes under the domain of will, resolution, pur- 
 pose, the blood takes on that purpose. Hov/ won- 
 derfully the blood is affected by thought. How the 
 young, sensitive maiden will blush. What is a 
 blush? It is a magnetic disturbance of the blood 
 corpuscles of the entire system. The pallor of fear 
 changes the constitution of the blood corpuscles, 
 and it aifects the brain and the whole vital system. 
 A contented mind leads to health ; a discontented 
 mind burns the candle of energy at both ends. 
 Hence, draw the moral for yourselves, that to live 
 long on earth, considering the conditions of your 
 
The Brain and the Trance State. 27 
 
 heredity the development of brain cells is conducive 
 to longevity. 
 
 You will find if you study the records of biogra- 
 phy and history that the men who have made their 
 mark as, epoch men have been long lived. There 
 are some few exceptions: Alexander, the Great, 
 died at the age of 37; Burns, at the age of 37 ; Lord 
 Byron, at the age of 37 ; Keats, at the age of 32 ; 
 Shelley, about the same age; but Thomas Carlyle, 
 Goethe, Humboldt, D'Israeli, Gladstone, Guizot, and 
 the great statesmen of modern times, as a rule, 
 have lived to be very old. The fires of ambition 
 stimulate vitality. This is your lesson — to learn 
 how to live. Thought is food. Mental inactivity 
 is starvation ; worry is starvation. 
 
 I have not touched the functional capability, the 
 responding capability of mediumship in the trance 
 state as to the interpretation of spiritual states of 
 consciousness. The capacity to express in the 
 trance consciousness is limited by the brain cells ; 
 also by the automatic cells of the medulla oblon- 
 gata. You will never find a powerful trance medi- 
 umship with a small medulla oblongata, but you 
 will find great capabilities of mediumship in a 
 mental temperament with a long medulla oblon- 
 gata. This was in Shakespeare, Goethe, Dante, 
 Homer, all the great teachers of the world that have 
 been subject to the flame and source of inspira- 
 tion. The great agitators of the world have had a 
 
28 The Brain and the Trance State. 
 
 large medulla oblongata, large lungs, and great 
 bases of the brain. These men are the agitators; 
 a tremendous magnetic force in the world, like 
 Martin Luther, " the sledge hammer of the refor- 
 mation ; " like John Wesley ; like some of the great 
 agitators of the present time, both in religion and 
 politics. Large lungs, large base of the brain, and 
 a great abdominal cavity: there must be stomach 
 power to build up the energy. Those of you who 
 have to receive inspiration and do inspirational 
 work should eat often, not a large amount at a time; 
 the fires of nervous force must be kept up; the 
 transmutation of psychic energy must be kept up. 
 Food is force, and the constitution of man can trans- 
 mute unconscious force, that is, force that is not 
 allied with consciousness into force that is allied 
 with consciousness. There is an evolution or incar- 
 nation of force from the vegetable to the animal, 
 and from the animal on to man. 
 
 The magnetism of the universe, the economy of 
 its forces, the display of its energies, are ever 
 charming to the mind of the thoughtful. You are 
 placed in relationship with the spiritual world on 
 many lines. Trance mediumship is not the only 
 form in which this automatic cell expresses itself. 
 It expresses itself under a large medulla ofelong.ata 
 in a physical form of mediumship; the vibratory 
 force extends upon the magnetic atmosphere and 
 moves bodies; magnetism passes from the magnetic 
 
The Brain and the Trance State. 29 
 
 cell into the atmospheric cell, and you get the rap; 
 it passes from an auric cell into an etheric cell, and 
 it becomes materialization — all difficult experi- 
 ments to make, and are experiments at all times. 
 Man sometimes blunders upon the conditions for 
 making it possible for spirits to manifest, but ere 
 long the science of mediumship will be better un- 
 derstood, and the phenomena more reliable, and 
 the gross charge of fraud not so often made among 
 intelligent students of the occult. You are rising 
 to the knowledge. Inspiration is transforming your 
 civilization. You think that your statesmen, ora- 
 tors, and divines are molding your culture; they 
 are instruments in the hands of a gigantic power. 
 I will call it Infinite Power, for what is the universe 
 but an expression? What is history but an expres- 
 sion ? What is a man soul but an expression, a 
 great spiritual, social combination? Man cannot 
 live alone. His isolation is imperfect. He stands in 
 the sphere of a mind; a mind that has thrown itself 
 out of the sphere of personality on to a sphere, I 
 will call it an atmosphere, and this providential 
 force is working out in nature realized ideas from 
 the spiritual plane. And as I look down the horo- 
 scope of time I see in the vista of the future the 
 coming glorification of your race. Man must yet be 
 happy on the plane of Time; life must be extended 
 in duration that man may accomplish the full field 
 of his expression. It is man that is behind, and 
 
30 The Brain and the Trance State. 
 
 he is under pressure; your civilization is under 
 pressure; your art is under pressure. Look at your 
 schools to-day, at the pressure ; look at your com- 
 merce ; look at your literature ; look at every 
 avenue of thought and life, and there is an intensity 
 of pressure. The spiritual world makes polarities 
 of men, and makes polarities of companies of men 
 and of nations — nations have a collective magne- 
 tism — that is destining the career of a higher and 
 more progressive civilization. 
 
 Behold the rise of the Japanese, in a generation 
 they have shot up into the first plane of national 
 life. An ancient thought, an ancient cult, dressed 
 in the modern terminology of progressive thought, 
 and destined to wield a mighty influence on Asiatic 
 civilization. And I see on the shadows of time the 
 fading away of effete nationalities, a dissolution of 
 impotent states, families and beliefs; and forward 
 the centuries awaiting your gaze is filled with un- 
 thinkable possibilities, and man and inspiration are 
 working in the domain of the small. It is in the 
 world of the insensible, the subsensible, where 
 science is at work, down in the elements of nature, 
 and the mighty forces of nature — the giants of the 
 universe — are being commanded by little children. 
 You are destined to immortality, and your first look 
 at your consciousness is an amazing look, but this 
 consciousness will rise from stage to stage, and 
 overlap and overlap as you rise in the sphere of 
 
The Brain and the Trance State. 31 
 
 being, and this overlapping is for the benefit of 
 humanity, for the benefit of the soul's advance, for 
 the unfoldment of the soul's consciousness. And 
 what a consciousness ! An infinite world visible 
 to the eye of the soul, the totality of all experience 
 in it, the vitality of all thought centered in one 
 great eternal Infinite Eye — Consciousness — cover- 
 ing all that has been, that is, and that will be, 
 life without end. This is the power of nature and 
 sovereign dignity of man, reason being but the 
 dawn of the conscious day, the beginning of the 
 light, the opening of the gate to the view of the 
 wonderous greatness of the subjective self. 
 
LECTURE II. 
 
 MIND. 
 
 When we met you, friends, on the last occasion 
 in this place, we sketched to you the physiological 
 conditions of mediumship as presented in the auto- 
 matic and trance states of consciousness, and with 
 what was" then said riveted in your consciousness 
 we are at a point where we can proceed to deal 
 with the great facts that lie in the realm of mind 
 itself. The task this evening will be to define the 
 mind. 
 
 I do not know of any one word that is more in 
 need of a definition than the word " mind." It has 
 been and it is used by difi"erent thinkers in a very 
 loose manner. 
 
 Mind is conscious operation. The activity of 
 consciousness in any mode or personality can be 
 correctly called mind. I can correctly, in a spirit- 
 ual consciousness, speak of my mind. The word 
 in that relation covers the operations of my con- 
 sciousness on any given thought: sensations, per- 
 ceptions, or ideations. Any presentation to the 
 eye of consciousness is mind. Mind is function. 
 The word function stands for what a thing does. 
 
Mind. 33 
 
 The function of a plow is to plow ; the function of 
 the tongue is to articulate ; the function of the 
 lungs is to breathe ; the function of the heart is 
 to regulate the circulation of the blood ; the func- 
 tion of the brain is to create modes of coherent 
 consecutive expression of the things in conscious- 
 ness. Mind is not consciousness, but mind is the 
 function of consciousness, and it is the measure of 
 the unfoldment of consciousness. 
 
 There are two kinds of mind ; there is unconscious 
 mind and conscious mind. Unconscious mind does 
 not mean what I have stated mind strictly to mean, 
 but unconscious mind means those operations of 
 selective and rejective states apart from knowing. 
 The whole of the function of the medulla oblon- 
 gata constitutes unconscious mind. 
 
 Unconscious mind was the animal soul of Plato. 
 In Plato's speculations you are introduced to the 
 animal soul, a terminology that once suited meta- 
 physical thinkers, but science requires a better term 
 than that, and until a better term is created I will 
 content myself with calling this mind a mechanical 
 mind. It performs very important functions in the 
 system of animal economy ; it carries on the chem- 
 ical processes of body building. The soul builds 
 the body under the conditions of the environment, 
 the environment always being the modifier of the 
 mechanical mind in the processes of body building. 
 The chemical activities controlled by the mechani- 
 
34 Mind. 
 
 cal mind enter into the structural development of 
 the body, and, at the same time, the dual act of 
 body building goes on, for there is a mechanical 
 selective and co-ordinating spiritual mind parallel 
 to and running consequentially with the bodily co- 
 ordinating mind — two minds and two bodies in 
 perfect polarity, as true a polarity as the molecules 
 constituting water ; a perfect harmonic relationship, 
 so that what is present in one mind is present in 
 the other without consciousness. The dual charac- 
 ter of mind should never be lost sight of in the 
 scientific study of biological evolution. Science 
 will never succeed in describing the building of 
 organic body without taking into consideration the 
 dual nature of energy. Scientific speculation is 
 reaching out in this direction, and it is beginning 
 to be a necessary speculation, in the hypothesis of 
 chemical combinations, to invent a second Ether. 
 
 This second ether of chemical science is a non- 
 polarized ether. In a few years it will advance to 
 the dignity of a definite hypothesis, and it will be 
 postulated that it is atomic like ether. To-day the 
 scientific mind is working in the ethers — marvelous 
 subjects — more marvelous even than the pheno- 
 mena of Modern Spiritualism, reaching out in the 
 domain of mind and realizing to conscious mind 
 how unstable are the so-called material phenomena 
 of nature. 
 
 Within the past decade matter has had to be de- 
 
Mind. 35 
 
 fined over again. The old doctrine of Thales, handed 
 down from generation to generation to the present 
 time, will have to be given up. Modern chemistry 
 has revolutionized old thought, and the X ray has 
 changed man's definition of the constitution of mat- 
 ter. The operations of this unconscious mechanical 
 process, its capacities for expression, are more pro- 
 found, indeed greater than the conscious mind, for 
 what could conscious mind do in constructing the 
 mechanism of an eye; what could conscious mind 
 do in constructing the powers and the attributes of 
 a blood corpuscle — marvelous in nature and constitu- 
 tion; what could conscious mind do in constructing 
 this wonderful piece of mechanism called the body 
 of man ? What mind can you find that is conscious 
 in nature that could produce for you, by any creative 
 method of its own, such a thing as a white lily, a 
 flower, a tree ? The marvelous capabilities of the 
 soul in stages in which consciousness is not reached, 
 for verily the body of man is the expression ot the 
 soul, the soul is the master workman and works 
 without design, works without plan, works without 
 knowing, but works with intelligence ; and this 
 unconscious intelligence manifested in nature is 
 constantly a surprise and constantly a marvel to 
 intellectual consciousness. At another time I will 
 speak to you more fully of unconscious mentality, 
 both in the individual and cosmic sense, but this 
 evening I want my remarks to be an entire defini- 
 
36 Mind. 
 
 tioii of conscious mental man. And we will begin 
 with the operation of mind itself. 
 
 There is no mind until there is a sense. Man is 
 endowed with live senses — five senses which have 
 advanced into the area of sense, perfect categorical 
 senses — not perfect, but perfect in their category. 
 The sense of feeling is an elemental feeling. I 
 define feeling to conscious relationship to what is 
 passing and acting upon bodily sensibility. Bodily 
 sensibility is sensory nerve vibration. 
 
 There are sensory nerves and motor nerves. A 
 motor nerve moves muscles ; a sensory nerve trans- 
 mits vibration both ways — to the mind of consci- 
 ousness and from the mind of consciousness. See- 
 ing is sensation; smelling is sensation. Things 
 perceived are in the mind; things in themselves 
 are out there, in nature. There is the mental thing, 
 the thing known and the thing objective. There 
 is the thing in the eye and there is the thing not 
 in the eye. Example : The chair you sit upon is 
 an object, a thing. This is the correct word, 
 " thing," and the correct use of the word thing. 
 But the chair you sit upon also exists in the 
 mind, and that mind-chair is not a thing in the 
 sense in which the chair you really sit upon is 
 a thing, because the chair you sit upon is in 
 the plane of dimension, and the thought -thing 
 in consciousness is not in the plane of dimen- 
 sion, it is in the plane of the non-dimensional. 
 
Mind. 37 
 
 In other words, the chair is in extension, the 
 mental chair is in thought, and it would be cor- 
 rect to say that the chair was a thought-thing in 
 consciousness, and that the word "chair" is the 
 name of a thing. All words are names of things, 
 and standing in this sense, in the large use of the 
 word " thing," all the photographs and representa- 
 tions in consciousness of the supposed form and 
 relationships of the general things, the verification, 
 the reality, the correctness of the photograph of 
 the thought-thing, and the objective thing cannot 
 be demonstrated by consciousness. I want j'^ou 
 thoroughly to realize this idea : that the picture 
 you have in consciousness of your friend may be 
 a correct or it may not be a correct picture of your 
 friend, but the correctness of your picture will be 
 determined by the correction of your sense. With 
 poor eyes you cannot see correctly, and the thought- 
 thing is not correct; the details are not in the 
 thought - thing while they are in the objective 
 thing. So here we come to the first condition of 
 consciousness, that there are things of which the 
 mind can become conscious, and the process or 
 manner is the process through the constitution of 
 the mind. 
 
 Sensations have characteristics, and these will 
 have to be defined. An objective thing— the thing 
 outside of me, the house, the horse, the railroad, 
 the world, the not-I — that which is outside of me 
 
38 Mind. 
 
 I am forming conceptions of, but none of these 
 conceptions are absolutely correct because of the 
 incorrect vibration created by them on the sense 
 apparatus. Everything outside of me has length, 
 breadth, and thickness. A shadow is not a " thing." 
 It has length and breadth, but no thickness. It has 
 a surface and is represented in the mind by a 
 thought-thing in two dimensions of space. The 
 real thing is in three dimensions of space — length, 
 breadth and thickness. That is form, the definition 
 of absolute form; and it is the definition of space, 
 the relation or the relationships of the attributes 
 of extension, and therefore must have a correspond- 
 ing definition in perception. 
 
 The soul either knew Form eternally or acquired 
 it by evolution. It is certainly an intuition. What 
 do I mean by "intuition?" I mean that the 
 thought of extension must have been in the soul 
 before sensation of a thing could be possible, and, 
 a 'priori^ sensation of that soul must be postulated 
 in order to explain the intuition of space. I think 
 Kant was correctly inspired when he insisted upon 
 space being an innate idea. By " innate " and 
 "intuition" I mean the same thing. That which 
 has not been acquired in consciousness through the 
 avenues of sense is intuition ; that which has not 
 been acquired through the senses is intuition ; that 
 which the soul throws into the mind, independent 
 of the sense, is intuition. 
 
Mind. 39 
 
 Intuition is not inspiration, but it is the soul 
 throwing into the mind what it has had expressed 
 in it by some previous relativity, and the soul, when 
 it attains the power of expression, the conscious 
 perception of space, has attained personality, but 
 not before. Without perception of space in which 
 to put the not-I there can be no personality. Un- 
 conscious mind is not personal, because it does not 
 cognize the not-I ; it does not cognize at all. An 
 unconscious mind sometimes can be covered by 
 what has been termed instinct. But instinct is so 
 meaningless. 
 
 I can remember as I go back to my retrospect, a 
 great debate between an old friend of mine — Lord 
 Brougham — and Sir David Brewster, on the mean- 
 ing of the word instinct. I agree with neither. 
 But I define instinct to be mind that acts without 
 perception, and continues to act without progres- 
 sion. 
 
 I will now speak of some of the instincts of the 
 mind. In the philosophy of Plato he called them 
 souls. Plato was in error; he called attributes 
 entities. That was his trouble ; a matter of errone- 
 ous terminology. There was the " animal soul," 
 there was the " soul of generation " — the amative 
 soul was the soul of generation — the " soul of 
 pubertj'^,-' the "soul of digestion," the "soul of 
 moral emotion," the " intellectual soul " that ex- 
 pressed the logos of consciousness. 
 
40 Mind. 
 
 The first instinct in the constitution of the mind 
 is that first produced in the order of evolutionary- 
 incarnation of the soul, the instinct of reproduc- 
 tion. The mind cell of reproduction was the first 
 vital cell. Coupled with that followed the protec- 
 tion of that which instinct had produced in its 
 most elemental form. Amativeness is chemical ad- 
 hesiveness in the processes of crystallization in the 
 natural world, and in the processes of the building- 
 up of the dual man-body in expansion and the 
 body in thought ; the aflinity between the two is 
 amativeness, the combination reproduction, and, 
 following in the evolution of instinct, immediately 
 come the instinct of motherhood, mother love; and 
 mother love brought a chain of instincts — comba- 
 tiveness, destructiveness, secretiveness, and the 
 sentiment of home — location ; and then followed 
 the instinct of personal rule: dominion, courage, 
 ■ fear, companionship ; slowly built up the soul, 
 slowly through millions of ages perfecting the 
 instincts of animal nature. Animal nature is as 
 divine as spiritual nature. The function of animal 
 reproduction is as divine as a soul being born into 
 spirit life. To be born into the earth life is as pure, 
 and as beautiful, and as grand a natural pheno- 
 menon as the ascent of an archangel to the con- 
 scious states of celestial spheres. There is nothing 
 vile, low, corrupt in nature. Natiire^hasjio morals, 
 y I and morals cannot be applied to nature. Nature 
 
Mind. 41 
 
 has no conduct. The laws of nature are the laws 
 of the operation of the infinite. I mean by " law," 
 habit; I do not mean bylaw power, but I mean 
 the manner in which power acts. The power of 
 the govornment of the United States is expressed 
 by law ; the power of nature, likewise, is expressed 
 in law. A sovereign power is law. The laws of a 
 State express the manner in which the sovereign 
 power of the people acts, so do not understand me 
 when I say the laws of nature that I mean the 
 powers of nature ; I simply mean the manner in 
 which the power of nature works; and when I say 
 " the laws of mind," I do not mean the powers of 
 mind, but the manner in which the powers of the 
 mind act. 
 
 The constitution of the mind is not law, but it 
 is the process of organic functions that constitute 
 mind, and the orderly compromises between these 
 functions constitute law — the manner of the action 
 of the mind. 
 
