HE 
 
 CONQUEST 
 EATH 
 
 HELEN WILMAN5
 
 Ex Libris 
 C. K. OGDEN 
 
 \; 
 
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 THE LIBRARY 
 
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 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
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 LOS ANGELES
 
 Uniform with this volume, price 4s. 6d. net 
 LIMITLESS MAN 
 
 BY HELEN WILMANS 
 
 In this volume, continuing the subject dealt with in 
 "The Conquest of Death," the Author treats of The 
 Action between Brain and Body — Man One 
 and Indivisible — Man's Destiny in his own 
 Hands — The Power of the Life Principle — 
 From Selfishness to Selfhood — Expectation 
 — Doubt — A Conquest of Fire by the Human 
 Body — Thought as a Force— The Develop- 
 ment of Will — The Will is the Individual 
 — The Uses of Beauty, etc. 
 
 [ Ready Shortly. 
 
 THE CREATIVE POWER OF 
 THOUGHT 
 
 BY HELEN WILMANS 
 
 Containing Chapters on Courage — Length of 
 Life Increasing — Life Expressed in Action 
 — Believing — How to Grow — The Substan- 
 tiality ok Thought — Mental Science the 
 true Interpreter of the Bible — Man a 
 Magnet— Whatever is, is Right, etc. 
 
 (/« the Press. 
 
 LONDON: ERNEST HELL
 
 THE CONQUEST OF DEATH
 
 §h Vorld, stock as <l# have give
 
 THE 
 
 Conquest of Death 
 
 HELEN WILMANS 
 
 Author of "Home Course in Mental Science," 
 
 "The Search for Freedom," "The Conquest of 
 
 Poverty," etc. 
 
 ' Out of the night that skelters me. 
 Black as the pit from pole to pole, 
 I thank whatever gods there be 
 /■\>r mv unconquerable soul." 
 
 LONDON 
 
 ERNEST BELL 
 
 YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN 
 
 I902
 
 PS 4c. 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THE strangeness of the title of this work, 
 " The Conquest of Death," will doubtless prompt 
 some, into whose hands it may chance to fall, 
 to lay it down without reading ; for the con- 
 quest of death, they say, is impossible. Yet, 
 who knows if it be so or not? 
 
 The Author of this work has discovered that 
 the conquest of death is altogether within the 
 law, and has sought herein to give some reasons 
 for her belief, which she knows to be worthy 
 of the highest consideration of all the people. 
 
 THE AUTHOR. 

 
 To think in the old ruts is to remain in 
 the old conditions. 
 
 To think expansively is to grow endlessly 
 in the direction of freedom and happiness.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. CAN DEATH BE OVERCOME? ... I 
 
 II. THE WRITERS OF THE BIBLE BELIEVED 
 
 THAT DEATH COULD BE OVERCOME 8 
 
 III. IMMORTALITY IN THE FLESH RESTS 
 
 UPON THE FACT THAT THE 
 HIGHEST ALWAYS HAS POWER TO 
 CONTROL ALL BELOW IT . . 1 4 
 
 IV. FROM THE STANDPOINT OF PERSONAL 
 
 EXPERIENCE . . . . . 1 9 
 
 V. THE EFFORT OF JESUS TO OVERCOME 
 
 DEATH ...... 26 
 
 VI. HOW I TRIED TO BOLSTER UP MY HOPE 
 BY SEARCHING FOR OTHERS WHO 
 WOULD BELIEVE IN IT . . . 32 
 
 VII. THE GROWTH OF PUBLIC OPINION IN 
 THE DIRECTION OF THE CONQUEST 
 OF DEATH . . . . . 41 
 
 VIII. EVERY HOPE IS THE SURE PROPHECY 
 
 OF ITS OWN FULFILMENT . . 52 
 
 IX. THE KNDLESS CREATIVENESS OF THE 
 
 HUMAN INTELLIGENCE ... 62 
 
 X. ALL GROWTH IS A REVOLT AGAINST 
 THE CLAIMS OF THE SO-CALLED 
 LAW OF GRAVITATION . . . 77
 
 x CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XI. THE ONE MIGHTY FACTOR IN RACE 
 
 GROWTH IS THOUGHT ... 85 
 
 XII. MAN HAS NO FETTERS BUT THOSE OF 
 HIS OWN IGNORANCE: AND NOTHING 
 BUT HIS OWN INTELLIGENCE WILL 
 LIBERATE HIM FROM THEM . . 91 
 
