OCCULT ESSAYS

All the essays contained in this volume have originally appeared in the pages of Broad Views, the monthly periodical which I have been editing for the last two years, and the value of which as an influence promoting the appreciation of occult study in its bearings on the practical affairs of life, will, I trust, be more and more clearly apprehended as time goes on.

Occult study has gone through various phases. At first its intense interest, as illuminating realms of Nature that formerly seemed beyond the reach of accurate knowledge, absorbed the attention of students. Then, as the whole scheme of human evolution became unveiled, to a considerable extent, it grew apparent that this knowledge shed such a light upon the means by which spiritual progress for each individual was to be obtained, that Occultism came to be regarded as a supreme rule of life, a guide to conduct. And, finally, many of us have perceived that it becomes a rule not merely of individual but of collective life; that the problems of politics and social organisation are only to be correctly solved when we have considered them in the light of occult teaching.

This idea was the inspiration of the periodical above named � Broad Views. It was described from the beginning as "the only periodical of its class frankly recognising the modern developments of occult science and their bearings on the problems of private and public life." And the essays now republished have represented-as far as my own writing has been concerned � my effort to justify that conception of its purpose.

The subjects of these essays have been suggested by circumstances as they arose, and as the progress of public events may suggest, they will, I trust, be followed by others that may contribute to establish the position I have ventured to take up.

A. P. SINNETT.

C O N T E N T S

1. THE DOCTRINE OF REINCARNATION
2. THE MEMORY OF NATURE
4. THE NEXT WORLD
5. LIFE IN THE NEXT WORLD
7. THE FUTURE LIFE OF ANIMALS
15. EARTHQUAKES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES
16. PROFESSOR MENDELEEF'S CONCEPTION OF THE ETHER
17. THE ORIGIN OF LIFE

[Numbers denote the order in which these articles followed in the original edition, 1905. Due to the lack of time I've scanned only those which seemed to me more interesting from the first glance � K.Z.]

The theory of evolution that seeks to account for the progress of the human soul by recognising each earth life as a link in a long chain of lives, instead of an isolated experience, has attracted a good deal of attention and not a little sympathy during the last twenty years. It has seemed to provide an answer to some riddles of the earth that were otherwise painfully bewildering. No one can turn the eye of imagination towards the seething masses of miserable, untaught, and criminal humanity without feeling that if each creature has but the one chance of securing salvation or ruining himself for ever, the inequalities of environment are deplorably unfair. We may take refuge in the thought that we did not make the world and are not responsible for its horrors. Or perhaps a good many of us, in spite of a faith formally professed, may feel imperfectly assured of a conscious existence on the other side of Woking, and so be of opinion that the one life resolves itself, at any rate, into all that is practically worth talking about. Meanwhile the variegated intellectual activity of our time affords scope for the development of new phases of religious thinking, coloured by the scientific method, and in this way the doctrine of reincarnation has found its way to favour, and has been fortified by collateral beliefs in regard to the unseen aspects of Nature around us, which must be taken into consideration by anyone who desires to understand the doctrine itself.

In dealing with these, I must ask the reader to remember that I am not here attempting to set forth the whole argument in favour of reincarnation, on which, for those who adopt it, the theory rests. To do this would expand the present statement to an excessive length; but the doctrine I wish to describe is frightfully caricatured unless the collateral ideas above referred to are taken into account.

And at all events there are, in the cultivated world, great multitudes of people by whom the actuality of vast regions of Nature behind the veil of matter is regarded as certain; to whom the old-established tenets of religion are not repugnant but merely incomplete; who feel that we may be on the brink of new developments of knowledge which at no distant period may bring us into conscious relationship with some phases of Nature hitherto thought to be in the region of the unknowable. I do not want to be guilty of the affectation of discussing the main idea I have at present in view, as though to me it were a matter of speculation or mere probability. But the actual conviction that a good many psychic students entertain to the effect that they have gone through various earth lives specifically known to them in the past; that many of their relationships in the current life are nothing less than ancient relationships re-established, and so on, are based on long years of experience connected with the possibilities of acquiring such knowledge. It is not easy to condense results thus obtained through half a lifetime of research, especially when that research has lain along unfamiliar roads, into a few pages. My present purpose, therefore, is simply to describe the doctrine of reincarnation, as it is held by those who have made it, and a multitude of inferences connected with human evolution which ramify from it, their special study. As talked about by people who have not made it such a study, it is often distorted out of all resemblance to its true shape. Even subject to such distortions it has frequently been found attractive to the imagination, and especially valuable as reconciling the mind to the apparent injustice of the world's government, but it can only be fairly judged when set forth without misrepresentation and when explained in conjunction with the collateral doctrines which harmonise it with earlier conceptions of spiritual existence, and show it not merely logical and scientific in itself, but quite compatible with all essential principles of the Christian religion.

The clue to the accurate appreciation of the reincarnation idea will be found in the fundamental conception that a human soul is no more an instantaneous creation ex nihilo than the complicated organism of the human body. As far as the physical world is concerned, theologians, even of the most antiquated type, have seen fit to fall into line with the doctrine of evolution. Only at the first glance did this seem to dethrone the Creator. In a little while it was perceived that it merely threw light on the methods adopted by the Creator. Early mankind had jumped to certain conclusions on that point, and for a few moments, so to speak, when these were demonstrably proved to be wrong, the Church fancied its foundations were being shaken. That is now an old story, and Darwin has long since been made welcome in the pulpit. A time will assuredly come � for some pulpits it has come already � when the principles of evolution will be seen to apply as satisfactorily to the growth of the soul as to that of the body. The two processes have, in fact, been parallel. We might go back behind the earliest beginnings of anything that can be thought of as a human soul if we sought to picture the old process of the world's development in the mind, but at some stage of the great undertaking, let us assume that some given centre of consciousness has attained to the condition of being a human soul. Geological remains of what is commonly supposed to be primitive man will hardly afford us examples of the primitive organism that sufficed to provide the very youngest souls with suitable vehicles of manifestation on the physical plane, but imagination will be sufficiently helped for the moment if we think of a black savage in the wilds of Australia, and realise the idea that the soul within him is not more advanced along the lines of soul evolution than his body along that line. The accepted view of human growth (as far as bodies are concerned) provides for an enormous procession of generations along which the experience of the race is reflected in its external constitution. Each generation of bodies is evanescent, but the next is a little improvement on the last, and so by degrees the race attains to civilisation. I am not wanting to imply that every remnant of savage races still lingering on earth will go through such a course of improvement, but the existing civilised races certainly sprang originally from races that were savage, and the growth of the bodies may be thought of as a continuous process, if we take account of the faculty inhering in each one of reproducing its kind plus a little improvement.

Now a moment's thought will show that it is not the body that accomplishes the little improvement each time, but the soul within. The consciousness of the man is gathering the experience of life. That enlargement of faculty makes a claim on the evolutionary law for a correspondingly improved organism. It is indeed difficult to reflect in language a correct idea of so delicate a process, for there is another influence at work. The souls coming into incarnation have, in their last lives, acquired something in the nature of capacity they did not possess before. They need a somewhat better vehicle of consciousness than they had last time, and that need is part of the claim on Nature of which I speak, but it is only a claim to which Nature responds by means of the improved heredity engendered by successive generations on the physical plane.

The actual course of events � it is tedious to be always interrupting the explanation to repeat that it is the description of a belief, and simpler to present it as the elucidation of a natural law � the actual course of events is only luminous to the mind when we realise that, after quitting the body, the soul for a time inhabits other vehicles of consciousness on other planes of Nature. And the region of Nature in which the soul of the primitive savage enjoys a spiritual rest, appropriate to his place in evolution, is the same region in which the soul of the most advanced European enjoys his rest (and some of the rewards that may be due to him), but it responds to the characteristics of the soul in a way I will endeavour to explain later. Enough for the moment to say that the inter-incarnate life is in each case as rich and varied as the soul determines that it shall be, by the extent of its own advancement. On the highest levels, indeed, that inter-incarnate experience may touch, the undeveloped soul of the savage is barely conscious Its growth has only just begun on the physical plane. It is there that by degrees the expansion of consciousness must be accomplished which fits it for vivid consciousness on the higher planes later on.

And as a consequence it will be seen that a very mild degree of moral responsibility attaches to the savage for the use he makes of his lives during the early stage of his progress through the ages. To some extent, no doubt, he does make a good or bad use, according to his lights, of the chances nature gives him, and to that extent, most assuredly, the great law of equilibrium will express itself in the conditions more or less desirable of each life to which he becomes destined. By overlooking or misunderstanding this law, people on the outskirts of the subject often make nonsense of the whole system. In one shape or another the idea of reward and punishment enters into every scheme of thinking having to do with a future life, but for want of defined conceptions on the subject, the operations of Nature along those lines are apt to be misunderstood. The moral laws of the world are not so awkwardly adjusted that any man can incur an inappropriate penalty or come into possession of an inappropriate reward. Indeed, from an advanced point of view, we almost lose sight of the idea of reward and punishment. We come into touch with the more scientific law of moral equilibrium. The complexities of that law are so profound that its analogue on the physical plane � the law of the conservation of energy � is relatively simple. We do not in any true sense of the word understand why force is indestructible, but we know by experience that it is. We can convert one force into another, heat into chemical action, mechanical motion into electricity, and so on, but we do not know why none of those forces should ever die away without assuming some other of their Protean shapes. The situation is exactly paralleled on the moral plane, where the conservation of energy transforms wrongdoing into suffering by its own spiritual alchemy j happily, also, transforming noble, unselfish, generous action into one or other of the shapes that good may assume, sometimes simple happiness, sometimes opportunities to accomplish the glory of going on, bound in their turn to lead at later periods to results (to say rewards would seem ignominious) of corresponding dignity.

Anyhow, that is the way the great law of "Karma," as it is sometimes called, actually operates. And thought will show that while there are very few claims made upon it one way or the other by the early races of savage humanity, the complexities of its operation in the case of advanced souls in highly civilised life become enormous. Every life passed in the midst of the complex temptations of modern society loads the soul with karmic forces, both for good and evil, but the point that has been missed by all who had not the clue to the truth afforded by the doctrine of reincarnation � in their speculations as to the consequences to the soul of its good or evil deeds � was necessarily missed in the absence of that clue. Acts of either kind, however specifically related to life on earth, were supposed to meet their reward or penalty under conditions of immaterial existence. Or, indeed, it was supposed that for the sake of considerations lying outside the relations of the soul in question with the moral law, many of the evil deeds might be forgiven, and the soul be as well off, after all, as though such deeds had never been performed. From the point of view of the doctrine now under discussion, the idea of forgiveness is no less foreign to the methods of Nature than the idea, for example, of forgiving a crystal of chlorate of potash for the consequences of coming in contact with sulphuric acid. But, first of all, implacability equally foreign to those methods, and equally foreign again is the idea of imposing on a soul tainted with the consequences of misdoing on the physical plane, a penalty out of proportion to the offence on some spiritual plane of existence. The law of the conservation of energy on the moral plane adapts its action with infallible exactitude to the character and conditions of the disturbance of its equilibrium that may have taken place. The penalties, so to speak, of any misdoing on the physical plane during life await the soul on its return to physical life, and, as regards the vast majority of human entities at the present stage of our evolution, they are incapable of acts for which any appropriate penalty could follow them on to the spiritual plane. There they have their rest, and such happiness, even as may be appropriate to the extent of their spiritual development, while their physical plane misdoing determines the character of the environment in the midst of which they will ultimately return to physical existence.

Here it may be just worth while to affirm definitely, what any moderately intelligent student of the reincarnation doctrine would take for granted, that it does not proclaim the return of human souls under any conditions in animal bodies. This preposterous conception seems to have been thrown out at early stages of the world's history to frighten the children � as theologians invented the idea of hell-fire for the same purpose at a later date. Or some Eastern writers, in the beginning, may have adopted that symbol as implying that successive births might become more and more degraded if the entities concerned led, time after time, more and more evil lives. Masses of ignorant people in the East to this day, indeed, for that matter, actually do believe in the transmigration of human souls into animal bodies, but I am not concerned at present with discussing the foolishness of popular beliefs in the East or West. No modern student of the law of reincarnation conceives for a moment that the kingdoms of Nature are entangled in this ridiculous way. The evolution of spiritual consciousness has, indeed, proceeded by gradual degrees through all the kingdoms, and the individualised souls of human beings emerged, once upon a time, from the less individualised manifestations of life that constitute the animal world. But, once human, the fully individualised soul can never relapse from that condition. It may waver in its progress through the ages between widely varying conditions of welfare. That is the consequence of its own action at each step of the process, but, however evil its activity in life, human fates may be amply distressing enough to restore the balance of disturbed forces. All serious writers on this subject have again and again emphasized the point that I am now making. It has been explained with all possible emphasis that the notion of transmigration into animal bodies was merely one of the caricatures to which the reincarnation doctrine has been subject, but still, critics from whom one might have expected more intelligence, continue to object that it is absurd to think of a man becoming a snake or a pig! Undoubtedly that would be absurd, but the doctrine of reincarnation is not responsible for the absurdity.

The working of the law can only be clearly understood in the light of a correct comprehension of the experiences through which the soul passes after the completion of each physical life. From the ordinary point of view, all that is wrapped in complete obscurity, but the great body of teaching out of which the doctrine of reincarnation emerges in its present scientific shape deals also with phases of human consciousness that are held to be within the range of investigation by persons gifted with faculties, rare, no doubt, per million of the population, but not so very scarce after all in the aggregate. At all events, the course of successive lives can only be understood by accepting, at least as a hypothesis, the explanation reincarnationists give of the intervening phases of existence, and as the one belief, that which has to do with the return to the physical plane, is inseparably blended with the other � which has to do with the superphysical conditions of life � that also must be set forth to make the whole idea intelligible To simplify the task, I put the exposition in the form of a straightforward statement, instead of saying every moment, reincarnationists believe this, and reincarnationists believe that.

The experiences that come on first when a human soul is emancipated from the prison of the flesh are not of a very exalted order. As consciousness fades from the physical vehicle, it carries with it the finer sheath of astral matter which has interpenetrated the coarser physical vehicle during life, and in this ethereal but still quite material envelope it exists for a time in the region commonly called the astral plane, so called not because it has any connection with the stars, but simply because that term has been employed to denote the condition of Nature in question by students of super-physical mystery for many hundred years, and it is inconvenient now to abandon the word. On the astral plane the soul, in a vehicle of consciousness which is insusceptible to heat or cold, incapable of fatigue, subject to no waste, and, therefore, superior to the necessity of taking food, continues an existence for a variable period which in many of its aspects is so like the life just abandoned that uninstructed people who pass over, constantly find it impossible to believe that they are what is called "dead." But that state of things, though, as it grows familiar, and as the field of view is enlarged, it may be agreeable enough, and may be associated with the renewal of friendships and affections interrupted for a time by death, is not the state of things that corresponds to the Heaven of religious teaching Occult views of the after-states do not by any means abolish Heaven, but few persons are really quite ready for that exalted condition immediately they leave the earth life. Only some are so wholly absorbed by thought and emotion of a truly spiritual order that they slip through the intermediate condition unconsciously. And by thought and emotion of a spiritual order, I do not mean merely religious fervour. That, when the feeling is not too much overladen with attachment to external form and ceremony, may carry a soul swiftly over the intermediate period, but in truth, real unselfish love directed towards other companion souls of the great human family, quite irrespective of devotion directed towards divine ideals, is a spiritual emotion of transcendent force, carrying the departed soul after a very brief interval to the region or subjective state in which all such emotion blossoms into unimaginable perfection. In that state, moreover, Nature is infinitely responsive to all the loftier aspirations and desires of the mind, so that all its abortive efforts during life, pointing to the acquisition of knowledge, meet with an entirely complete and satisfactory fulfilment. Meanwhile, nothing that has ever been said from the religious point of view concerning the blissful condition of the soul in Heaven involves any exaggeration. On the contrary, the basic fact connected with existence on the plane of Nature corresponding to the Heaven of theology is bliss, absolute, complete, and unalloyed. Always subject to this qualification, be it remembered, that the capacity of different souls for the sensation of happiness varies almost as greatly as their capacity for appreciating knowledge.

But the methods of Nature provide for all cases, not merely for those of the spiritual aristocracy. How are we to think of the condition in Heaven of, let us say, a drunken coal-heaver, whose earth life has been anything but meritorious? He is probably to begin with a very young member of the human family, to whom but little has yet been given, and from whom but little will be yet expected, if we may for a moment dramatise the situation without forgetting that the results are all worked out and fall into their places by virtue of infinitely elastic and all-embracing moral laws which cover all possible cases. The drunken coal-heaver, of course, has his consciousness so deeply involved in material existence that the intermediate state of what may be thought of as semi-material existence is for him enormously prolonged. But even in such a man's life there may have been some little gleams of a spiritual feeling, something resembling love for a woman or a child. From such a little seed, or rather round such a little nucleus, when in the progress perhaps of ages the physical life cravings have worn themselves out, a relatively faint capacity for existence on the spiritual plane may be developed. And then such a man, even, has his share of the purer condition of consciousness and of happiness to the extent that his undeveloped nature renders the higher form of happiness possible. He is in presence of conditions which, if he knew how to avail himself of them, would be as responsive in his case as in that of the warm-hearted philanthropist, the noble-minded woman representing the ideal perfection of wife and motherhood, the really devoted lover, the really devout worshipper of Divinity, whatever concrete aspect that may assume in his mind. But he has only room in his consciousness for one little millionth of the harmonies around him. For the rest, for him, it is as though they were not. But he is taking in all the time just as much happiness as he can absorb, and is wholly unaware that there are realms beyond his horizon.

Any accurate appreciation of the condition of things I have been endeavouring to depict will show how very far the reincarnation doctrine is from doing away with Heaven, one of the first vague objections raised by people who do not understand it properly. It only does away with the profoundly unphilosophical idea that the moral forces engendered during a brief earth life of a few score years at best can give rise to an infinity of consequence. The periods of time spent in the real Heaven I have described are so protracted that early teaching, addressed to a world not yet ripe to think with scientific exactitude, may well be excused for having treated them as infinite to all intents and purposes. For the average period between earth lives ranges between 1500 and 2000 years. So ample is the provision Nature makes for rest after the struggle of material existence, of which each of us is in need ! There are many circumstances which in individual cases may expand or curtail the period of spiritual rest, but it is of the foremost importance to realise that the reincarnation doctrine, as affecting mankind at large, involves no idea of a hurried return to earth that would entangle relationships in a manner repugnant to imagination. In two thousand years, even old acquaintances, perhaps, returning to the earth life together, have lost touch with the specific relationships of their last visit. If they are united in bonds of affection, those indeed spontaneously re-assert themselves, and so also with our antipathies and enmities. They also re-assert themselves, for the Heaven period over, the soul is back again in the midst of the sin and sorrow, as well as of the love and progress of the former time. And now comes the inevitable reaping of what was sown in the last life, whether the crop be a pleasant harvest of wholesome enjoyment or a dismal fruition of evil doing in the past.