 Animal propensities, animal feelings and passions 
 in men are there because they have been planted 
 by the reminiscent past on an unconscious mental 
 sphere. The soul traveled up toward the expres- 
 sion of consciousness. The animal powers in the 
 mind are tendencies, not thought-making faculties, 
 but tendencies. To change the form of expression, 
 they are like the wind blowing the mind, the con- 
 sciousness, toward the evidences of perception in 
 
42 Mind. 
 
 certain directions, making an exhileration, a super- 
 lative excitement of perception ; the superlative 
 excitement coming from the awakening of the 
 reminiscent. 
 
 Sexual excitement is the result of the soul con- 
 sciously coming to the memory of a past creative 
 action. It is the birth of a thought, and in the 
 spiritual mind the birth of a thought will be the 
 amative joy of that life, and the expansion of the 
 soul is always an expression of the soul-force of 
 past relativities, and the rest of the propensities 
 centering around this central activity of function 
 to exalt it; and what follows in what I may call 
 moral sentiment and the esthetic powers of the 
 mind are evolutions out of this same propensity. 
 That is to say, that all the blossoms of the mind 
 originate in amativeness at the beginning of the de- 
 velopment of the soul, the potentiality of the soul, 
 and the influence on tlie moral sense of the rela- 
 tionship, for you will readily comprehend me when 
 I say that the moral faculty is the faculty recog- 
 nizing truth and justice. 
 
 Then what is truth ? Truth is the conscious veri- 
 fication of the perception. When the soul sanctions 
 the likeness of the thought-thing and the external 
 or objective, w^hen there is a perfect recognition, 
 that is the birth-place of the conception of truth. 
 It is the verification of two photographs. It is a 
 dual expression. It is conception ; the spiritual 
 
Mind. 43 
 
 amativeness of that instinctive consciousness rising 
 to know itself. Moral adhesiveness is that resolu- 
 tion or power to hold conviction — decision. This 
 power is innate. Some souls, due to the conditions 
 of heredity and circumstance, are unable to hold 
 the hand of moral adhesiveness — intellect enough 
 to know the right, instinctive power enough to 
 strive for, but no adhesiveness to hold it. It is a 
 power — I will call it the moral sticking plaster — 
 that enables the integrity of conviction to be main- 
 tained in the resolution of the mind. Some souls, 
 in the expression of mentality in body, are weak 
 here, and this leads to a failure to keep the law of 
 the social body and the moral law of private con- 
 tract. It is the mother of lies, hypocrisy and mis- 
 representation, hence, not a perfect mind; amoral 
 blindness or corresponding condition to sensational 
 blindness, then the moral perception and concep- 
 tion are tendencies that blow upon the intellect 
 always in the same direction. They are instinctive, 
 that is, they are innate ; they are the intuitions of 
 the soul — the soul expressing its powers in con- 
 sciousness. 
 
 Perception must now be defined. All percep- 
 tions are acts of mind and follow two sensations. 
 With one sensation only there could not be per- 
 ception. Sensations are so complicated that it 
 would be impossible for you to produce one sen- 
 sation, so many things would appear in that sensa- 
 
44 Mind. 
 
 tion. When you look at one another you see in 
 the background of the picture so many details 
 which never are really identified by consciousness, 
 but which are in the sensation. It would be, there- 
 fore, impossible to get a pure unit of sense. If 
 you could, there would be no perception. Con- 
 sciousness would not be made. There must be at 
 least two vibrations, and then the mind distin- 
 guishes the difference. The difference between two 
 sensations is a thought. First, it is a comparative 
 thought. When you have the paving stone as a sen- 
 sensation and the wheelbarrow as another sensation, 
 the mind distinguishes the difference between the 
 wheelbarrow and the paving stone by comparison 
 of the attributes of each. This power to compare 
 is also intuitive, coming out of the heredity of 
 past conditions ; and this, in the science of logic, 
 is called induction. When a man is comparing the 
 different things on the face of the earth with each 
 other he is working inductively. When a man is 
 working among the phenomena of nature and per- 
 ceives that from the seed he plants a vegetable 
 comes, he calls into existence the faculty of com- 
 parison and another, and that other is the recog- 
 nition of the conception that the seed is the cause, 
 that the vegetable is the consequence of the power 
 of the seed, and this is deduction. This is also an 
 intuition coming from the soul awakened by previ- 
 ous relativities of the soul, and in this expression 
 
Mind. 45 
 
 coming up the ladder of evolution to a greater 
 expression, due to the favorable conditions of the 
 environment, a human environment giving a higher 
 expression to mind. 
 
 With the activity of induction and deduction you 
 have reason. When induction is diseased, there is 
 a loss of the conception of personality. If you 
 will study the insane in your lunatic asylums you 
 will find a confusion and contradiction of person- 
 ality in the diseased, and this is a loss of personal 
 consciousness in expression. Should the patient 
 be restored to mental health there may be or there 
 may not be a remembrance of the confusion of 
 the personality in the insane state. When reason 
 is thoroughly dethroned, it is the disease of the 
 powers of deduction and induction. 
 
 The right use of the faculties of the mind is the 
 science of logic. Memory covers ideas, percep- 
 tions, and sensations. The soul has intuitions of 
 form covering relationship. The mathematical con- 
 ception of time, of place, of condition, of number, 
 in time and place, color, solidity, are intuitive 
 ideas. 
 
 My friend, David Hume, the Scottish metaphy- 
 sician, said — still says — that there is no criterion 
 in the human reason by which the thought of 
 solidity can be demonstrated. Probably there will 
 never be a time until science is perfectly victorious 
 over the laws of matter to demonstrate Hume's 
 
46 Mind. 
 
 postulate, but the intellectual faculties thus con- 
 stituted are under processes of evolution, and still 
 the mind is incomplete in the description we have 
 given of it, for there are several faculties in the 
 mind yet to be described. 
 
 I define the inventive faculty to be conception, 
 not perceptiou. I shall be contradicted by some 
 thinkers in both spheres, but when I have ex- 
 plained I think you will agree with me. A process 
 of induction can only bring into the conclusion 
 what is in a sense ; that is, I cannot logically come 
 to a correct conclusion and put more into my con- 
 clusion than the facts contain. If I do so I am 
 reasoning illogically. But invention is something 
 not in the facts. It would not be invention if it lay 
 in the perceived facts. It is a creation of the mind, 
 not a creation of the soul, but thrown from the 
 soul sometimes into the mind, and in this sense it 
 is an intuition. 
 
 Sometimes I would define invention to be intui- 
 tion, and sometimes, under some circumstances 
 and conditions, I would define it to be this : There 
 is a soul out there on the spiritual plane with a 
 complex thought ; telepathically that soul can ex- 
 press it to another soul, and that soul can tele- 
 pathically express it too through an accentuated 
 mental state, then it is invention by inspiration. 
 Sometimes, as it were, the lungs of the mind can 
 inhale from the external mind realm. Just as there 
 
Mind. 47 
 
 is a material world there is a mind world, and the 
 mind's consciousness can enter into rapport with 
 the mental realm and become inspired. An in- 
 spiration can be invention, for the mind is subject 
 to intuition and subject to inspiration. Thus the 
 conceptions of mind are so varied and so complex 
 that the order of mental progress is due to the 
 enlargement of the inhalation of concepts from 
 soul consciousness that is objective to the personal 
 consciousness. I want you to see this idea because 
 some men have failed to see its power and its 
 significance in the operations of intellect, and are 
 at this day trying to develop a philosophy that shall 
 ascribe all progress to intuition and none to inspira- 
 tion. To deny inspiration is absurd. The different 
 philosophies and sects that are trying to substitute 
 the innate contents of a subjective consciousness for 
 inspiration fail to meet the problems of intelligence 
 and genius. There is invention by inspiration; 
 there is the development of thought by inspiration, 
 transcending experience, learning and organic capa- 
 bility, and there is invention by intuition. In such 
 conditions as are presented the soul, which is the 
 maker of its body, can reveal to a degree itself, 
 and then it is the inventor, but as soul-life is co- 
 operative and spheral the soul enters into magnetic 
 relationships and becomes inspired ; that is, it 
 awakens to new conceptions of truth. But as the 
 finite rolls before the limited consciousness the in- 
 
48 Mind. 
 
 finite — that is, the total knowledge, the cosmic intel- 
 ligence of nature itself — becomes automatic inspira- 
 tion, and it is correct to say that nature, as a whole, 
 covered by your sensation, can inspire you. What 
 an inspiration man can draw from the forms of 
 nature, due to the exaltation of the faculties of 
 imagination — the esthetic faculties, the conceptive 
 faculties, dominating the power of original taste — 
 the perception of the sublime. I wish you would 
 study a book written by an old friend of mine, 
 a man whose name will ever be endeared to the 
 patriotic life of America — Edmund Burke; and 
 the book I want you to read is his work on the 
 "Sublime and Beautiful." It is an exposition of 
 the conception and the perception of the laws 
 thereof of the beautiful ; and such works have to 
 man an infinite value, much neglected by the 
 shallow metaphysics and metaphysicians of the 
 times in which you live. 
 
 Sterling thinkers, inspired men, you have had, 
 and because they are only for the few they are 
 neglected, and in the frivolous, immoral and excit- 
 ing literature of common life lost in the great 
 rubbish of your day. I want to see harder reading. 
 I want you to see the great thinkers of the world, 
 for what is the use of dealing with lesser lights 
 when a view of the great light would obviate the 
 necessity and awaken within you the great ideas 
 pf the thought. If you want idealism, and to 
 
Mind. 49 
 
 know what it means, go to Fichte, and not to the 
 diluted streams — minds that have not understood 
 Fichte. If you want Anglican idealism, go to 
 Berkeley ; if you want sensationlism go to Leckey ; 
 if you want Scottish sensationlism, go to Hume ; if 
 you want philosophical phenomenalism, go to 
 Herbert Spencer ; if you want a philosophical 
 phenomenalist, in its best logical expression, go to 
 John Stuart Mill, where the best invention, the 
 highest expression in philosophy, can be found. If 
 you want a historical idealism, go to the Vedas. 
 If you want the earliest spiritual poetry, go to 
 India and the Egyptian Book of the Dead. If you 
 want a Grecian Idealism, go to the poets of Greece. 
 If you want the romance of pastoral poetry and 
 imagination, go to the brilliant age of Augustus. 
 If you want the monotheism of the ecclesiastical 
 dominating civilization, go to the Mohammedan 
 thinkers and poets. 
 
 Do not let your mind live in one thought, in 
 one cult. He who knows only his own cult knows 
 but little. My old friend Brougham used to say 
 to me : " I study the case of my opponent, and 
 when I know it better than he knows it, I can 
 refute him." If you want to refute error you must 
 know it better than those who believe it; you must 
 understand the opposite side of the case. If you 
 are inclined to idealism, know thoroughly the phil- 
 osophy of materialism; if you are a materialist. 
 
50 Mind. 
 
 know thoroughly the doctrines of idealism. What 
 are philosophies but scaffolding ? They are not the 
 truth, but they are the scaffolding by which you 
 mount to truth. Love truth and yonr convictions, 
 but hold the mind ready for the truth of to-morrow. 
 What a dreadful thing to shut out truth from the 
 mind by a dominating dogma. 
 
 Intellectual freedom is an intellect with its door 
 open to welcome the stranger. The vagrant thought 
 may bring a truth to you. The lowest element 
 in consciousness may stimulate and bring an arch- 
 angel down. Look everywhere. Everyone should 
 be free, but the recognition of truth should be as 
 emphatic as are the laws of God. The soul will 
 know truth when it meets it. The soul recognizes 
 itself on the planes of eternal progress. The mind 
 is enlarging. Consciousness is mystery, and it is 
 lying close to the mystery of the infinite. Con- 
 sciousness is the chariot of the logos. Conscious- 
 ness is deity in expression. 
 
 These are the teachings that I want to leave with 
 you, and with the deliberation and the power 1 
 have had at my command I have come into the 
 precincts of your reason, and I want you to value 
 the thought at its worth, and in days to come to 
 meditate upon these things. I want you to be 
 useful to the human race by teaching other souls 
 how to express. When you teach you instruct 
 another. I am instructing you through the avenues 
 
Mind. 51 
 
 of sense. You are like the Dog Star, looking upon 
 two worlds, the world of Osiris and the world of 
 Isis. You are looking into the one soul in dual 
 expression, male and female. Work on then, for 
 you are naturally immortal. You can vacate form 
 expression, you can enter into the spiritual expres- 
 sion, but up the ladder of infinite time you have 
 to walk, and we are going on together; hand in 
 hand we climb the Alpine hills, and from the snowy 
 summits of exalted progress we shout to the world 
 below, " Excelsior." 
 
LECTURE III. 
 
 THE SPIRIT MAN IN RELATION TO THE PSYCHIC MAN. 
 
 The Spirit Man in Relation to the Psychic Man is 
 the subject for my discussion this evening. As you 
 are already aware, my friends, the " my " covers 
 a band of spirits. My effort has been to elucidate 
 that you may understand some of the elementary 
 laws of human mentality and spiritual existence, 
 and to some of you the didactic method has been 
 very hard and severe. The struggle to attain to 
 the conception of a new truth is a mental exercise 
 that will redound to the intellectual progress of 
 the person now and in future days. Never fear 
 grappling with the difficult in thought. Repeat 
 the thought and repeat it, and by familiarity with 
 the thought the mind will grow. A difficult sub- 
 ject becomes easy by repetition. 
 
 By the term " spirit man " I mean the man built 
 after the death of the body, for verily the continued 
 personal consciousness is of the nature and con- 
 stitution of man. Man never vacates heredity. 
 That which has been contributed in the develop- 
 ment of the whole Ego is never lost. Nothing 
 perishes in the material world — I mean, the sub- 
 
 S2 
 
Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 53 
 
 stance itself remains ; and in the thought-sphere 
 nothing fails, all conceptions last, all experiences 
 maintain their relativity to the spirit man. 
 
 And, first of all, I will try to give you an idea 
 of the meaning of the word " form " in its objective 
 and in relation to its subjective state. There is a 
 faculty in consciousness perception that covers the 
 sensation of form, but when form is reduced to its 
 last analysis, it is purely a metaphysical concept. 
 
 There are in the mind what I will call intuitive 
 or original ideas of form; this form being an 
 intuitive or a subjective perception is a law of 
 consciousness. The soul will never vacate the per- 
 ception of form ; it will always identify sensation 
 with form, even in the highest expressions of clair- 
 voyance. It will never vacate the idea of a thing 
 — a thing abstract and thing as a subjective intui- 
 tion of consciousness. The idea of thing is not 
 acquired by experiences, but it is something more 
 profound and original than any experience. It is 
 one of the pillars in the scaffold of experience, 
 hence, it would be absurd to talk to you about a 
 world of consciousness without form ; it would be 
 absolutely impossible for you to form the remotest 
 conception of the world of existence and pheno- 
 mena without existence and phenomena taking 
 form ; hence, the spirit man has his form ; hence, 
 the spiritual world is made up of extension and 
 form in the concept of the spirit. To suppose the 
 
54 Spirit Man in Eelation to Psychic Man. 
 
 contrary is to suppose that the spirit man has no 
 form; but to suppose that the spiritual world and 
 its phenomena had no form is to suppose that 
 which in itself is absolutely inconceivable and 
 therefore absurd. The only idea that it would be 
 possible for you to take, or that I can possibly give 
 you, is in the description of the fact of the spirit 
 man, that he has form, a spirit form contradistin- 
 guishing him from a denizen of the material state. 
 In the abstract speculations of the ancient poets 
 and philosophers the great mistake was made of 
 asserting too wide a division between the constitu- 
 tion of spirit and the constitution of matter. Those 
 poets and philosophers forgot that these two modes 
 of being stood to each other in vibratory relativity. 
 and that there was no void, no chasm, between mat- 
 ter and spirit. Sectional hatred grew out of the 
 antagonism. He who held the body of the man to 
 be the real existence was looked upon with con- 
 tempt and pronounced a sensualist, a materialist — 
 terms of contempt in those days, and that con- 
 tempt, more or less, has come floating down the 
 ages, and the intellectual man even to-day speaks 
 of the " materialistic tendencies of mind," and 
 the " groveling conditions of the mind," " a mind 
 unable to comprehend the beautiful spiritual laws 
 and conditions," and '■'■ a mind clouded with material 
 conditions," as if matter was in some condition of 
 condemnation; as if matter was some obnoxious 
 
Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 55 
 
 expression of Satanic power in the universe. In- 
 deed, there was a time when it was so believed, for 
 did not the speculations of Pythagoras so teach ? 
 Did not a school in India so teach long before the 
 days of Pythagoras ? And did not he pick up that 
 thought in Egypt and did not he carry it into Italy ? 
 The thought came from India. The thought was 
 this : That existence was pure divine essence ; that 
 existence was pure soul ; and that in the course of 
 the happy existences in the multiplex consciousness 
 of divinity quarrels arose, and this beautiful sphere, 
 this divine elj^^sium became filled with contending 
 divinities. The contending divinities met on the 
 field of heaven and fought. This idea John Milton 
 takes up in " Paradise Lost : " not a Christian epic 
 by any means, but an ancient pagan epic. 
 
 There is nothing mean, there is nothing disgust- 
 ing, there is nothing unholy, there is nothing con- 
 temptible about matter. All that can possibly be 
 said about matter is that it may be dirt. And what 
 is dirt ? Why just matter in the wrong place, that 
 is all. And what is evil ? Why just a thought and 
 an action at the wrong place, that is all. So that 
 relativity is the determining factor of good and 
 evil, and there is nothing in this wide universe that 
 is, in itself perceived, either good or evil 
 
 A man may have a gold watch and it may keep 
 bad time ; it is a bad watch. A man may have a 
 nickle-silver watch, and it may keep good time ; 
 
56 Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 
 
 it is a good watch. That is a good thing that does 
 well the work for which it was designed. Good 
 and evil are relative states of action, of pleasure 
 and of pain. 
 
 In the past man has deemed that for good which 
 gave him pleasure, and that to be evil which gave 
 him pain. Well, then, let us dismiss that subject, 
 and nevermore attempt to cast a stigma on any- 
 body who happens to have the courage to say that 
 there is actually a material world ; that it is not all 
 mind, but that there is something outside of mind 
 that we call matter. Verily, then, in this material 
 world there is an interior spirit. The great universe 
 in which you live is a body, and the spirit moves 
 within it. 
 
 Let us pause one moment while we think of the 
 retrospect. During the eighteenth century, when 
 man was seeking facts with which to prop up the 
 tottering theology of the time, what did he do ? 
 Bishop Butler and Paley went to nature to seek 
 for an argument to establish the great fact of the 
 existence of an independent, absolute, creative force 
 — God. Now let us look at the distinction between 
 the statement that I made and the statements made 
 by these learned men in the eighteenth century. 
 
 Here you have a piano. Did the piano make 
 itself, or did the piano design itself? The answer 
 will be emphatically no. A man, you say, designed 
 the piano, a man made it, a man sold it, a man 
 
Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 57 
 
 carried it. Then there was a piano in the man's 
 mind before this piano was made, and after the 
 model thought of in that mind that pianot stood 
 forth. This was an eighteenth century speculation 
 about spirit and matter, and spirit designing and 
 thought contrivance in relation to matter. The 
 statement I made was this: That there is a spirit 
 in nature, and the spirit in nature unfolds the world. 
 Then we would have a postulate like this : That 
 the piano was made by a spirit that is in it, and 
 the spirit of the piano is the real piano and ex- 
 presses itself; the thought-piano that was in the 
 mind of the thinker was the cause piano. That is 
 one of the phases of the creative cause piano, and 
 standing forth the piano comes by labor ; in nature 
 it comes by evolution, which is the manner of the 
 labor. 
 