 XIII. DESIRE THE ORGANISING PRINCIPLE . 107 
 
 XIV. BELIEFS: BOTH FIXED AND UNFIXED . 121 
 XV. THE LAW OF ATTRACTION . . I 26 
 
 XVI. THE EGO 132 
 
 XVII. ENDLESS PROGRESSION : ITS RETARDA- 
 TION BY FEAR . . . .148 
 
 XVIII. MAN'S POWER TO SPEAK THE CREATIVE 
 
 WORD: EVOLUTION OF THE IDEAL. 1 59 
 
 XIX. HEALTH AND STRENGTH AND BEAUTY 
 AX I) OPULENCE ARE TO BE FOUND 
 IN GREATER FULNESS IN THIS NEW 
 AND WONDERFUL THOUGHT THAN 
 IN ANYTHING ELSE IX THE WHOLE 
 WORLD . . . . . .178
 
 THE CONQUEST OF DEATH 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 CAN DEATH BE OVERCOME ? 
 
 To many, probably the majority of people, 
 the question, " Can death be overcome ? " will 
 appear a foolish one, and a person a foolish 
 person who would, in seriousness, ask it, 
 expecting a serious answer. Yet the question 
 has been asked in all seriousness by some of 
 the greatest minds the world has known, and 
 one whom the Christian world regards most 
 highly has answered it affirmatively, if not 
 with absolute directness. He said, " The last 
 enemy that shall be overcome is death." 
 
 Where is one to whom has been given 
 rightful authority to interpret this saying of 
 St Paul as meaning other than what he says 
 — that when man should have overcome all 
 other enemies, should have learned the law of 
 the lightning and have harnessed it ; when 
 the winds and the waves had become his 
 servants, and did his bidding ; when on land 
 A
 
 2 CAN DEATH 
 
 and on sea man commanded the forces in 
 nature, and was master over the elements, 
 which, in his more ignorant state, he conceived 
 to be engines of the gods, who used them in 
 their anger for his destruction — who has 
 authority or where is the reasonableness in 
 saying that Paul did not mean to express that 
 when man had thus far conquered he should 
 also conquer death ? I insist that the language 
 quoted can, in reason, be given no other mean- 
 ing, and has been otherwise construed simply 
 because the mass of humanity has been unable 
 to conceive of the possibility of immortality 
 in the flesh, and so has been compelled, since 
 it felt that it might not reject the saying, to 
 attribute to it a meaning other than that 
 which it was evidently intended by its author 
 to convey. 
 
 Death is everywhere and universally under- 
 stood to mean the dissolution of a bodily form. 
 Where form does not exist there can be no 
 dissolution, no death. It is absolutely certain, 
 then, that when the apostle used the word, he 
 did so because of the meaning which attached 
 to it, and must, therefore, have meant one of 
 two things — either that men would eventually 
 learn the law by which life could be perpetu- 
 ated in these bodies indefinitely, or that there
 
 BE OVERCOME ? 3 
 
 existed spiritual bodies which were subject to 
 dissolution and death, but which might be some 
 time, though they were not yet, able to over- 
 come death. 
 
 This latter supposition, that the spiritual 
 body, of which the theologians make so much, 
 is subject to death, is altogether antagonistic 
 to the teachings of every religious organisa- 
 tion founded upon the Bible ; and, since there 
 are but two horns to the dilemma, it is to be 
 hoped that in deciding between them theology 
 will accept the former and concede that which 
 is altogether the most reasonable ; namely, that 
 Paul intended to be understood as referring 
 to our present fleshly bodies when he said 
 death should finally be overcome. 
 
 The writer of this is not a theologian — not, 
 at least, in the commonly accepted meaning 
 of the word. She does not believe that all 
 wisdom resided in those men who lived two 
 thousand years ago, or that it died with them. 
 She does believe, however, that there were 
 minds in those days, as in more recent times, 
 whose grasp of natural law so far exceeded 
 that of the mass of humanity as to make their 
 utterances unintelligible to other than the very 
 few. The same condition of things exists 
 to-day, though in a much less marked degree,
 
 4 CAN DEATH 
 
 the general diffusion of knowledge and the com- 
 mingling of men and of nations having lifted 
 the race to a plane so much above that upon 
 which it stood two thousand years ago, as to have 
 gone far toward obliterating the line between 
 the most illumined of minds and the man)-. 
 
 But, though the line of demarcation is less 
 distinct, it still exists, and exists largely 
 because of the tendency of the race to cling 
 to old ways and old habits of thought, reject- 
 ing the new, simply because it is new, and 
 which, because it is new, appears strange and 
 improbable. 
 