Of all the silly phrases that ignorance has ever coined there is none sillier than "the accident of birth." Birth is no more an accident than the delivery of a letter by the postman at the address on the envelope. I could � for occult research has penetrated very deeply into the methods of Nature in respect to the course of human evolution � say a great deal about the mechanism of the law which guides re-birth, but that would involve too protracted a digression. Enough for the moment to insist unreservedly on this idea as one of the fundamental principles of re-incarnation, that the environment into which each soul as it comes into earth life is thrown is the nearest approximation that the law can provide to a mathematically accurate expression of the soul's desert. I say approximation, because in these days souls are burdened or possessed of such complicated volumes of "karma" that no one life can possibly express them all. Several lives may be tinctured with the action, good or bad, of some lives of great activity in the past. And then before that elaborate account is adjusted the soul concerned will undoubtedly have been adding both to the debit and the credit side, so there is never a moment, or very rarely with entities of our stage in evolution, when the environment of a life clears off the old account entirely.

Meanwhile be it understood that whatever the environment making for pleasure or suffering may be, the condition of advancement of the Ego, his place on the scale of evolution, his acquired intellectual capacity and his sympathy or want of sympathy with moral ideas, is a permanent fact in his nature that environment does not alter. Within limits he may be raised up or cast down in the world. Station in society is, of course, a very important feature in the soul's environment, and is by no means left to chance, but it would be unusual for an entity to be tossed wildly up and down in the world. Those doing its rougher work at present are for the most part its younger children, and of that sort of work at some time in the past we have most of us had our share, but still there are karmic influences that will operate both ways to exalt or depress condition as compared with the station of the soul in the previous life, and for those who can trace the past lives of their own series, or of others, the effects of that sort of change are very striking.

More important, however, to a correct view of the whole subject than further detail in that direction is the great principle that people do not come into incarnation singly, spasmodically, or alone, but in company always with many whom they have been associated with in former lives. There is nothing in the least degree to be regarded as surprising in such concurrent reincarnations. By the hypothesis all the persons concerned died from the last life about the same time. They have spent about the same time on the planes of spiritual rest and happiness, where, be it remembered, if they are attached to one another there has been no real separation, and they wear out the forces that keep them on the spiritual plane at about the same rate, side by side. They are ready to resume work on the physical plane at the same time, and they are tied together by the strong bonds of attachment, or (for we must never overlook the evil side of human relationships) by the equally strong bonds of enmity. The man who has bitterly wronged another in one life will be mixed up with his affairs again in the next, and it may be that he will in turn become the sufferer; but to dwell on that possibility would be to suggest a very wooden, inelastic idea of the karmic law. There are endless varieties in the way bad karma may work itself out, and it by no means follows that the victim of wrong-doing in one life is by any pressure of the law bound to revenge himself in the next. Quite the contrary; he merely keeps up the disturbed equilibrium of the law if he does so, and perpetuates the trouble through future ages. The forgiveness of sins may not be possible in the sense of causing past facts not to have taken place, but it is a very magnificent possibility as regards the disturbance of equilibrium between any two members of the human family. Let the wronged personage forego his vengeance, and "I will repay, saith the Lord." The truthfulness of many phrases in Scripture, when they are properly understood in the light of spiritual science, is a source of much interest and gratification to the occult student.

Besides the common delusion that the doctrine of reincarnation does away with Heaven, the familiar objection next to be dealt with arises from the fact that (most) people do not remember their past lives, and the equally familiar answer from the student's point of view is that some of them do. If the account just given of the normal course followed by the soul between lives is properly appreciated, it will be obvious that specific memories of each life in turn fade from the consciousness of the soul before it is ready for another period of physical activity. That readiness, in fact, is expressed by the final obliteration from the consciousness of all detail concerning the last life. As long as its details interest the Ego, the spiritual condition is maintained. But while in this way it is obvious that the normal rule for people at this stage of evolution must be forgetfulness of past lives, the growth and further evolution of their higher vehicles of consciousness will in time provide them with resources by means of which they may recover any past memories that they may desire to recover. Having more or less completely digested Darwinian teaching in regard to the past, it ought not to be very difficult for us to forecast the possibilities of evolution in the future to the extent of realising that great expansions of faculty still await humanity. These will really be especially associated with the further development of the higher vehicles, the more than ethereal bodies in which the soul exists on the higher planes, and which, be it remembered, are already associated with the body during physical life. For most people the development of these higher vehicles is by no means so far advanced as that of the physical organism. Nature does not build her structures from the top downwards, any more than a physical plane architect would do this. The ground floor has to be built, as far as its main walls are concerned at all events, before the upper floors are constructed, and in the vast processes of evolution the same simple rule holds good. It is not until the consciousness is fairly well developed on the plane of earth life that it begins to work freely in its higher "bodies." That is not inconsistent with what I have said concerning the vivid consciousness of happiness in the inter-incarnate periods. That vivid consciousness for all ordinary people is, as I have endeavoured to explain, a glorification of all that was best in the physical life just spent. It does not mean that the Ego is in a position to work with all the possibilities of the spiritual plane on which he enjoys his appropriate rest. But as the evolution of the spiritual body proceeds, that process depending itself on the activities of the soul in incarnation, it becomes more and more able to live on the spiritual plane, not merely to bask for a time in its sunshine. And as this power expands, so does the soul carry back into the earth life next in order, a capacity during that life of being conscious in its spiritual body as well as in its physical body. Now on the spiritual plane, for those in tune with its loftier possibilities, desire for knowledge is equivalent to its instant possession. So when any Ego, or soul, is advanced in spiritual growth a little beyond the stage that has been generally attained at present by the most developed representatives of ordinary humanity, it finds itself in a position to transfer its consciousness at will from the one plane to the other without going through the formality of "dying." And if it does that with the desire of recovering recollection of any past life, it will recover that recollection with a degree of amplitude and precision that no ordinary memory even faintly suggests.

Thus already, for some souls are very much further advanced along the line of spiritual evolution than others, I know people who not alone remember their past lives, but are in a position, if it were worth while, to write a complete diary of every day of those past lives. For all persons the faculty in due course of time will come, but its coming may be greatly hastened as compared with the normal progress of the majority, for them a question perhaps, not of centuries, but of a long series of lives, each spaced out in time according to the rules governing reincarnation.

In connection with this matter of remembering the past, there are many other points of interest to be noted. So variegated are the possibilities of evolution that it may happen to some people to have developed their higher vehicles very considerably, sufficiently to command the possibilities of memory just referred to, and many other grander possibilities as well, without having evolved a physical organism capable of responding to their own consciousness in the higher vehicles. That is a question of physical plane karma. Just as the environment of a life is that which, whether it is agreeable, or the reverse, the entity concerned has earned for himself by former physical plane activities, so the faculties of the body are the product of his own action in a former life. That is the case with all its faculties. If a man is an ardent musician in one life, he will have a body suited to apprehend and express musical ideas in his next life. So with the other varieties of art, and so also with capacity to deal with the problems of science. The great musician or man of science is not the product of the infinitesimal activities he may engage in between birth and maturity. He is the product of many lives of persistent effort along the line of his speciality. And the peculiar faculties of brain that make for what is called the psychic temperament � the capacity of translating to the waking physical consciousness the impressions or experiences gone through on higher planes while the soul is temporarily in sleep or trance, away from the physical body � are in their turn the product of efforts in that direction in former lives. In reference to the bodily instrument we acquire each time we come into incarnation, Nature gives us � to put the idea into that crude fashion what we want to have if we do not put impediments in her way by generating bad karma, which interferes with the fruition of our wishes. But Nature can only rearrange our affairs in respect of such desires at each fresh departure: at the beginning, that is to say, of each fresh life. If last time all our ambitions were bent on some purely mundane object, we are fitted out in the next life accordingly, and then it is too late to change our minds and ask Nature to give us a body that would express some wholly different aspiration. In other words, people who are born quite without the faculties of psychic perception, will very rarely be able to acquire them by effort, but if they really learn to want them, they will have them next time.

So now that I have fairly well defined the doctrine of reincarnation as understood by those who believe in it � for many of whom, of course, it is no "theory" at all, but a living fact of consciousness � only one other important suggestion need be made to those for whom as yet it is only a theory. At all events, it is a theory which has the merit of bringing the terrible conditions of life all around us into harmony with the idea of ultimate moral and intellectual progress for all. The laws by which that progress is regulated may, like many other laws of Nature, bring about suffering in individual cases for a time, but when we realise that in each individual case suffering is no more than a transient experience, itself the product of causes that have either been set up by the soul concerned or constitute some among the earlier influences that have to be brought to bear on it in order to promote its ultimate evolution, the grievous riddle of the earth at all events assumes a new aspect which robs it of much of its horror. That thought will not operate with anyone who understands the law aright, to render him in the minutest degree less anxious than before to do his best, whatever that may be, to mitigate the suffering of others less advanced than himself. On the contrary, it will stimulate every such effort in a way no mere philanthropic sympathy could stimulate it, because for each reincarnating soul there is no surer road to happiness than eager desire to promote the happiness of others, no surer method of bringing suffering on oneself than the careless neglect of opportunities that may be afforded for softening the pressure of the karmic law on others. But that is not the thought on which any occult student would dwell most earnestly, because the very essence of the higher morality which a comprehension of the whole system of evolution engenders is the futility of all action designed with a self-regarding motive. The great law is working towards results which the clearest view of the future but dimly foreshadows; but we can see vistas of progress before the human race of such a kind that the progress so far accomplished since the earliest savage condition is a mere first step in the direction along which that progress lies. The onward movement is not to be accomplished by lazily drifting with the current of growth towards higher spheres of being. This world is the appointed arena of all activity which conduces to the grand purpose. Existence in brighter spheres can only be the harvest of the soul's cultivation here, and, but for the methods of Nature which bring back each soul again and again to the more or less painful arena of struggle, it would be self-condemned for ever to remain in a state which, by comparison with the potentialities of its nature, would be like that of the infant in arms as compared with the mature man. This physical world is for the human family, not merely the school in which we are trained more or less severely for higher destinies. That view is apt to drift people into thinking of the whole evolutionary process as one in which the entities concerned are helpless puppets in the hands of an arbitrary master. Surely the familiar teaching which, for so many, unfortunately is little more than a meaningless form of words � to the effect that Divinity is immanent in man-should suggest a loftier view of the truth. The whole stupendous aggregation of moral law in the midst of which we exist, but faintly suggested by the marvellous complexity of the laws that govern physical matter, is the Divine power which affords to every item of its diffused essence the boundless opportunities this world provides for developing the Divine principle. A time will come for all sooner or later when that principle will have been evolved, and when, therefore, further return to the sphere of work, struggle, and progress is no longer needful. Then, for such exalted beings, the law of reincarnation will have accomplished its purpose, and in modes of existence that ordinary human imagination at present is incapable of figuring in the mind, the possibilities of even further progress will somehow become manifest. But, with such speculations as that, it is needless to entangle our attempts to comprehend the working of the great evolutionary principle which controls this stage of our development. For vast ranges of time to come, that development can only go on in the sphere of existence to which we are at present bound, from which from time to time we escape to enjoy protracted periods of rest, but from which we are only separated in delusive imagination during such periods. Perhaps, for many of us, life after life at this stage of our career may be spent without much visible advantage, but if so, that is our own fault. All that is needed now to make the progress perceptible, or even rapid, is that our own intelligent effort should unite its influence with those of the natural evolutionary tendency. Then the final purpose of the law of reincarnation will be vindicated, and the soul, enlightened by knowledge, will be enabled eventually to triumph even over that law, and to blend itself in a consciousness which yet loses nothing of the past, with the Almighty Power by Whom the methods of its earlier growth have been designed.

Students concerned with the study of that profoundly interesting body of natural laws governing the phenomena which superphysical science is engaged in investigating, find themselves, as time goes on, in presence of an increasing difficulty when they wish to lay before the world at large the results of their researches. Few departments of science have progressed more, within the last few years, than that which deals with mysteries hitherto called occult, but nothing has been known of its gradual development by people absorbed in the more familiar avocations of life, and serious occult inquiry has unfortunately been divided from these by a margin or fringe of more or less absurd frivolity, the character of which has entirely veiled from public view the real nature of the operations in the background. The mere frivolities of occultism are of themselves sufficiently entertaining to attract a good deal of attention A change of feeling in reference to the whole subject, which has gone further than even those influenced by it may be fully aware, has induced a great many people to engage themselves with more or less zeal in this frivolity; but the broad result of all this is that thinkers of the ordinary type imagine that all devotees of occult inquiry part company, at the outset of their various pursuits, with the cool, balanced judgment required for the conduct of any new research, and pursue the notions with which they are possessed under the influence of boundless credulity, and in disregard of the conclusions reached by sedate students of Nature who have worked, during the progress of natural science, with continual and cautious reference to knowledge accumulated by their predecessors. The truth of the matter is that the genuine achievements of occult investigation during the last dozen years have been accomplished with as much prudence, care, and balanced judgment as those which have had to do, during the same period, with the advance made in chemical or electrical science, and the real reason why so wide a gulf still divides the knowledge that has thus been acquired from that possessed by the world at large, is to be found in the fact that serious occult investigation can only be conducted by methods which differ in some important respects from those by which purely physical investigation has hitherto been carried on.

Clearly it is possible to push forward knowledge in either one of two very different ways. We may attach ourselves to the block of knowledge already acquired, and add to it particle by particle, as the coral insects construct their islands. We may, on the other hand, if there seems adequate justification for attempting that method, start from the nucleus of an entirely new hypothesis, established, so to speak, far on in advance of existing knowledge in the ocean of the unknown and uncertain, and constantly keeping in mind at the outset of such new work that the nucleus represents hypothesis and not ascertained fact, surround it, so to speak, by all the inferences by which its actuality can be tested, expanding the structure downwards as well as upwards, until at last it may come into communication with existing knowledge, be recognised then as in continuous relations with this, and thus finally acquire as definite a right to be regarded as a part of the whole structure as though it had been thrown out in the first instance by the old-fashioned method. In the last half dozen years serious occult inquiry has been carried on in the manner just described, as also to some limited extent in accordance with the older method of building from original foundations. That older method has been mainly represented by the activities of the society devoted to psychical research, the other has been adopted by students encouraged to frame their first hypotheses by bolder speculation based upon abnormal experience. Speaking from the point of view of the latter school, it appears to me that the accretions of previously existing knowledge accomplished by means of the old-fashioned method have been extremely insignificant compared to those which have been developed by the other. It appears to me also that a great many results acquired by the newer method are now fairly in touch with the main body of previously familiar knowledge, and can thus be rendered intelligible to a larger audience than that in tune from the outset with the newer system. I propose to select from the results attained a coherent group of conclusions concerning some of the great laws of Nature which could only have been developed from previously existing knowledge after protracted delay.

The far-sighted speculations that have given rise to the results in question turned round experiences � not always of a very impressive or dignified character in themselves, but none the less suggestive for people who could discern underlying principles � acquired in connection with the strange faculty by virtue of which some persons of abnormal gifts have, from time to time, been able to recognise events at a distance, to read writing set before them when they have been effectually blindfolded, and to divine by some unintelligible method the pathological condition of people suffering from disease without using any of the resources of ordinary medical diagnosis. All these faculties have been comprehensively described as Clairvoyance, and have lain so far beyond the ordinary range of experience, and have been at first so entirely unattended by any intelligible explanations, that most people advancing cautiously along the beaten paths of science have treated the whole body of phenomena concerned with contemptuous neglect, convinced, in spite of whatever testimony seemed to support the stories told, that no condition of things they failed to apprehend could possibly exist. The facts nevertheless accumulated by even the early students of Clairvoyance remained a body of facts no less absolute in their character as such than the observations of astronomy, even though the majority of mankind have chosen to disregard them. Dr Esdaile, himself a patient and laborious practitioner of curative mesmerism, whose results at Calcutta are attested by floods of contemporary evidence, speaks of the researches in Clairvoyance conducted by the French mesmerist, Dr Petitin, as conclusively establishing the reality of Clairvoyance as a fact in Nature; while later on Dr Gregory accumulated a volume of evidence on the subject, the result mainly of his own, but also to a considerable degree of independent contemporary observation, compared to which Dr Petitin's cases were the mere first drops of the thunderstorm. At the present day people who speak of Clairvoyance as though the whole thing were a superstition at variance with the enlarged wisdom represented by modern physical science, are simply exhibiting ignorance of the work done in this department very ludicrous from the point of view of those of us who in the present day, in connection with our own further studies, have come to be as familiar with the fact of Clairvoyance as with the process of conveying thought by means of the telegraph or the penny post.

One of the circumstances under which Clairvoyance of the spasmodic, untrained kind is occasionally manifest asses with students familiar with the subject under the name of psychometry. The circumstances under which this variety of the gift in question is most often manifested are these: � Certain persons by feeling a piece of writing, a letter or whatever it may be, without reading or paying the least attention to its contents, will derive impressions concerning the writer, occasionally consisting of mere broad feeling as to his character and temperament, sometimes running into minute detail as to the circumstances under which the writing in question was produced. I myself, in testing the capacity of a friend along these peculiar lines of clairvoyant perception, have taken up a bundle of miscellaneous letters just as they lay in the drawer of a writing-table, and have given them one by one to the sensitive, who has told me something concerning each writer more or less important, but always with accuracy so far as it went, in fifteen or twenty cases in succession.

This experiment, of course, is one of an elementary order. We approach achievements really of the same nature, but apparently more complicated, when we deal with natural objects. The effect of these in the case of the highly gifted psychometrist is to put his consciousness in touch with previous conditions of Nature associated with the object he holds. To illustrate what I mean, let me describe a case in point. I have long been in the habit, when travelling abroad, of picking up pebbles or chipping bits of old walls to use when opportunity should serve as objects for psychometric experiments. I gave one such fragment of stone on one occasion to a psychometrist, and within ten minutes she had quite accurately described to me the leading characteristics of a very peculiarly configured island off the coast of Norway where I had picked up the stone some years previously. Enthusiasts for the telepathic idea will here suggest that I knew the characteristics of the place all the time, and that my friend obtained her impressions from my mind. It is a great step in advance of commonplace thinking to reach a comprehension of telepathy as a fact in Nature, no less distinctly established as such than the circulation of the blood, but many people who have gone so far are inclined to pause in their progress and assign all manner of psychic phenomena to telepathy with a persistence that is not a little unreasonable in the estimation of those who are familiar with other laws. To cover the telepathic suggestion in this case, however, I will give another instance of psychometry within my own experience. I gave on one occasion to a psychometrist a jade ring which I had myself bought in China, expecting to hear a description of the place where I procured it. Instead of this I received an account of a vision concerned entirely with wild mountain scenery with which I myself was totally unacquainted. Some time afterwards I ascertained that the jade so commonly used for ornamental purposes in China comes originally from the huge mountain ranges between East Turkestan and Tibet, and in this case the original "magnetism" of the stone had carried back the clairvoyant perceptions of my sensitive to the very region from which it had been quarried. Here it will be seen that there was no room for the telepathic hypothesis. And let me add, having just for the first time in this essay used the term "magnetism," that I apologise for it as very inappropriate to the mysterious currents of influence that continue to flow between objects and the places from which they have come. It is a word only used by occultists for want of a better, and embodies no suggestion that the magnetism in question is identical with that of the lodestone and its offspring.

The two experiments last described are still in the nature of elementary attempts. When the faculty employed is found in higher perfection, it will enable us to trace back the history of any given place or building along a connected series of retrospective visions which may apparently extend back to infinity without exhibiting the slightest indication of a tendency to fade. I have thus, with adequate help, been enabled to look back to the actual construction of Stonehenge, and in other investigations of a similar character have dealt with problems of remote history of an even more interesting kind; but with these for the moment it is not my purpose to deal. I am concerned simply with the principle involved in all such investigations, and, in order to consider that more systematically, we must turn aside for a moment into other paths of occult research, and examine, as far as we are able, the nature of that consciousness on which it is possible to impress either views of the present or visions of the past.