 In the eighteenth century the ideal stood outside 
 of the universe, as if God, the creator, with leath- 
 ern apron on, rolled up His shirt sleeves and went 
 to work on His great infinite bench and rolled out 
 a universe something after this style: Stepping 
 forward into the universe of nothing, with His shirt 
 sleeves rolled up. He stretched forth His great 
 infinite hands and took two handsful of nothing 
 and rolled nothing into something, then stepped 
 forward and placed this lump of something that 
 He had created out of nothing there and called it 
 the Sun, and started it spinning upon its axis ; then 
 
58 Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 
 
 He took another lump of nothing, bowled it into 
 space, and called it Mercury ; then He took another 
 lump of nothing, rolled it hard, and bowled it into 
 space and called it Venus, and so on until the uni- 
 verse was made. This must be abandoned as too 
 far fetched and too limited a concept. 
 
 No, the spirit of God is in nature, and nature is 
 the coat he wears — this mighty universe — the phil- 
 osophy of which is so perplexing, a philosophy of 
 clothes and nothing more. Within this physical 
 man there resides a spirit man, and the spirit man 
 made this physical body — made it, shaped it, de- 
 signed it, executed all the work in it under an 
 hereditary environment, and when the intent and 
 purpose of the spirit has been accomplished the 
 physical body is laid aside, and Oasser gets out and 
 leaves the palace in which he lived behind him, 
 and gazes on his new relationships and expression. 
 He then sees his body, it has parts, organs, func- 
 tions, and capabilities. It has an atmosphere like 
 the physical body ; it has the same or developed 
 atmosphere which it brought with it when it was 
 simply a soul, for did not that soul live before it 
 came and made that body ? Are there not millions 
 of souls already housed in relativity with j'our 
 soul, here and now, struggling, waiting, waiting 
 for their day of incarnation ? 
 
 What is your blood ? The home of souls. What 
 does science say to you upon this subject? The 
 
Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 59 
 
 science of histology tells you that every blood 
 corpuscle is possessed of nuclei. And what are 
 nuclei? Two small, unthinkably sized tadpoles, 
 living in every blood corpuscle circulating in your 
 arteries. The millions of inhabitants within you 
 form the basis on which your soul can hold itself 
 in a communal co-partnership with physical expres- 
 sion, and when you pass into the spiritual world 
 those elements of soul expression that are able to 
 go with you go, and they are in the magnetic at- 
 mosphere of your spiritual body, and they are 
 germinal elements in the great atmosphere in which 
 you are living; and think you that you could live 
 here — think you that you could transmute energy 
 that has no thought into energy that has thought? 
 That would be a miracle. You have to take that 
 great energy of the universe, that great potency of 
 the universe that is to be expressed some day, you 
 have to take it in through those lungs, you have 
 to breathe it into your blood — the breath of life, 
 the soul of soul; and so the transmutation of the 
 magnetism of the soul goes on. This master soul, 
 this master workman, with his millions of slaves 
 under his feet builds himself, rises to his dignity, 
 and goes on and on, and that affinity that he had 
 always is continued, and that man-soul rushes on 
 in the evolution of his conscious progress, while 
 those souls struggling behind are coming on, and 
 his inspiration is beating upon the mighty fortresses 
 
60 Spirit Man in Kelation to Psychic Man. 
 
 of their intelligences, and they are ascending. His 
 inspiration is general, and it rolls back in the form 
 of a mighty inspiration to the race that is behind. 
 So that the duration of expression of a great soul 
 — of thy soul — will last for ages and ages. 
 
 German scientists have already established the 
 fact of the nuclei ; that life is built up of these 
 entities. I affirm that they come from the spiritual 
 world. : Science has demonstrated their existence, 
 and in this fact you have a solution of the evolu- 
 tionary origin of man, not of the origin of nature, 
 or the absolute origin, but of the stages of origin, 
 of the epoch of origin — and in this atmosphere of 
 magnetism we find this soul life, and this is the 
 healing power that you give to the weak and to 
 the feeble. 
 
 Here you come to a wretched constitution, a fee- 
 ble woman of mental constitution and temperament, 
 a small medulla oblongata and narrow thin lungs, 
 delicate personality, and not likely to live. The 
 healer brings his magnetic atmosphere and the 
 spirit increases the force of its germ life; these 
 same germs to be the future tenants of body and 
 express personal intelligence. Under almost all 
 conditions there is power enough in these germs to 
 cure all diseases if sufficient will-power is brought 
 to bear by the healer. 
 
 Probably some of these things you have never 
 heard of before. Ah, the future ages will hear 
 
Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 61 
 
 a great deal about them. Are not the best of 
 the scientists now working in the domain of the 
 invisible, and are finding in that domain many- 
 solutions to the great problems held in the secret 
 of nature. In the microscopic world lie the won- 
 derful beginnings of form life on earth. 
 
 These elemental monad-men, so called by us, are 
 the very genesis of sex ; the division of the living 
 forces of the organic nature. Everywhere in all de- 
 partments of life you will find the mark of sex. 
 Back of all visible action in generation lie the ele- 
 ments that control the matter of sex. The greatest 
 question of the age is to what extent does this invi- 
 sible monad act on mental and physical states, deter- 
 mining the quality and character of the lives of men 
 to-day. There is something below temperament 
 and instinct, something under the power of heredity, 
 these monad-men are there and they are elFecting 
 great spiritual and physical results by their presence 
 in the life-blood of the race. 
 
 It seems as if the intellectual soul stood at the 
 top of the pyramid of life, and that it commanded 
 all these elemental forms of life and mind ; that 
 health and disease were eff"ected by them ; that all 
 the forms of temperament and phases of character 
 were more or less produced by them, and that they 
 had a relation to the atmosphere and vegetable life, 
 and that the very quality of life was determined 
 by them. They are elements in the powers of life 
 
62 Spirit Man in Rela'Hon to Psychic Man. 
 
 itself, and cannot be discussed apart from the or- 
 ganic forms of life. 
 
 These living elements are subject to feeling and 
 will. Mental states affect them, and they affect 
 changing states in the body. Good magnetism has 
 strong elements in it. The greatest healers are the 
 men who have abundance of these vital elements. 
 I would define magnetism as an atmosphere of vital 
 elements, or monad-men, lying back of all vital 
 form. They are to the chemistry of spirit what the 
 atom is to the chemistry of matter. All planes of 
 substance co-ordinate in certain given forms of 
 motions — spirit and matter and all their interlying 
 planes. 
 
 As all magnetism responds to mind, the mind 
 becomes a moving force, whether it be conscious 
 mind or unconscious mind; it is force that acts 
 upon the magnetic principles of life. Those cures 
 claimed to have been made by Mental Scientists and 
 Faith Cureists and Magnetic Healers are all due 
 to the power of the spirit over physical states, and 
 the action of personal magnetism — that magnetism 
 which has entered into the formation of ceils, the 
 result of the crystallization of blood into organic 
 tissue. 
 
 In these monad-men, in the atmosphere of the 
 spirit magnetism, there is no perception even, no 
 reason even, yet born. In these monad-men there 
 is instinct. It came by the contact it had with the 
 
Spirit Man in Kelation to Psychic Man. 63 
 
 matter-man, and in its evolution through the mat- 
 ter-man it attained instinct, and this is its heredity; 
 it brings this heredity conditioned by the mental 
 states of the matter-nature, and it can be im- 
 pressed by the magnetism of spirits — the magnetism 
 of elementary monad-men. Hence these conditions 
 that come into the birth place of life are of an 
 extraordinar}'' nature, and sometimes the likeness 
 of the child-will representing the dominating monad 
 or elementary instinctive intelligence. Noble 
 women, exalted women, virtuous women, beautiful 
 women, have given birth to bad sojis, but nature, 
 not the women — the monad-men, not the women — 
 have caused the abnormal development of animal 
 propensities that have come from the unusual aggre- 
 gation of those in the generic forms of life. Many a 
 mother has lived her life and gone to her everlast- 
 ing existence with an aching heart, with a tear in 
 her eye, lamenting that she ever gave birth to such 
 a child. The child is not her child. Parentage has 
 limitations. 
 
 The mother and the father of the child are but 
 the vehicles for the soul to embody itself in matter- 
 form and bring it into the realm of reason. All 
 the instincts have been acquired by the soul before 
 it attained the power to incarnate. It was in the 
 condition to receive all the like powers from the 
 activity it had in the organism while in contact 
 with the mental life of the father or mother as it 
 
64 Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 
 
 existed in the blood corpuscle. It did not begin 
 to live when it took on the foetal relation, but 
 before it entered the ovum it was already impressed 
 with the instinctive characteristics of its future 
 mentality. The mother brought to its aid other 
 elements of the magnetic sphere and gave to it the 
 whole resources of her own magnetic life, so that 
 the monad-men of the magnetic sphere entered the 
 plane of the new soul-life through the vehicle of 
 motherhood. When she is in a very good magnetic 
 state she will dominate the sex and largely control 
 the constitution of the mental powers or genius ; 
 when she is feeble or magnetically weak she will 
 be the matrix of a male personality. 
 
 The soul is not in itself sexed, but the sex is due 
 to the magnetic relation it takes on at the time of 
 conception. It is in itself both male and female 
 as an element of pure soul, and contains all, but 
 it has to express these under relations of changing 
 environments, and the sex of the personality is 
 fixed by the magnetic condition of the mother at 
 the time of conception. 
 
 It is very difficult to disturb an old idea like this 
 that a man is a perfect personality, that his con- 
 sciousness is a perfect one uninterfered with func- 
 tion, but when I tell you that there are a great many 
 influences at work to produce that consciousness, 
 that it is dependent upon the relations and antece- 
 dents which are too fine for the mind to perceive 
 
Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 65 
 
 the coming of them. The soul is subject to influ- 
 ences which do not approach consciousness on the 
 sense-perceptive channel, but reach consciousness 
 by the subjective channel, which is related to the 
 spiritual sphere. Man is a creature subject to the 
 influences thrown upon him, and his personality is 
 limited and bent by them. The soul can only ex-^ 
 press that which the condition of embodiment will 
 allow or permit. Whatever may be in the soul 
 above or below the line of sense-perception cannot 
 be determined by sense, but the personality is a 
 character and a power determined by the whole 
 field of these influences and relations. With the 
 death of the physical body and the birth of the 
 personality of the spirit there is a great change 
 due to the evolution of new condition in the sur- 
 roundings of the soul. The loss of the physical 
 body is an event that changes the mental state of 
 the soul, and awakens dormant powers in it and 
 enlarges the power of perception. The soul breathes 
 in from the atmosphere of soul. Man's personality 
 stands on a bare plain, subject to the wind, the 
 storms and cyclones of spirit-thought, illumination, 
 and clairvoyance. It breathes out the mind atmos- 
 phere of the soul sphere; it gives out and it takes 
 in. It gives expression to the mind ; it stores ex- 
 pression of the mind ; thus it is a dependent and a 
 changing personality as to capacity, but not as to 
 the essential concept of consciousness. 
 
66 Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 
 
 Aa eternal personality must be given up for an 
 eternal individuality. I am eternally conscious, 
 but I am changing so fast that my faculties become 
 enlarged, and faculties become added to me that 
 I can speak of myself as having faculties which 
 once I did not have, and that between the coming 
 of the faculties are to be found the chapters of my 
 conscious life. Each chapter of my conscious life 
 being a personality carried along to my new life 
 as instinct. Instinct is that which my soul carries 
 with it from previous relationship made and passed 
 in matter, which states of expression have pre- 
 pared the way for the expression of the spirit's con- 
 sciousness. The rational mind cannot explain the 
 clairvoyant consciousness, that is, reason is below 
 clairvoyance. It is in time and place as thought 
 relation, but clairvoyance is not in time and place 
 relation. It sees the past and the future, and thus 
 is the consciousness that pertains to the conscious- 
 ness of the original Intelligence of Nature. To 
 know the entire past of time and the future of 
 time are attributes of a being greater than man. 
 So a spiritual being is greater than a man, and can 
 only know man personally by going into its past — 
 into the personality of man. The divine attribute 
 of clairvoyance — knowing the past and future — is 
 the manner of perceiving in the spiritual sphere of 
 the soul's expression; but while that soul is in the 
 physical personality of expression the attribute of 
 
Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 67 
 
 consciousness is reason, a lower plane of soul con- 
 sciousness. When a soul on the spiritual plane of 
 consciousness seeks to express in the personality of 
 reason, which it requires in passing through the 
 phjT'sical body, it vacates the vibrations of the spi- 
 ritual consciousness for the time being that it may 
 enter the sphere of a lower vibration and commun- 
 icate and enter into the perfect relationship with 
 man, and evolve over again the contents of the rea- 
 soning powers, and so enters upon and covers the 
 plane of its own personal memory. On that retro- 
 spective plane it can give and receive inspiration. 
 The soul in this relation to man becomes the Christ, 
 the inspirer, the logos of Plato and John. Reason 
 falls below the spiritual plane of consciousness. The 
 spiritual consciousness can only be guessed at by 
 those who have attained to an elemental degree 
 of that power, as seen in the best condition of 
 mediumistic clairvoyance. Its real power is found 
 only in the spiritual consciousness. 
 
 I said that the mother will, under her strong 
 magnetic conditions, dominate the sex, and she will 
 also dominate the genius. Now this genius may 
 also be the result of the father's strong magnetic 
 personality, or the mother's personalitj'^ ; or it may 
 come from the pre-determined purpose of a center 
 of spiritual power that has a certain definite aim 
 and plan to work out on the earth-plane, and so 
 has to create conditions for the production of a 
 
68 Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 
 
 real epoch man. These men come but at very rare 
 intervals of time : they have been the creators of 
 new conditions. Sometimes they have appeared in 
 the realm of philosophy ; sometimes in the realms 
 of political government, and have changed the 
 power and character of empires and states ; some- 
 times they have come with new religious thought, 
 and changed the conduct and faith of a people. 
 The poet and the artist, and the musician too have 
 come at the bidding of great epochal centers of 
 spiritual power, determining the era for a change. 
 in the character of dominating belief, taste, and 
 thought for the time being. Genius is so closely 
 related to magnetic and inspirational states that a 
 temperament must be made and all the physical 
 conditions created for the product in the child of 
 all these attributes, which serve to make a man 
 of great spiritual and intellectual capacity. 
 
 The brilliant civilizations of past ages, which 
 have long ago faded from the perspective vision 
 of the historian, are the product of these periods 
 of great centralization of spirit power on the race 
 of man. In recent times this power has often ap- 
 peared, for these recent times have been unusually 
 fertile in great and startling inspirations and great 
 geniuses, whose mentality have filled the world with 
 the greatness of their work and the magnificence 
 of their inventive creations. 
 
 The remarkable changes and development of the 
 
Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 69 
 
 eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have given to 
 the world such surprising results and wonderful 
 inventions, that it can be truly said that at no period 
 of the world's history before have such great and 
 wonderful inventions been given to the world. But 
 these inventions were the outcome of great mental 
 states being created by the spirit world to do the 
 necessary work. At the crisis of events the man 
 needed comes forth and does his work with that 
 rare power which can only come from those who 
 are specially fitted for such work. Do not suppose 
 that every crisis in the world's history brings forth 
 the truly wonderful creator of great changes, great 
 thoughts, great deeds. The special periods are rare 
 and are conditioned by the predetermining power 
 of the spirit world. 
 
 The development of things in the material world 
 is by a process that is mechanical, or what is called 
 natural law, but as we approach the mental realm we 
 see the action of will, plan, purpose, design in the 
 coming and going of the events and changes of time. 
 
 The scientist readily recognizes the operations 
 of laws in the conduct and product of the pheno- 
 mena of nature, and fails to see a guiding force of 
 intelligence in the development of the character- 
 istics of civilization and history. 
 
 Nature presents the operations of unconscious 
 force and the activity of intelligence force, the latter 
 as seen in the conduct of human consciousness. 
 
70 Spikit Man in Eelation to Psychic Man. 
 
 There comes to me at this moment a brilliant 
 spirit who lived on the earth plane thousands of 
 years ago in Egypt. He brings to me the karma 
 of a magnificent life. His thought-temple I see. 
 The temple in which he taught was on the banks 
 of the Nile, and I see the waters of the Nile slowly 
 making their way to the sea; the parched earth has 
 become fertile, and abundance of food is certain 
 for the season of need. I am in the temple, in the 
 sanctuary of that temple, in the holy place, the 
 great crowd forming the congregation devoutly 
 worshipping at the shrine of Osiris; and here in 
 this holy place are the virgins of the sanctuary, 
 specially prepared instruments of the spirit world, 
 to give interpretation to the great spirit of life and 
 nature — they are the mediums of that day. I see 
 a stand made of the wood ebony ; a tripod on 
 which stands a silver bowl polished and having 
 beautiful chasings and wrought design of celestial 
 beings and hanging flowers, and bowing trees, fes- 
 tooned with trailing and creeping vines. Inside 
 the bowl is suspended by a silken cord a golden 
 plumb-bob ; a virgin sits at the tripod with her white 
 cap on her head. I hear the sweet but melancholy 
 chime of sweet bells and a stringed instrument. It 
 is a lovely scene. Soft sounds and delightful gloom ; 
 mystery and wonder stir my mind. Here the gods 
 talk with men. The priests come in and out. 
 Messages are being received from the god. The 
 
Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 71 
 
 bowl is a little bell for the swinging plumb-bob to 
 swing to-and-fro in an intelligent order, and the 
 communications are received and whispered to the 
 priest, and he retires to speak with the people the 
 word of the Great Lord of the spheres; and the 
 ancient spirit teaches me that there are coming to 
 the world great changes in the character of modern 
 civilization; that Asia is coming into the pale of 
 active competitive thought and industry with the 
 western world, and that the great ideas of modern 
 science and inventions are going to be adopted and 
 shared in those lands, which are now the seat of 
 primitive superstitions and crude manners derived 
 from ages long past, but preserved with a devout 
 religious care and simplicity ; they are to go into the 
 vortex. The new age demands new thought and 
 new men, and they are coming to the earth. The 
 conflict which rages will end in the real coming of 
 liberty, which means the great emancipation of man 
 from present conditions. The world belongs to 
 man and he enters into possession ; labor troubles 
 end under the sway of real beneficent government 
 of love and justice. This is the prophecy of human 
 redemption from ignorance and poverty, and from 
 the hard curses of excessive daily toil. This is the 
 aspiration of all philanthropic reform of all the 
 moral movements of the age. How beautiful is 
 the sight. It is man turning to heaven to get the 
 
72 Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 
 
 best of the thought, counsel, and guidance of the 
 beneficent wisdom of nature. 
 
 This ancient spirit teaches me. 
 
