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plays upon them. In the abstract, thought-substance is always blue, varying from a dull cerulean to the crystalline violet of the X ray: the more subliminal the intellect the more subliminal the quality and hue of the substance it evolves, but the passions of the heart modify this intrinsic hue and fuse upon it carnal color tints; it is rarely found in virgin integrity.

4th. They possess sound which is audible to the mental ear; this sound varies as the cohering processes vary; if the thought operations are in synthetic accord these vibrations are harmonious and produce soothing sensations upon consciousness, and vice versa.

5th. They also possess motion, not only the rudimentary atomic activity, but also a movement resembling the movement of clouds, produced by the centripetal and centrifugal respiratory currents of the spiritual body. As thoughts move thus to and fro within their mental precincts, various lights are cast upon them by the etheric solar rays by which the critical faculties of the intellect cognize their symmetry. It is to these currents also that the disintegration of thoughts is due; a thought form can survive no longer than a direct and definite virile force is played upon it, and this is usually of sufficient duration to project a vivid picture of it upon the mind. Thoughts disintegrate by dissemination, the substance of which they are formed dissipates in the atmosphere; it is expunged from the mind as fetid elements are expunged from the body.

6th. They are absorbent; being magnetic they derive bland or stringent qualities from our emotions; for instance, a violent thought carries the force of a blow if given a definite animus and trend, a pathetic thought will induce tears, a selfish thought incite resentment, etc., etc.

7th. Thoughts determine the purity of the mind, not the thoughts of others but our own thoughts; it is erroneous to suppose that an inherently pure intelligence can be infected by impure suggestions from without; there must always be the congenital affiliation for evil as for good, before either can be assimilated; intrinsic purity repels impurity as vigorously and as effectually as light dispels darkness. If thoughts were visible to the physical eye we would cultivate them more carefully.

This brings us by consistent procedure, from thoughts to the thinking faculties. Here much misapprehension prevails; the occupations of the mind are as various as are the manual avocations of man, but few of them, literally speaking, are thinking processes. Real thinking involves labor, because it involves the exercise of reason, and a collateral exercise of all the perspicacious faculties. From an esoteric point of view thinking is reasoning and is so taught by Masters of the esoteric cult. Technically, to think is to analyze, to discriminate in the selection of ideas*; it is to construct with precision and care, to build idea upon idea till a consummate result is attained, and necessitates the employment of all the profound faculties.

Intellect is endowed with many faculties that are in no sense thinking faculties. Imagination is a recreative faculty, its creations are phantasmagorical and evanescent; they hover erratically over brain territory and are always diaphanous and unstable in form. Metaphorically imagination plays with thought-substance; it catches as it were furtive glimpses of intellectual possibilities with no desire or ambition to actualize them. Imagination is rapid and discursive in action, reason is deliberate and concise; imagination is speculative and visionary, reason is calculating and exact; imagination is ideal and intuitive, reason is practical and logical. Imagination operates upon the boundaries of the executive territory of the mind, reason focuses brain power upon operations in immediate proximity to the brain.

Memory is a recreative faculty, it deals with the past and holds us in touch with it.

Recollection, or more accurately the recollective faculties, for they are many, are laboring faculties, and very important auxiliaries to reason; their office is statistical, they deal with the data of individual experience, and are indispensable agents in all study or research; specifically they provide corroborative support by means of which the deductions of reason are sustained.

Contemplation is a diversion of the mental faculties and embraces an indolent exercise both of reason and imagination or of either alone; it is a cursory survey of mental interests, and resembles * Fragmentary thoughts.

thinking no more than the tranquil survey of scenery from a mountain top resembles actual exploration of that scenery.

Musing, reflection, retrospection, introspection and all kindred mental moods are somnambulic in character; they are slumber periods for the active faculties. During these rest periods the subconscious faculties act; the interior self communes with the exterior self; moral estimates are taken, moral resolutions made and moral admonitions and incentives received. In these reveries the mind is religiously self-examined (always semi-consciously), and tutelary impulses reach it from the occult.

Perception is not a faculty per se, it is what in the corpus homo we designate a sense; it is intellectual vision, and all the mental faculties possess it pro ratio to their degree of utility.