For the occult student, no fact connected with human consciousness is more certain than the fact that it does not depend upon its embodiment within the physical framework of a human being. Of course, to establish this fundamental truth to the satisfaction of those who are quite outside the researches which have to do with it would involve very long dissertations on that branch of the subject alone, and the record of much laborious experiment. But summing up the knowledge obtained by students along these lines for the purpose of the explanation more especially in hand, it may be enough to say that it is a common experience for people of adequately developed psychic faculty to meet one another in vehicles of consciousness belonging to a finer order of materiality than that of which physical bodies are composed, when, as far as their physical bodies are concerned, these are far apart or even asleep in different parts of the world. The intercourse on that other plane of Nature with which they are then concerned will be fully remembered by both in the waking state, and may be the subject of subsequent verification.

The bearing of such experience on the psychometric mystery has to do with the manner in which it shows that the consciousness which perceives or remembers is something quite independent of the physical brain, which in the waking state of its embodiment in flesh is undoubtedly the vehicle of its perception or remembrance, as much the vehicle as the piano when played upon is the instrument which produces the music although the conception of that music has been a state of consciousness in the player's mind before the keyboard was touched. In this way one may remark parenthetically that all the laborious imaginings of physiologists who have endeavoured to assign memory to molecular changes going on in the brain whenever an impression is received may be cast completely aside on the scrap-heap of obsolete delusions. There is no more molecular change in the human brain after it has been used to excite an impression on the consciousness associated with it for the moment than there is a permanent change in the strings of a piano because some definite chord has been struck.

One other conception concerning consciousness must be recognised in order to bring us within range of anything resembling an explanation of psychometry. A psychic of adequate development can, as I have just asserted, bring back into the waking state a memory of experiences enjoyed on a higher plane of Nature in appropriate vehicles of consciousness; but, in truth, all moderately advanced human beings in the vanguard of evolution at present do this in a greater or less degree without fully realising what they are about. Amongst quite ordinary people their best and loftiest thoughts and impulses may really be a reflection, in this way, of impressions gathered from higher planes of Nature, and in the case of the ordinary psychometrist we have an example of faculties standing mid-way between those of quite ordinary people and those of occult students so far advanced as to be able to understand the nature of their own higher activities. The mere psychometrist feels as if the object he touches linked him in some way with a specific vision. The more advanced psychic will realise that that vision is only part of a series so extensive that it may not inappropriately be called "the memory of Nature."

For all of us an analysis of memory is a hopeless undertaking. Occult research goes no further than to show that it is a function of consciousness, and that consciousness itself, as we are in the habit of contemplating it, is, as it were, the lower end of a fibre, the upper end of which is so completely immersed in that divine all-comprehensive consciousness on which the very existence of the whole scheme of creation depends that nothing could be more futile than for us at present to attempt a description of its attributes. But without presuming to grapple with metaphysical problems that can only, if handled at all, throw light upon the impotence of embodied thinking, it is enough to recognise that, as we ascend higher and higher along that fibre of which I speak, itself, of course, a mere allegorical suggestion, we undoubtedly enlarge our lateral range of consciousness. That is to say, at the extreme tip of the fibre, or in our embodied waking state, consciousness is concentrated within the tip; higher up, impressions flow in, as it were, from all sides; and at a certain degree of elevation this inflow is tantamount to a consciousness which extends over all transactions which have had to do with the development of the evolutionary scheme to which that fibre belongs. Memory, in this way, as we commonly use the expression, meaning thereby the recollection possible at the extreme tip of the fibre, relates merely to those impressions which have actually been acquired by consciousness within those limitations. In the ordinary language of commonplace thinking, no one would expect to remember more than he has once known or perceived; but the memory of the single, individualised, embodied consciousness is a memory as minute in reference to the memory of Nature, of which it is really a part, as the single individual himself is minute compared with the whole world. There is a condition to which it is possible for human consciousness to ascend, at which memory may relate to anything that has ever transpired within the world to which that ray of consciousness belongs.

No one who appreciates in the slightest degree the significance of this dazzling thought can fail to realise something of the horizon it opens out before the mind. Half a century ago, patient Dr Gregory, groping along the path of research with no better light than that afforded by pre-existing knowledge of the common-place order, perceived, from what he saw of Clairvoyance, that it foreshadowed a mighty possibility which he sketched in something like prophetic language. If this faculty should be capable of any very great development, it would put us, he saw, in possession of means for investigating the past history of the world, beside which literary records would sink into insignificance. No doubt to those who are steeped in materialistic habits of thought, nothing as yet will seem trustworthy as a method of historical investigation except the written record, or the equally tangible testimony of ancient monuments; but with those who have only gone a little way in the practical use of the higher faculties, this habit of mind is entirely out of date. The faculty, indeed, in the case of people who have only advanced a little way towards its perfection may often be itself untrustworthy. Evidence concerning the past which may be collected from the imperfectly trained observer must be abundantly verified by collateral observation of an independent character before it would command the respect of any cautious inquirer. But this much we have clearly ascertained; the nature of the record itself, whatever that may be, which constitutes Nature's memory, correctly seen, is infallible. It is the impress on a medium which cannot lie, of a record corresponding with the fact, self-recorded more rigorously than the photographic image by its object. The picture "in the astral light," to use a technical expression, may be seen through many distorted media, just as a scene of Nature herself may be viewed through corrugated glass, but the view is not corrugated. So with the picture in astral light; it is unchangeably defined with faultless accuracy, and the circumstances which at one time may obscure the perceptions of one observer will be cleared away for another, and we already know that there is a point of view from which the imperishable records can be observed, from which, if the observer can attain that point of view, no possibility of distortion or error threatens him with the smallest mistake.

Of course, the conception we are dealing with is one which bewilders the imagination. If it is possible to evoke from the memory of Nature the aspect of any single room, or of any one group of people there assembled at some former time, it is obviously necessary to assume that every room in every house in the world is contributing in the same way to the immeasurable store of records. That every landscape has impressed its changing features, as the seasons revolved, on the same imperishable pages; that there has never been a moment of time since the world began in connection with which the memory of the conditions prevailing at that moment has been blotted out of existence. The finite human understanding is so little able to grasp a condition of things like this, that for a long time to come the Philistine thinker will take refuge in simple incredulity. The only reply to such incredulity which it is necessary to make is, that the repudiation of any conjecture concerning Nature, not to speak of observations built on facts, merely because conjecture assumes Nature to be very complicated, is to exhibit a Bceotian state of mind in reference to many phenomena with which we are daily in contact. Take the methods by which the contents of any single room are made perceptible to the vision or senses of persons within it: by the vibrations of ether. What do these vibrations really signify? From every point of matter within the room, however variegated its contents, a sphere of vibration must be extending in all directions. Each point can be seen from any part of the room equally well by different observers, and yet every point is crossed by the vibrations emitted from every other point of matter within the room. The complexity of such vibrations is something in itself no less calculated to loosen the reason of anyone who attempts to follow out the whole process in imagination than the attempt to grasp infinity, whether of time or space; and none of these vibrations, of all the million million spheres of such which every room contains, is alike in its character, for they represent, besides the objective point from which they emanate, the infinite varieties of colour and intensities of light with which these points may have to do. It would be easy to derive from chemical science, for people familiar with that line of thought, illustrations concerning the resources of Nature for dealing with complexity which are no less effective than that which I have just put forward. Take the case of a reaction between two solutions, of different solids. Each molecule in each of these solutions is something, the construction of which from the point of view of ordinary science can but be dimly conjectured, but which, at all events, is a piece of mechanism of highly elaborate structure within dimensions which great mathematical authority declared to bear about the same relation to a drop of water as that which a cricket ball bears to the earth. In little more than an instant of time, when the two solutions are mingled, every molecule in the mixture has been entirely reconstructed, every molecule, remember, of a number of which, if the mixture consists of less liquid than might be contained in a common tumbler, would be represented by a row of ciphers stretching across this page. Only by those who ponder on the meaning of astronomical distances, and on the equally appalling significance of the infinitely little, will the power of Nature to grapple with complexity be reverently appreciated. What, then, lies before mankind as the ultimate possibility of the state of things concerning the memory of Nature of which modern occult research has now definite assurance? Clearly it is obvious that no one who realises the possibility of inquiring into the knowledge of the past, by putting himself into relation with the memory of Nature, will be content with the mere discovery of the methods by which this can be done. He will seek to apply this method to practical uses, and with its help to solve some of the problems which obscure the early history of mankind. For that matter in some cases he will apply to the elucidation of historical problems lying within a nearer range; but whatever are the results he thus obtains, he will find himself in presence of this dilemma: the results will be almost valueless for those who fail to appreciate the method, while it seems unreasonable to go at great length into a description of the method without indicating for the benefit of those who may be able to grasp its true significance some of the results which may illustrate its range and potency. Applied to some historical problems of the foremost interest, it has actually let in a flood of light upon many occurrences which have hitherto been accepted by the civilised world on the basis of misleading literary testimony; but, however little desirous the occult student may be to reserve for himself the benefit of his own clearer knowledge, it will not serve any useful purpose to throw into the arena of modern thought entirely unfamiliar versions of past events embraced within the historical period. It is useless to do this, at any rate, in advance of the more general recognition of the great scientific principles on which alone accurate pictures of the remote past can be reconstructed.

Students of those mysteries of nature which are generally still called "occult," because they are as yet only half revealed, are continually either amused or irritated, according to their individual temperament, by the way in which representatives of ordinary culture imagine that nothing can be known definitely outside the limits of the very narrow knowledge they themselves possess. Of course, the intelligent world at the present day is fermenting with the consciousness that many rents have been made in what is figuratively called "the Veil of Isis" � that many glimpses are possible for us now, in connection with future conditions of human existence lying beyond the physical period of our lives. But still the representatives of the stolid ignorance which prevailed before these glimpses were discerned � and they are still the great majority at this early stage of the transitional period � continue to exhibit the comical conceit which so often accompanies ignorance, by assigning the character of superstition to all statements of experience belonging to the newer order of things. The characteristic in question is illustrated in a peculiarly amusing fashion by a short letter in the Times on the subject of what is called "water-finding" or "dowsing," by a self-satisfied ignoramus whom it is unnecessary to name. He ridicules the proofs concerning the reality of this curious faculty brought forward by Professor Barrett and others who have really studied the subject, by arguing that if such evidence constituted valid proof, we should have to assume that witchcraft in the seventeenth century was also true, as well as "astrology, crystal-gazing, and the new superstition of telepathy." Our amusing ignoramus, who is careful in parenthesis to explain to his readers that he is "Reverend," is perfectly right in one way. Evidence of the same kind as that which proves the reality of "water-finding," that is to say, the abundant experience of those who investigate the subject, establishes on a solid foundation of certainty some broad principles connected with each of the subjects referred to in the above quotation. And the new "superstition of telepathy," as all well-informed people are aware, has now been established by such evidence on the same level of certainty as any other new discovery in recent science � like those, for example, connected with radium, or the etheric vibrations which have to do with the still imperfectly understood phenomena of wireless telegraphy.

But while, of course, the treatment of new facts in unfamiliar branches of science as though they belonged to the region of superstition is, so to speak, a reductio ad absurdum of the common-place mental attitude, the same kind of mistake is more widely made, and with somewhat better excuse, in reference to much more important subjects of occult investigation. Large numbers of people, who may be quite reasonable enough to accept and appreciate the evidence connected with such abnormal phenomena as water-finding and crystal-gazing, may still imagine that whatever hope is to be entertained concerning the continuity of human life beyond the bodily period, definite knowledge on that subject is � for inscrutable motives governing the providential design � hidden permanently from incarnate human understanding. The mistake which such an attitude of mind represents is no less absolutely at variance with the facts than the more comical blunder illustrated by the letter in the Times. Investigation concerning the conditions of existence attending the human soul in that which may truly be called "the next world" has been accumulated in such abundance that not much mystery is left in regard to that particular phase of future experience. This claim, however, does not really mean so much as it might at the first glance be supposed to imply. All researches into the mysteries of Nature, however successful they may be in penetrating regions which at first seemed involved in obscurity, introduce us to new horizons beyond which observation cannot penetrate. Putting the idea concisely, actual research shows us that the next world does lie within the range of our observation, but that worlds ad infition beyond that, or states of existence transcending those into which the soul immediately passes after death, range into infinities with which human understanding at our present stage of development is ill-qualified to grapple.

In the childhood of the human race, represented for that matter still by the attitude of mind taken up by the majority of those who vainly imagine themselves to be spiritual teachers, the next world was supposed to be a condition that might vaguely be described as one of uniformity and omniscience. The soul, if saved, was supposed to be exalted into a state of divine beatitude and perfection, or, to be disposed of in other ways with equal finality, if the saving process had missed fire. But a perception of the truth of things, illuminated by some facilities for observation extending beyond this physical plane of life, soon showed students of occult mystery that the processes of spiritual development in the after life were as gradual and varied as those which belong to the evolution of bodily forms on this earth. And so it came to pass that for many devotees of the higher knowledge the conditions of existence actually appertaining to what may truly be called the "next world" ceased to have much more importance than those associated with the transitory experiences of this. Aspiration pointed with impassioned eagerness in the direction of loftier spiritual conditions vaguely apprehended as lying beyond. And while for one great section of humanity, representing commonplace culture, nothing is supposed to be knowable in connection with the destinies of the soul, beyond the moment when it quits the body, for the most advanced students of occultism that which is actually the next world ceases to have any interest by the time its conditions come to be fully comprehended. In its turn it was seen to constitute merely a stage on the great journey, one which had indeed its transitory aspects of welfare or the reverse, but could hardly be regarded as worth claiming the serious attention of those bent upon true spiritual progress.

Nor, indeed, for those who can catch sight of loftier possibilities, is it reasonable to suppose that the relatively unimportant distractions of a temporary, even though superphysical, period need engage their present interest with any degree of intensity. But the truth certainly is that for a large proportion of humanity at its present stage of evolution the next world, although in one sense but the avenue of approach to loftier spiritual levels, will play so important a part in after-death experiences that it is more than worth their while to study its conditions with attention. Indeed, no phrase that can be used with that significance can be otherwise than weak and inexpressive in view of its inner meaning. The vague, indistinct anticipation of a future life which faintly envelops the understanding of those who have been brought up under the influence of conventional religious teaching is in itself only one degree in advance of the agnostic distrust in the possibilities of any future at all. A hope rather than a belief that somehow in perfectly unknown ways their consciousness will be maintained is all that has been left in the minds of those who, while in sympathy with religious ideas, are untouched by the definite acquisitions of occult research.

How can such research be carried out? � is the first question asked by those unfamiliar with the work. First of all, by the now old-fashioned methods of spiritualism. The fascinating interest of inquiry concerning the condition of those who have "passed on," gives rise to a great volume of imposture with which any new inquirer probably comes into contact before he reaches the inner nucleus of genuine work; so the multitude of common-place lookers � on carelessly suppose that no genuine experiences lie behind this unattractive barrier. But without laborious effort, anyone who has the patience to explore the great library of spiritualistic literature, which by this time has accumulated on our hands, will see abundant reason to feel sure that real communications emanating from people already established in the next world are available all around us in almost infinite abundance. For reasons which more scientific research has now made clear, a large proportion of these, it is true, seem untinged by any intellectual value. In some cases, however, they are pervaded by a much clearer intelligence, and referring to the records of my own experience, I have been for the last twelve months, and still am, in frequent communication with a former acquaintance of this life, who, since his death, has been passing rather rapidly through processes of development on the other side, and is now enabled to describe what may be called his present life, from a point of view in sympathy, so to speak, with my own desire for information. His story coincides with many of the more important records embodied in spiritualistic literature, and also vindicates occult information concerning the next world (more technically described as the Astral Plane) in a very interesting way.

The scientific view of the astral plane, with which, as I say, my friend's information corresponds, is derived by the development on the part of some people still embodied in the flesh of a possibility attaching to human nature but little understood as yet by most of us. At "death," as we commonly call it, the true consciousness passes away from the body and exists, on the astral plane, in an appropriate vehicle of consciousness consisting of highly refined matter such as that of which the whole astral plane is built. But in order so to pass away and to experience existence on the astral plane, it is by no means necessary to go through the whole process of death. Those who know how � and the acquisition of that knowledge lies at the threshold of all genuine occult inquiry � can pass out from the physical body in the astral vehicle already available for such excursions, during life. Truth to tell, all human beings of the ordinary type even, do, in this way, pass out of the body during sleep. But in ordinary cases the subtle body so made use of is not sufficiently advanced in its evolution to be available for intelligent activity. When it returns to the physical body on waking the vaguest recollections of its ultra-physical experiences are all that it contrives to bring back, and, indeed, these experiences, by the hypothesis, are themselves but vague and incoherent. But it is a simple solid fact of nature familiar to the experience of large numbers � although those numbers are a small percentage of the whole population � that where astral evolution has been adequately advanced, and where certain other characteristics inhere in the bodily organism, it is possible during life to investigate in advance the next world through which it is the destiny of all human beings eventually to pass, and to bring back clearer and more definite recollections concerning its nature than are generally to be obtained by the methods of spiritualism from those who, having finally quitted this plane of existence, lose touch, as it were, with our methods of formulating information.

In this way occult research, as the abundant literature to which it has given rise during the last twenty years will show, has enabled us to realise the variegated structure of the next world, which, be it remembered, must not be thought of as a vague spiritual condition out of touch with the phenomena of time and space. It is an outer sphere, or series of spheres, surrounding this earth, belonging to its life and plan, and without which it would be a mere dead mass of physical matter. For the convenience of description, this vast astral envelope must be thought of as consisting of a series of concentric spheres or planes, inhabited, to put the idea crudely, by human beings at different stages of moral and intellectual advancement. The multitudes who pass on from lives of coarse degradation ascend through these varied envelopes but slowly. Those whose physical life has already attuned their consciousness to loftier conditions of being slip through the lower regions unconsciously, and awake to the after-life on higher levels appropriate to their condition. And to embrace in this first glance loftier possibilities still, those whose moral and spiritual nature even during life is exalted to a very high degree of perfection scarcely have any experience, after the death of the body, of this astral region, though it may be fairly described as the "next world" for the majority. For them, still loftier planes of existence beyond become almost immediately accessible, but for the moment, in fulfilment of our present purpose, it is needless to speak of these. After all, for the vast majority of human beings at this period of evolution, consciousness, for considerable periods, must be focussed on some level or other of the astral plane, and the conditions attending life in this region are therefore those which have predominant interest for ordinary people.

The embarrassment one first encounters in attempting to describe the astral region has to do with the way in which � although its various sub-planes may roughly be thought of as concentric, the higher actually in space above the lower � they are not partitioned off one from another in the formal matter which applies to the storeys of a house. From the higher levels, all below are readily accessible. Those above become accessible as individual evolution advances. But, holding this fact in reserve for the moment, it must be recognised that the lowest levels, which by the very obvious fact that they are the lowest are most nearly in touch with the physical planes of this world, are inhabited in a predominant degree by what may be described as the dregs of our population. And because people of this kind are still looking back with lingering regret to the physical existence from which they have been torn, they are very apt to avail themselves of such opportunities as spiritual mediumship affords for getting in touch once more with the plane of life they regret. From higher sub-planes, however, inhabited by those who have already shaken off the bequest of earthly affinities � operative, perhaps, even with them at first, after their entrance into the next world � it is equally possible to make use of the opportunities afforded by what is called spiritual mediumship, and thus to enter into communication with friends who have been left behind. And when strong ties of affection bind persons on the astral plane to some of those whom they have left behind, even without the opportunities of mediumship, they may, and much more frequently than is commonly supposed do, take note of all that passes in connection with the life of their beloved ones here below, bringing what influence they can to bear sometimes upon their welfare or their consolation in distress.