 The ancient nations knew the meaning and the 
 folly of great personal and family wealth, which 
 was used for the aggrandizement of the political 
 power of the family and the subjugation of the 
 people — the enslavement of the people. They 
 cultivated the spirit of art to adorn their homes 
 and persons, costly ornaments had to be produced 
 and costly apparal, and to the extent of their pro- 
 duction they cultivated the arts. You are repeat- 
 ing the same error, but you are in the ancient 
 thought, you are inspired by these ancient spirits 
 and cannot yet be liberated, but the liberating 
 thought is coming to the earth to epochal minds. 
 Clairvoyance is coming as an elemental faculty into 
 the brain and intellect of man, and these old civili- 
 zations will be beaten back and perish, and man 
 shall reap that which is his own by the laws of 
 nature and natural rights. 
 
 What is the matter with Asia, what has the United 
 States to do in Asia ? What is the matter with 
 that trans-Siberian railroad in China? What is the 
 matter with China, with Japan? The great spirits 
 of the ancient family of races are rolling on the 
 earth their inspiration, and the civilization of the 
 far back ages is coming into rythmic harmony with 
 the civilization of the western world, and there is 
 
Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 73 
 
 going to be a wonderful change. Clairvoyance is 
 coming into the statesmanship of the world, but 
 that will come under the faculty of deduction, and 
 also there will be an inductive illumination. 
 
 The day when this century and this Republic, 
 were born was an age in which men talked of lib- 
 erty. They had brought this thought out of the 
 trammels and chains of a religious despotism and 
 superstition. They had come into the world to 
 plant a new civilization, a new form of religion, to 
 make man happy, and the dominant idea was 
 Liberty. But liberty is no longer a term shouted 
 from the watch-tower of human progress. It is not 
 that liberty has come; it is not that, but it is the 
 achievements, the virtues of liberty, the power that 
 liberty can give; that intellectual intercourse and 
 spiritual illumination can give to .art, mechanics, 
 trade, agriculture, to home, to body, to humanity, 
 and to life. Liberty means all this ; and also that 
 the spirit-man is in psychical relativity with the 
 mortal man, and this co-partnership of the two 
 worlds will become more apparent as days go on, 
 and the peculiar inconsistency of the church will 
 become more clear, and there will be a greater 
 union in the impulses of civilization than ever in 
 the past — that liberty will come even to those of 
 this generation. 
 
 I define clairvoyance for you to be the power or 
 facultj'' of a soul that can in its revelation give 
 
74 Spirit Man in Kelation to Psychic Man. 
 
 expression to whatever is created for its eye, its 
 atmosphere or thought, whether it shall be the 
 thought of the past or the thought of the future 
 rolled into the thought of the now; that is clair- 
 voyance, and this is the consciousness of the spirit- 
 man. When he has lived, when he has departed, 
 when he has thrown from himself these monad- 
 men which he brought through the physical organ- 
 ism of his body, then he is ready for celestial states. 
 That soul that changed him to a physical expres- 
 sion; that soul that brought him through a monad 
 — as a monad through a bodj'- — that soul is away 
 up yonder in celestial spheres facing the divine, 
 touching the magnetism of celestial states and 
 generating the celestial spheres. This is your life 
 line; this is the order to which you belong; this is 
 why you live. You love the companions that you 
 have met in these forces; you are in the family; 
 you are in the heritage ; you are in the law. 
 
 I have given you this that you might see the 
 process of the evolution of great intelligences — the 
 necessity of passing through life. Wliat is the 
 need of passing through life if you are not going 
 to higher and to grander states ? 
 
 As I look back and see the growth of the psy- 
 chometric faculty that discovered these truths, and 
 as I see the rise of these great truths of personality 
 and the soul awakening to its experiences, I see 
 that there is in the heredity of the mind's atmos- 
 
Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 75 
 
 phere great possibilities for advancing and realiz- 
 ing truth to-day and truth in the future. As I feel 
 the inspiration that comes up from man, as I feel 
 the inspiration that comes up from nature, as I feel 
 the inspiration that comes from celestial states, and 
 as I center in this great life, what a glow of con 
 scious joy, of happiness, comes to me. To be happy 
 — not to have pleasure, but to be happy ; to have 
 the J03'" of truth is something man can only dream 
 of as yet. The artist even has not had it yet, for 
 he looks at his picture, and it is never finished; 
 the orator looks at his oration, it is never perfect; 
 the poet looks at his poem, it is never completed. 
 On and on. But the gratification that comes and 
 the glow of finished power is happiness; the grati- 
 fication of perfect love is happiness ; afiinity or one- 
 ness of being in the life stream is the highest love. 
 You are loving life, you are loving the world, 
 you are ambitious for success, you are struggling 
 for personal supremacy, you want to succeed. All 
 this is in the order of right and in the pathway of 
 duty, but I feel none of these; I have risen out 
 of these; they left me when the monad-men left 
 me, when I came to my knowledges, when I came 
 to my clairvoyance. But after breathing these 
 thoughts out to you I cannot linger, I cannot hold 
 the medium, for I am burning up brain cells, and 
 as a stranger from the spirit spheres above 1 greet 
 you with love and blessing. 
 
LECTURE IV. 
 
 THE SOUL. 
 
 It is customary now to refer all natural pheno- 
 mena in external nature to have come by the pro- 
 cess of evolution. It is not usual for a scientist to 
 pay his respects to the old theories of the past 
 relating to the absolute origin of all things. The 
 absolute origin is so far out of the range of scien- 
 tific investigation that it is far better to leave the 
 paths through the fog-land of speculation to be 
 pursued by those minds alone addicted to the occult, 
 the mysterious realms of darkness lying beyond 
 the phenomenal ken of human intelligence. When 
 reason dawned, in the earliest ages of the race, 
 and faintly burned in the most highly developed 
 brain, the order, system, and plan of nature, and her 
 wonderful forces, struck that weak flame with the 
 great ideas of order, system, and plan. That nature 
 was not a chaos, a blundering expression of blind 
 force, so this man early addicted himself to spec- 
 ulative vices, and wandered out into those reahns 
 of causation where he had no lamp to guide his 
 feet, and no voice to speak to him the thought and 
 
 word of directing truth. He formulated systems 
 
 76 
 
The Soul. 77 
 
 of speculative truth, rude and childlike, that have 
 with amazing vitality held their ground, to some 
 extent, even down to the present day. Old error 
 is hard to uproot. Man is just as eager to conserve 
 his old errors as he is to save his new truths. 
 
 The subjects which attracted his attention were 
 in the heavens above him and on the earth beneath 
 his feet. 
 
 The everlasting question came to this early man 
 as it comes to us. What is the cause of all this 
 display of order, system, and plan in the pheno- 
 mena of nature ? 
 
 What is nature ? 
 
 What is this great universe above our heads and 
 these worlds of space ? 
 
 What is this organic life, which sits in every 
 form we see on the landscape over which we walk, 
 and what are all those hidden powers of life ex- 
 pressed in every growing and every breathing thing 
 around us ? 
 
 Such questions are not novel. These are the 
 common acts of every mind. The limitations put 
 on the capacity of the philosopher prevented him 
 correctly giving an answer to these questions. 
 
 Science deals with the phenomena of nature. Its 
 work is to describe them and their relations to each 
 other, but the absolute cause is not yet a question 
 to trouble the scientific mind. 
 
 The universe of matter and of mind are with us, 
 
78 The Soul. 
 
 they exist. How they first came, before there was 
 a man to see the way things were first born, and 
 the map or traces of the first things, and their com- 
 ing and going, and no voice existed to tell or teach 
 the truth of the Absolute. Man to be useful to 
 himself must keep his work and mind in action 
 within the utilitarian pale of the knowable, and not 
 waste his time and powers in entering into that 
 realm which can never provide for him a single 
 demonstrated truth. 
 
 Science begins with matter and intelligence as 
 being already in existence, and assumes the postu- 
 late that matter and energy have been eternally 
 corelated, and that nature is in harmony with her- 
 self, and that the great principle of order and in 
 telligence are in themselves phases or attributes of 
 the eternal world of matter and of mind. 
 
 Evolution is a populor doctrine, hardly modern 
 in its origin, but modern in its weight and authority, 
 as a method in which nature works out her pheno- 
 mena. The characters and phases of the pheno- 
 mena presented in nature are subject to eternal 
 change of form and expression. That the action 
 of circumstances upon life and its systems of or- 
 ganization tends to change the organic character 
 and power; and that this constant tendency to 
 variation accounts for so many different forms of 
 organic life and expressions of personal intelligence 
 seen in the animal kingdom of nature. Evolution 
 
The Soul. 79 
 
 is generally becoming acceptable to the scientific 
 thinkers as the best hypothesis for explaining the 
 coming and the going of natural phenomena. It 
 is, therefore, likely to a correct basis on which to 
 work the universal operations of nature. This law 
 of evolution must therefore be applied to all exist- 
 ences; as a law it must be universal. All forms 
 and capacities must be subject to change and re- 
 modelment, according to the habit and processes 
 surrounding any given form of life. But this can 
 only be said of the phenomena of nature. There 
 are certain elements of nature that are primal; that 
 never change in themselves; that -are fixed forces 
 and eternal. In . the building of the universe there 
 must be some common raw material or stutf never 
 in itself subject to change or decay. This must be 
 the eternal foundation on which the changing struc- 
 tures of nature exist. We say then that the chem- 
 ical elements of nature persist and are essential 
 existences, not subject in themselves to the pro- 
 cess of evolution; to suppose the contrary would 
 be to let into the operations of nature a failure of 
 action and of order and stability, that would wreck 
 the fabric of all things, and admit the possibility 
 of all nature making a grand failure and ending in 
 a fiasco. 
 
 The work done for science by the wise and inde- 
 fatigable labors of Charles Darwin in establishing 
 the hypothesis of evolution, can never be fully esti- 
 
80 The Soul. 
 
 mated. He did not seek to explain the origin of 
 all things. He did not touch the question of the 
 Absolute Cause of all things, nor did he dispose 
 of the great question of design or the existence of 
 a designing intelligence in nature. These questions 
 belong to the realm of philosophical speculation 
 and not to science. But his work sets forth the 
 manner of the coming of the diiferent organic forms 
 of life found in nature. 
 
 The modern spiritist or spiritualist must walk 
 with Darwin. No teaching can be true and lasting 
 which does not harmonize with the fact of evolution. 
 Nature is consistent. 
 
 The greatest law presented by the mental pheno- 
 mena seen in organic life is that mind is in perfect 
 corelation with the size, quality, and the develop- 
 ment of the brain. The brain being the product 
 of a long series of epochs in the course of evolu- 
 tion, every faculty of the mind at one time or 
 another came into being as a function of conscious- 
 ness. It must be stated that reason itself came by 
 the same process, and is indeed at the present time 
 under slow process of change. It must be recog- 
 nized as a truth that the state in which we find 
 reason to-day is a more correct reason than the 
 reason manifested by the primative men. Experi- 
 ence has been the main factor in the development 
 of the powers of nature, nature itself containing 
 the constitution of reason. In the system of pheno- 
 
The Soul. 81 
 
 mena presented by nature the facilities of reason 
 have come out of the constant habit of life being 
 subject to their influence. Eeason itself being the 
 expression of the innate constitution of the power 
 which is expressing itself in nature. Power in 
 reality is nature. Intelligence and non-intelligence 
 are attributes of this eternal power. But let that 
 go, reason is the product of the orderly operations 
 of nature and the consciousness of these operations 
 is conscious personality ? 
 
 The strength of any one of the faculties of reason 
 is dependent on the nature of the brain and organic 
 development of the ganglia of the nervous system, 
 the cerebral mass of brain being the determining 
 factor of mental power. The physical basis of the 
 power and quality of the mind is here conceded 
 and aflirmed. The brain being the conditioning 
 factor in the extent of the function of conscious- 
 ness. This being so a study of the development 
 of the brain in man will comprise the study of his 
 mental growth and advancement since his first ap- 
 pearance on the earth. The faculties being powers 
 added to consciousness gradually in the regular 
 course of development. These faculties form there- 
 fore a key to enable the student to read the grad- 
 ual unfoldment of the power of the animal and 
 rational consciousness. The unfoldment must have 
 been very slow and gradual. In some parts of the 
 world where there existed more favorable condi- 
 
S2 The Soul. 
 
 tions the career of mental progress must of neces- 
 sity have heen more rapid. The early man, pressed 
 hard by his surrounding conditions, had to make 
 provision against the rigorous foe of his life and 
 happiness. This called into existence all the capa- 
 city of his watchfulness and invention. He gradu- 
 ally came to know the protective use of things 
 around him, and thus he made a gradual progress 
 in the knowledge of the powers of nature, and 
 this action of knowledge and necessity awoke in 
 him higher capacity to think, will, and execute. 
 The history of the correct circumstances of his life 
 would show the causes of the manner of the growth 
 of his mind. But this is not the place to prove 
 that man has thus gradually come out of the simple 
 conditions of mentality, I state it only just in pass- 
 ing to show that no field of nature is exempt from 
 the operation of evolution. The body of man has 
 changed to meet new conditions, and with that 
 change there has come, too, a change in the mental 
 capacity, one has gone with the other to make a 
 perfect and constant fitness for the new phase of 
 life, but, as I said before, all these changes have 
 come very slowly and with an imperceptible tread 
 at the time, and that it is because long ages have 
 passed that these great changes become apparent. 
 
 Mind is the function of all the faculties of con- 
 sciousness brought into exercise by the environ- 
 ment. Mind is not an entity. Its complex func- 
 
The Soul. 83 
 
 tions have organs in the brain and nervous system. 
 Each organ does its own work, and the united work 
 of all these organs is mind. These organs are built 
 up and kept in repair like all the other organs of 
 the body. The life-principle is very active and 
 causes a great dissipation of energ}'-, and it has to 
 be restored to the organs from the blood, which is 
 made out of the food supply. Both mental energy 
 and muscular energy are made, or rather taken, 
 from the food we eat. So much muscular motion re- 
 presents so much food, and so much thought stands 
 for so much food taken into the stomach each day. 
 I do not mean that energy is thought, that the 
 energy that is stored in a pound loaf of bread be- 
 comes, when brought into the new relation with 
 blood and the brain, is thought. I do not think so. 
 I think that thought is of the spiritual sphere of 
 being, and is an action that is purely in the sphere 
 of the soul itself. I do not think that energy stored 
 in food can be transmuted into thought, but it can 
 sujDply the chemical elements necessary to erect 
 the at6mic polarities in the brain that come into 
 corelated vibration with the soul. The brain be- 
 comes the tool of the soul to carry forward into 
 brain and organic relativity thought; through the 
 body the soul thus comes into knowing relations 
 with the external world. The brain becomes the 
 molecular receiver of all that action going on in the 
 soul that its polarities can reach. 
 
84 The Soul. 
 
 Vibration is not thought. The molecules of the 
 brain may vibrate at any rate you may name ; mere 
 motion is not thought ; motion may be the symbol 
 of thought ; so many vibrations may stand for any 
 kind of thought which two persons may agree upon, 
 but any manner of communicating thought can 
 only be by symbol. Before a set of vibrations can 
 be understood it must have some collective order, 
 arrangement, and form, then it can be adopted as a 
 symbol. When a transmitter of electrical energy, 
 under the Marconi system of wireless telegraphy, 
 acts upon a receiver at a distance of some miles, the 
 vibrations are understood symbols, and the vibra- 
 tions are not thought nor things, nor facts, but are 
 simple changes of vibrations which have an agreed 
 meaning, and as such become language, the sign 
 and symbol of thought. All the actions performed 
 by the cells of the brain are but vibrations and not 
 thought. The thought of consciousness is in the 
 soul itself, and can not be born in matter or in any 
 evolution of brain or celluar vibration. 
 
 Conditions of matter are the vehicle for the ex- 
 pression and transmission of thought, but not the 
 thought-maker. Consciousness is not a property of 
 matter. But supposing consciousness to be a pro- 
 perty of some states of matter, then we have two 
 kinds of matter so far apart from each other that 
 they may be said to form distinctly two kinds of 
 stuff, thinking stuff and non-thinking stuff. Sup- 
 
The Soul. 85 
 
 posing then that to be so we have not helped to get 
 rid of the soul, for the soul under that supposition 
 becomes the thinking stuflf, and we are at once 
 back into the old position. It would be absurd to 
 affirm that all matter thinks, or that matter has the 
 potency of thought, because then all matter would 
 be in a thinking state. That thought, either active 
 or potential, would at all times be present in mat- 
 ter. The postulate has brought us face to face with 
 so many states of matter. We have solids, liquids, 
 gases, and ethers. All vibratory states of matter 
 differing from one another in the manner of mole- 
 cular change. The basis being a common ether. 
 While this vibration and the different ratios of 
 molecular action account for the different modes of 
 matter, the mode itself gives no indication either of 
 latent of active intelligence in itself. But the man- 
 ner in which the combined phenomena or the col- 
 lective phenomena of nature act show that the 
 power of action is under some determining principle 
 of intelligence. Nature has order and system. Or- 
 der and system without determining thought would 
 be impossible. I hold, therefore, that there is in 
 nature a thinking formative principle, or cause, at 
 the back of, or in, all existences. 
 
 The soul, I postulate, as a primal intelligence, a 
 formative force corelated in all the conditions of 
 phenomenal nature. That is itself intelligence, and 
 that is the ruling principle in form and thought 
 
86 The Soul. 
 
 expression. This soul I hold to be the architect 
 of all bodily structures under an environment of 
 standing heredity. That the surroundings under 
 which a soul comes into body determines capability 
 to express itself. The nature of the embodiment, 
 its simple or complex structure, fixing the order and 
 power of its place in nature and its intelligence. 
 It seems to me to be in harmony with the highest 
 rational principle to believe that the soul is a neces- 
 sary intelligent entity, simple and uncompounded, 
 an element of thinking stuff that is in itself self-exis- 
 tent, that is, that is not a derived or made entity, 
 that it always has existed, and that it always will 
 exist. I believe this because if the soul entity had 
 been created it had been created either by some- 
 thing like itself, or something different from itself. 
 It could not have been created by something differ- 
 ent from itself because things which have nothing 
 in common cannot be the cause of one another, if 
 created at all it must have been created by some- 
 thing like itself, which, under those conditions, would 
 be the same, and therefore but a continuation of 
 the same stuff, therefore I believe that the soul is 
 uncreated, that the soul never began to be and will 
 never have an end. 
 
 Under the present conditions of my conscious 
 expression I am not able to give the eternal biogra- 
 phy of a soul ; I expect at some period of my spirit- 
 ual consciousness to have a full view of all that my 
 
The Soul. 8T 
 
 soul has realized or thought, or that it will have in 
 the future, in its relative possibilities of expression. 
 
 I believe that I am going forward to more com- 
 plex states of mental relationships and expression, 
 and that my personality is subject to great advances 
 in power of thought and ability to know. This 
 progress is for bodily and also for spiritual states 
 of consciousness coming to the soul in the future. 
 The end of the evolution of man on the earth- 
 plane is not yet. He will be a being still more 
 advanced in conceptive and inventive power. Man 
 on earth will develop a complete clairvoyant con- 
 sciousness, and know a broader field of natural 
 phenomena, and approach the domain of cause with 
 a greater grasp of being. The process of evolution 
 is endless. To suppose the opposite is absurd. 
 