 The tendency toward investigation, due to 
 the wonderful discoveries and inventions made 
 within the last half of the century, has, how- 
 ever, so increased in all directions and among 
 all classes — even the most stubborn adherents 
 to ancient lines of thought — that no one need 
 longer fear being considered mad who advances 
 a new idea, provided he can sustain his pro- 
 position by a fair show of fact or logic ; and 
 it is because of this fact that I anticipate at 
 least a respectful and thoughtful considera- 
 tion of my work at the hands of the public. 
 Conceding that I am off main-travelled roads, 
 I yet insist that I am not only travelling in 
 the right direction, as designated by the com-
 
 BE OVERCOME ? 5 
 
 pass of reason, backed by logic, and not 
 unsupported by fact, but that the way has 
 been blazed by others who have preceded me 
 in other centuries. I would not have it under- 
 stood that I care very greatly whether anybody 
 has ever passed along this way before, for I 
 do not value truth because of its long residence 
 among men ; but I wish to give credit where 
 credit is due, and, further, I am not above 
 quoting precedent, if thereby I can gain a 
 more attentive audience. I believe most 
 sincerely that heaven is a condition, and not 
 a place, and that it cannot be attained while 
 the fear of death exists ; death, which is 
 nothing less than the removal by force, and 
 without their consent, or of that of their 
 friends, of human beings from all their associa- 
 tions and interests just when they are best 
 prepared to be of most service to themselves 
 and to the world. 
 
 If the reader likes, he may consider these 
 writings as a protest against such a condition 
 of things ; but I would wish him to first ask 
 himself if he is satisfied with such conditions, 
 and if he knows as an absolute certainty that 
 the power through which he came to exist as 
 an individual is incapable of continuing, or has 
 any settled objection to his continued existence-
 
 6 CAN DEATH 
 
 The author of this work believes it entirely 
 possible for the human race to overcome death. 
 She believes that Jesus believed it, and that 
 both before and since his time there have 
 been others who believed in and sought for 
 the overcoming of death, and that it will yet 
 be attained. That it has not been is no 
 argument to prove that it will not be. A 
 very great many things that have not yet 
 been proven will be some time. We knew 
 little about steam or steam-engines, electricity 
 or magnetism, or sound waves or the ether a 
 century ago. And the most we now know 
 about some of them is that there is much 
 more to be learned than we yet know. We 
 are only just beginning to get under the 
 blanket beneath which Nature has hidden her 
 secrets ; just beginning to learn a little some- 
 thing about her and about ourselves. We 
 are her children, the eldest and best beloved 
 of our mother — the immortal, the deathless. 
 Shall she not impart the secret of life to us, 
 if by diligence in searching and faithfulness 
 in obeying we prove worthy ? 
 
 Most implicitly do I believe so. 
 
 When I say I believe it possible to overcome 
 death and continue to live in our bodies, I do 
 not mean that our bodies must, necessarily,
 
 BE OVERCOME? 7 
 
 continue exactly as they are. It is reasonable 
 to suppose that they will gradually refine and 
 become more beautiful, and that other senses 
 than the five we now possess will develop, and 
 men become more perfect in every way, 
 physically, mentally and morally. This will 
 be a growth, as all things else are, but growth 
 will be much more rapid, though endless, when 
 the fear of death has been removed through a 
 knowledge of the law whereby life may be 
 sustained indefinitely.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE WRITERS OF THE BIBLE BELIEVED THAT 
 DEATH COULD BE OVERCOME 
 
 If we are to give credit, as I suggested, to 
 those who before us sought to blaze the way 
 to continued existence in our present bodies, 
 we must begin with the author of the Book of 
 Genesis. Turn now to that book of the Bible, 
 and read that man was, according to the account 
 there given, created immortal ; that for eating of 
 the forbidden fruit he was condemned to die. 
 Death must here refer to the body ; if not, then 
 it could only mean annihilation — the absence of 
 any future life whatever. If this latter con- 
 struction be put upon it, it would utterly 
 annihilate every proposition put forward by 
 the theologians, and remove every stone of the 
 foundation upon which rests the Christian 
 church ; nor would the Mohammedans fare 
 better. 
 
 It would mean the rankest of materialism ; 
 for, if to die meant the death of what remained 
 after the dissolution of the body, there could 
 be nothing upon which to base a theory of 
 
 S
 
 THE WRITERS OF THE BIBLE 9 
 
 salvation, since there would be nothing to save. 
 Hence, when it was said to our first parents (as 
 reported in Genesis, chap. 2, v. 17), "But of the 
 tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou 
 shalt not eat of it, for in the day that thou 
 eatest thereof thou shalt surely die," it must 
 have referred to the death of the fleshly body. 
 If he did not eat of the tree of knowledge of 
 good and evil — that is, if he did not violate 
 the law of his being, and so become conscious 
 of being out of harmony with it, he would 
 continue always to live ; if he did do this, he 
 would die. 
 