From the commonplace point of view, it may be asked how, in such cases, can the after life be one of happiness if associated with the observation of suffering incurred by persons beloved by the one who has passed on. The answer is, firstly, that the condition of human life in this immediately next world is not necessarily one of undiluted happiness. It is a transitional period during which very varied states of consciousness are possible. There does lie beyond a region in which existence cannot but be associated with unblemished happiness, but that is held in reserve for a later progress. But again, from the point of view of the next world, suffering undergone in this life is so manifestly of a transitory character, that, although evoking sympathetic sorrow, it is tinged with something more than a hope concerning its termination � it is qualified by the definite perception and certainty that it is only of a temporary kind, to be followed at no distant date, even in the next world, by conditions of relatively pure and untroubled happiness. So the one who has passed on, assuming that he belongs already to one of the higher levels of the astral region, is waiting with patience for those whom he watches over with affectionate care, foreseeing that the period for which he will have to wait will not, for him, be of very long duration. His observation of distress below is not very greatly different from that feeling with which a grown person looks on at the transitory griefs of childhood, foreseeing, with confidence, the brighter prospect of a near future.

And now, � to attempt, as far as we are able, some realisation in advance of the actual conditions under which people who have passed on find themselves in the next world, � the clear perception of natural truth available for those who can survey it in advance, shows us neither the ecstatic beatitude attached by theological conceptions to the idea of Heaven nor the horrors supposed to belong to the nether worlds of ordinary superstition. The ecstatic bliss, be it remembered, may be attained eventually; and there is, as a matter of fact, a dark possibility in reserve for the spiritual consciousness of those who are wedded to evil in a manner that is unnecessary for the moment to discuss, simply because such terrible conditions are wholly beyond the reach even of those who lead the most abominable lives which commonplace capacities at this stage of human evolution render possible. But still the experiences immediately following disincarnation for a person of deplorably degraded life, of merely sensual desire, of utter criminal selfishness, are eminently disagreeable while they last. They are disagreeable, not because such conditions are the penalty appointed by Nature for the offences of such a person as we imagine. Those penalties, or rather consequences of the causes such a person has set in activity, await him on his return to physical life at a much later period under the infallible law of reincarnation when he finds himself once again on that stage of existence to which his activities have so far alone belonged, and where alone consequences appropriate to his misguided life can be realised. But still such a being has, by the hypothesis, so little within his consciousness to establish affinities with super-physical conditions of existence of anything approaching an elevated or dignified kind, that he can but slowly disentangle himself from the bequest of his earthly life. His consciousness is often for a long time torpid and all but obscured. But even he must have, latent in his nature, some smouldering spark, as it were, of the divine influence which necessarily permeates in varying degrees the whole of humanity, and so will eventually ascend not merely through the higher regions of astral experience, but even to those which may truly be described as the Heaven worlds beyond. Not, indeed, to exercise there any full capacity for vivid spiritual happiness, only possible in the case of those who have advanced far beyond his level of evolution. But a little taper may shine in its own way in the same region illuminated by the dazzling blaze of an electric arc. In neither case is the effect due to the surrounding atmosphere, but to the interior qualities of the light which shines. So the Heaven world means a very different state of consciousness for those whose expanded capacities can embrace a great volume of its possibilities as compared with those who can absorb but some of its fainter influences. But still for them, as far as the capacities of their being go, they are filled when there with such influence, and so, as I say, even for the humbler representatives of humanity there is a period between two lives of incarnation in which the maximum felicity their nature can assimilate falls to their portion.

Nor would such humbler entities be correctly imagined as reaching towards this destiny by a regular series of promotions up through the varying sub-planes of the astral or next world. The situation is far more complicated than that conception would suggest. Let us take, to illustrate the idea, the case of a human being of harmless, gentle life, affectionate and kind within a narrow sphere of opportunity, but little endowed so far with those attributes we associate with the idea of intellectual development. Side by side with the destiny of such a person, let us consider that of a man advanced in a very high degree as regards intellectual development not necessarily tainted with any of the grosser vices possible for humanity, but touched in hardly an appreciable degree by any of the loftier emotions distinctly appropriate, in their ultimate expansion, to the loftiest and most blissful conditions of spiritual existence, for which, truth to tell, the development in no inconsiderable degree of the love principle is a sine qua non. The amiable but undeveloped soul will, so to speak, slip unconsciously through the lower planes of astral discomfort, will spend some relatively brief interval on intermediate planes where no very vivid consciousness will be awakened, and will then sink into a restful condition of unconsciousness from which the immediate awakening will be on the lofty levels of the truly spiritual plane, where, of course, to be candid, such a person will be incapable of assimilating more than a few of the possibilities of that exalted level, but within the limits of his or her evolution will enjoy unblemished happiness. The other entity conceived will equally slip unharmed through the lower astral planes with which he has no particular amnity. His high intellectual development enables him to disentangle himself very quickly from the mere habits of physical life, which have never absorbed his thinking energy. He finds abundant scope for the exercise of intelligence on the highest levels of the astral plane, but includes within his consciousness very little, by the hypothesis, of that radiating love principle which belongs especially to spiritual existence. On the high levels of astral consciousness he will find nothing to interfere with or impair the intellectual enjoyments of the kind to which he has been used. Those of us who are enabled while in life to explore all regions of the astral world, tell us of their recognition, on such of its higher levels, of some men who have been distinguished during life in connection with the exercise of high intellectual gifts. They find an extreme delight in the continued exercise of these in presence of new conditions, which give rise to ranges of thought far in advance of those with which they were familiar during life. Thus a mathematician on the higher levels of the next world finds new avenues of mathematical thought opening before him which the limited observation of Nature from this point of view had never previously suggested. In his way he is eminently contented with the life in which he finds himself, and his very contentment precludes him for a long while from touching anything better.

And though the idea is so difficult to handle from our present point of view, on those levels of existence to which he has been translated he finds books and instruments of research available for his use as readily, or perhaps much more readily, than at his earlier stage of development when in touch with the libraries and laboratories of the physical plane. How can this be in regions inaccessible to earthly vision � in spheres wherein matter as studied in the laboratories does not exist? So far a vivid scientific imagination is necessary before we can realise matter which is still matter although perceptible only to senses which differ entirely from those we are using now. Let me try and illuminate the thought by an anecdote which may be more suggestive than abstract reasoning. A friend, mainly concerned with scientific pursuits, but not without some of the faculties which have to do with the phenomena of other planes, had been � whimsically and perversely � arguing in conversation one evening along the lines of conventional scientific scepticism. At the back of his mind, of course, there lay a state of consciousness which was the answer to his own sophistical pretence of reasoning. That night it seemed to him that he awoke, and a dignified presence in his room drew him away on an excursion. He found himself in a garden glowing with flowers, and his conductor asked him if he knew one in particular which was pointed out. He did not. He was asked to pluck it and examine it in detail. He did so, with the skill of one familiar with scientific methods. He confessed that the flower was a strange one to him, striking as its appearance was. "But it is a real flower, is it not?" said his conductor. "You have its bright petals lying in your hand." "Of course it a real flower," said my friend, "what else can it be?" "Then," replied his companion, "go back and do not again let me hear you talking such nonsense as I heard you talking last night."

And such experiences, be it remembered, rare perhaps, and accidental as it seems for those who are imperfectly equipped with psychic faculties, lie within the grasp at any time of such occult students as those to whose researches we are mainly indebted for the knowledge we possess concerning the next world.

I propose, now, to throw into a shape as connected as the circumstances will allow, the highly variegated evidence we are enabled to obtain from those who have passed on beyond the present life concerning the experiences they have subsequently enjoyed � or, perhaps, sometimes "endured," would be the better word.

It must never be forgotten, however, that experiences encountered in the immediately next world, in which the soul liberated from incarnation first awakens to consciousness, do not constitute a complete body of rewards and penalties for the life that has just been spent. Future lives on the physical plane of this earth provide the appropriate rewards and penalties for action accomplished on this plane, and a vivid appreciation of this principle led modern occult students in the beginning to assume, to a greater degree than a subsequent investigation of the facts entirely bears out, that conditions of consciousness intervening between two lives on earth had very little to do with those karmic laws which governed the ultimate administration of natural justice. Our first conception with reference to the course of events pointed to the idea that a soul heavily burdened with earthly passions and desires would go through a somewhat comfortless period on the astral plane as he gradually escaped from the entanglement of these feelings, but that the karma of evil, so to speak, would stand aside for the time, leaving the soul to enjoy on spiritual levels whatever happiness could be distilled from its best aspirations and emotions, such as these may have been, however imperfectly cultivated. When the whole process of human existence is regarded from a lofty standpoint, and when a sweep of time extending through long ages is taken into account, it is true, in accordance with the earlier and cruder view of the subject, that the astral experience intervening between earth life and the truly spiritual condition seems almost a negligible quantity. But while it is in progress it seems no more negligible than the pilgrimage, so wearisome for many of us, along the path of incarnate existence. And the attempt with which I am now concerned has to do with that astral period alone, a true comprehension of which is highly important in the interest of the world at large, even if it may be less so for those whose advanced knowledge and intensity of effort during physical life may give rise to future experiences in which the astral plane plays but a very limited part. In this way, indeed, it seems to me that many theosophic writers sin against the principle of unselfishness � so supremely important a law in connection with all spiritual progress � by dwelling too exclusively on the possibilities of a lofty spiritual future, attainable, no doubt, by a few, but as yet beyond all reasonable expectation in regard to the great majority of our companions at this stage of evolution. The astral plane for long periods of vivid consciousness, which may be thoroughly delightful or extremely the reverse, must be the home after bodily death for about 99 out of every 100 people we meet on this earth. In their interest it is extremely desirable that the conditions prevailing in that home should be understood as widely and accurately as possible, and for the 99 it might almost be declared premature to burden their consciousness by conceptions relating to more advanced conditions of progress than it is possible for them, for some lives to come, to attain.

There are two distinctly different ways in which we may gather information concerning life in the next world � on the "astral plane," that is to say. to use the technical expression. Some few persons whose evolution has already advanced to that degree which enables them in consciousness during life to get out of the body, as the common phrase goes, and in the appropriate vehicle of consciousness, the so-called astral body, to investigate in advance the regions to which most people naturally float when that body is disengaged from its physical encumbrance, can in this way give us the result of their observation in a manner which, as far as it goes, is more trustworthy than the reports from people who are actually denizens of the next world. For the clairvoyant explorer is embarrassed by no personal relations with what he observes. He is up in a balloon, so to speak, surveying the country below him, realising the respective magnitudes of different regions and the different aspects their scenery presents. But when, as may also happen, we are enabled to get into communication with someone actually passing through the astral existence, we may be able to get from him a more detailed account of the region to which he individually belongs, together with his recollections of other regions which in the earlier stages of his progress he may have passed through. The world at large, as yet, is but imperfectly aware, for the most part wholly ignorant, of the extent to which communications of the kind thus referred to are actually available for our use. But the oceanic literature of Spiritualism is enriched with an enormous variety of stories told by those who have "passed on" concerning their experiences. These will sometimes be communicated through persons so qualified to be able to write, under control, the record which the friend who has gone on desires to convey. In other cases, where the subtle conditions required are favourable, the astral inhabitant can return to this plane of life, and materialising for the purpose the organs of speech, actually convey to us his own straightforward narrative of what he wishes to tell.

The embarrassment one feels in dealing with subjects of this kind is two-fold. The actual information to be conveyed is subtle and difficult to handle, relating as it does to conditions of life very unlike those around us; and for most people at the present stage of public enlightenment, to whom the explanation may be addressed, the very methods by which the information is obtained are themselves unintelligible, the subject very likely of incredulity, and in conflict, perhaps, with crudely developed religious prejudices. But in discussing super-physical mysteries, one can only handle one branch of the subject at a time. For those who are in what is truly the absurd position of disbelieving in the fact that communications are received on this plane of life from people who have passed on, it is enough for the moment to say that any patient examination of the evidence provided in innumerable volumes on the subject will make that attitude of mind absolutely ridiculous, and will leave the honest students in no more doubt about the principal fact that communications do come back to us from the next world than if the question had to do with the possibility of getting letters from other parts of this planet

Selecting from the flood of available material two books which represent the astral researches of living people qualified to investigate the planes of Nature now under consideration, let us proceed to consider the statements embodied in Mr C. W. Leadbeater's "Astral Plane" and Mrs Besant's "Ancient Wisdom".* Then in regard to communications received from inhabitants of the astral region, I will concern myself especially with three streams of information available in a literary form; having, that is to say, been produced by automatic writing through qualified mediums, and finally with a body of communications I have myself received from astral plane friends speaking to me with "the direct voice." We shall see in how interesting a way these varied contributions to our knowledge harmonise with each other in regard to essentials, while varying in a way which is quite adequately accounted for by the differences of opportunity which the speakers or writers have enjoyed.

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* Of course my own book, "The Growth of the Soul", deals also with this question, amongst others with which it is more directly concerned.

From the volumes embodying theosophical research, we obtain in the first instance a clear conception of the next world as itself divided into regions differing very widely from one another in their characteristics, so that, on some, existence is in truth distressing and burdensome to a terrible degree, while on others it is so exhilarating that the happy denizens thereof imagine themselves already provided for in a condition of eternal bliss. The lowest regions of all embody, truth to tell, conditions of gloom and misery which can hardly be exaggerated. Their population mainly represents the scum of humanity � murderers, ruffians, violent criminals of all types, drunkards, profligates, the vilest of mankind. Terrible passions of revenge and hatred are stirring the majority of these unhappy beings. Helpless longing for physical enjoyments no longer possible on that plane of existence contribute to render the lives of all who are there deplorable and wretched to an extent that can hardly be over-coloured. But this is no sooner said than many problems of grave importance arise in connection with such a condition of things. It would seem, then, that the penalty of earthly misdeeds is not reserved for the next physical life; that the next world is a veritable sphere of retribution in the case of those who deserve to suffer; and then if future lives on earth are to be painful and distressing, as a penalty for evil doing, the whole system is unjust beyond even the conceptions of ordinary human justice, where, at all events, the criminal is not punished twice for the same offence ! Another embarrassing question perplexes the understanding. Where, in terms of our space, is this region situated? It has been said already (in the former essay) that the sub-planes of the astral world may fairly be thought of as concentric spheres surrounding the planet, only invisible to common sight by reason of the manifold limitations to which this faculty is subject, and of which, for the most part, it is so unconscious. But we cannot reconcile with the reason of things the idea that this region of gloom and misery is to be found anywhere above the surface of the earth bathed in the blue heavens to which we turn our upward gaze; hardly less easy of comprehension from another point of view is the conjecture that it may somehow exist within the very body of the earth itself. But, at all events, the real existence of such a region is but too surely established, not merely by clairvoyant observation, but by the testimony of more than one of those to whom I referred above as giving us the story of their own experience.

It may be as well, perhaps, before passing on, to spend some further thought upon the problems of actual space in connection with this great subject. Many imaginations revolt at the attempt to assign in terms of terrestrial measurement any definite place or region to the various sub-planes of the astral world. In vague terms, none will quarrel with the conception that the astral world does envelop our own, hut when that admission is dissected in detail, it seems unacceptable to many thinkers. And for all of us it is necessary to associate with speculation along these lines a recognition of the great truth that matter of an ultra-refined order may interpenetrate matter of a grosser kind, and in so doing be as unconscious, so to speak, of the lower kind as that is of the more refined medium. Again, on planes of Nature transcending the physical, matter is endowed with mysterious characteristics that have been very erroneously, and in a misleading way, described as endowing it with a fourth dimension. That subject is one which claims independent treatment; but whatever the actual attributes of super-physical matter thus referred to may be, they no doubt give rise to a condition of things which makes it seem erroneous to assign definite measurements in terms of our space to spaces of the astral world. From different levels, or from different stages of enlightenment, some of the astral friends who have communicated with myself on this subject give apparently incompatible assurances. One of them belonging to the fourth sub-plane (counting from the bottom upwards) had never paid attention to the question until I pressed it on his notice, but, endeavouring to ascertain the actual facts, declared that the region to which he belonged, although one from which, of course, he could reach the earth plane in a flash if necessary, was situated about 500 miles above the surface of the earth. Another friend who has already ascended to a more exalted level, and speaks from the sixth sub-plane, objects to measure any of these distances in miles, conceiving that idea to be misleading. And yet, pressed with the question whether the spacial conditions to which he is now accustomed do not include � whatever other attributes they may possess � -those of the three dimensional world with which we are acquainted, he is fain to confess that that certainly is so, although still maintaining that any statement bringing miles into relation with astral condition is bound to be misleading rather than instructive.

I can readily imagine that to be the case, but, at the same time, if we banish in imagination from the astral world the conceptions relating to space that we are familiar with here, we are apt to lose sight too completely of its definitely material character. Loftier regions of consciousness should be thought of, certainly, with as little reference as possible to ideas embodying material conceptions, but let it always be remembered that the astral plane is but an intermediate condition, partaking of attributes on the one side borrowed as it were from physical manifestation, on the other sharing those reserved for loftier conditions. And in reference to the astral body adhering to and clinging round the physical body during life that is definitely discernible, for those who see it, as having dimensions, and as extending beyond the outlines of the physical body by feet or inches, as the case may be, and analogy certainly suggests that similar characteristics belong to the astral plane itself which may not improperly be thought of as the astral body of the earth.

But returning now to the problem arising from the painful or disagreeable experiences that some people encounter on first passing over, let us consider whether these can fairly be regarded in the light of penalties for mis-doing, or accounted for on another line of thought. What, to begin with, are the facts with which we have to deal? Of the three literary narratives referred to above, transmitted by mediumship from people who have gone through many years and stages of astral experience, one, embodied in a printed volume entitled "A Wanderer in Spirit lands", may claim our attention first, and has claimed mine because I know enough of the circumstances under which it was produced to be absolutely sure that it is a genuine dictation from unseen regions of consciousness through the hand of a writer in reference to whom any suspicion concerning her bona fides would be, for those acquainted with her, grotesquely absurd. In this case, the real author frankly admits that he "passed on" rather suddenly in early middle life, having misspent his period of physical incarnation as completely as was possible for a man devoted to a career of selfish and reckless indifference to the sorrows he brought on others with whom his life was associated. He wakes to consciousness on the other side, in what seems to him a region of all but total darkness and misery. For a long while he cannot escape from the neighbourhood of his grave. He cannot in any way make his presence known to the one woman whom in life he really loved, whom he sees mourning for his loss. After a prolonged period of this wretchedness he encounters some who tell him that only in one way can he escape from these conditions. He must at last learn the lessons that earth life had failed to teach him � he must devote himself to the service of those whom he may find enduring sufferings even worse than his own. Only by at last engaging himself in the performance of unselfish duty can he escape from the conditions with which he himself, by his former life, has surrounded his consciousness. The story is far too elaborate in detail to be completely epitomised here; it thrills with human interest throughout, for the one genuine emotion or love that has accompanied him from his earth life becomes the redeeming influence of his later progress � the only force powerful enough to stimulate his efforts as he advances along the painful path of self-redemption. Eventually, after terrible experiences in regions even more saturated with suffering than those in which he first awakened to consciousness, he ascends to higher levels, from which at last he is enabled to communicate with the woman he loves, though still (now willingly) he continually returns to the lower levels to go on with the work by which he has accomplished his own purification.