 With the idea before me that the chain of con- 
 tinuous evolution will remain unbroken it is fair to 
 say and expect that in coming ages man will have 
 a better brain than what he has to-day, and that the 
 standard of reason will be higher, and that the con- 
 stitution of reason itself will be improved, that is, 
 that there will appear elemental faculties added to 
 the capacity of reason as the course of mental evolu- 
 tion appears. It is clear that the progress of man in 
 the past is marked by the coming forth of at first 
 elemental faculties, and then these same faculties 
 become fuHy developed and form perfect function 
 in the mind. The earliest appearance of man must 
 
88 The Soul. 
 
 have been very low. in the power of mental expres- 
 sion. The dawn of reason could hardly have in it 
 the faculty of deduction. Some of the lower ani- 
 mals so called have no apparent power of clear 
 deduction, and when man came forth out of the 
 mental darkness there were manifested in his men- 
 tal operations but little if any of this faculty. As 
 ages went on the experiences and exigencies of life 
 produced the full power of this faculty. It must 
 be equally true then that if the laws of nature are 
 continuous the action of circumstances on man 
 and his experiences must do for him what they did 
 for him in more elemental states of his mentality; 
 and in trying to give a general guess at what man's 
 intellectual nature will be in that vast future of 
 natural progress on this plane of earth, I must be 
 guided and must take into full consideration the 
 great uncertainty that will be in the general ele- 
 ments which will go to make the future circumstan- 
 ces of man on this earth, there must remain a large 
 field of uncertainty about the period and the nature 
 of the mind's new faculties that will appear. Already 
 it can be discerned that the mind is forming a set 
 of new faculties, which have a range of function far 
 above the domain of mere reason. I refer to the 
 faculities of psychometry and clairvoyance. Neither 
 phase of function expressed by these powers is in- 
 cluded in the constitution of reason; indeed, they 
 seem to act without much relation to the higher 
 
The Soul. 89 
 
 faculties of reason, why they are more related to 
 the perceptive faculities than to the reflective facul- 
 ties will appear in a moment. The perception in 
 clairvoyance is the same as in reason. Every object 
 to the chairvoyant eye will have form and size and 
 color. The whole power of the sensational plane is 
 retained, but it is not so in the higher faculties of 
 reason. It does not reason. It knows. It is the 
 directly knowing faculty. It knows without reflect- 
 ing or even without the act of memory, for then it 
 covers the field of memory with sight. It is not in 
 a past nor a future, but all phenomena are in a vis- 
 ible present. Reason cannot comprehend such a 
 state of consciousness. It is the past and the pres- 
 ent realized in a present and eternal perception. 
 In the conditions of the human mind are the first 
 appearances of these powers of psychometry and 
 clairvoyance. The spiritual medium is one of the 
 persons showing in an elemental way the appear- 
 ance of the powers. Sometimes they are so weak 
 in their action that the power falls into disrepute, 
 for adventurers have sprung up and imitated the 
 work of the genuine mediums, and much harm to 
 the cause of mental science has been done in the 
 public mind, and especially have the scientists, grave 
 and serious men, addicted to the accurate measure- 
 ment of natural facts, and who are not wedded to any 
 special philosophy of life and destiny, been much 
 constrained to treat the whole subject as one of 
 
90 The Soul. 
 
 delusion and fraud. To treat the subject this way- 
 is too hasty, and also unscientific, but much can be 
 excused, seeing what has been attempted by those 
 who have had no regard for fact or truth, who have 
 palmed all sorts of contrivances on the credulous 
 public as phenomena produced by the agency of 
 the spiritual world. The safety of all truth consists 
 in correctly seeing and knowing all the facts. 
 
 I may say just a word here about the oriental 
 mind in times past having done much speculative 
 work as to the beginning of material things, the 
 coming into existence of the world, the start of 
 moral consciousness, and the absolute being of a 
 God. These have been the fruitful themes of the 
 ancient and oriental philosophers. India stands 
 forth as being the most prolific and idealistic of 
 the ancient nations in the work of religious devo- 
 tion and speculation. The sacred books of India are 
 very old and very numerous. They are character- 
 ized by great spiritual sincerity, profound insight, 
 moral elevation of tone, and a perfect resignation 
 to the supreme power of God. By nature the 
 Hindoo is devout and meek in spirit. He is not 
 aggressive, nor cruel, but of a spiritual and devout 
 mind. His superstitions are great, and hold hirn in 
 perfect mental slavery to old philosophical teaching 
 that has come down the ages from his forefathers. 
 Hindoos have not been inactive in their spetiila- 
 tions about the history, origin and powers as weU 
 
The Soul. 91 
 
 as the ultimate destiny of the soul. Asia in fact 
 has absorbed this very old idea that God is all 
 things, and that the soul is an emanation from him. 
 That his essence is pure intelligence, and that the 
 soul of man is from this essence, and is itself of the 
 nature of pure intelligence, but degraded by coming 
 into matter. 
 
 Greek idealism took hold of the same belief. In 
 the best age of Greek thought the beliefs common 
 to India began to appear and to gain some ascend- 
 ancy. The scholars of those ages traveled from 
 country to country in their early days to discover 
 new truth, and to spread the truth they had. The 
 nations which had in their character the most mili- 
 tary genius did the most to foster their ideas 
 amongst distant and foreign peoples. The soldier 
 carried his priest with him, and stamped his beliefs 
 on the prostrated nations to some extent, and thus 
 modified and mixed the prevailing superstitions. 
 Egypt was a great country, addicted to religion, to 
 speculation on the origin of things, and the divine 
 relationship of creative power to the soul of man. 
 In the religious ideas of Egypt the soul has the 
 stamp of a divine origin. The soul is a spark of the 
 essence of God. Perfect before its descent into 
 matter, but through matter returns to the perfect 
 state which had been lost in its personal descent. 
 Such were the fanciful dreams of ancient oriental 
 thought. Time has brought great changes into the 
 
92 The Soul. 
 
 realm of natural origin. The genesis of things can 
 not be settled by the imagination, but it must be re- 
 alized that the correct way to find the truths locked 
 up in the archives of nature is to study nature, which 
 science does, so that science is not presumptuous 
 when it enters the domain of speculative philosophy 
 and asks the question : What is a soul ? 
 
 For a long time the mind of Europe took its 
 salient features of belief from the Greek intellect, 
 and the long contending forces stood face to face 
 in the councils of the early Christian Church as to 
 whether the Platonic or the Aristotelian philoso- 
 phers should be paramount in the belief and teach- 
 ing of the Church. The contentions have but just 
 ended at this day. It has taken generations of 
 thinkers and students of nature to close in and 
 break the rule of philosophy in the Schools. Sci- 
 ence has come to reign and direct the future course 
 of speculation. 
 
 Plato, the most profound thinker of all antiquit}^, 
 and the most sweet and graceful spirit of all the 
 teachers of antiquity, often turns to the soul as a 
 subject for his most sublime meditations. He owed 
 much to the great teacher that preceded him in time, 
 and while seeking the crown of an original thinker, 
 did not lack the sense of gratitude toward those 
 teachers who had laid down much that was essen- 
 tial to a perfect mental philosophy. He was both a 
 creator and a preserver of thought. That which he 
 
The Soul. 93 
 
 discerned as truth in other philosophies he incor- 
 porated into the body of his own thought. Amid 
 the disputations and the social convulsions which 
 soon attacked the Greek mind and the loss of the 
 independence of its government, they soon became 
 confused, and their teachings less worthy and con- 
 sistent in thought. The battle of philosophy was 
 soon removed from Athens to Rome, a wider theatre 
 of power and world influence. The power of Rome 
 carried the thought and the beautiful arts of the 
 Greeks to all parts of the earth where the arms 
 of the conquerors could reach. Thus Christianity 
 obtained an easy conquest over the rude and bar- 
 barous habits and superstitions of Europe. For 
 some centuries the christian philosophers con- 
 tended with each other about the origin and nature 
 of the soul. Some being inspired with the teachings 
 of Aristotle, and others devoted to the doctrines of 
 Plato as presented in the Logos. The incarnation 
 of the immortal soul in the life of man, the nature 
 of conversion and the coming and nature of the 
 Holy Spirit were all derived ideas from the general 
 activity of Greek idealism in the age preceding the 
 introduction of Christianity to the Roman world. 
 But the common belief that the soul of man was of 
 the essence of God was a common belief difiused 
 throughout the ancient world, and Christianity did 
 not invent any new doctrine nor give any new char- 
 acter or definition to God that had not been before 
 
94 The Soul. 
 
 held by the barbarian so-called. The philosophy of 
 Christianity is of the Greek and Egyptian family of 
 speculation, and as time goes on science will correct 
 the standing errors of faith and speculations. 
 
 The soul in all ages of superstition was looked 
 upon as the pure essence of God, and had in itself 
 the seeds of perfection. Potentially it had all 
 wisdom and goodness. That its imperfections con- 
 sisted in its degration and enslavement in matter, 
 and that the animal propensities did not belong to 
 the immortal soul. That the animal soul perished 
 with the death of the body, and that the pure intellec- 
 tual principle alone survived to live and continue in 
 the onward career of greater purity and perfection. 
 
 The historical episodes of the soul's career in the 
 celestial world, and its condemnation and its descent 
 into matter, have been themes for the pious poets 
 and speculators of antiquity. They have no value 
 but as work, showing the gradual rise of the mind to 
 more correct methods of reasoning and to more ra- 
 tional methods of life. Man has been slow in coming 
 for the correction of all his studies to the character 
 and operations of nature. The closer man keeps 
 himself to the order and conditions of natural truth 
 the more accurate will be his thought and the more 
 correct his life. The first view that nature was the 
 product of an inferior deity, and very imperfect and 
 corrupting to soul, was the processes of procreation, 
 and the animal faculties of the mind were so adverse 
 
The Soul. 95 
 
 to the cultivation of the spiritual virtues, that actu- 
 ally nature became the adverse power of inspiration, 
 and man began to believe the farther he could get 
 away from nature the greater spiritual virtue he, 
 would possess. Such were the egregeous errors of 
 man when the flame of human reason hardly rose 
 above the groveling passions of bodily indulgence 
 and a base appetite. The effect of the belief of the 
 absolute moral purity of God and the soul has led to a 
 gradual evolution of the moral character of the race. 
 Without this ideal and the anticipated glories of the 
 world to come the sluggish and cruel barbarisms 
 of the olden days would not have so speedily given 
 way before the triumphant march of faith in God. 
 This conception of an ideal perfection in the good- 
 ness and justice of God made all peoples feel a desire 
 to live in harmony with that ideal, so the character 
 gradually was lifted, and the standard of social living 
 became purer under the beneficent sway of the 
 christian religion. While the ideal of righteousness 
 was always human, always the product of the human 
 mind, that ideal did the work, and through faith man 
 became subject to the higher moral and inspirations 
 of life. The power and action of the fiery passions 
 were calmed and subdued, and an era of peace to 
 the soul came that could not easily have come in 
 any other way. 
 
 This moral concession to superstition must and 
 ought to be made, because a frame work of faith 
 
96 The Soul. 
 
 may be incorrect or actually false, yet that moral 
 ideality enshrined in the structure of that faith 
 may tend to the general betterment of mankind. 
 
 The abuses of the Christian name and the distor- 
 tion of the Christian character can not be laid at 
 the door of the great moral concepts on which the 
 character of the soul and of God are founded. 
 
 I think it will ever be retained in the thoughtful 
 veneration of man that the soul is an element of 
 absolute purity, like all the other elements of 
 nature. There is nothing wrong or bad in nature. 
 
 Amid the conflict and the jargon of contending 
 Schools amongst the Greek and the Komans the 
 question of the existence and the character of God 
 was uppermost, and excited the fiercest spirit of 
 party resentment. But it must be conceded that 
 the flower of Greek thought and scholarhip are 
 essentially Platonic. Plato carried the abstract 
 conception of God ahead of the conceptions of the 
 renowned thinkers of his time and for some suc- 
 ceeding ages. It was the highest and most refined 
 Pan-Theism the world had ever had. He tried to 
 conceive God the universal and infinite intelligence 
 manifested in the phenomena of nature. This ideal 
 was too advanced for vulgar minds, and the Deity 
 was conceived and worshipped by many nations as 
 a personality, self-existent and apart from the forms 
 of nature, and capable of exerting his power over all 
 things, and had a residence in the celestial world. 
 
The S6UL. 97 
 
 Platonism antagonized anthropomorphism. The 
 Roman mind inclined to the latter form of thought, 
 and christianty, in its dominant form, became and 
 largely remains the latter. The spiritual and moral 
 eifect remained. In both creations the intelligence 
 and moral nature were perfect and absolute, so the 
 ideal in moral results on man remained identically 
 the same. The highest rule of sovereignty was 
 perfect justice, and the eternal heart of the God 
 was perfect goodness. 
 
 If the Christians in their lives and practices could 
 have followed the ideal, what a different world we 
 would have had to-day. Man's religions are always 
 better than he is himself practically. At the close 
 of the Dark Ages following the decay of the military 
 spirit engendered by the christian ardor of the 
 Crusades, there came a calm and a philosophical 
 spirit of change, partly due to the influence of the 
 Saracens upon the Christians. The Christians in 
 their onslaughts on the legions of Islam, and their 
 intercourse with the devout followers of the Arabian 
 prophet, imbibed the scholarship that had not been 
 extinguished in the fires of Moslem conquests, they 
 revived the classic learning of the ancients, and 
 again the lamp of Plato began to burn. The learned 
 occupant of the Papal 8ee, Hildebrand, fanned the 
 flame, and soon the ideal dreams of metaphysicans 
 became the rage, till the influence of the Baconian 
 philosophy, which was but a restoration of the best 
 
98 The Soul. 
 
 thought of Aristotle. The Inductive Method at last 
 won a signal victory from and under the higher 
 forces of logical precision, theology and philosophy 
 passed under the most trying and serious clianges 
 that had awaited them for ages. To that important 
 change may be ascribed the changes that have come 
 in succeeding ages. The age of a perfect faith 
 waned and died when the real force of the scien- 
 tific method took possession of the scholastic mind. 
 The influence of the change — the death of the school- 
 men — brought forward the modern spirit of religious 
 and political reform. The soul was viewed as a 
 real representation of God in man, and conscience, 
 the moral monitor of the mind, ascended in author- 
 ity over individual conduct to be supreme, and was 
 regarded as the voice of God in the soul. The ex- 
 treme of this philosophical and spiritual revolution 
 was the birth of the extreme spirit of puritanism. 
 Democracy itself took form, and changes, which at 
 one time would have staggered the conservatism of 
 Europe, entered into the political conditions of the 
 Christian nations, and the dominant powers of feud- 
 alism retired before the new power of the people. 
 The doctrine of the immortality of the soul stood 
 as the foundation of man's political and civil rights. 
 This principle of personal right and liberty surpassed 
 all the personal claims to political justice ever 
 made in the world before. But after all, philosophy 
 had not yet decided the questions involved in the 
 
The Soul. 99 
 
 doctrine of eternal life and justification. Great 
 problems inspired the religious controversies of 
 those times. The justification of man, the myste- 
 rious doctrine of Christianity was maintained to be 
 through the sacrificial death of Christ, the son of 
 God, and through his righteousness were all made 
 righteous through faith. The struggle was to justify 
 the ways of God to man. For more than two cen- 
 turies, opening with the birth of the Reformation, 
 the religious controversies were acrimonious, and 
 tended to the disruption and dishonor of govern- 
 ments and states. Partisan zeal went beyond all 
 rational bounds, and persecution reigned supreme. 
 Still the soul was the one perfect, pure entity to be 
 forever housed in the kingdom of heaven with the 
 all-perfect father. 
 
 To-day science has come with her wand to solve 
 some of the great mysteries of time and the future. 
 The soul, the thinking entity, has become the sub- 
 ject of scientific investigation as to its powers over 
 the body, and those eff"ects that are seen in abnor- 
 mal mental states. The hypnotic state uplifts the 
 vail from obscure recesses of the soul, and the eye of 
 mind widens to the grasp of broader fields of truth. 
 It was supposed a little while ago that hypnotism 
 settled a great number of subjects, but the fact is it 
 has opened up more avenues of mystery than it has 
 closed. The problems involved in Mind Reading 
 have come to us, the problems of Psychometry have 
 
 LofC. 
 
100 The Soul. 
 
 grown, and the difficulties of changing personalities 
 in the trance state have not yet been removed. 
 The new psychologist has widened the field of in- 
 vestigation, but has not settled the boundaries of 
 the subject. The investigation covers all the phe- 
 nomena of mind, and the far reaching questions that 
 concern the durability and the changing relations of 
 consciousness. The influence of the spiritual world 
 comes more and more into sight as the phenomena 
 of changing mental states are investigated. And 
 it becomes clearer as a fact in nature that just be- 
 yond the walls of human sense stand the eternal 
 sentinels of the spirit world as guides and loved 
 ones, helping to advance and strengthen the mental 
 tides which ebb and flow from the great ocean of 
 Mind in the eternal spheres of soul-being. The 
 great universe of spirit is co-related to us, and we 
 are acting with it in the world's changes and pro- 
 gress. 
 
 This fact, when realized by the human race, man 
 will see and feel the true force and strength in pro- 
 gress, and he will stand on a firmer principle of 
 life, and weave the threads of his mortal happiness, 
 and life purposes with greater insight of truth and 
 a stronger hold on the consciousness of life. Great 
 are the spiritual possibilities and revelations await- 
 ing us in the future. 
 
LECTURE V. 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OP INSPIRATION ON MAN. 
 
 The capabilities and possibilities of the individual 
 soul, extending its expression from state to sphere, 
 from personality to personality, covering the grada- 
 tions of sex as problems, have been before the 
 thinking mind ever since there grew up a capacity 
 for receiving the instruction of spirits in the great 
 realm. Remember that Spiritualism is as old as 
 the development of the faculty of intuition, and 
 down through the ages there has always been a 
 great and glorious inspiration moving the very 
 inner springs of civilization. The profound histo- 
 rian has not noted the divinity pulsating in phe- 
 nomena; the scientific analyst of events has not 
 taken note of the great moving central principle of 
 nature, but the events of history and of life have 
 been discoursed upon and put in historical order as 
 if they had no relation with one another as phe- 
 nomena in the domain of cause; but as there is law 
 in the physical world, law in the mental world, 
 there is law in the historical world. To suppose the 
 contrary is to introduce a new element into the 
 
102 The Influence of Inspiration on Man. 
 
 constitution of nature that will lead to confusion 
 and dislocation. 
 
 Once admit the existence of natural law in the 
 development of physical nature you must admit it 
 to exist in all departments of nature, for nature 
 cannot be partly controlled by law and partly con- 
 trolled by chance. The mind of intelligence can- 
 not set aside the developing forms and processes 
 of law, hence he who would think wisely and well 
 must recognize in the operations of nature a uni- 
 form action of law. Here comes in the philosoph- 
 ical problem to be decided: Does intelligence pre- 
 side in law ? Each philosopher must decide this 
 according to the development of his capability in 
 the classification of ideas. 
 