Reducing this analysis to a simple mathematical equation, we find but two generic classes of intellectual faculties, viz. the reason. ing and the imaginative, each equal to each in reactional reciprocity. Every grade of intellectual action may be classified in one or the other of these categories; they represent the antitheses of intelligence and between their limits every variation of learning and ignorance is found. PAUL AVENEL.

First, then, thou must purify thy ruling faculty, and this vocation of thine also, saying: Now it is my mind I must shape, as the carpenter shapes wood and a shoemaker leather; and the thing to be formed is a right use of appearances. -Epictetus.

The beginning of creation (in man's soul as in nature) is light. Till the eye have vision, the whole members are in bonds.—Carlyle.

Science is the systematic classification of experience.-G. H. Lewes.

Science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or, the state of science is an index of our self-knowledge. -Emerson.

The all in all of faith is that we believe; of knowledge what we know, as well as how much and how well.-Goethe.

The being whose strength excels its necessities is strong; the being whose necessities excel its strength is feeble.-Rousseau.

LIFE ETERNAL:

THE LIFE OF ETERNITY.

II.

Our individuality, as we exist in this sublunary world, does not constitute the whole of our being. Much that pertains to us essentially has never been developed in this life. Hence we are differentiated rather than integral, a grouping of qualities and characteristics rather than a complete essence. We are influenced by others and imbued more or less by their peculiar nature and disposition; while, on the other hand, those with whom we associate and whom we love and esteem take somewhat from us in their turn. The traits which are peculiar to us are chiefly accidents of our individual mode of existence, and very often are the heirlooms of races and families to which we belong. Indeed, we have, all of us, become more or less the continuation and bodying anew of ancestors. The umbilical cord is not really divided while we exist here, and we are nourished from the life and permeated with the thought of a thousand generations. We are shoots and branches of the great World-Tree, and derive sap, all of us in common, from its root.

The unexplained operations of the mind, nevertheless, may by no means be all imputed to heredity. The Rabbis tell us that several souls, human spirits, may adjoin themselves to an individual, and at certain times help, strengthen and inspire him, dwelling with and in him. They generally leave him when their work has been accomplished; but in some instances an individual receives this aid all his lifetime. Oliver Wendell Holmes remarks in one of his works that there are times when our friends do not act like themselves, but apparently in obedience to some other law than that of their own proper nature; and also that we ourselves do things both when

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awake and when asleep that surprise us.

have co-tenants in this house we live in."

"Perhaps," he adds, "we

John Bunyan also has represented his Pilgrim as being on one occasion infested by a malignant spirit that whisperingly suggested many grievous blasphemies to him in such an artful manner that poor Christian thought that they proceeded from his own mind. We observe something of the same nature in the mesmeric phenomena, and in the contagious enthusiasm of popular assemblages.

It is but a step further for us to acknowledge unqualifiedly the presence and agency of invisible beings. Milton assures us that millions of these are constantly walking the earth. We may not reasonably doubt, when the physical world abounds with innumerable races and genera of living beings, that the invisible world is no less densely peopled; nor that we all are surrounded by spiritual entities, bodied and unbodied, that are capable of transfusing their thoughts, impulses and appetences into us. We observe something like this in our ordinary mental operations. What we denominate reasoning is the conscious endeavor of the understanding to trace out facts, their relations and correspondences.* Beyond this region of the soul there is that of the intuitive intellect, more occult and apart from this world. It is not limited, like the other, to matters of observation and experience, but is manifestly in communication with beings and intelligences that are beyond the acknowledged realm of physical existence. Such intercourse is of the eternal world, of which this material universe is but a colony. "Not when I am divorced from the connection of the earthly world," says Fichtê, "do I first gain admission into that which is above the earth. I am in it already, and I live in it more truly than in the earthly. That which they denominate Heaven lies not beyond the grave. It is already here, diffused around our nature, and its light rises in every pure heart."

I am convinced that what is commonly recognized as apperception, intuition and inspiration, is this faculty of supra-conscious intelligence. It is a remembering, the reproducing and bringing into consciousness of what we knew and possessed before we became sojourners in the region of limit and change. It belongs to that sphere of being to *"Every thought is a soul!"-BULWER LYTTON.

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