It is highly possible that many details of his narrative represent imperfect powers of observation and mistakes, arising from the curious liability to misunderstand appearances, which certainly besets all those who enter the astral region without the advantage of much preliminary training. But still, the main outlines of his story confirm not merely the narratives of others, as I will endeavour to show, but also fit in with many of the explanations given by living clairvoyants, fortified in their explanations of the astral plane by occult knowledge. For example, we are told that the external appearance of the astral body is on each stage of its progress a reflection of the interior conditions of the soul. When our Wanderer at first realises the aspect he presents during his earlier passage through the lower subplanes, he is eager rather to conceal himself than to manifest himself to the woman he loves on earth. When at last he is privileged to do this, he has attained a condition in which his external appearance, while still recognisable, is a glorified rather than an actual portrait of his earthly self.

But strangely enough, in reference to another narrative that has come under my observation, though of this I can only speak in guarded terms, as the recipient, for private reasons, would not sanction its publication, we find that some distressing experiences on the lower planes of the astral may befall people who were in no way distinguished by leading bad lives on earth. The case in question has to do with a woman dying in early life, whose brief incarnate experience was simply that of unblemished happiness owing to the wealth and love with which she was surrounded, but whose innocence turns out to have been due rather to absolute freedom from temptation than to interior characteristics. Circumstances on the other side quickly revealed her nature as utterly selfish and undisciplined in reality, with the result that she in turn goes through experiences not wholly unlike in principle those described by the Wanderer. For the reason already suggested I must not refer to these in detail, but the lesson given appears to be that happy conditions on the astral plane can only arise from what may be called the interior suitability of the soul for happiness of those kinds which are associated, at all events in some degree, with generous and lofty impulses. On this plane of life, happiness, as we understand it, may sometimes be the privilege of those in possession of all they want. On the astral plane it is only compatible with interior conditions, amongst which the selfish craving for possessions can play but a subordinate part. And the third of the literary communications with which I am dealing contributes to substantiate this view indirectly, because, in that case, the man passing over, after a life not only of refined culture but of lofty aspirations on earth, has no experience of the lower planes at all. He awakened to consciousness on those where already his own nature found an appropriate expansion, from which he gives an alluring account of the after life to his friends on earth, and is mainly concerned with conveying teaching relating to the great laws controlling human evolution, the character of which is enough to show to the occult student that for those who are ready to learn, the development of knowledge concerning those great laws has been going on amongst those who have passed over, concurrently with the conditions that have been available to the occult students here during recent years. For those spiritualists who are under the impression that their friends on the other side never confirm teachings concerning human evolution which embody for instance the doctrine of reincarnation, it will be a surprise to learn how frequently at the present day this great principle is coming into recognition among those on the astral plane whose intellectual activity is sufficiently awakened to deal with problems of that nature. And in reference to that matter I may say at once that of the three friends in the next world who have lately been communicating with me, two of them are fully alive to the great truth that reincarnation at some period in the future will await them, while the third has not yet got sufficiently clear of the lower levels to be much interested in anything but the hopes he entertains of going higher ere long.

In one of the other two cases we have a very direct confirmation of what, for convenience sake, I may call the Wanderer's view. R-----, that is to say, without having led any specially bad life, found himself when first awakening beyond the grave very much in the condition described by the Wanderer, and this was due in his case, according to his own explanation, arrived at later, to the fact that his consciousness was very much saturated with the sentiment of hatred, one which we can realise at once as so distinctly antagonistic to that sympathetic and helpful temperament required for existence on the higher astral levels that it is not surprising to find it a serious drag on the progress of the soul.

Now, let us try to synthesize these various streams of information into something more like a coherent interpretation of the destinies awaiting mankind in the immediately next world than has hitherto been provided by any teaching I know of embodied in occult literature. The astral plane is undeniably a region playing a more important part in existence than some early occult writings led students to suppose. But the recognition of this truth does not destroy the force of a position that has been emphasized in occult literature, to the effect that the astral plane is a region in which a struggle between the higher and lower principles of anyone passing over must take place, and from which, if that struggle ends, as it were, in the supremacy of the higher, the entity passes away to regions of unblemished spiritual happiness. The mistake lay in imagining that the struggle was a brief tug of war leading at once to one result or the other. I do not doubt that that which may be called the early occult statement is realised in the long course of events. People, that is to say, who by virtue of their interior progress during life have really qualified themselves almost completely for a passage to the loftiest spiritual conditions, scarcely awake to the consciousness of any levels of the astral; may never have the slightest touch with its lower and more distressing conditions, and may pass through it almost, to use the old illustration, like an arrow through a cloud. But these are the exceptional cases as compared with the bulk of humanity. The vast majority are not only unfitted for the lofty happiness of a purely spiritual condition, but equally so for the relatively lofty conditions of happiness in a quasi-material world, where the conditions of the astral plane prevail. And thus we may think of whatever purifying processes they pass through on the lower planes of suffering as due rather to the deficiencies of their nature than to their definite liability, so to speak, to penal treatment.

Take, for example, the case referred to above, of a young woman whose life on earth had been stained by absolutely no overt misdeeds, but whose interior nature was still in great need of development. Her deficiencies precluded her from the immediate enjoyment after death of happiness of that kind which does not ensue from the possession of what you want, but from interior conditions in harmony with the loftiest purposes of nature. She suffers undeniably in the realisation of her deficiencies in the gradual acallicition of characteristics that enable her, in the course of a period measurable within the lifetime of her still living correspondent, to ascend to conditions where she is at last happy and contented. But is there not in this case a double penalty? By the hypothesis, our young friend's purely earthly karma was free of all embarrassment. In her case there is nothing to preclude a return to earth eventually under conditions as enjoyable as those of her last life. The suffering she incurs is the inevitable accompaniment of moral growth, and has nothing to do with what we commonly conceive as the karma of former lives. And our friend, the Wanderer, whose record as regards his earthly karma is one which cannot but be productive of a next life under distinctly unfavourable conditions, is not during his progress through the astral planes encountering the specific penalty of misdeeds. He is himself, as in the other case, enduring suffering incidental to moral growth which he has not previously accomplished. And that moral growth attained through suffering will necessarily mitigate the painful conditions of the next physical life, in so far as it will provide him with an attitude of mind which will make the best, instead of the worst, of them.

Undoubtedly the intimate acquaintance we are now acquiring with the next world dissipates the fantastic conceptions thereof which have sufficed to entertain the imagination of the world's children during primitive ages of culture, nor does this more intimate acquaintance operate to extinguish altogether the conceptions which represent the after state as liable to be a state of retribution in most cases. That is the rough view of the uncultured mind in reference to suffering incurred. A subtler conception will discriminate between the suffering due to moral deficiency and the suffering due to definite acts productive of misery to others, the reaction of which must ultimately afflict the misdoer. No doubt in many cases which represent not merely injury to others, but deplorable moral deficiency as well, there must in this way be encountered consequences that seem at the first glance a double penalty for the same offence. In truth, these consequences represent a division of the penalty, one part falling on the reincarnated entity at a later period, the other on the soul in its inter-incarnate experience. But clearly from all narratives of suffering on the astral plane there emerges the conception that these are in the nature of curative rather than penal treatment, and supplementary in their character to the suffering (as far as it may be curative) of physical existence.

As for why it appears inevitable on all planes that moral progress at its earlier stages, at all events, must be associated with suffering, that problem is one which the wisest among occult students of our own period are inclined to leave unsettled for the present. One may know a great deal more than is common knowledge as yet concerning the laws that govern human evolution, its vast scope in the future, its marvellous retrospect in the past, and at the same time we may remain even more convinced than at the outset, of our inability to fathom the deepest mysteries which underlie the whole undertaking. No question is more familiar to the occult student as emanating from those who first glimpse the idea that he knows something, than the old and time-worn query concerning the origin of evil. Answers which sound like answers can readily be framed, but those who might be best able to evade the point of the enquiry may be the most assured of our inability as yet to account really for the phenomenon. Whether in the universe there exist schemes of evolution providing for the loftiest development of individual consciousness along paths strewn with flowers alone and quite free from their thorns, is a question that few of us are yet in a position to deal with. We know that such a design has not been contemplated in our own case, and thus all problems connected with suffering turn on its specific origin in individual cases, and on the results to which in some, at all events, it manifestly leads.

But even now I have but faintly touched on the question which for some enquirers should perhaps evoke the most interesting answer available concerning the next world, that which relates to the manner in which lives are lived there. To explain this completely would be to grasp in advance conditions of thought and feeling almost as unlike those with which we are familiar here as the attributes of matter are unlike those of earthly physics. But a great deal can be comprehended, and the first intelligible truth to emphasise is that, in the beginning, life in the next world is so strangely similar in its character to life in this, that a great many people passing over are for a long time incapable of realising that they have gone through the change they have been in the habit of calling death. The truth is only forced on their understanding when they find themselves no longer able to communicate with their still living friends, and when, perhaps, others who have previously passed over reach them and explain the situation. Where this happens the experienced inhabitants of the next world will be their guides to the regions where they properly belong; and here assuming that the region in question is raised above those dreary and depressing lower levels to which reference has been already made, they will find themselves in presence of conditions extraordinarily like those of the life they have left, even to the extent of including natural scenery, and apparently houses in which the inhabitants live. That the living in question is widely unlike the earth life may be realised when we comprehend that people established there are freed from all the burdens incidental to wants of the flesh, troubled by no need to eat or drink, troubled by no craving for property which is not theirs, troubled by no need for incomes with which to secure whatever comforts they require.

Efforts of imagination almost beyond the possibilities of ordinary thinking are required to picture the conditions of such existence clearly in the mind, for if we say that all the things around our next world inhabitants are products of their imagination, the unreal figments of a dream, we shall quite misrepresent the true facts, although it is undeniably true that the plastic matter of the next world so readily responds to thought and desire that the objects surrounding people there are the product of their own thinking, subjective to that extent and yet objective when so brought into existence. I have questioned one friend who speaks to me from the fourth sub-plane of the astral (counting from the bottom), and he maintains that he lives there in a house with congenial friends, not, as it happens in his case, those whom he knew on earth, but those whose development beyond this life has corresponded with his own. If I question him: "Does the view you command from the house in which you say you live remain always the same, or does it change?" he frankly answers that it changes. Or someone else a little better able than he, because speaking from a higher level, to explain the situation maintains that there is an underlying objective reality in the view in question, but that this is developed, expanded, and continually modified by the thought of those who are looking at it. The prosaic thinker of this world will imagine that everything must be muddled and unreal in a world so constituted. The confusion is to be found merely in the attempt to picture in terms of physical plane consciousness the subtler conditions of consciousness on another level. For those who are there, by universal consent, all that lies around them, the scenery, the friends, the details of their domestic lives, are as real as such things possibly can be for us. Enthusiastic informants dealing with enquiries of this nature will constantly declare, "much more real!" much more satisfying, much more permanent than the decaying phenomena of the earth world left behind." Do you or the friends with whom you live ever wish that you were back again in the earth life?" I asked my friend R- on the fourth sub-plane. "Never!" was the impassioned reply, given with instantaneous eagerness, and yet that fourth plane represents conditions far inferior in their resources of happiness to the regions of the next world still beyond it; and let readers of this attempt to interpret such conditions never forget that the whole series of astral plane territories is but for human souls in progress, a transitional condition inferior in every way, and especially in its power of conferring happiness to those more truly spiritual regions beyond, with which these present explanations have nothing to do.

I know how grotesquely impossible it would be for the prosaic thinker, for whom nothing is real but the matter he can feel and see, to believe in or realise the existence of all these teeming worlds of phenomena and consciousness somewhere above us in the blue empyrean, apparently such an empty void. But a thrill of intelligence is stirring the consciousness of current generations, and the coarse incapacity to transcend the limitations of the physical world which distinguished the intellectual progress of the later nineteenth century is rapidly giving way in presence of the advanced revelations for which the twentieth is being prepared. Material phenomena are everywhere relative to sense perceptions. We need not trouble ourselves with metaphysical fancies, which, on the basis of this important truth, attempt to explain matter away altogether, and the phrase quoted above in reference to matter which has an objective foundation and subjective development may be true of all orders of matter with which sense perceptions work. For sense perceptions, quite unlike our own, the worlds for us unseen which surround the physical globe may be material, as definitely as the rocks and seas of the planet for physical observers.

"But if this ground on which you walk is solid to your footsteps, how do you get down to those lower levels where, amidst still suffering brothers of the human race, your work appears to lie?" I asked of my fourth plane friend. And endeavouring to give a physical plane colouring or illustration to his answer, he says: "It seems like going down in a diving bell created around one by the desire to descend," and then the descent suggests the idea of passing through thick fog. But all hints of this kind must necessarily be very slight, and there would be danger in trusting too implicitly to any one such statement because of the extent to which it must necessarily be coloured by the consciousness of the narrator. But that which it is important for people, willing to make in advance some little study of the next world to which most assuredly they are bound, to realise in advance, is that they will not be migrating to any fantastic fairyland, nor to any monotonous Heaven in which they will be condemned to sing hymns for ever, but that they will find in the real next world great possibilities of happiness, if their moral nature is fit for this � very arduous and even painful training at first, if they live this life in a moral condition out of harmony with true happiness; abundant scope for the exercise of intellectual ability if that should be superadded to the more spiritual attributes, which in the next world are a sine qua non for those who desire to enjoy it. Above all, let those who already in some degree can forecast the nobler emotions, which the training of the next world seems specially designed to cultivate, realise that they will find ample opportunities for work there to be performed in the interests of humanity, opportunities in presence of which the relatively disheartening conditions which surround philanthropy on earth will all have disappeared, providing everyone who is willing to do good, with spheres of activity in which beyond the possibility of mistake, it is certain that his activity will have good results.

Whoever � being capable of serious thought � has ever loved and lost a dog, must have more or less earnestly pondered on the possibility that "the poor Indian" of Pope's essay may have been more wisely inspired than the poet, who seems to scorn his faith when he believed that

".... admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company."

Attention has been specially turned to the problem by Mr Rider Haggard's experience in connection with the tragic death of his own favourite, an experience which the conventional reader of his letter to the Times may have thought strange and remarkable, but which, in truth, from the point of view of a somewhat higher knowledge, is merely an incident falling into its place in a considerable body of similar experiences with which students of super-physical phenomena are familiar. In Mr Haggard's case he had a vision in his sleep of the painful conditions under which his dog was killed, and later investigation showed that the vision corresponded with the facts.

As constituting the text on the basis of which I wish to set forth such knowledge as we really possess in reference to the after life of animals, it may be worth while at the outset to refer a little more in detail to the experience in question. The vision did not embrace all the circumstances of the tragedy. The dog was dashed over a bridge by the engine of a passing train, and died of its injuries on the bank of a little river, or in the water, where he may have been finally drowned, though the medical evidence was to the effect that he must have been killed instantaneously by the shock of the accident on the railway. His master realised him as dying by the water-side or in the water, but did not cognise the preliminary shock. This omission precisely corresponds with the explanation which probably explains what happened. The vision evidently was the product of the story which the dog himself some hours after his physical death contrived to tell his master, to whom he had naturally returned in his new condition. Such a statement, of course, anticipates the main part of the explanation which has to be given. The fact that a dog may have a new life after the destruction of his physical body can only be understood in the light of a fairly complete comprehension of the principles governing spiritual evolution from the lower forms of conscious existence up to those with which humanity is concerned. And this essay will be directed to the elucidation of that stupendous process so far as may be necessary for the interpretation of the phenomena immediately under notice. But, granting for the moment the return of the dog in his astral body to the master he loved, he would only be able to tell so much of his story as he himself understood. The shock received from the passing train would not have left any definite impressions on his own consciousness, any more than similar shocks are remembered by human beings who experience them. Anyone, for instance, who has been nearly but not quite killed in a gunpowder explosion will remember sensations connected with his recovery of consciousness, but not with the shock itself. The dog, in the same way, was in his normal condition at one moment and the next was lying shattered and dying by the brink of the river. How it came to pass that he was in that state would not have been within his own consciousness, and all that he could communicate to his master was the body of feeling he experienced while dying. This he did communicate very effectually, making his master feel as though he himself were undergoing the sufferings described.

This condition of things, again, corresponds with all similar experiences where only human beings are concerned. Anyone who has "passed on," as the phrase goes, to astral conditions of existence under painful circumstances, and who, with the "Ancient Mariner's" instinct, desires to pour his story into a sympathetic ear, will lead the person with whom he finds it possible to communicate to imagine himself going through the experiences described. A case lies within my own experience that illustrates the idea. A psychic friend went through a long series of connected dreams on one occasion, in which she imagined herself to have committed a murder, to have been arrested and tried, to have undergone sentence of death, and to have felt all the agonising terror of such a situation. She had, as a matter of fact, been approached on the astral plane during sleep by one who had actually gone through these experiences in life, and who told her pathetic story but too vividly.

Of course, in the attempt to elucidate experiences of this nature for the benefit of people who have not been used to investigating the phenomena of the unseen worlds around us, such statements as these are apt to be rather bewildering, but for students of the subject � a very considerable number in these days, although, unhappily, a small minority as yet of the cultivated world � the leading characteristics of the unseen world immediately around us are fairly well understood. It must not be supposed that the conditions on this so-called "astral plane" represent the ultimate possibilities of spiritual life. This unseen phase of our own world � however rich in its content, varied in its character, and fascinating in its possibilities � is but the antechamber of spiritual regions very much more exalted. But it is not necessary to complicate the present explanation by ascending in imagination to these loftier realms. Although still quite a terra incognita for the world at large, this spiritual antechamber is well within the range of clairvoyant observation, and its scenery and inhabitants have been very fully described in the literature of occult science, so that although as regards human consciousness of the ordinary type it lies beyond the grave, it by no means shares the condition of that which is indeed "unknowable" for us at present, the ultimate possibilities of spiritual life.

Though much admired in the days of its usefulness, the phrase "unknowable" has contributed in no small degree to mislead modern intelligence. It is apt to represent for each writer who employs it the conditions of Nature which are unknown to him. For others, these may be as familiar as a foreign country frequently explored. Indeed, the more widely exploration is carried out in regions of Nature beyond the range of the physical senses, the more profoundly mysterious become the regions or conditions lying still further beyond. An old illustration serves best to convey the idea. From a low level of observation the horizon seems very near, from the point of view of a lofty peak it is enormously more expanded, but the wider the horizon becomes, the wider is the circle of ignorance; and the more profoundly spiritual investigation is pursued, the more deeply is the investigator impressed with the immensities of the universe he is unable to comprehend. The only idea which it is needful to emphasize for the moment is that the horizon line of the unknowable is continually shifting, as the knowledge of mankind approaches its maturity, so that very much which is quite unknown to the plodding conventionalist (and with a conceit commensurate with his ignorance described by him as unknowable) is familiar ground for those who are a little further on in the direction of human maturity than himself.