 I am not now arguing the inspired character 
 of the Bible, nor do I intend to do so in any 
 part of this work ; let that be as it may, and 
 let each student of it judge for himself. 
 Whether it is divinely inspired or not is not 
 a vital issue in this connection. Neither is it 
 of vast importance that we agree as to who 
 wrote the Book of Genesis, or when or where 
 it was written. What I am seeking to point 
 out is, that whoever the author may have been, 
 and whether divinely inspired or not, he con- 
 ceived man to have been possessed, at his first 
 appearance upon earth, of the power to con- 
 tinue in the body indefinitely ; that he lost this 
 power through ignorance or failure to obey the
 
 10 THE WRITERS 
 
 law laid down for him ; that thereafter he could 
 have regained immortal life in the body and 
 become as the gods, had he but eaten of the tree 
 of life — i.e. gained such knowledge of the law of 
 his being as would have put him in harmony with 
 the one universal life. Put into plain everyday 
 language, the Bible statement is that in ignor- 
 ance man violated the law of life and became 
 subject to death ; but that if he had known 
 more ; if he had known enough to eat of the 
 tree of life, which would have been to come 
 into an understanding of the law of his being, 
 he could have continued in the body as long 
 as he wished, and could then have shaped 
 things to his liking, as the gods were supposed 
 to do. 
 
 That this is the thought which the authors 
 of Genesis intended to convey is made doubly 
 apparent, when we consider the fact that no- 
 where in the Old Testament is it made clear 
 that its authors believed in an existence of a 
 soul after the death of the body. This being 
 the case, there is no other possible construction 
 to be put upon the language in Genesis other 
 than that its authors, whether inspired or not, 
 conceived it possible that men might acquire 
 the knowledge which should enable them to 
 command the life forces, and so continue to
 
 OF THE BIBLE II 
 
 live in their present bodies as long as they 
 wished. 
 
 The authors of the Old Testament, then, 
 were the first to suggest the possibility, if 
 not to point the way, to immortality in the 
 flesh through a victory over death. That 
 Jesus of Nazareth believed also in immortal 
 life in the flesh is evident in the restoration 
 to life of Lazarus and others, and in declaring 
 that he himself would return to life (restore 
 life to his body) on the third day, and in the 
 repeated healing of diseased bodies, which, if 
 not healed, must speedily have succumbed to 
 the disease by which they were affected. 
 
 And now I wish to ask the reader's thought- 
 ful consideration of this proposition. I ask it 
 because of the magnitude of the interests in- 
 volved, and because I believe that any who 
 may have read thus far will have become 
 sufficiently interested to, at least, be willing 
 to give the author a hearing, and the subject 
 of which she treats a thoughtful consideration. 
 
 The question I wish to ask is this : If by 
 any purely mental process health can be re- 
 stored to a diseased body, is it not reasonable 
 to suppose that the process can be continued 
 indefinitely, and health, which means continued 
 life, made permanent ? In other words, if there
 
 12 THE WRITERS 
 
 is a law by the application of which disease 
 may be eliminated from the system for a time, 
 may it not be that the effect can be made 
 continuous, and disease prevented from ever 
 causing the dissolution of the body? 
 
 I do not forget that many — perhaps most 
 people who believe that Jesus really did heal 
 the sick — believed that he possessed miraculous 
 powers ; but I would call the attention of all 
 these persons to his assertion that those who 
 believed on him, or as he did, should do greater 
 works than he had done. If he had considered 
 his acts as outside of natural law, and due to 
 some special relation which he bore to Godhead, 
 he would not have declared that others who 
 bore no such special relation should do greater 
 things. 
 
 Let us be logical. The interests at stake 
 are the greatest possible to conceive of, and 
 no one among us can afford to do less than 
 to bring to bear the best reasoning power of 
 which he or she is possessed. Jesus did not 
 claim to heal the sick by a power which might 
 not be attained by any one who would follow 
 his instructions, and he did say that others 
 who should come after him should do more 
 than he had been able to do. 
 
 Again I ask, if there exists a law by which,
 
 OF THE BIBLE 13 
 
 through purely mental processes, and without 
 the use of drugs, diseases of the body can be 
 removed, does it not follow logically that when 
 we have a fuller understanding of the law by 
 which this is done, we shall be able to remove 
 all disease and continue life in the body in- 
 definitely? 
 