 But does it not strike you that in the uniformity 
 of law, in the persistence of order, there must be in- 
 telligence? How could a thing be intelligible if it 
 was not the expression of intelligence ? When you 
 have chaotic phenomena you have no intelligence. 
 When you shake a dice box with the twenty-six 
 letters of the alphabet in it and throw them out upon 
 the table they fall upon the table in chaos, they 
 do not arrange themselves according to intelligence, 
 and, therefore, when you come to look at the al- 
 phabet thus lying upon your table the letters do not 
 spell any words. Before these letters can spell the 
 hand of intelligence must manipulate them. Before 
 any flower can come forth out of the plant intelli- 
 
The Influence of Inspiration on Man. 103 
 
 gence must be in the plant, and the expression of 
 the evolution of the flower is an expression of the 
 intelligence. This is the law. All the laws of 
 nature express intelligence. All the laws of the 
 District of Columbia express intelligence, and they 
 express the sovereignty of an intelligent people. So 
 in the constitution of the body of man, the sover- 
 eignty of the soul is expressed in the laws of life, 
 the laws regulating magnetism, the laws regulating 
 generation, the laws regulating the variation of in- 
 tellectual and spiritual power; intelligence being 
 at the back of all phenomena make all phenomena 
 intelligible. 
 
 As the intellect of man creeps up the ascending 
 scale of evolution it reaches the spiritual world, 
 and reason — now then for the trouble ! — reason be- 
 comes an instinct. What is an instinct? Instinct 
 is a subjective power, that is fixed and does not 
 change or improve by experience ; and that which 
 does not improve by experience and has selective 
 capability is instinct. Intellect in passing into the 
 spiritual world becomes instinct, and ranges itself 
 with the other instincts called animal instincts, and 
 the soul ascending to the command of its spiritual 
 body becomes a clairvoyant soul, and has a larger 
 lordship over surrounding conditions. 
 
 The phenomena of the spiritual world are pro- 
 duced out of spirit. Now, I did not make this word 
 " spirit " for you, but I take it because it has a ver- 
 
104 The Influence op Inspiration on Man. 
 
 nacular use. I could not use a more difficult word, 
 because there are attached to it certain theological 
 meanings, and these meanings are very difficult to 
 separate from it, but by "spirit" I mean a mode of 
 stuff that is not matter; it is on a higher vibration, 
 and, being on a higher vibration, the molecules are 
 finer and richer and of a different nature ; and these 
 molecular motions and combinations of spirit con- 
 stitute a new order of things in rythmic relation- 
 ship to all lower and grosser forms of motion, but 
 the soul is at the top of all co-ordination. The soul 
 does not suspend any law that is in operation in 
 atomic nature, neither in matter nor in magnetism., 
 nor in spirit, but adapts its action to the principles 
 of.law, and uses law to promote the design and pur- 
 poses of the soul. 
 
 The soul has, in its development of personality, 
 come into the expression of sex. You have been 
 told that the soul has journeyed through different 
 forms of expression until it expresses itself in the 
 personality of man. With man you are familiar, 
 with the spirit developed you are less familiar. You 
 are faced with the sex problem. In the matter state 
 you have the male and the female personality — the 
 negative and the positive states of electrical action. 
 The electrical action on the lowest planes of gen- 
 eration is most apparent, but in reality there is not 
 that difference in the constitution of the female 
 personality and the constitution of the male perso- 
 
The Influence of Inspiration on Man, 105 
 
 nality as you might think would appear. In the 
 microscopic world, in the elemental expressions of 
 life, there are many forms of life that are dual, 
 where the male and the female express themselves 
 in the same personality, so that it is not contrary to 
 the laws of nature for me to affirm that there are 
 states in which the dual soul expresses itself through 
 one body, and as the soul ascends to the expression 
 of personality in the union of the perfect marital life 
 the souls become so closely related to each other 
 that they express themselves in the same — shall I 
 say the same? — celestial body, and we know this 
 body in the spiritual world as the angelic body. It 
 is a dual-sexed body ; that is to say, the travail of the 
 two souls that are expressing perfect harmony pro- 
 duces a perfect reflection of that harmony in a celes- 
 tial angelic body, and in lower spheres in spirit life 
 it will take expression of the most beautiful wavy 
 lines and structual perfection th^t the genius of the 
 soul's creative powers can set forth. Hence when 
 spirits that even have been long in spirit life have 
 watched the coming of these great spiritual beings 
 they have seen them come clothed in light. This 
 life is the vibration of a celestial magetism. 
 
 There can be no expression only in the etheric 
 spheres. Even in man you bring down these vibra- 
 tions, and when the angel visits the conditions of 
 development in spirit life it is only to make a more 
 powerful connection with those units, and this 
 
106 The Influence oe Inspiration on Man. 
 
 angel becomes an eonic, soul; that is to say, the 
 great governor, the great light, the celestial wis- 
 dom. It is by wisdom that we rise. Wisdom is 
 the redeemer, and the more closely we can get to 
 this magnificent light the more rapidly does the 
 soul awaken to the divine consciousness in it. 
 
 1 think I can take a simple, clear illustration 
 for you from astronomy and show what is meant by 
 the life line. Now, if you will take a great combi- 
 nation of stellar worlds, on the law of the dynamics 
 of the spheres, you will find that your sun is the cen- 
 ter of the solar system, the system that is revolving 
 around the solar orbit. The sun is revolving with 
 her attendants like a great king and his courtiers 
 — like a magnificent center away out there — and 
 gathering in a large field innumerable millions of 
 stars, forming a great center of astronomical energy 
 around this magnificent polarity, and so rolling 
 and gathering and gathering and rolling into one 
 harmonious motion one gigantic stellar miracle. It 
 is so with souls. 
 
 There is one great soul. We are tending toward 
 that great soul, and that great soul is tending 
 toward other souls. We are on the line of affinity, 
 and we have contracted this affinity through the 
 stages of evolution we passed in acquiring perso- 
 nality. We never lose that affinity we have gath- 
 ered, hence there are people that you meet for the 
 first time feeling sure ,that yon have met them 
 
The Influence of Inspiration on Man. 107 
 
 somewhere before; feeling sure that it may have 
 been in some other incarnation when it is only the 
 same karma. J 
 
 When a molecule, dominated by an elemental con- 
 sciousness, has come into arterial corpuscular relat- 
 ionship to your soul, and with the millions of cor- 
 puscles now constituting the sources of life, you 
 have formed a psychic relationship, and experiences 
 of today are being imparted to them at second 
 hand — a mere dumb transcrij)t of them is being 
 transferred to these elemental states living as nu 
 clei in the blood corpuscles, and as they rise toward 
 personality they carry that heredity with them, and 
 having carried previous heredities and lived them 
 they come into foetal life, and you cannot, in the 
 first stages of gestation, tell whether the form is 
 going to be a fish, a dog, a horse, a mammal of what 
 kind, but through the different stages and evolutio- 
 nary tj^pes of heredity the expression made comes, 
 because the creative soul has passed through these 
 stages and taken on these karma, and is unrolling 
 them. This constitutes heredity; it constitutes the 
 heredity of sex; it constitutes the heredity of love; 
 it constitutes also an elemental philosophical here- 
 dity, and passes on and up, and is never lost in the 
 genesis of the soul's evolution. It passes into in- 
 stinct, and, as instinct, stimulates life. 
 
 Has it never struck you with wonder when you 
 have seen animals inferior toman drop their young? 
 
108 The Influence op Inspiration on Man. 
 
 The intelligent perfecton of the j'^oung ; how readily 
 they adapt themselves to the changed condition in 
 the awakening moments of their independent exist- 
 ence; they are ready to stand on their feet. For 
 example, the colt or calf immediately after birth 
 will-get up and seem to be possessed of a sufficient 
 development of conscious intelligence to know 
 where the food supply will be found, to be able to 
 understand the language of the animal, to be warned 
 of danger by the simple articulations of the animal. 
 The teaching capabilities seem to be prominent. 
 Man seems to be one of the most helpless creatures 
 when born, requiring the greatest amount of atten- 
 tion and the greatest amount of time for the expres- 
 sion of that which is instinctive in him. Now this 
 is a subject upon which you can study, but the law 
 lies deep.' Through these evolutionary stages you 
 have come. You have come, sometimes by what 
 were epoch jumps, due to the conditions of intel- 
 lectuality of the body through w^hich you have 
 ascended, and these states of affinity will corres- 
 pond to the intellectual magnetism in which you 
 have been placed. 
 
 Your world, then, is made for you. The degree 
 of your talent, the sum total of your capability, of 
 genius, is settled for you long before jou take upon 
 yourselves the characteristics of the human. In a 
 couple of years the science of bacteriology will throw 
 a light upon this great study that will carry the 
 
The Influence op Inspiration on Man. 109 
 
 genus horn® back into those animalculae spheres 
 of being. 
 
 The study of the soul is the study of giganic pro- 
 cessess of nature's personal forms of expression, 
 and no scientific intellect can carry any hypothesis 
 as an explanation of generation that does not ac- 
 cept the postulate that the soul is the creator there- 
 of. The materialistic hypothesis will break down 
 right at the threshold, it cannot stand for one mo- 
 ment under the chain of sequences that are now 
 visible in the gigantic study called histolog3^ 
 
 I have so far been only upon the ground that is 
 known, of what is now the common knowledge of 
 the student, and the onward development is the 
 work of the spiritual world, to reveal the encase- 
 ments, the conditions of the soul in spiritual states. 
 
 The old Hindoo idea that there would have to be 
 a perpetual coming back in cycles to purge the ani- 
 mal soul of its propensities, and giving the perfect 
 soul expression in order to enter the perfect state 
 or Nirvana — that idea is elemental. That idea is 
 projected from a sphere that knew a great deal, but 
 is still learning and climbing. Evolution is on- 
 ward. Evolution is differentiation. Progress is the 
 advancement toward complexity. Evolution in the 
 spiritual world, in the direction of the angel, is the 
 evolution of consciousness, and man, when he at- 
 tains the intuitional stage, when he attains the 
 clairvoyant expression, he has gone as far as matter 
 
110 The Influence of Inspiration on Man. 
 
 can carry him — he has come to the plane of spirit 
 — you have come to the plane of spirit and will 
 evolve the latent possibilities of soul. 
 
 What you call incarnation is embodiment. I 
 want words, I mean embodiment in spirit, not em- 
 bodiment in the lower vibrations ; you have passed 
 through those, and they are registered in the ele- 
 ments of foetal life ; they are registered in your in- 
 stinct, in your animal propensities, in your moral 
 emotions and intellectual faculties, for did not every 
 faculty that you iDossess come by the impingement 
 of personal experiences ? so the development of 
 these magnificent powers of consciousness in the 
 spirit world ; they have to be unfolded like the pages 
 in a book by the evolution of new expressions. The 
 amativeness of the instinctive man has not finished 
 its work, and the sex life is eternally associated with 
 the evolution of consciousness until it becomes ab- 
 sorbed in the angel, and then it rushes on to fields 
 of inexpressible power, consciousness, intensity, 
 thought — eternal, immeasurable thought. 
 
 I have no language at my command which will 
 enable me to lead you up to these great altitudes of 
 progress, but what I wish to do is to present to you 
 a faint picture of a part — shall I call it a part? — of 
 3^our destiny. It would not be worth while for infi- 
 nite intelligence to produce a phenomenon like man 
 on earth and end him there. It would not be worth 
 while for the infinite intelligence in nature to pro- 
 
The Influence of Inspiration on Man. Ill 
 
 duce a spirit and end him there. Infinite intelli- 
 gence will never be satified with its condition of 
 expression until it has made the vast universe of 
 energy conscious — conscious energy. That which 
 is mechanical is coming up to conscious energy ; it 
 is the mighty Infinite coming to Himself; the 
 mighty Infinite being born to a conscious knowledge 
 of Himself; man envolving — and the evolution will 
 be upon the discussion, upon the views, upon the 
 aspects, upon the forms which the human mind will 
 strike out of itself to become infinite. Not an idle 
 work; not a mere amusement having no use. 
 
 He who sends out of his consciousness the anthro- 
 pomorphic expression of the infinite intelligence, 
 making him an infinite man; the man who makes 
 infinite intelligence an immanence of nature, a great 
 soul of which the infinite is the expression, has given 
 expression to another thought, and the two thoughts 
 assist each other. In the negative and positive 
 elements of thought the great thoughts become cohe- 
 sive and disruptive. In the spiritual spheres they 
 are things, and therefore it is a turmoil of thought 
 in the struggle for expression with the souls in the 
 spheres above you. They are coming to their know- 
 ledge — awakening — just as the different notes that 
 are in this instrument if struck will produce differ- 
 ent tones, and each tone will awaken some great 
 rythmic harmony in consciousness. Now, this is the 
 spiritual world. Far is it from being a world of 
 
112 The Influence of Inspiration on Man. 
 
 dreamy rest and poetical simplicity. Throw away 
 the idea, never rest upon it any more, that the life 
 of the spiritual world is an emotional sleep ; that the 
 faculities of exalted creative intelligences are at 
 rest, and that you are going to find happiness in the 
 acclamations of praise to this Infinite Intelligence 
 that you have built up there. You are not going 
 to do this. You are not going to be the eternal 
 solicitors of favors. The spiritual world is not an 
 everlasting prayer meeting. The spiritual world is 
 not a congregation of psalm singers. The spiritual 
 world is a world of differentiated spiritual activities, 
 thoughts and life, marvelously threading and inter- 
 threading and beating upon the world of human 
 mind with the greatest possible force, and through 
 it all there runs a chord of harmony. Kound all that 
 wonderful diversity there is a thread of spiritual 
 law, of mighty purpose, of Infinite Intelligence, the 
 mighty directing power, which in its own order, 
 time, place, condition, is expressing that power — 
 all the possible power. 
 
 Think you that this could have been a different 
 age ? How could the law of gravitation have been 
 any different ? Just as well imagine that the uni- 
 verse could have been something else as to imagine 
 that the course of history could have been difi'erent 
 from what it is. Could George Washington have 
 come had Oliver Cromwell never lived? Could 
 there have been an Oliver Cromwell if Martin 
 
The Influence of Inspiration on Man. 1 13 
 
 Luther, " the sledge-hammer of the German Refor- 
 mation," had not lived ? Could the reformation 
 have come at all if there had not been Saracenic 
 wars with the Christians? Could the Anglo-Saxon 
 race have blessed the world with its intellectual 
 power had not the Roman world gathered the cults 
 of the East and the South, and the patriotic cults of 
 the North and West, and moulded them into a posi- 
 tive equilibrium and run them into the life and 
 faith of Europe ? Every event, every man, every 
 spirit, the universe, consciousness, hang in the 
 equilibrium of law, and intelligence is using law 
 for the grand expression of the highest power. 
 
 This is not Calvinism either, this is not fatalism, 
 but this is the law of conscious infinite life, and the 
 — Gnos — that which you know, that which knows; 
 that Eternal Gnos is the highest expression of Infi- 
 nite Intelligence. Now, upon this the great civiliza- 
 tion of the future is going to turn. This conception 
 of the Infinite will win in the intellectual civiliza- 
 tion. Creeds are tottering to their fall ; faith is 
 growing in the omnipotence of the spiritual world, 
 but faith in formulated dogma is passing away — it 
 has done its work, which was the expression for 
 an ignorant age — it was the lever with which to lift 
 the religous thought and character of a barbaric 
 time. But man is touched by a higher power, it is 
 the power of a growing intellect, and as he becomes 
 more sure of the ground on which he stands the 
 
114 The Influence of Inspiration on Man. 
 
 more clearly he will see how he is touched, inspired, 
 manipulated, used for the general expression of the 
 spiritul stages. When you come to study deeply, 
 these are the lessons of the spirit; when you come 
 to study deeply into these great problems, you will 
 find that your consciousness is largely a spiritual 
 consciousness now, and that to a very large extent 
 your deductive faculties are in that plane of being, 
 and that, though unconscious of being aided by 
 spiritual beings, you are really, through those 
 mighty cells of the brain, breathing the thought 
 of spiritual atmosphere ; you rise to the conception 
 that the brain cellular arrangement is but a mental 
 system of expansive lungs to take in the great 
 activities of the thought world. 
 
 The more humanity can realize and come to the 
 standpoint of this high faith the more the signifi- 
 cance of the teaching of the Apostle Paul will be 
 apparent, that " Faith is the substance of things 
 hoped for. " That which you want you will create ; 
 that which you need you shall have. If you have 
 faith like a grain of mustard seed you shall move 
 that mountain. You shall make your angelhood 
 by your life and by your faith. If you have no 
 faith you will not progress. 
 
 What is the difference between the man who 
 succeeds on a financial plane on earth and the man 
 who fails? The man who succeeds has the boldness 
 of faith ; the man who fails sees that tide in the 
 
The Influence of Inspiration on Man. 115 
 
 affairs of men come to a flood and hesitates, runs 
 back, does not advance to his opportunity — no 
 faith. Faith builds immortality, and when man 
 shall rise to his faith, when he shall know the truth, 
 the truth of the soul's power to create, he will have 
 faith. There is no reason why a man should not 
 live until he is a thousand years old. Why cannot 
 he live till he is a thousand years old? Because 
 he has not come to the truth, to the law of vital 
 co-relation ; when he knows it he will have faith, 
 his faith will be in accordance with his knowledge, 
 and with faith he can rise to his immortality. The 
 poet wrote wiser then he knew when he wrote, — 
 
 " Music raised a mortal to the skies 
 And brought an angel down." 
 
 This is a truth. It is harmony, it is the truth; 
 truth is harmony, and it is that which brings an 
 angel down. 
 
 Study the writing of Shakespeare. Love him, 
 That love strikes his sphere, and to you that soul 
 descends and bathes you with its light. Have you 
 faith? He can manifest to you the mighty phe- 
 nomena of his thought. You can grow to your 
 faith ; you will rise to your faith. See what it does 
 in the schools, in the world, in mathematics, in 
 speculation — everywhere. Rise to your knowledge ; 
 rise to your faith. 
 
 When it becomes a matter of health, a knowl- 
 edge of the truth brings faith, and the bodily pow- 
 
116 The Influence op Inspiration on Man. 
 
 ers become stronger, and you extend the cable line 
 of physical life. 
 
 Look at the life of that great statesman, Benja- 
 min Disraeli. What a gigantic struggle from sim- 
 ple beginnings it made. Watch him as he comes 
 up. He said, "I want to be the Prime Minister of 
 England." That sensitive organization yields to 
 the power of spiritual ambition and spirits of his 
 race — inspirational conditions of the spheres — bend 
 their powers, saying, " He shall be Prime Minister 
 of England," and the faith grows in him, and he 
 becomes the Prime Minister of England, and faith 
 has done its work. What then? No more brain 
 cells to make, no more work to do; the field of 
 ambition filled, done, completed, he dies, and dies 
 because faith is done. The power of life is ex- 
 hausted, and he goes away. 
 