Now the fact, to begin with, that on the astral plane some animals are recognised as continuing their existence just like human beings as far as that plane is concerned, is absolutely familiar to qualified students of the subject, and although it would not be true to say that every animal who dies off the physical plane continues a conscious existence on the astral, it would be necessary to draw the line rather low down amongst the varied species of the animal kingdom before we could say definitely that below that level no astral survival would be possible. Nature is nowhere fond of hard and fast lines. The colours of the spectrum, serviceable for so many suggestive analogies, will elucidate this amongst many other ideas. There is an undeniable difference between yellow and green, but in looking at a rainbow it is not easy to say at what precise place one colour changes into another. So with the question of the animal future. The intelligent and affectionate dog will be found after physical life on the astral plane as certainly as any human being. The same statement could not be made with the same certainty in regard to a slaughtered sheep or a pig. In truth, such animals do bequeath something to the astral plane, and influences, which, when the time comes for them to be properly understood, will perhaps induce a future humanity to revise many of its present customs in regard to such creatures. But carrying the conception down far lower again to that level of animal creation represented by lower reptiles or insects, assuredly there is no definite after-state of consciousness embodied in such forms. Even that last statement will require explanation and illustration before the whole story is thoroughly complete, but it may be left to stand as it is till then. Concerning ourselves for the moment merely with animals of the highest type, and especially with the dog as an illustration thereof, let us first enquire what it is in the dog, who enjoys an undeniable hereafter, which distinguishes him from the animal of the lower type whose consciousness has no specific future as such beyond the period of his physical existence. The question is not difficult to answer from the point of view of super-physical knowledge even in its present state, but the answer cannot very easily be rendered intelligible for those to whom the rudiments of such knowledge are unfamiliar without some preliminary explanations.

In its broadest outlines the idea that all animated creatures may be regarded as emanating in some mysterious fashion from the Divine Mind is almost a commonplace of metaphysical speculation. The omnipresence of the Deity is acknowledged throughout the religious world by the language of the lips, though the significance of the familiar phrase is hardly discerned in every case. But to a moderately advanced understanding all vital phenomena, even going down to those of the vegetable kingdom, represent in varying stages what, in oriental philosophy, is called the Descent of Spirit into Matter. That, so far as the deepest insight can enable us to realise, is the phrase which best represents the stupendous enterprise commonly spoken of in the West as "creation." Without attempting so extravagant a theory as one which would pretend to comprehend the ultimate divine purpose of creation, that which even limited observation enables us to perceive with definite certainty is that the animated life of this world is concerned with processes of spiritual evolution which run side by side with those more familiar to the science commonly called biology, relating to successive developments of form. Naturally the evolution of consciousness is a more subtle process than that which has to do with the growth, from generation to generation, of improved animal bodies. But for the purposes of the study immediately in hand we need neither attempt to interpret its beginnings nor presume to forecast its ultimate purpose. That which does come within the range of what is definitely knowable for students properly gifted is this state of facts: � that spiritual energy clothes itself, on certain lofty planes of Nature, in vehicles of consciousness very varied in their character and design; and that some of these vehicles of consciousness, pouring down their influence on the material world, give rise to a multiplicity of forms, while others of a more highly developed order are related to but one physical being on this plane of life. In other words, there are some volumes of spiritual energy which give rise to, or animate, a considerable number of creatures belonging to the animal world, while other volumes (to use the only phrase that seems available, though it is very ill-adapted to suit the extreme subtlety of the idea) give rise in manifestation on this plane, to human beings whose individuality is maintained throughout the ages and is quite as recognisable (for those who can see) on the one plane as on the other. But the evolutionary process which is going on in the case of those volumes of energy, which animate large groups of animals, has for its purpose � to this extent we may quite confidentially venture to read the designs of Nature � the ultimate differentiation of specific portions, so to speak, which shall, when differentiated, enter on an existence in which individuality will never again be lost.

It is so important, with a view to the comprehension of the higher animal life, to understand this process aright that it may be worth while to attempt its exposition in another set of phrases. The soul of a human being is an entity, distinctly recognisable as such on higher planes of Nature. From the commonplace point of view, people, unfamiliar with the facts, are fond of asserting that they lie in that favourite region, the Unknowable. Undoubtedly there is much connected with the possibilities of ultimate spiritual development which is unknown at present even by those who possess extensive information concerning the unseen world. But the conditions of human consciousness immediately succeeding physical dissolution, and even for a considerable range of progress beyond that limit, are absolutely familiar to many people qualified to deal with such researches. Now the consciousness which is the essential attribute of each human soul clothes itself in successive vehicles of subtle matter as it ascends through the various planes of Nature, which it is qualified by its development to reach, and always such vehicles are peculiar to itself The liberated soul is as much an entity on the higher spiritual planes above the astral as during its existence in the physical body. Its spiritual body is as definite a possession of its own as its flesh and bones were here. But this is not precisely the case with animal consciousness, unless, as we shall see directly, that has attained to the very highest levels of its possible development in that kingdom. The animal consciousness may, indeed, and in most cases does, exist in a more or less drowsy fashion for relatively brief periods after the death of the body on the astral plane. But when, in turn, this period of existence is past, the consciousness is not sufficiently evolved, as a rule, to exist in a vehicle of its own on the higher plane. It merges itself in what may be thought of as a spiritual envelope embracing the consciousness of a great many animals of varying types. This spiritual aggregation has often been spoken of in the literature of the subject as the "common-soul" of an animal group, and with the explanation thus given that phrase will probably be intelligible.

Such common-souls have been undergoing a protracted evolution over vast periods of time. It is not necessary for our present purpose to attempt an explanation of their actual origin. In any given case we may recognise them as having been concerned, at earlier periods of the world's history, with the animation of animal forms belonging to the humbler types of that kingdom, but existence even in humble animal forms involves something in the nature of experience; and just as in the case of the human soul all the experience gathered during each life contributes to the enlargement and expansion of faculty and character, so, in their humble way, the contributions that each animal is enabled to make, go to enlarge the possibilities with which the common-soul is endowed, and thus, as the ages roll on, each such common-soul becomes qualified to animate animals of a higher and higher type. And concurrently with the advance of human civilisation and the development of relations between the human and the animal world beyond those of the hunter and the hunted, it comes to pass that the most advanced animals associated with any definite group become gradually more and more individualised. Keeping our attention fixed upon conditions that are intelligible at the present day, we are enabled to observe that such animals as come into close and intimate relations with the higher human order (three kinds especially may be mentioned � the dog, the horse, and the cat) become qualified to go through an experience which the earlier varieties of animal existence did not provide for. They become qualified to develop the emotion of love for a being higher in the scale of Nature than themselves. This is tantamount to the awakening within them of the greatest potentiality derived from their actual origin as an emanation of Divinity. For this main thought must never be lost sight of in studying the processes of life wherever these are carried on. The divine influence is ever present, however obscured by conditions or latent � as the possibilities of the plant are latent in the seed. Now, when the differentiation of one of the higher animals in any group has been completely carried out, the volume of consciousness constituting the soul of such an animal is capable of an independent existence on the higher plane, and in that condition has begun its career of individual immortality; has become ready for incarnation in the human form, with all the stupendous possibilities before it which are associated with that condition of existence.

It does not follow that such transition from one kingdom of Nature to the other is immediately accomplished. One of the difficulties connected with the presentation of truths concerning the higher activities of Nature which stand in the way of rendering them intelligible outside the circle of special students has to do with the necessity for dealing with enormous periods of time, and with the necessity of recognising that such periods have very different meanings for the different planes of Nature on which consciousness may function. It may be that the newly differentiated soul of a dog, too far advanced ever again to inhabit an animal form, will find no opportunity in the present condition of the world for incarnation in humanity. The lower types of humanity around us in savage conditions are far too low down in their own development to afford opportunities for the progress of such animals as we are thinking of, whose consciousness is filled with a glow of beautiful emotion which the savage would be quite incapable of understanding. But the animal in question could hardly be evolved sufficiently along the lines of mental development to be ripe for an incarnation amongst civilised mankind. He must, therefore, await the opening of a new chapter in the whole human story, and this will not be ready to begin until a very remote period. Meanwhile that animal soul in question need not be regarded as prejudiced by the delay. It exists in a condition of as much beatitude as its progress will allow of, and, although awaiting further progress until opportunity serves, it may rather be congratulated on its period of rest than pitied on account of its inactivity.

As usual, however, between the two extreme conditions of any process under examination, intermediate possibilities arise. The extremes we have here to deal with are, in the first case, the simple failure of the animal to differentiate, and the return of its consciousness to the common-soul of the animal group to which it has belonged; on the other hand, the actual establishment on the spiritual plane of a new entity ready for human incarnation. It may happen, however, where attachment between the differentiating animal and his own especial human friend has been very intense, that the animal will actually be drawn back into incarnation in a similar animal form in association with the human being either during that life or in the course of another. In this way, some few among our higher domesticated pets may actually be thought of as reincarnating entities, although it is in a high degree improbable that such reincarnations would be more than at most once or twice repeated. And again, a possibility arises which has been known to bring about what seems a very wonderful result. Where the tie of affectionate devotion is very close on both sides, as between the animal and his master, it is just possible that the animal will reincarnate as a human being concurrently with the next reincarnation of the man, in some race sufficiently raised above the mere savage condition to make it possible for him to find an opening there; and in such cases the intricate influences which control and mould human affairs in accordance with the karmic programme, or let us say the providential design, will bring the new human entity into personal relations with the older one to whom he owes his humanity. Again, it is just possible that animals below the rank of those few who come most closely into touch with humanity may, by the development in a less perfect way of the love principle amongst themselves, actually become reincarnating entities before it is possible for them to develop an entirely independent vehicle of consciousness on the spiritual plane. Physical analogies which would help to render the idea intelligible are apt to be misleading, but such partially differentiated animals may be thought of as clinging like a bubble to the surface of the subtle envelope of the common-soul, not yet sufficiently developed to fly off on their own account.

I have spoken of three animals familiar to ourselves as amongst those which are capable of differentiation under human influence. There is one other which undeniably belongs to the same rank, the elephant; but he is not sufficiently understood in the West, as a general rule, to be much worth talking about in this connection. He is worth mentioning, however, because such mention will help to emphasize an important consideration to which our attention has not yet been turned. All these vast processes of natural evolution proceed along appropriate lines, so to speak, and the animal soul whose highest achievement, for example, would be the animation of horses, would not also he concerned with the animation of dogs, cats, or elephants. Each of these four animals must be thought of as the head animal of its own series. To trace out the series of which in each case each such animal is the head would be a task of extreme difficulty, and the results of such an effort would seem very bewildering because they would not have any reference whatever to similarity of form. The one thought which it is always necessary to keep clearly in view if we would understand the scheme of Nature aright, is the one which unhappily the modern biologist entirely overlooks. The evolution of form proceeds along one line of rails, so to speak, the evolution of spiritual consciousness animating such forms may follow a course almost at right angles to the other progress, or inclined, at all events, at an angle approximating to that. In other words, the progressing spiritual consciousness may find an appropriate opportunity for gathering experience in one animal form, and next time may find its slightly more advanced opportunity in a form of a totally different character. Just as, in the human case, a soul may incarnate at one period along one line of ancestry, at another find its appropriate habitat in a different part of the world and even a different race.

And now we come to the moral to be deduced from all these observations, a moral which ordinary mankind is at present as little capable of suspecting as of investigating the phenomena. The cultivation of animal consciousness up to the conditions in which it is capable of advancing along the loftier lines of progress is the task assigned by Nature to the human family. It is a task which the human family at present not only fails to accomplish, except in a few cases by accident, but is for the most part offending against and defying in many more ways than one. Animals collectively ought to be regarded by mankind as pupils or apprentices to life. It has not yet been held incompatible with the highest civilisation to regard them, for the most part, as so much material for the exercise of the savage instinct. The sportsman, it is true, who takes pleasure in killing his humbler fellow creatures, and who in doing so is saturating the animal souls to which they belong with an instinct, in reference to humanity, distinctly prejudicial to their evolutionary growth, is not necessarily a criminal. He is simply undeveloped to that extent, incapable of comprehending his place in Nature, of the loftier duties attaching to his station. This thought applies to the present condition of mankind in a great many ways. The occult student is painfully aware of the fact that his contemporaries, for the most part, are at a very early stage of their course through the ages. The modern world, so to speak, is streaked with divine rays of intelligence, manifesting themselves in very beautiful action, even on the part of those who in other respects represent a deplorably backward condition, and many offenders against the natural design, as it affects the relation between mankind and the animal world, exhibit in many of their activities, accomplishments of spiritual progress the value of which they themselves are as yet quite unable to comprehend. But concurrently with such achievements, they do sometimes blunder about, for want of more exact super-physical knowledge, in a very deplorable and extraordinary fashion.

Anyhow, the habit of taking pleasure in the destruction of animal life is amongst the most disgusting, from the occultist's point of view, of those which blot the pages recording the doctrines of current morality. One must equally recognise that the slaughter of animals for food is another bequest from a barbarous age, which must of necessity be abandoned as a practice when human understanding is a little more illuminated. From the point of view of a very imperfect comprehension of the way in which the world is governed, some people to whom these views may be unacceptable will ask why such practices are "allowed" if they interfere with the progress of the whole evolutionary design. They might as well contend that murder and theft are approved of because they also are allowed by Providence to take place. The underlying principle which all study of Nature in its highest aspects enforces on the observation of the occult student is that somehow it is necessary to let mankind blunder on in darkness and ignorance for a time, multiplying its mistakes as it proceeds, bearing their consequences in the shape of manifold suffering, and even distributing superfluous suffering around, the sight of which, for those who can see, is amongst the saddest aspects of the whole drama. But no less certain than the fact that ignorance and stupidity give rise to suffering is the ultimate prospect of its amelioration in the days to come when wisdom and enlightenment shall reign.

The earthquake itself is not altogether a mystery for science. It is generally recognised as a consequence of some slip or rupture in the rock strata constituting the earth's crust, due to the contraction of the whole mass as it gradually cools. The evidence of geology is too abundant in reference to such interior changes to be misunderstood. We find the actual strata crumpled up in all directions like the skin of a shrivelled apple, to use a favourite illustration, and the character of such crumpling generally suggests a sudden rupture at some time in the past, and no gradual process like those for which geologists as a rule have a marked preference.

And while the old conception of the earth's constitution � as a huge mass of molten matter at an enormously high temperature surrounded by a relatively thin crust � held its own, the conception that the crust in question would crinkle up as the heat of the interior mass gradually diffused away was very readily acceptable. To some extent, indeed, since then, he problem presented to the mind has assumed unforeseen complexity, because the notion that the earth is a molten mass surrounded by a relatively thin crust has long since been abandoned, owing to the impossibility of reconciling with that idea the continued maintenance by the earth of its definite shape. The matter of which it consists could not retain that shape under the varying attractions to which its movements within the solar system subject it, unless, so mathematicians have long since affirmed, it were throughout at least as rigid as though it were composed of cold steel. So for most thinkers the old molten interior theory has been abandoned, without being definitely replaced by any other providing an interpretation for well-known facts, and geology has to remain content with many apparent contradictions in the phenomena it is able to observe.

Some superficial facts seem to support the old idea, for in almost all investigations having to do with deep borings the temperature of the earth rises about one degree of Fahrenheit for every 50 feet that we descend. If that progress is maintained we need not go down in imagination more than 20 or 30 miles at the most to reach a condition of things in which all the known metals would be in a fluid state and the heat in excess of anything that our resources on the surface enable us to command. How, then, are we to imagine that the main body of the earth is cold and rigid if somewhere not far beneath the surface its heat is enough to melt rock itself? Attempts to meet the embarrassment have been made by suggesting that even liquids, under the enormous pressures to which the interior of the earth is subject, would possess many of the qualities we associate with the idea of solids, and would be no longer in the mobile state generally thought of as an attribute of liquids. But the suggestion is unsatisfactory, and at all events conceptions of a very much more plausible kind are available for our use, if we take advantage not merely of the speculations so far available in geological text books, but also of those arising from observations of a kind with which the science of the twelfth century at all events was not generally concerned

So far, of course, the theory of the earth's constitution which I am about to set forth need only be considered by the reader as a theory to be judged in accordance with its merits, and with the manner in which it may or may not be found to harmonise with observed phenomena it may be employed to explain. By a few it may be recognised as belonging to a certain great body of teaching concerning the life-history of this planet which depends on methods of observation wholly unlike those employed in ordinary physical research. But in view of the practical impossibility, in an essay of this kind, of setting forth the reasons which may induce some students of occult science to treat the problems connected with the earth's interior as susceptible of definite investigation, it will be enough to offer the present account of the earth's constitution to the reader as a theory, relating to the manner in which the earth may have come into existence, and may thus have acquired attributes which explain the apparent anomalies referred to above.

Primitive conjectures concerning creation turn generally on the idea that huge results are accomplished, so to speak, instantaneously, when the Divine fiat goes forth. Experience of the manner in which creation proceeds all around us at the present day leads one to recognise the gradual character of most natural performances as one of their most striking features. The biggest tree begins with a very small seed; the largest animals are evolved from germs that are microscopically minute. The latest teachings of science point to the conclusion that all the matter with which we are familiar is built up by the aggregation of atoms the magnitude of which is almost beyond the reach of imagination in the direction of the infinitely little, and thus it is not unreasonable to imagine that the earth itself is a growth from beginnings small in comparison with its present girth. That all planets are brought into being in the first instance by the condensation of nebulae is a view which is equally acceptable by astronomers and occult students. But it does not follow that each planet of our system has been formed by virtue, so to speak, of one great aggregation of nebulous matter. Nebulae in the heavens engaged in the process of engendering solar systems show us sometimes nuclei already evolved within the swirling spirals of chaotic material, and if these have ensued from the condensation of that material in such regions, there is still obviously a vast supply of it awaiting further use.

Suppose our earth at one time was such a nucleus, it may be that then its magnitude was insignificant compared to that which it has since attained. It is not unreasonable to imagine that subtler forces than those of mere gravitation and momentum are concerned with the process of planetary formation, and it is not extravagant to imagine that such forces may be intermittent in their operation. Let us assume, therefore, that nebular condensation gave rise, in the first instance, to a small planetary body, and that the forces that provoked this result were then in suspension for a time. That small planetary body would continue to revolve in its orbit, and may be thought of as gradually cooling down at the surface sufficiently to become solidified. Time may be assigned to all operations of this kind with unlimited generosity. But eventually the planet-making forces come once more into activity. Again, a great volume of nebulous matter is gathered around the original nucleus and condensed in the shape of a new shell surrounding the original body. We can imagine this enlarged globe careering through space in its orbit until in turn the outer shell, as regards its outer surface, cools down to a solid condition. Thus we are provided with a world in which the outer crust is hard, in which a layer of intensely heated matter lies within this, but within which, again, a solid nucleus is to be found if we go deep enough.

Again, allow the vast patience of Nature to operate through protracted ages. The shell is now itself prepared to play the part of the original nucleus in a new condensation of nebulous matter. The old programme is repeated. A second shell thus grows over the first, and the stratification of the growing globe, as representing alternately solid and molten matter, is becoming more complex. So the work may go on until a series of concentric spheres shall have been built one over another � until at last the planet, having attained maturity, is allowed to engender on its latest surface the kingdoms of Nature providing for the higher evolutions to which we ourselves belong. These concentric spheres need not be thought of as thin relatively to the diameter of the whole planet. Clairvoyant observation tells us � or rather, let me say, adhering to the presentation of this story as a theory � the outer crust of the earth may have a thickness of about 800 miles. Below this, by the whole hypothesis, there must still exist a layer probably of some considerable thickness still glowing with the heat of the latest nebular condensation.

But how about observed phenomena which lead us to imagine that the glowing temperature would be encountered at 20�30 miles rather than at 800? Fertile imagination, or detailed information, whichever way we like to look at it, accounts for the embarrassing detail. The latest external shell which completes the body of the earth must, for obvious mathematical reasons, be thicker than those within, and beyond this may have some peculiar features appropriate to its condition as a permanent external envelope. These conditions might, perhaps, be supplied by a final top-dressing, so to speak, of nebular condensation on the outside of the thick external shell, when this should finally have been provided for. It is not unreasonable to imagine that for the peculiar purposes of evolutions to be carried out on the surface, greater variety of matter might be required than for the actual structure of the planet's interior body, although it will not be necessary to discredit the versatility of Nature by supposing for a moment that the exterior evolutions are alone those with which the earth is concerned. One of the most attractive features of the theory here set forth is, indeed, to be discerned in the way it provides for a great variety of life conditions within, wholly different from those belonging to the surface of the sphere. Ordinary crude and foolish speculation as to where life may exist, and where natural conditions forbid the thought of it, are based of course on a narrow conception of life, as only compatible with bodies resembling those in current use amongst mankind. A broader conception of natural possibilities will point to the idea that no conditions of physical temperature need be thought of as incompatible with appropriate vehicles of consciousness. But into that branch of our comprehensive theory it is hardly necessary to go much further. The scientific value of the whole conception has to do with the manner in which it helps us to account for some of the natural mysteries in the category of those to which earthquakes belong, which no reasoning based on other conceptions concerning the earth's interior constitution will provide for in any satisfactory manner.

The earthquake itself has become a fairly intelligible phenomenon, because the slippings and crumblings of the rock strata within a few miles of the surface are enough to account for it. The earthquake, in short, belongs to the order of natural occurrences happening within that mere skin of the earth, the result of the very latest nebular top-dressing, and the thickness of which is not incorrectly indicated by the increase of temperature as we go down the deeper mines. But, after all, earthquakes are only one among several natural phenomena of the kind associated with interior convulsive forces. We must acknowledge that we understand earthquakes but imperfectly so long as we fail to realise the connection which experience as well as instinct vaguely induces us to recognise between the earthquake and the volcanic eruption. Certainly records have constantly shown that great volcanic eruptions have been preceded by earthquakes in or near the neighbourhood of their occurrence. And the latest great earthquake in India, which has been turning public attention to the subject so earnestly of late, is obviously connected in some way with the volcanic outburst reported from the mountain ranges a little further to the north.

We shall be the better able to harness the earthquake and the volcano together as two effects from one cause if, in the first instance, we realise the intensely unsatisfactory and insufficient character of most conventional theories made use of to support the varied guesses that, from time to time, have been set forth to account for volcanic eruptions. Sometimes an effort has been made to attribute the forces of the volcano to chemical action beneath the surface of the earth, between such metals as sodium or potassium, and water, which may reach them by filtration from the ocean beds. This theory, utterly insufficient to account for the facts, was tempting to some imaginations when the peculiar behaviour of the alkali metals with water was first discovered, just as, at the present day, discoveries connected with radio-activity and the new element which exhibits this power in the greatest degree have provoked various extravagant conjectures concerning the constitution of the sun. But when the chemical theory of earthquakes was practically abandoned, the percolation theory still held its own. This idea was to the effect that somehow volumes of sea-water found their way through crevices in the rock strata to regions of very high temperature. Thus a volcanic eruption became a steam-boiler explosion on a large scale, and the fact that steam is emitted by volcanoes in enormous volume seemed to fortify the guess. But, in truth, volcanoes emit molten rock as well as gaseous water, and the steam-boiler theory will wholly fail to account for lava, dust, or ashes. Nor, if we begin to speculate, on the basis of such a theory, concerning the earth's constitution as set forth above, shall we help ourselves to any satisfactory conjecture even by assuming that sea-water actually finds its way down 20 or 30 miles to that heated region in which no doubt molten rock exists, and from which it might be vaguely possible to surmise that some of it would be hurled to the surface in connection with the steam of a vast explosion. Allowing in imagination that sea-water could percolate to such a depth, the forces of a steam explosion engendered in that way would be inadequate to account for the result, and in many ways that it is hardly worth while to examine the idea in detail; the theory would not fit the facts.

The theory that will fit the facts requires us to descend in search of the forces which actually engender a volcanic eruption to the nearest great region of enormous heat and pressure lying beneath the outer shell-between that and the next of the concentric shells which constitute the earth. Here we have matter in a condition of heat and pressure that will account for all the phenomena with which we have to deal. The explanation required is one which will provide for the partial escape of these stupendous forces lying at a depth some 800 miles beneath our feet. The earthquake in reality provides us with this explanation. As geologists quite correctly conjecture, the whole external shell of the earth is still slightly contracting. As time goes on, and a deeper and deeper mass is cooled, the diffusion of interior heat is lessened almost to the vanishing-point, but it still does continue, and, therefore, it still happens from time to time that some slipping amongst themselves of the rock strata, some crumpling of their folds, although insignificant in magnitude compared with those of the past, are possible. And when such a slipping, rift, or rupture occurs, a leakage is established through which the stupendous forces of the hot one can escape. Now these forces consist, � as a matter of fact, or may be assumed to consist, if the reader prefers that expression, � very largely of steam, but of steam at a temperature and pressure that no experiments on the surface of the earth will enable us to realise. Such steam would, of course, be at a temperature enormously in excess, for example, of the melting-point of platinum, and its energies would be enhanced in a corresponding degree. Rushing upwards through the crevices created by the earthquake disturbance, its heat is great enough to melt the rocky walls between which it passes, and its pressure great enough to carry some of the molten mass upwards. And the result is finally manifest at the surface in the shape of a volcanic eruption, including not merely steam itself, � which at last in the cool regions of the atmosphere liquefies in the condition of torrential rain, � and not merely molten rock brought up from great depths, but also great varieties of debris accumulated by the passage of the volcanic current through the varied strata lying near the surface.

Of course, the whole of this elaborate conjecture is so unfamiliar to ordinary thinking that only those who are deeply impressed with the limitations of ordinary thinking will open their minds readily to its reception. But, in truth, the facts of volcanic history correspond with this theory in a curiously exact fashion, and the records of geology confirm it. Glance for a moment at observations that have been made concerning the volumes of steam emitted by volcanoes. During the eruption of Etna, in 1865, careful observation showed that during the hundred days of its activity the volume of steam emitted was equivalent to about 2³/₄ million cubic yards of water.* Figures in such groups as these mean little to ordinary imagination. The quantity would fill a reservoir 700 yards wide, 2¹/₂ miles long, and 30 feet deep. But why, it may be asked, does the eruption come out through a cylindrical crater when the theory would rather suggest an elongated rift along the surface? Geological history provides the answer. At earlier periods of the earth's growth when the contraction of the outer shell was proceeding more rapidly, and the chasms created by this crumpling were much greater than of recent years, volcanic eruptions did take the shape of vast overflows emerging from elongated rifts in the surface. The geology of North America is specially endowed with evidence to this effect. And as these vast fissures closed, in time they established, throughout the world, lines of relative weakness, still traceable on the map, as the well-known areas of volcanic activity. And along these lines of weakness there will be necessarily spots, as it were, of greatest weakness, the craters, in fact, of modern volcanoes.

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* See Volcanoes, their Structure and Significance, by T. G. Bonny, F. R. S.

Another little bit of testimony harmonising with our general theory is provided by the experience of modern seismology. At an earthquake station like that of Professor Milne in the Isle of Wight the tremors that announce a distant earthquake arrive in three instalments. The recording instrument first gives a peculiar wriggle. A little later this wriggle is repeated, but very much more violently. Then after a considerable interval, perhaps amounting to three-quarters of an hour, if the earthquake under record is far away, the self-same wriggle is repeated with diminished amplitude with a violence intermediate between that of the first and the second. It is obvious that these three signals must be due to the same earthquake. Why do they occur in this manner? Because the first, it is assumed, comes by the shortest cut through the body of the earth. The second travels through the rocky strata of the surface going the shortest way round. The third is, again, a superficial tremor which goes the long way round, whichever direction that may be. But why is the first direct signal feeble in its character comparatively? Conventional explanations are content with suggesting that the greater density of the deeper strata through which it passes must explain its enfeebled character A much more satisfactory explanation-one, that is to say, better in harmony with the usual manners and customs of vibrations � is derived from the concentric sphere system set forth in this paper. The direct message passes successively through strata of very varying density, and acoustic science is familiar with the fact that the passage of sound, for instance, through strata of varying density greatly diminishes its energy. Certainly it would be going too far to say that the character of seismological indications is a proof of the general theory here suggested, but, at all events, it seems to harmonise with that theory in rather a pretty way.

For most of us, of course, all speculation concerning the interior of the world on which but by no means in which we live must remain destitute of any firm scientific guarantee. Nor can it be hinted that the explanations here put forward are proved, however well they may be in harmony with various circumstances connected with volcanic eruptions. But only those who remain quite resolutely outside the idea of the newer science which avails itself of abnormal human faculties as instruments of research will be scornfully indifferent to the statement I am in a position to make, that the general view of the whole subject here defined is the product of superphysical investigation, and in no way available for being credited to the brilliant resources of my own imagination.

The scientific world has from time to time been under the influence of various theories concerning the ether. We need not go very far back to come in contact with a period when one such theory was to the effect that no such thing existed. That is only the inverted statement of the fact that up to the middle of the last century the ether was always referred to as a "hypothetical" medium invented to account for some phenomena that could not otherwise be explained. Then by degrees, as the undulations of light came to be more closely and exactly studied, it was seen to be entirely impossible to do without ether, but the attributes assigned to it were bewildering and contradictory in a very extraordinary degree. At one time a favourite illustration used to account for some of its properties compared it to a jelly pervading all space, mobile but incompressible. For a long while this conception so far held its ground that the ether was resolutely denied the molecular or atomic structure supposed to belong to all other material bodies. In the course of a lecture at the London Institution in 1880, Sir Oliver Lodge summed up existing knowledge on the subject in these terms: �

"As far as we know it appears to be a perfectly homogeneous incompressible continuous body, incapable of being resolved into simpler elements or atoms; it is, in fact, continuous, not molecular. There is no other body of which we can say this, and hence the properties of ether must be somewhat different from those of ordinary matter. But there is little difficulty in picturing a continuous substance to ourselves, inasmuch as the molecular and porous nature of ordinary matter is by no means evident to the senses, but is an inference of some difficulty.

Ether is often called a fluid, or a liquid, and again it has been called a solid, and has been likened to a jelly because of its rigidity; but none of these names are very much good; all these are molecular groupings and therefore not like ether; let us think simply and solely of a continuous frictionless medium possessing inertia, and the vagueness of the notion will be nothing more than is proper in the present state of our knowledge."

That view of the subject seems to have held its own up to a recent period, and perhaps has not yet been recognized as overthrown by any general consensus of scientific opinion. The first serious challenge directed against the homogeneous theory was that embodied within the last twelve months by Professor Osborne Reynolds in the course of his somewhat startling contributions to the literature of the Royal Society. He adopts a distinctly molecular theory of the ether, but one which is very far from ranging it side by side with any other molecular fluid with which we are acquainted. Our purpose for the moment, however, is not to attempt the extremely difficult task of epitomising Professor Reynolds' views. No matter how striking some of the evidence he advances on its behalf may be, the whole body of speculation which his theory represents has quite lately been swept aside by the great Russian chemist, Professor Mendeleef, who has published a short essay, entitled An Attempt towards a Chemical Conception of the Ether.

The course of his speculation will be interesting in a high degree to all students of science. His great reputation as the discoverer of the Periodic Law discernible in the characteristics of the chemical elements, and the estimation in which his work has been generally held, will render it impossible for anyone to treat his present conception with indifference, severely even as it may strain some long-established impressions. Summing up his present argument very briefly, he regards the ether as in effect an ultra-rarified gas, distinctly molecular in its character, and endowed with a molecular velocity which renders it indifferent to the gravitational influence, not merely of the planets, but of the suns in space. There is no half-hearted ambiguity in his declaration. A few sentences selected here and there from the present essay will show how boldly he has declared his belief.

"The ether may be said to be a gas like helion or argon, incapable of chemical combination."

"In calling ether a gas, we understand a fluid in the widest sense, an elastic fluid having no cohesion between its parts."

Mendeleef has arrived at these conclusions under the influence of thoughts suggested by the recent study of radio-active bodies. But he describes his present conclusions as resulting from an "extrapolation" of the periodic law. "Extrapolation" is a somewhat unfamiliar word, but it signifies the mental process which assumes that a law holding good up to a certain point will hold good in regions beyond experimental investigation. As for the periodic law, very familiar under that title to all students of chemistry, it may be worth while here briefly to explain that its main significance is as follows: � If we group the known chemical elements in successive series of sevens, in the order of their increasing atomic weights, the seventh of each series will correspond in its most striking chemical characteristics with the sevenths of other series. Each note of the octave, in fact, has a note in the octave above with which it is in unison. Now, hitherto, hydrogen has been taken as the first note of the first octave, and the law represented by the grouping he adopts is so abundantly confirmed that Mendeleef in his present essay ventures to speak of it as an absolute law. Now, however, that we have to take into account various gases that were unknown at the time the periodic law was first enunciated, those which Professor Ramsay has discovered in the atmosphere, Argon, Crypton, Xenon, and the rest, � besides the all � important Helium, which encourages us to believe that in time we shall also get hold of Coronium, � Mendeleef has been encouraged to extrapolate the periodic law backwards, so to speak, and to establish in the rear of the hydrogen group one which he now calls the "zero" group, which actually, if his bold guess is to be relied on, carries us back to a substance, called "X" for the moment, which is, in point of fact, atomic ether. Another as yet conjectural element belonging to the zero group, to be called "Y" for the present, would be Coronium, or some other gas with a density of about 0.2.

As regards "X" itself, Mendeleef quotes, apparently without objecting to the idea, conclusions which he says Lord Kelvin arrived at some time ago in attempting to estimate the theoretical weight of the ether. It might perhaps be urged that to assign weight to a body the characteristics of which enable it to triumph over the laws of gravitation is somewhat unreasonable, but, at all events, the figures used help us to realise the scientific conception of rarity as applied to the ether. Lord Kelvin's estimate is as follows: � "While a cubic metre of hydrogen would weigh 90 grs. under atmospheric pressure, the weight of a cubic metre of ether would be 0.000,000,000,000,000,1 grm."

Expressed in words, that would mean that a cubic metre of ether would weigh a thousandth part of a million-millionth part of a gramme. As the gas to which this mass is assigned becomes by current hypothesis the medium by means of which the forces of gravitation are exercised, the anomalous nature of the calculation is very bewildering.

Nor is it our purpose at present to put forward the arguments in its favour. The great interest of Mendeleef's present conception, from the point of view of those who at the same time may watch scientific progress and also give an ear to the discoveries of occult science, turns on this remarkable fact: that the conception of the ether now put forward by the great Russian chemist was explicitly anticipated about nine years ago by certain explanations published at that time in theosophic literature, as the result of a special research carried out by certain occult students endowed with the necessary clairvoyant faculties in reference to the constitution of matter. The results of this research are described in the periodical now called the Theosophic Review, then published under its earlier name Lucifer, for 15-th November 1895, Imperfectly developed as it was, and interrupted by circumstances that impeded its further progress, this research not merely led to the appreciation of the ether along lines very closely corresponding with those which Mendeleef is now working upon, but really carries the conception a great deal further than the limits which his boldest extrapolation will enable him to reach.

The object in view in the first instance in connection with the research referred to was not so much to investigate the composition of the ether as to determine the actual nature of physical atoms. Here it becomes desirable to say a few words concerning the nature of clairvoyant vision when cultivated under intelligent guidance to the highest degrees of its potentiality. It becomes not merely a means of observing distant places or penetrating opaque obstacles, it has both the microscopic and telescopic capacities developed almost to infinity in both directions. The best microscope provided by the optician, beautiful as it is at the present day compared with some of its relatively savage ancestors, is an instrument of very limited range compared to the microscopic sight of a clairvoyant who can freely employ that which occultists describe as "astral vision". That kind of microscope has no limitations, and can be tuned, so to speak, to deal with any part of the interminable path leading in the direction of the infinitely little. Does the reader grasp the conception of molecular magnitude as understood by ordinary science? The favourite illustration is that the molecules of a drop of water bear about the same relation to the drop that bodies somewhere between the magnitudes of cricket balls and small shot would bear to the Earth. And yet one of these molecules can be separately observed by those who are gifted with appropriate astral vision and its constitution examined in detail.

If such an atom of any metal be chosen for observation, it will be found that its complexity is so overwhelming as practically to defy accurate description. But the complexity of individual atoms of any given chemical element varies in exact proportion with their atomic weight. While an atom of gold, for example, is seen to contain some thousands of subordinate atoms arranged in a definite structure and moving amongst themselves with the symmetric rhythm of a minute solar system, the atom of the lightest element known, hydrogen, is somewhat more easily describable. It consists of only eighteen of these primary atoms, discerned to be to all intents and purposes identical in their individual nature, except in so far as some of them have attributes which may be vaguely described as positive, and others those of a corresponding negative kind. With these details for the moment it is not necessary to concern ourselves. The particular result of the occult investigation we are dealing with is to the effect that all the chemical elements known to us, however varied their properties, consist of atoms, the structure of which is widely different, but the composition of which is so far identical throughout, that primary atoms of the same order are concerned with building up all of these dissimilar bodies. The houses built differ widely in architecture and magnitude, but the bricks used are in all cases the same. When this great fundamental principle was realised it became also apparent that these atoms, the primary atoms of inconceivable minuteness, were dispersed throughout space, even interpenetrating the molecular structure of the physical bodies perceptible to our senses, and that, in point of fact, these primary atoms were atoms of the universal ether.

So far the idea is simply identical with Mendeleef's present conception, although if it passes into general acceptance it will no doubt be associated in the future with his name and not with those of the unknown authors of the occult investigation. That will be a matter of infinitely small interest to the persons concerned, for occult knowledge dealing with many other problems besides the constitution of ether reduces worldly fame to an importance, as compared with the permanent conditions of the ego, that might be fairly well expressed by Lord Kelvin's fraction quoted above. It is more important, however, that the world at large should realise that all the really great advances to be expected in future in connection with the progress of those studies which deal with the attributes of matter must be looked for in connection with methods of research which at present fall under the ban of popular disapproval as occult.

The information derived from the occult research we have been describing does not stop short at investing us with the conception of the ether as consisting of extremely minute atoms dispersed throughout space. The further explanation of its nature must be overtaken by orthodox discovery sooner or later, and meanwhile we may venture on a forecast of the direction such later discovery will take. As will be seen from Professor Mendeleef's book, as also from the writings published so far by Professor Reynolds, speculation along familiar lines has always taken for granted that the ether is uniform throughout in its character, whatever that may be. Whether as a homogeneous jelly or as an ultrararified gas, it has been thought of always as a definite form of matter. The occult research of 1895, however, partly overtaken, as has been shown by physical discovery, discerned several varieties of ether as actually existing under conditions which eluded ordinary chemical observation. Four distinctly different kinds of ether play their respective parts in the great natural activities with which this medium is concerned, and it is only when primary atoms are completely dispersed so that they are separately diffused through space that we arrive at that which may be called the elementary condition of ether. Between this condition and that in which a sufficient number of atoms are aggregated together to constitute a substance with attributes manifest to the physical senses, there exist three varieties of what it may be convenient to call "molecular ether."