 The power of the soul, the power of the sex life, 
 the power of the angel, the domination of this 
 mighty law you are just touching, and because you 
 are only just touching it the movement of progres- 
 sive thought seems to be flying to atoms. Here 
 one man gets a glimpse of the thought, here another 
 man gets another glimpse, and they are tearing one 
 another to pieces; but it is all the spiritul world; it 
 is all Spiritualism, lifting the human race to a 
 higher and a grander expression. 
 
LECTURE VI. 
 
 POWER. 
 
 The power of intelligence is to express. The 
 intelligent mind is seeking to express the fullness 
 of its power. The soul, functioning through the 
 intellect, is endeavoring to express its power. The 
 flowers of springtime are expressions of power. 
 The oak grows in the forest, in silence express- 
 ing; in silence it grows for a thousand years; no 
 tumult, no loud blowing of trumpets, it silently 
 attends to its own business, expressing the power. 
 The true life is to express the power, not denying it ; 
 not to vacate obligation, but to express the power. 
 
 All that a man has attained in expression is the 
 work of the power. That expression may have 
 been delayed by powerful circumstances, modified 
 by conditions over which the power had no efficient 
 commanding control. 
 
 Man physically and mentally is an expression of 
 power. The sum of all men's power is that which is 
 felt in the world, diversified by states, faculty, and 
 organizatioti. There is not a faculty in the mind 
 of man that is an evil faculty. When wrong is 
 
 done it is a violation of the proper use of power. 
 
 117 
 
118 Power. 
 
 The highest use of power is to make it possible 
 for a still higher use of power. You are seeking 
 more power, and you can only attain more power 
 by using the power you have correctly. 
 
 The animal powers of man are not evil powers, 
 necessary powers; they will be discarded by power 
 when power wants them no more. 
 
 You are compelled to live in a competitive world; 
 you have to compete with the changing seasons; 
 you have to fight the differentiated powers of nature. 
 You have to seek to know the order and procession 
 of events, the power and potency of vitality in 
 vegetable nature; you have to learn thrift and 
 economy of your resources and your possessions. 
 A waste of power is seen because it brings weak- 
 ness; a waste of time is seen because it brings 
 delay to the expression of power. 
 
 The unwise use of the mind, for purposes of 
 extended pleasure, immoderate pleasure, is seen; 
 it delays the expression of power. No man can 
 play with power. Nature is the most earnest thing 
 you will ever find in the sphere of being. You 
 cannot delay nor trifle with nature. Nature never 
 forgives; nature does not overlook a mistake. If 
 you cannot correctly answer the problems pro- 
 pounded to you by the Sphinx, you must suffer the 
 consequences. Nature abhors neglect. Nature 
 closes her door against you till you acquire the 
 ability to open it. Fire will burn when j^'ou put your 
 
Uo, 
 
 Power. 119 
 
 finger in it. A pope of Rome might put his finger 
 into the fire and it would burn; a South Sea 
 Islander might put his finger into the fire and it 
 would burn. 
 _V- The moral laws of nature do not suspend the 
 physical laws of nature. You may be the best 
 husband the Lord ever made, and have a poor 
 digestion; you may be the best wife the sun ever 
 shone upon and you may be subject to consumption. 
 The moral states of nature do not abrogate physical 
 laws. You may be as good as an archangel, but you 
 are liable to typhoid fever. Moral states, however 
 exalted, do not relieve you from physical con- 
 sequences. Nature will express her power. Nature 
 is not a murderer, because nature is sovereign; 
 power is absolute. You stand related to that 
 power; you have no moral claims upon that power; 
 your morality is founded upon the highest use of 
 your conscious power. 
 
 The sooner you can learn the lessons of nature the 
 sooner will follow happiness — the millennium of 
 consciousness. Happiness is not pleasure. Happi- 
 ness is the great harmony of all the faculties of the 
 soul — power doing its work correctly. 
 
 Your place in nature is an honorable one ; you are 
 the crowning work of the evolution of power; on 
 the physical plane the mind of man is the highest 
 product; on the spiritual plane the spiritual con- 
 sciousness is the highest product ; on the celestial 
 
 / 
 
 I 
 
 /> 
 
120 Power. 
 
 plane the celestial consciousness is the highest 
 product 
 
 The consciousness on the material plane is 
 inspired by the consciousness on the spiritual 
 plane ; the consciousness on the spiritual plane is 
 inspired by the consciousness of the celestial plane ; 
 the happiness of all secured by a correct expres- 
 sion of the faculties of consciousness; that con- 
 sciousness seeking the securest and the fittest place 
 in nature. 
 
 All arbitrary systems have a human guidance 
 not in harmony with nature, and being artificial 
 will come to naught. All the religions in the world 
 not in harmony with the laws of nature will come 
 to naught. They will serve their day, they will do 
 their work under the conception, under the power 
 as it could feel, sense and know. 
 
 Power is developing knowledge ; knowledge 
 comes from experience and inspiration ; knowledge 
 when attained covers the fact and the law of the 
 phenomenon. Knowledge was power when George 
 Stephenson conceived the principle and structure 
 of that elemental locomotive steam engine; know- 
 ledge was power when Edison conceived the basic 
 principle of stored electrical energy — Power, when 
 you know nature. When man knew that iron was 
 harder than stone he acquired a bit of knowledge 
 that lifted the degrees of civilization. When man 
 could make a saw that would cut the oak tree he 
 
Power — Master Workman. 121 
 
 had gained a bit of knowledge that would give him 
 power and advance civilization. 
 
 Man stands to-day in the flood of incoming know- 
 ledge, and this knowledge is the Logos, the Savior 
 of the World ; knowledge of spirit ; knowledge of 
 moral law; knowledge of life, social organization, 
 government, jurisprudence, liberty, the powers of 
 imagination, the beautiful, the harmonious. 
 
 The universe responds at the feet of Intelligent 
 Power. 
 
 MASTER WORKMAN 
 
 It was said of Henry Brougham, Lord Chancellor 
 of England, that had he been a bootblack he would 
 never have been satisfied until he was the best 
 bootblack that ever lived. There is no question 
 but it is a very high and a very grand ideal for a 
 workman to determine to be the best workman at 
 his trade that ever pursued it; for the scholar to be 
 the best scholar that ever lived; for an orator to be 
 the best orator that ever lived; for a statesman to 
 be the best statesman that ever lived. Virtuous in 
 a way, indeed, is such a resolution; bright indeed is 
 such an ambition. Deplorable in any age of the 
 world when the workman is an inefficient workman. 
 It is taken for granted that every workman will 
 be efficient, and the master workman is he who 
 thoroughly knows his trade — knows the art of his 
 
122 Power— Master Workman. 
 
 trade — knows all liis trade. This is the veritable, 
 the real workman. 
 
 There used to be in the world master workmen, 
 who really were master workmen ; there were men 
 who could make a shoe from start to finish — could 
 make it, knew how it should be made — could make 
 a good shoe — because they were master workmen. 
 Since that time changes have come, and there has 
 come a master without being a workman. He is a 
 man who has power, money — capital it is called in 
 economical studies. A capitalist has come, and 
 with his lordship commands and holds the present 
 form of civilization in his grip. Money is the ver- 
 itable god at the beginning of the twentieth cen- 
 tury — that sterling power that can be carried about; 
 that can buy commodities; that can buy pleasures; 
 that can build large houses; that can even make 
 shoddy statesmen — Money ! the god of the opening 
 twentieth century ! 
 
 This is an age of avarice, but that is not correct 
 altogether, it is only a half truth; it only specifies 
 a part of the human race, for I do hold that the 
 master workman is not dead, absolutely dead, abso- 
 lutely blown off the face of this planet : I do not 
 hold that by any means. I still am conservative 
 enough to believe that there are men who love art 
 more than money, and who love justice more than 
 money. I do verily and positively believe that 
 there are statesmen in the United States that love 
 
Power — Master Workman. 123 
 
 their country, that love liberty, that love justice, 
 more than money. But I do believe that there are 
 more weak-kneed statesmen in the world who 
 worship money more than liberty than ever in the 
 world before. There is a tendency to overdo every 
 noble and worthy pursuit. Ask the boy going to 
 the art school what is his ambition; the reply 
 comes, " To be the best artist." This is egoism of 
 the narrowest kind. What man would not wish 
 to wield the brush and genius of a Raphael ? But 
 that is not enough. A good artist that can paint a 
 picture and cannot love his children is a mal-formed 
 man. A great artist who can charm the world with 
 his pigments when he cannot expand his spiritual 
 nature into the broad avenues of human life is a 
 kind of a natural freak. That is not what you 
 want. You want a better formed man than that. 
 A master workman truly, but nothing more — a 
 hump-backed man anyhow. The soul demands, 
 the spiritual world demands, a better man than a 
 lop-sided man. It wants a man with all his facul- 
 ties harmoniously at work. The cook that can only 
 make Scotch porridge is not fit for Washington. 
 The cook must know the properties of foods and be 
 a good cook ; virtue truly, but only a cook — a man 
 and only a cook! A man and only a painter; a 
 man and only a statesman ; a man and only a par- 
 rot! That is not enough. The whole field of intel- 
 lectual life is demanded for an activity at your 
 
124 Power — Master Workman. 
 
 hands. Thy perceptive faculties have been given 
 to thee to be used. Some men go though the world 
 and never use their eyes ; they have eyes and see 
 not. 
 
 " A primrose by the river's brim 
 A yellow primrose is to him, 
 And nothing more." 
 
 When he goes to your wonderful congressional 
 library he sees marble form, paint, and nothing 
 more. When with his eyes he looks at Turner's 
 magnificent paintings he sees a piece of paint and 
 nothing more. He sees not a soul there, for in the 
 painting there is a soul ; in the library there is a 
 soul, and perception is to be used to see the soul. 
 To see the form only and not feel that flapping of 
 the angels' wings in thy consciousness is to be 
 blind. Bring to nature thy eyesight. Behold the 
 flowers; what are they? They are souls, when you 
 can see them. Behold the animals which live in 
 jungle, tree and plain, what are they? Mere forms! 
 automata! Verily thou art blind, for these are 
 souls, wrought out in workmanship by the master 
 workman, the mighty worker in this universe ; and 
 thy brotherhood is with the denizen of the forest, 
 the jungle, and the plain. The moral dictates of 
 conscience are applied to all forms of life. 
 
 A mother loves her child, the cat its kitten. The 
 mother loves her child better than her neighbor's 
 child. What grander form of expression would it 
 
Power — Master Workman. 125 
 
 be if that mother could love her neighbor's child as 
 well as her own ? What power that would be if an 
 artist could love the picture drawn by another artist 
 as well as he loves his own ? 
 
 How different it would be if the magnate million- 
 aires should love the poor man's pocket as well 
 as they love their own. If the soul could express 
 that equal fraternal love, what ^ change this world 
 would see. That love would invade the workshop, 
 it would live upon the farm, and it would dwell 
 in the kitchen — everywhere — is not that what you 
 want? Would not that be your heaven ? If every 
 man, woman and child had the development of the 
 love right in its fullness ; if you had no place in 
 your heart to cherish envy, no place in your heart 
 for dislike, no place for covetousness, your soul 
 would be a spiritual paradise. Are you doing any- 
 thing for yourself to bring you to that spot of con- 
 sciousness where you can love every man, woman 
 and child, or are you trying to love one, to wor- 
 ship one ; to adore and make a god or goddess of 
 just one ? Put this question : Will it not be the 
 highest and grandest flower of happiness when the 
 eyes of the body, and love, and intuition, will be 
 so perfect as to see equal beauty everywhere, and 
 equal rights everywhere, and love developed to 
 respect them ? That does seem to me to be the 
 best and the most earnest work for a human soul 
 to set about doing here ; where he can see a blem- 
 
126 Power — Master Workman. 
 
 ish let him try and remedy it; where he can see 
 imperfection let him try to bring perfection ; and, 
 first of all, he can do this for himself in his own 
 nature. 
 
 The trouble with this age is that men think 
 all men inefficient but themselves. All men are 
 mortal. All men will die. I am immortal ; I 
 will not die. Unrealized error, mistake, imperfec- 
 tion. You are more liable to see imperfection in 
 another than in yourselves. Now this is the condi- 
 tion. I am not blaming you, bless you, not at all, 
 but we are reasoning upon the big moral man ; we 
 are trying to build the master workman that we can 
 be the fullest, the roundest, the most just and the 
 most loving master workman that ever touched the 
 earth. This ambition appears to me to be the real 
 ambition, to be great in every faculty, wise in every 
 act, noble in every love. What for? To attain hap- 
 piness. Happiness can only be attained by the slow 
 ascent of virtuous paths. What is virtue? Is virtue 
 weight for weight? When a man gives a yard of 
 cloth for a dollar, is that virtue? Oh no, that is 
 not virtue. When the farmer's wife gives a pound 
 of butter for twenty-five cents, is that virtue ? No ! 
 What is virtue ? Why this is virtue : when the 
 farmer's wife gives you a pound of butter for 
 twenty -five cents, then puts a little bit on besides; 
 it is that added little bit that is virtue. Weight for 
 weight is not virtue. Giving something that right- 
 
Power — Master Workman. 127 
 
 fully belongs to thee — self-sacrifice — is virtue ; and 
 the fine lady that sulks because she cannot have 
 the highest place in the banqueting hall has no 
 virtue. Her egoism is perfect, and whether she sits 
 at the head of the table or at the foot of the table 
 she is the least person at the table. 
 
 He who wants to be the president and leader of 
 a spiritual organization, a society, that wants it for 
 his own honor and not the development of the 
 truth, is no leader at all — a sham. I am not per- 
 sonal; merely took it for an illustration to show 
 you that the egoism of life is not virtue. 
 
 You must be noble, you must sacrifice self for 
 the good of others. Why? Because the human 
 conditions are today imperiled. But why should 
 you do it ? That the higher egoism of the celestial 
 states may unfold ; that thy master workman may 
 be perfect ; that the lines of thy body may correctly 
 weave in the lines of truth ; that thy spirituality 
 may conform to the celestial standard. How we 
 wobble on the moral lines of life, and we say we 
 can not help it. How can we help it ? Look how 
 marriges are made. Look where wives and hus- 
 bands are taken from? See how the family is 
 built. See the hovels of vice ; see the drunkenness 
 in the world ; see the workshops of the world ; see 
 the tyranny of the world ; see the imperfection of 
 society. How can you get a correctly made man 
 out of these conditions ? I am not blaming any- 
 
128 Power — Master Workman. 
 
 body. The working out of the power by evolu- 
 tionary methods is slow. 
 
 If I could be God for ten minutes — there is no 
 blasphemy'- in my heart — 1 am not impugning the 
 wisdom of celestial power — but so urgent is my 
 philanthrophy, that if I had the power I would take 
 every man to pieces and put him together again on 
 a higher plane of organization. I would re-shape 
 statesman ; I would re-shape capitalist. I would go 
 to the stock exchange and I would bore a hole in 
 every stockman's head and put in a little bit more 
 brain ; and every foolish statesman from the East 
 and from the West, I would lift up his scalp and 
 breathe into him the breath of a higher life. I 
 think when I had done that probably somebody 
 would shoot me — unless I could seize him and re- 
 model and change him — but this is only my am- 
 bition. The great master workman of the universe 
 says to me, " Stand off — too much steam — in too big 
 a hurrj'^ — I am going there myself, and I will do it. 
 I will do it by my power when I am ready." And 
 I know that the master workman of this universe 
 knows his business, knows it all round; knows it as 
 a lover; knows it as a cook; knows it as a manu 
 facturer; knows it as an artist, and the universe 
 will be all right. And so, having faith in the power 
 of the universe, having faith in the power of 
 natural intelligence, I go my way, but in going my 
 way I make my thought my best thought ; my best 
 
Power — Master Workman. 129 
 
 thought is my God-thought. I make my God- 
 thought utterable, and my God-thought becomes 
 an element in the evolution of the spiritual condi- 
 tions of the world. 
 
 Unless the emphasis of my moral adhesiveness 
 causes me to send out, how can my fellow beings 
 take that which I do ? I must express, that I may 
 awaken another. I must rouse myself, that the 
 sleeping soul of another may be roused. Paul may 
 plant and Apollos may water, but God giveth the 
 increase. I can bring my truth, I can knock at 
 your door of consciousness, I can ring the bell, but 
 I can not make you awaken. I may throw the 
 treasures of the world's knowledge before you, but 
 I cannot make you take them. I may lead the 
 horse to the well, but I can not make him drink. I 
 can do this, it is my work; it is the work of the 
 master workman of the universe commanding me. 
 I like the work — that is my virtue — and if you are 
 awakened by my knocking at your door — in other 
 words, dropping the simile — if you can rise to your 
 consciousness through a view of my consciousness, 
 the law of evolution has elevated you to my plane. 
 
 This, then, is the true work of every man and of 
 every woman. I like to see beauty. I love the 
 beautiful. Why? Because it awakens the beau- 
 tiful. Why does art help man ? Becaue it helps him 
 to the esthetic, the interior beautiful in himself. 
 Show me a people without a love of art — show me 
 
130 Power — Master Workman. 
 
 a man without a picture in his house, and I will 
 show you a man with a blunted moral nature ; I 
 will show you a man who has not awakened to life. 
 Show me a man who is so conditioned in life that he 
 is contented to live and work for a hundred dollars 
 a year, and I will show you a soul that is in slavery. 
 If I can make men love the beautiful ; if I can make 
 men love virtue and wisdom, and can make men 
 have virtue, wisdom and knowledge, I can cure the 
 ills of society; I can kill bad goverment; I can kill 
 despots; I can topple the crowns of empires in the 
 dust; I can resurrect humanity; I can make an era 
 of higher civilization ; I can make the brotherhood 
 of man a reality. If I can stimulate knowledge I 
 can kill trusts and millionaires, and bring an era of 
 justice and humanity with knowledge. 
 
 Show me a people that have not resources with 
 which to buy and I will show you a people that are 
 ignorant. If I were to take you to Spain I could 
 show you a man living one year on one hundred 
 dollars. A man so living cannot be a light to 
 stimulate art nor create a demand for the commo- 
 dities of commerce. He must demand higher 
 wages, and the demand can only come with intel- 
 ligence, with the growth of intelligence. An intel- 
 ligent community of men cannot be enslaved, 
 cannot be imposed upon by combination ; and an 
 awakened people cannot be the slaves of the 
 moneyocracy. 
 