From the point of view of the knowledge we are endeavouring to set forth, it is impossible to continue the use of the terms "atom" and "molecule" in precisely their conventional significance. For readers unfamiliar with the technicalities of physics, it may be as well to explain that when a chemist speaks of a "molecule" of any given known substance, he means two atoms of that substance in a mysterious kind of union. This method of thinking was adopted to facilitate the expression, by chemical formulae, of the composition of compound bodies. Without the hypothesis in question chemists would have been drawn into the embarrassment of assuming that in some cases the molecule of a combined body contained half-atoms of some of its constituents. Occult research, however, shows this method of thinking to be out of harmony with natural truth, although it fits some of the facts. When it comes to be recognised that the atom of each chemical element contains a multitude of etheric atoms, and that the union between two elementary substances involves a complicated interaction amongst their respective primary atoms, the word molecule will cease to have this artificial and inaccurate meaning. For our present purpose, and anticipating what will probably be the practice of chemists in the future, it will be convenient to reserve the word atom for application to those fundamental particles which constitute the simplest variety of ether, and to employ the term "molecule" to signify the single organised structure which can be recognised as a chemical element on this plane. For some time, indeed, the conventions of language are so embarrassing that if we speak of the hydrogen molecule or the molecule of any other substance we are liable to mislead the ordinary thinker into supposing that we mean the conventional molecule of two atoms, so that it may still be convenient to speak of the atom in reference to the indivisible particle of any given substance, even though that may contain hundreds of atoms properly entitled to the name.

And here it may be convenient, before going on to indicate what little is known concerning the molecular varieties of ether, to indicate the probabilities arising from such observations concerning the actual number of atoms in the molecules of the known elements in so far as that number has been observed. In reference, at all events, to oxygen and nitrogen, it turns out that the number of atoms in each molecule of these substances is exactly equal to the product of the atomic weight and the number 18, which represents the number of atoms in the molecule of hydrogen. If this law holds good throughout, it enables us to determine with precision the number of atoms entering into the composition of the molecules of any known substance, and when we come to deal with substances the atomic weights of which are over 200, it will be seen that each molecule includes several thousands of ultimate atoms, and thus it is not difficult to conceive that in such cases the ultimate limits of stability have been reached, and that the phenomena of radio-activity are to be readily explained along the lines of thought suggested by this condition.

But going back to the varieties of molecular ether, these appear to be ruled off one from another by limitations relating to the number of atoms entering into the composition of their molecules. The 18 atoms in the molecule of hydrogen represent two distinct groups of 9 atoms each, interlaced in a curious fashion which could hardly be described in words, or even shown by a diagram. A model in three dimensions would be necessary to make the arrangement intelligible. But the highest or most complicated form of etheric molecule may be represented by either of these groups taken separately and disentangled from its partner. We need not assume that all ether of this kind, which may conveniently be called "ether 4," consists exactly of such molecules as the separate hydrogen groups would represent. Other combinations of 9 or 7 would still belong to "ether 4." As yet it is impossible to be very precise in defining the limits in each case, but ethers 3 and 2 consist of molecules embodying some smaller numbers of atoms than those which make up the molecules of ether 4, and one interesting thought connected with this part of our explanation carries us back to Professor Mendeleef's recent speculations. Ethers 2, 3 and 4 will go very far towards filling up the vacant places in that zero series which he now adds to his periodic table, the refinements of which culminate in his "X" substance identical with atomic ether.

The extent and manner in which the different varieties of ether may be diffused through space must as yet remain a matter of speculation even for those who avail themselves most fully of the occult information at our disposal. It may be, and for various reasons appears probable, that the more complex orders of ether are subject to gravitational influence, and therefore aggregated around the planetary bodies. That the atomic ether is for some reason entirely exempt from the influences of gravitation appears to be a conclusion we cannot but accept, and one, indeed, which Mendeleef himself adopts. But if molecular ether does surround each planet as a highly refined atmosphere, it may, at some future date, be found very helpful in interpreting many optical phenomena connected with light and colour. If, in pursuit of this idea, we were to soar upwards into the loftier regions of speculation "on the wings of extrapolation," as one scientific lecturer once put the idea, we might expand that last suggestion to very magnificent proportions, but that is hardly the purpose with which this essay has been written. The scientific world has been interested if not startled by a new view of one amongst the most important of its hitherto unsolved problems, and that new view, as far as it goes, is in direct harmony with the foolishly neglected teachings of occult science. To show this plainly has been the purpose of the present writer, and there for the moment the matter may be allowed to rest.

For most purposes of ordinary thinking the Darwinian theory of evolution provides a sufficient reply to the question, prompted by the present condition of this globe, "How were the animal and human forms with which the world is peopled first brought into existence?" Although it is only in imagination that the process can be followed back to its very early stages, the great biologist showed that the variations of animal forms within the range of observation were enough to suggest the generalisations embodied in the well-known phrases, "sexual selection" and the "survival of the fittest." The profusion of Nature in squandering her materials � manifest in so many ways � enables us to accept the idea that in the processes of selecting the fittest for survival she is willing to cast off, with infinite recklessness, the vast multitudes of the less fitted. In the struggle for life the best forms maintain their existence and perpetuate their characteristics, and, in this way, an ever-ascending series of better and better forms culminates in the production of organisms suited to maintain advanced forms of animal life, and ultimately to give rise to human conditions. We are left at liberty to carry back the process in imagination until the simplest varieties of microscopic life are recognised as containing within their potentialities the possibility of ultimate development practically without a limit.

Thinkers, it is true, who may be disposed to suspect the existence of influences in the world of a somewhat more delicate character than those which have simply to do with the blind impulses of the animal kingdom, may be inclined to regard the Darwinian theory as a view of Hamlet which omits the part of the prince. As conceivable, perhaps, as the operation of the forces which the Darwinian conception recognises, the intervention of some conscious agencies on planes of Nature beyond the range of physical observation may be considered as a hypothesis. Their energies, in some as yet unintelligible way, may direct and control the variation of forms through successive generations independently of, or at all events as supplementing, the influences recognised by the ordinary biologist. But even if such intervention be accepted as probably in operation, we are left � as entirely as by the other hypothesis � without any clue to the comprehension of the way in which, in the first instance, germs of organic life were established on the planet in its infancy.

The one thing we may feel certain about in connection with the earliest phases of our world's existence arises from the conviction we must all entertain, that, at one time in the course of its evolution from the original nebulae, the solid globe we now inhabit was a mass of highly incandescent matter, existing at a temperature which precludes the idea that any, even of its more volatile solids, could have been in any other state but that of highly heated gases; while matter which still remains with us in the liquid and gaseous forms could only have been a widely diffused nimbus surrounding the glowing nucleus. And even when solidification may be thought of as having taken place, there would necessarily have been a stage at which the surface of the solid globe was still at a temperature utterly precluding the idea that it bore any organisms of the kind which, on the Darwinian hypothesis, could have started the process of organic evolution. The question how, in the first instance, when the period came at which the globe had cooled down sufficiently to bear organic forms, the earliest of these were actually developed on its surface, is one which has engaged more scientific thinking than its very rare discussion in connection with biological science would lead the casual observer to suppose. The question, in fact, has always been regarded as one of those which are practically insoluble, and, like the mystery of gravitation, is discreetly shunned, as a rule, by those who have felt unable to contribute a reasonable suggestion tending in the direction of an answer. From time to time, indeed, wild guesses have been formulated. Logical thinkers have appreciated the absurdity of discussing a vast theory of organic evolution which rests on no visible foundation. The scientist may ridicule the mediaeval theologian. Adam and Eve, even for the modern preacher of the more advanced type, may vanish in the mists of allegory, but no one who tenders a willing submission to the fundamental principle, "ex nihilo nihil fit", can disguise from himself the embarrassing reflection that the first amoeba is no more easily to be thought of as evolved from nothing, by Divine Will, than the first man � ruthlessly torn from his original setting in the Garden of Eden by modern scientific thought. Protoplasm in its simplest form, when once in a planet's possession, may be held sufficient to account for all subsequent developments of life, but the simplest speck of protoplasm is so essentially different from the subtlest combination of inorganic molecules, that scientific speculation, as a rule, has been reluctant even to conceive its original development as a product of any such combination. To some extent, indeed, even that reluctance has given way in face of the absolute necessity of supposing that the earliest protoplasmic germs came into existence somehow. The desperate hint that they may have floated over here from the wreck of former worlds on the backs of meteoric messengers has hardly been regarded as doing more than emphasize the hopeless difficulty of the problem.

Cutting away the branch on which it rested, scientific investigation has, none the less, more and more resolutely determined, as recent years advanced, to reject the conception of spontaneous generation. But while denied as a phenomenon of our own period, even that idea has been played with in imagination by some, at all events, of the great biologists of the nineteenth century. Huxley himself, as quotations from his writings brought forward in the course of a recent newspaper correspondence, in which Sir Oliver Lodge and other distinguished men of science have taken part, is shown to have been willing to accept, as at all events a provisional hypothesis, the idea that in the beginning Nature may have developed organic cells from inorganic materials. And carrying out the idea to its logical conclusions, Sir Oliver Lodge has been inclined to recognise as a conceivable hypothesis the discovery at some future period by human science of the method by which this apparent miracle may be accomplished. The conjecture is logical undoubtedly, just as every reductio ad absurdum hangs logically to its antecedent formulae. But simply by means of a faint collateral illumination cast upon the whole problem from departments of ultra-physical enquiry in which the ordinary biologist has not yet found a footing, it is possible, at all events, to suggest a method by means of which Nature may have accomplished the seeming miracle by methods lying within the domain of universal law, subject to which her processes are carried on at the present day, and within the operation of which it was possible for her to start the processes of evolution even when the conditions of the problem were as unlike those of the present day as the "earth with verdure clad" is unlike the fiery globe of incandescent matter which undeniably at one time occupied its place in the system.

To interpret the idea which it may thus be possible to contribute to the great controversy concerning the origin of life, it may be well to remind the reader that modern scientific speculation, assisted by the discoveries that have been recently made concerning the properties of radium, tends now, or even does more than tend, in the direction of recognising the ideas connected with the origin of the inorganic globe itself, that have long been familiar to the students of super-physical science. The inorganic molecules of the kind known as those of the chemical elements are themselves, of course, complicated structures built up of immeasurably more minute atoms of physical matter which themselves represent the ultimate material of inorganic substances, the ultimate atom underlying all varieties known to chemistry; long suspected by chemists of the more imaginative temperament; long since identified by occult research as the atomic condition of the ether pervading space, and now all but acknowledged in that capacity by the students of radium emanations. We are hardly going in advance of accepted scientific conclusions in treating the "electron" as identical with the universal ether, our theory of which need now no longer be embarrassed by the early conception that this medium differed from all other orders of matter in not being atomic. It may freely be acknowledged that many phenomena connected with its vibrations seem for the moment rather embarrassed than explained by the recognition of its atomic character, but these we may leave aside for the moment as outside the relationship between atomic ether and molecular matter which, at all events, is rapidly assuming a definite aspect. The ether itself is the protyle that has long been thought of as the medium in which, under the operation of forces still undiscovered, the various chemical elements were at first engendered. And thus the conception of the whole process of world creation at its nebular stage assumes a reasonable shape in the imagination. The condensation of etheric atoms gathered in from huge volumes of space may account satisfactorily for the origin of the world as far as its rocky foundations are concerned.

And now we turn to another view of the antecedent conditions in the universe, which undoubtedly as yet remain without the experimental evidences which have supported the etheric origin of inorganic matter, but which, at all events, that great theory, now approaching establishment, may help us to comprehend or even to recognise as something more than probable. No reasonable student of Nature will hastily assume that any of her aspects coming within the range of observation preclude the idea that others may be concurrently existing which up to the present time have eluded research. In gaining touch with varieties of matter which our immediate predecessors in physical research failed altogether to anticipate, reasonable intellectual modesty may well forbid us to assume that the atomic ether, now all but recognised as diffused throughout infinity, sums up the whole of the contents of space. Considering, indeed, the infinite complexity of Nature, we may go the length of saying that it is practically certain we have not yet put together anything resembling a complete catalogue of its contents. Now one simple guess as to what infinite space may hold in addition to etheric atoms � sufficient in themselves to account for the existence of visible worlds � will go far towards removing the difficulties which have hitherto barred the way to a harmonious theory concerning the origin of life.

We start with the acceptance of what seems the obvious fact within our observation, that something inherently different distinguishes the most minute organism we can think of from any equally minute molecule of inorganic matter. The cell is generally regarded as the most minute portion of organic matter that it is worth while to talk about, and though the cell is recognised as a complicated structure, including within its minute fragment of protoplasm a nucleus and a nucleolus, both endowed with mysterious attributes, it can only be thought of as built up of atoms immeasurably more minute than itself. Now, if we think of these atoms as simply etheric atoms of the kind considered above, we are brought back to the unsatisfactory position that the most minute molecule of organic substance is nothing more than a compound of inorganic atoms like any ultimate molecule of gold or oxygen gas. There is something so inherently different in the most minute portion of a living substance, as compared with the most complex molecule of inorganic matter, that this inference is profoundly unacceptable to the mind. Either a something of a material order, the nature of which is, as yet, wholly beyond our conception, has been super-added to the combination of etheric atoms making up the cell, or what for various reasons will, on consideration, be thought a simpler hypothesis, the cell itself is built up wholly or partly of atoms differing fundamentally in their nature from those hitherto described as etheric.

Let us turn now for a moment to the consideration of what we know concerning the most minute portions of living matter with which observation can directly deal. The often-quoted amoeba is, of course, a giant compared to these. In search of the most minute molecule of organic matter we must first come back to the most minute masses thereof which the microscope can recognise and consider. The bacterium comes within the range of microscopic observation, although but just within the range. But the germ from which the bacterium is developed, � the seed which grows that relatively massive creature, � eludes microscopic observation altogether. To test the presence of such seeds in any suspected substance, this has to be left for a time in presence of a suitable nutritive medium and suffered to grow into maturity. So then, although we cannot actually handle or photograph the germ, we are enabled to deal with that material something as confidently as we can now examine the properties of the etheric atom in connection with radium emanations. And, at all events, the suggestion which readily presents itself to the mind brackets the bacterial germ and the etheric atom in the same order of magnitude. If the etheric is, as we now feel all but sure, diffused through universal space, there is nothing to outrage the understanding in the hypothesis that so also the bacterial germ � or what may perhaps more conveniently, in view of future thinking, be described as an organic atom � also pervades all space.

And for a moment let us turn to the results of some recent researches connected with the endurance of bacterial germs in presence of extreme conditions of temperature. That they are sensitive in a remarkable degree to increase of temperature we have been long aware. No greater heat than that of boiling � water will sterilise any substance and destroy the vitality of whatever bacterial germs it may have contained. But since laboratories have been supplied with the resources which enable us to experiment with extremes of minus temperature, it has been found that no degree of cold suffices to destroy the vitality of the bacterial germ. Left for long periods in liquid hydrogen, the temperature of which is only a few degrees above the absolute zero, bacterial germs nevertheless show themselves, on returning to more genial conditions, fully as active as before. In the cold of interstellar space they may exist, it would appear, unchangeably, in company with the equally frigid etheric atom, torpid as long as that temperature continues, but ready to display their mysterious internal attribute of life as soon as circumstances may put them in presence of the warmth in which they are qualified to expand.

Now here at last we come into the presence of a theory which, if well founded, will emancipate us at once from the whole embarrassment attending the question we set out to consider � How did life originate on this or any other planet? Matter, in the intangible invisible condition of the ether pervades all space available under the influence of creative will for the construction of planets. Life in the diffused condition of the bacterial germ or organic atom may equally be diffused throughout space, available whenever needed for the development of living forms on any newly evolving planet ripe for their reception. We may think of our globe during its incandescent period whirling through space and destroying or dissipating into other forms inconceivable myriads of the organic atoms it encounters on its journey. But more inconceivable myriads from outer infinity restore the equilibrium of Nature in its wake, and a time comes when its surface has cooled down to conditions in which the organic atoms against which it impinges suffer destruction no longer in its embrace. They have, on the contrary, fallen in with the conditions appointed by Nature to promote their growth. The temperature in which they find themselves is at last adapted to their constitution, and all that is still wanting to enable us to realise every stage of the process from that moment up to the development of conscious animal forms is the comprehension of the way in which Nature, in the beginning, may supply the substitute for the nutritive media in which, at the present stage of organic chemistry, we find it necessary to immerse the organic atom before it will grow. But is such immersion absolutely necessary to the process? It is necessary to a rapid and visible development of the organic atom into bacteria that the microscope can deal with, but in our atmosphere alone is it not possible that with adequate time assigned to the operation, the germ will be capable of deriving sufficient nutriment to blossom forth into maturity? The vegetable kingdom within our observation has the power of converting inorganic matter into the cellular organic substance that builds up its leaves and stems. There is nothing to constrain the reason in the assumption that the organic atom is equally endowed with the capacity of infusing its own life principle into the etheric or even the more complex chemical molecules it may gather in the course of its growth.

The suggestion embodied in this essay does not profess to interpret the inner significance or nature of the life principle. That may approximately be understood when many of the subtler forces of Nature, reserved for the investigation of a later race, come fairly within the range of experimental research. However simple may be any form of vegetable or animal substance with which we may have to deal, it is obvious that it consists of matter in a peculiar condition fitting it to be the vehicle of life, not that it is life itself, which is an utterly different thing. Those who attempt, in their own minds, to account for life itself, are attempting to comprehend the nature of Divinity, a vague expression, surrounded in most imaginations with a mass of incongruous detail, but representing a sublime mystery, the existence of which, behind the scenes of the universe, must be no less certain for the philosophic thinker than � for the material observer � is the existence of the sun behind the screen of cloud on a day which, however overcast, is still illuminated by daylight. But in search of an answer to the question � How did life begin on this globe? � we are not called upon to touch the stupendous question relating to the origin of life itself. The mystery lies much more nearly in the region of thought that relates simply to the development on the planet of material forms in which that which we call life in its highest significance may exist. The organic matter itself, whether in its simplest or most complex manifestations, is but the vehicle of the life that some systems of philosophy describe as the "one life" pervading all Nature. And we need not shun the recognition of another theory, which some systems of philosophy maintain, that life in a certain sense may be diffused even through the rock foundations of the earth, through the mineral molecules of which that is built up, or even in the ultimate etheric atom itself. But that region of thinking lies in the dreamland of metaphysics, and, compared with that, the question concerning the origin of organic matter qualified to be the vehicle of vivid and ultimately self-conscious life is one with which we may regard ourselves as immediately concerned.

At all events, the hypothesis here set forth is one which blends instinctively with our reason, and relieves us from the disagreeable necessity of supposing the uniformities of Nature broken into during the earlier stages of this world's existence to overcome a hitch or difficulty in connection with the general design. The theologian who clings to the literal accuracy of allegorical fable, who seeks an escape from the obvious uniformities of Nature within observable periods, falls back on the theory that, although the age of miracles is past, divine Providence could not manage without them when mankind was in its infancy. The modern man of science who is hunted back by the embarrassments of the problem into a corner, in which he admits that once upon a time Nature may have built protoplasm out of inorganic matter, although it is quite clear she has left off the habit of doing so in later years, is really taking a leaf out of the book of the mediaeval theologian. The unnecessary conjecture is only due to the habits of mind surviving from the period when the actual constitution of the universal ether was wholly misunderstood, and now that an epoch-making revelation has been obtained in connection with that great branch of natural history, it is much more than likely that the new habits of thought thus engendered will creep into many departments of speculation, and lead before long to the recognition of a hypothetical medium interpenetrating the ether-filled immensity, the ultimate constituent parts of which we have here ventured to describe as the organic atom.

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