Power — Master Workman. 131 
 
 But when you are led to the lowest planes of 
 intelligence and reason, despots are born. They 
 come in the law of necessity. Then look to your 
 workmanship, to your education, to your thought, 
 to your life. Master these things that are the out- 
 come of conditions, and when you are ready you 
 can throw them off. You could not wear the 
 armor of the middle ages; you could not wear the 
 breeches you wore when you were boys ; you can 
 wear what you can wear, that is all. But you can 
 look out of the window of desire. The teaching 
 that tells vou not to desire any more will make 
 slaves^f J^ie^hjam^^ The teaching that tells 
 
 you to renounce that which nature has given j'^ou 
 for your good is a teaching that if accepted will 
 end the reign of civilization. It has done it with 
 past civilizations. Why was Christianity accepted 
 by the world — by the European world — why ? Be- 
 cause it set aside the renunciation of the faculties 
 of the soul by the substitution of the atonement; it 
 was a link in the evolution of the moral and spir- 
 itual qualities of the human race. And while the 
 old religion has no monopoly of spiritual truth, and 
 all religions have a little spiritual truth, and all 
 systems of morality some good, and all social or- 
 ganizations some virtue, the conditions of general 
 life are the products of the past mingling with the 
 inspirations of the present. 
 But I must leave you. I want you to realize that 
 
132 Power — Master Workman. 
 
 the spiritual world is only a stepping stone; that you 
 are not finished, not completed, when you have 
 passed from this life into the life which is to come. 
 When millions of ages shall have rolled o'er you, 
 you are climbing still ; mountains on mountains 
 still arise ; the Empire of Life is before you, and 
 God more marvelous — God is the eternal mystery ; 
 God is the eternal life for which you search ; the 
 eternal harmony. The better you get the better 
 you seek to become; the wiser you get the wiser 
 you want to be ; the sweep of your consciousness cov- 
 ering two or more modes of nature, the more modes 
 of nature you want to cover. You want to see a 
 chicken from the next hatching; you want to see the 
 next child; you want to see the next thought, the 
 next life, the next empire of being. Chained to thy 
 state, in the hollow of the Infinite Hand, thy life 
 goes on, but that life is expression ; thou art to 
 express — a chain — a link — to express. In the no- 
 bility of thy eternal expression are found the de- 
 lights, the glories of the infinite revealed. Life is 
 work. Launch into life, never to be vacated, and 
 sail up and on into the eternal ages, and express 
 thyself. No man then is enslaved ; enslaves no one. 
 But in the empire of thy wisest art, in the country 
 of thy brighest love, raise humanity to the highest 
 ideal, and do thy duty now. 
 
LECTURE VII. 
 
 PROGRESS OP LIBERTY. 
 
 There has never been in any age of time so much 
 confidence reposed in the judgment of the democ- 
 racy as now. By the democracy I mean the peo- 
 ple. In all ages of the world those entrusted with 
 or usurping social or political power have been 
 jealous of the prerogative of the people, they have 
 never trusted the people, and the people equally on 
 their side have never trusted their leaders. The 
 old conservatism, characteristic of the leading and 
 dominating minds by the force of the past associa- 
 tion, never admitted into its confidence the common 
 people, but disputed the claim that the people were 
 proper custodians of religious truth or political 
 domination. 
 
 The sword of Bunker Hill represents and is the 
 spirit of a period of time when confidence in the 
 people had begun to arise. That confidence arose 
 out of the decay of powerfully organized religious 
 communities. It may be somewhat of a new in- 
 spiration to you to be told that the American 
 revolution sprung out of religious conditions rather 
 than economical conditions ; that it arose out of the 
 
 »33 
 
134 Progress op Liberty. 
 
 conditions and the dissolution of the unity of the 
 Christian faith, and that the attempt to unify and 
 put into a classified expression true religious 
 thoughts failed in its comprehensiveness to cover 
 the people. All acts of conformity, to compel the 
 people to believe certain stipulated and defined 
 dogmas, have failed, when the age has been an in- 
 tellectual one. 
 
 A spiritual struggle occurred in the age of Oliver 
 Cromwell — an epoch man — a man of divine inspi- 
 ration, of noble spiritual mould. I fear that this 
 eulogy on Oliver Cromwell may fall upon your ears 
 with somewhat of a startling announcement, for 
 some of you have been accustomed to read histories 
 which are but a very imperfect representation of 
 the Cromwellian epoch, and what the man stood for; 
 for let me now declare that when you have in your 
 midst a great man, he is trusted because he repre- 
 sents the spiritual center in which he moves — he is 
 either a builder or a destroyer, possibly both — and 
 this age of Oliver Cromwell represented a spiritual 
 power that was working for the emancipation of 
 the civil and intellectual conditions of the human 
 family. 
 
 The cause of liberty knows no country, the cause 
 of justice knows no clan, they are sacred and divine 
 causes, and Oliver represented that wing of pro- 
 gressive thought that despised and held in contempt 
 the conservative methods of the old world of re- 
 
Progress of Liberty. 135 
 
 ligion and politics. Indeed, I may say that in 
 Oliver there was not even a beginning, but that a 
 chain of spiritual causes had led from period to 
 period until he presents himself, and it may be 
 interesting to you if I for a moment sketch how a 
 great man is produced. 
 
 It is not enough to merely say that a man is great 
 because his temperament is fine; that the brain 
 cells and areas are numerous, and that there is a 
 large vitality. Men are not great because of these 
 conditions alone, but when these conditions are 
 present in an organization, and suitable spiritual 
 states and demands are present and in existence, 
 then it can be possible for a man to be great, and a 
 spiritual world make its great men. There never 
 did — this is a bold declaration — there never did 
 walk the pathways of great power when in your 
 world a man who was not the pivotal expression of 
 the power and thought of a spiritual world. When 
 circumstances in the objective world have come to 
 such a state of maturity that the expression of a 
 great thought becomes necessary, the man or woman 
 appears to express that thought by purpose, by 
 design — the great man appears. By whose pur- 
 pose ? By whose design does the great man appear ? 
 By the purpose and design of intelligent, masterful, 
 magnanimous intelligences unfolded in the spir- 
 itual world, and through its power of concentrating 
 magnetism it throws that magnetism with all its 
 
136 Progress op Liberty. 
 
 fund of psychographs — with all its details of spirit- 
 ual karma — they throw it on the soul sphere that is 
 gestating a body in the womb of mother life, and 
 add to — contribute to — the development of that 
 life. It is the incarnation of spiritual power, the 
 incarnation of a psychograph ; that which is in the 
 magnetism of the spiritual being is planted in the 
 life that is gestating in the mother's womb, to be 
 matured by circumstances that are foreseen will 
 follow. 
 
 Can you for a moment conceive that beings in 
 the spiritual world, endowed with capacity to fore- 
 see the coming of a series of events that would be 
 damaging to the human race, that they would not 
 make some attempts to avoid, to defeat, or j)ut back 
 the threatened danger to the growth of the human 
 race? Did it not in 1812 look as if the fiery genius 
 of the first Napoleon was going to destroy and wither 
 up the legacy of the ages ? Did it not look as if his 
 vaulting ambition was going to strip every country 
 of its traditional power, the characteristics of its 
 past, and the genius of its civilization? But there 
 immediately arose on the horizon of the mentality 
 of Europe a mental power adequate to deal with 
 the conditions made by this fiery genius of Napo- 
 leon. I am not doing any injustice to this remark- 
 able man. I know that the majority of men are 
 not yet prepared to do justice to the extraordinary 
 Oorsican that lit his watch-fires and cast terror into 
 
Progress of Liberty. 137 
 
 Europe. This extraordinary man had a mission — 
 he was a projection from the spiritual world for the 
 purpose of clearing Europe from the dominating 
 power of conservative feudalism. It required all 
 this power to liberate man. Sometimes you have 
 to cause a great deal of pain to cure the toothache 
 — you have to extract the tooth. So in the devel- 
 opment of human progress it comes through cutting 
 off the dead limbs, the obstructive limbs of the tree, 
 aud making it possible for new centers of inspi- 
 ration to come. 
 
 It seemed inevitable in 632 that Europe would 
 be covered by the power, the spirits and the spirit- 
 ualism of Mohammedanism. There did not seem to 
 be a fortress, a bulwark, or a sword that could hurl 
 back from Europe the ranks of the Saracens. Why ? 
 The Saracens were advanced in literature, they had 
 a civilization superior to the civilization of the 
 nations of Europe ; the Roman Empire had broken 
 to pieces, the influence of Christianity had decayed, 
 the national life had been affected by the religious 
 teachings of the time, and the hope and love of man 
 were centered in the domain of faith and spiritual 
 attainment. The world was despised; the paradise 
 beyond the skies coveted, desired and adored. 
 Human life was held cheap. The achievements of 
 toil, the gift of intellect and power lightly esteemed 
 by men who were the children of God and heirs of 
 immortality. The contemplation was to get through 
 
138 Progress of Liberty. 
 
 this life as quickly as possible, and enter into the 
 kingdom where the Lord Christ ruled in love and 
 righteousness. This was the attitude of the seventh 
 century in Europe. But the bold, chivalrous, daring, 
 cultured, Saracen pointed his sword and ambition 
 towards the cities of Europe, and looked with avar- 
 icious design on the conquest of Europe, and the 
 planting of the thought of his prophet where the 
 Roman Empire had held its magnificent authority. 
 But in the darkness of that time, in that hour 
 which seemed left to despair, there arose a man, a 
 child of violence and of blood. It was the sword of 
 Charles Martel that drove back the Saracen, and it 
 seemed to be an accident of history. It was no 
 accident ; but because of that sword-play of Charles 
 Martel you are not Mohammedans in Washington ? 
 Had that sword not been victorious every one of 
 you would have been Mohammedans today. The 
 power of Rome would have been lost in the velocity 
 of the transformation ; Trinitarianism would have 
 sunk into Unitarianism, and the anthropomorphism 
 of Mohammedanism would have covered Europe. 
 It took nearly a thousand years of expression 
 to settle that problem. Problems are not easily 
 settled. 
 
 If you settle the Philippine problem in two hun- 
 dred years you will do well. If England endeavors 
 to assimilate the civilization of the Boers in five 
 hundred years, England will do well. If England 
 
Progress op Liberty. 139 
 
 assimilates the sympathy of Ireland in ten thousand 
 years, England will do well. 
 
 The spiritual conditions have to be considered. 
 It is not the sword that settles, but it is the God of 
 Thought that does the work. Any philosophy of 
 history that leaves out of the consideration the cause- 
 world has not given a correct picture of history. In 
 the thousand years following the sword-point of 
 Charles Martel followed an eternal vigilence of 
 conflict between the two great religious systems, 
 Mohammedanism and Christianity. In armed, hot 
 revengeful attitude they faced one another, and after 
 the preaching of Peter, the Hermit, Europe flew to 
 arms to recover the shrine of of the Saviour of the 
 world from the Saracens, and it took two hundred 
 and fifty years of blood and slaughter to cure 
 Europe of that mania. What was the result ? The 
 Reformation was born. Where did the reformation 
 come from? It came from the spiritual world, 
 through Saracenic action. The culture of the Mo- 
 hammedan put sense into the Christian's head, and 
 after the Christians had in convivility and inter- 
 course mingled with the people of Asia and with 
 the people of Africa, they began to feel the power 
 of a new mentality. It led to the emancipation of 
 Europe. What were the painters doing at that time, 
 the divinely gifted — the men of genius with clear 
 brain and skillful brush — the exponents of heaven ? 
 Why, they were painting Madonnas : the ideal 
 
140 Progress of Liberty. 
 
 mother. Great theme I Who can paint a mother? By 
 the very truth, no man ever can paint the thought 
 of mother. The painters of the Renaissance were 
 painting Madonnas, presenting in form the spirit 
 of that mother, and that is what you look at when 
 you see the Virgin Mary —you are looking at man's 
 attempt to paint the mother, to paint the thought- 
 mother ; the mother-thought ; the mother that is 
 God. 
 
 And then that day rolled by and the spiritual 
 world came clear to earth. The painter was eman- 
 cipated. There came freedom to earth, and what 
 was the result ? The painter went to nature and 
 imitated nature. He painted the woodland and 
 the meadow ; he painted the face and the heart of 
 man ; tragedy and victory ; love and hate ; ideality 
 and the esthetic came in turn. What a wonderful 
 change. That was the birthplace of human liberty. 
 That made it possible for Oliver Cromwell. If these 
 conditions had not come, old Oliver could not have 
 come. If Oliver could not have come, you could 
 not. In the line of cause you follow the order and 
 the law of the spiritual world. 
 
 In the tenth century, when the thousand years 
 were completed after the so-called crucifixion, men 
 believed that the end of the world had come. A 
 great delusion. The end of an epoch had come, 
 surely ; new ideals were coming ; and some of the 
 lawyers at that age declined to make a deed. It 
 
Pkogress of Liberty. 141 
 
 was no use, the world was to come to an end. 
 Merchants would not buy. A stagnation in affairs. 
 The end of the world! It did not come. This was 
 the first shock that the Christian world received, 
 and that shock awakened it and made a change in 
 the philosophy. It gave a shock to that charac- 
 terization of the Aristotelian faith that came into 
 Christianity, and it made Platonism popular for 
 nearly a hundred and fifty years. 
 
 The spiritual world is working, incarnating thought 
 all the time ; producing phenomenal conditions all 
 the time; then there comes another tremendous 
 shock, never had Christianity received such a shock 
 before that, and it made the reformation a com- 
 plete success in some countries. What was that ? 
 The astronomer treading upon the geocentric hypo- 
 thesis, that is, that the earth was the center of 
 the universe ; that the stars were made to light the 
 earth by night ; that the sun was set in the heavens 
 to light the earth by day; that the earth was flat; 
 that up there was a firmament, and this firmament 
 was a floor ; that above the firmament was heaven ; 
 that God had His throne there, just up there above 
 the firmament. It was a solid floor on which heaven 
 was placed. All the angels were up there. When 
 Columbus touched the shores of the New World that 
 was the thought of Christendom. The trouble he 
 had was that his men were afraid they would sail to 
 the edge and drop ofi". That was the trouble, that 
 
142 Progress of Liberty. 
 
 there was a dropping off place, and if they only 
 went there they would drop and drop and continue 
 dropping forever. What a horrible thought, what a 
 dreadful picture ! But the men were children. 
 They were honest; they had fear; they believed as 
 they were taught. That was the faith of Christen- 
 dom, and when it was declared by the astronomers 
 that there was no firmament there at all, that it was 
 all space, why, they saw in a moment at Rome that 
 that would not do — there was no heaven any more! 
 There is no place to put the throne of God any 
 more; there is no heaven; and the persecutions 
 that followed were something terrible. That was 
 the greatest shock Christianity ever had, and it led 
 to the birthplace of the reformation. It led to the 
 development of intellect. It was astronomy that 
 knocked the bottom out of Christianity. 
 
 Out of these conditions grew others that made it 
 better for man, for intellectual and for the spiritual 
 world. It probed the materialism of Christianity, for 
 what was Christianity then but materialism ? Just a 
 world where there was an eternal prayer meeting 
 before the throne of God. Oh, what a monotony 1 
 Think of it. The spiritual world was bright on one 
 side and a curse on the other. The thought was, 
 believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and if thou believest 
 thou shalt have a crown and a palm and everlasting 
 happiness; for the rejection of this gospel thy soul 
 shall go to everlasting fagot and to everlasting 
 
Progress of Liberty. 143 
 
 flame. Believe me and be happy ; disbelive me 
 and be damned. That was liberty for you ; that was 
 the despotism against which men rebelled ; this was 
 the emancipation of the human race. 
 
 In the fourteenth century one of the greatest 
 thinkers of the century declared that if God Al- 
 mighty said wrong was right wrong would be right! 
 Against that Arminianism protested that God Al- 
 mighty could not make wrong right. That was a 
 limitation of the infinite. That was the first time 
 God had his head cut off by the Christians, but they 
 have been decapitating him every century since, 
 changing the God ideal. I am not blaming anybody. 
 It was wise, it was good that the development of 
 man as man became better and his conception of 
 God became higher. The conception is growing in 
 this day. All these changes were produced in the 
 spiritual world, and man was simply working out 
 the results of that power. It would hardly be a 
 popular thought for me to utter at this moment, 
 but I will venture the expression any way. You 
 remember that there were very dark days in this 
 city in 1863; very dark days when this city was 
 threatened by the marshaled hosts of an uncon- 
 quered South ; when the waters of the Potomac ran 
 red with the best blood of the earth. Those were 
 dark days. One of the sweetest natures heaven ever 
 made was struggling for a united country in the 
 environments of the White House, a great soul, an 
 
144 Progress of Liberty. 
 
 extraordinary man. But another man was yet 
 lingering in tlie lap of mystery. This nation was 
 looking for the man that could strike the blow and 
 end the rebellion. Out of the darkness, out of the 
 fog, a figure rises on the meteoric sky, a marvel, 
 and the sword of Grant shines in the sunlight and 
 the mighty republic stands firm and indivisible 
 forever. 
 
 The spiritual world is seen in the providence of 
 nations and of men. You tell me that nature is 
 under law; I tell you that history is under law; 
 I tell you that the human race is under law, and 
 that no wild blind chance is regulating the destiny 
 of life ; that you are not rocked in the cradle of the 
 infinite deep without a guiding star; that thy soul 
 is not left to steal blindly its way through the 
 breakers of the ages. That little boy of thine, with 
 curly hair and sweet blue eyes, that thy afi"ection 
 nursed with doting pride and love, that little boy 
 that loved thee and went his way into the invisible 
 is safe in the hands of the infinite, held like yonder 
 shining star, and never a soul was lost in the 
 byways and forests of eternal life. 
 
 A mother weeps yonder in her solitary chamber ; 
 that man who loved her, cared for her, watched her 
 wants, has gone from her side to yonder world. She 
 weeps; she is alone. But that frail heart, stagger- 
 ing under the grief and woe, plunged in the depths 
 of despair, is as safe in the hollow of the hand of 
 
Progress of Liberty, 145 
 
 of the infinite as yonder worlds that play their 
 games in the meadows of infinite space. 
 
 There is law governing and holding the hnman 
 soul, and what thy life meets with, whether it be 
 flowers or stones ; whether thy path be over sandy 
 deserts, thy feet bleeding in thy struggles with the 
 world, or whether it be through palaces and courts 
 of ease, smiled on by beauty and belpved by men, 
 thy life is following the same majestic necessity, 
 expressing itself in the phenomena of life. Thy 
 duty is plain. Thy duty is to do thy work today; 
 to use thy talent today, this hour, and thus fulfill 
 the promise of thy life and inspiration. Tomorrow 
 other duties will come to thee. Thy duties now 
 discharge and they will be thy preparations for the 
 duties of tomorrow and tomorrow into the endless 
 ages. Thy growth is the discharge of thy duty. 
 
 Learn a lesson from the lilies of the fields. They 
 express according to their power. Listen to the 
 bird that sings in woodland glade. Listen ! It 
 expresses all it can. Behold the light of stars, 
 vigilant in their mechanical duty. Imitate the 
 birds, imitate the stars. Child of nature, discharge 
 thy duties today. What are they ? They are emo- 
 tional, they are intellectual, they are moral, and 
 they are spiritual. Drop the seed of knowledge in 
 the mental ground of thy neighbor ; speak a kind 
 word where a kind word can be spoken ; and if you 
 find a man with a larger load than he can carry, if 
 
146 Progress op Liberty. 
 
 his coat be out at elbow, if he be shoeless and 
 hungry, help him, give him a lift on the way, he is 
 a man, and some day, in the fields of a grander 
 world, he will meet thee again. Love thy neighbor. 
 All men are neighbors. Love the spirits that come 
 to thee. Seek happiness in the communion of the 
 highest, and some fair day, in the sunset of thy 
 earthly career, there will come to thy vision the 
 darlings of another land, and in the paradise of a 
 happier world you will meet the darlings of your 
 love to part no more. 
 
Feb 
 
 '^'♦'vQc 
 

 FEB. 14 1902