 Dismissing as not vitally essential to the 
 matter in hand at this moment the question 
 of whether or not Jesus healed through an 
 understanding of natural law, or by virtue of 
 a special relation to a supreme power, I appeal 
 to the ten thousands of living witnesses — people 
 who are alive to-day because they have been 
 healed by mental processes purely, after all 
 efforts at healing by drugs administered by 
 the most noted physicians had failed ; I appeal 
 to these witnesses to prove the existence of 
 the law for the healing of disease, and claim 
 that in their evidence is conclusive proof of the 
 existence of a law, which, if understood and 
 applied, will annihilate disease and give the 
 victory over death.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 IMMORTALITY IN THE FLESH RESTS UPON THE 
 FACT THAT THE HIGHEST ALWAYS HAS 
 POWER TO CONTROL ALL BELOW IT 
 
 I AM far from being alone in my search for 
 immortal life in the flesh, or in faith that it 
 can be accomplished, though all who search 
 and hope have not the courage to declare 
 their purpose. Eminent physicians talk of 
 " increasing the tenure of life in man," and 
 of " a renewal of youth " after old age shall 
 have stiffened the joints and lessened the 
 flow of the vital forces. To-day, as I laid 
 aside my pen to scan the papers I found in 
 two dailies of wide circulation and influence 
 a half page in each devoted to accounts of 
 declared discoveries, by a noted professor, of 
 a lymph that is to renew youth in age, and 
 extend the span of life from three-score and 
 ten to many times that number of years. 
 This professed discovery is treated by the 
 great journals of the land with respect, as 
 being a thing that their editors conceived to 
 
 14
 
 THE HIGHEST HAS POWER I 5 
 
 be possible. They do well to give such en- 
 couragement. Every honest searcher after a 
 knowledge of the hidden laws of being is 
 worthy of commendation and support, how- 
 ever mistaken he may be in his conclusions, 
 or however misleading the clue which he 
 follows. As in ancient times all roads led to 
 Rome, so, in science, all research leads in the 
 direction of ultimate truth. The victory over 
 death will never be gained through the in- 
 troduction into the circulation of the blood 
 of any lymph or other fluid or solid ; but 
 investigation and research bring an increase of 
 knowledge, and every advance in knowledge 
 brings us one step nearer the truth. 
 
 We concede to lymph and to drugs a 
 character, an individuality, and the authority 
 which individuality implies. Individuality, 
 whether of the lowest or the highest form, 
 implies character ; implies it in the rock as 
 certainly as in the man. The character of 
 any certain drug is the same always, but its 
 relation to, and power over, other individualities 
 vary, as the mental characteristics of individuals 
 vary ; hence, the improbability of a science of 
 medicine. Prof. Metchinkoff, or another, may 
 discover a lymph or a drug that will have 
 the effect of helping to sustain life in human
 
 16 THE HIGHEST HAS TOWER 
 
 bodies beyond the present average of years ; 
 but nothing except an understanding of the 
 law, and a coming into harmony with it, by 
 which means it is possible to command it, 
 will ever enable man to continue existence in 
 the body at will. These men are not wiser 
 in their day and generation than was Ponce 
 de Leon in his. They seek for the elixir of 
 youth at the same fountainhead. The only 
 difference between the de Leon of 15 12 and 
 these searchers of 1900 for lymph, is that these 
 seek to produce what he sought to find — a 
 combination of material substances possessing 
 the power to remove the effects of old age. 
 They search amiss, yet do they approach the 
 truth, who seek through physical means to 
 preserve the physical body. For in the last 
 analysis the physical is one with the mental ; 
 and through searching they will arrive at the 
 great truth that, though one in essence, yet 
 is the physical but the visible expression of 
 the mental, which latter is the overseer and 
 rules ; and to it, and not to the physical, must 
 the appeal be made for the renewal of youth 
 and the conquest over old age and death. 
 That this is true we have demonstrated again 
 and again by actual test. That it is true can 
 be logically demonstrated to any one capable
 
 TO CONTROL ALL BELOW \J 
 
 of deducing a logical conclusion from a pre- 
 sentation of self-evident facts. 
 
 For example, the rock crumbles beneath the 
 action of the elements and becomes soil ; slowly, 
 but certainly, the soil becomes soluble, and is 
 drawn into the life of the vegetable whose roots 
 have found lodgment and a home in its depth ; 
 the vegetable is consumed by man and goes 
 to form the tissues of his body, including the 
 brain, which evolves thought, as a flower gives 
 off perfume ; is consumed in thought much as 
 the body is wasted by physical exertion. By 
 a perfectly natural process the rock has evolved 
 into the finest and most powerful element 
 possible to conceive of, proving beyond pos- 
 sibility of mistaking that the physical is in 
 essence one with the mental. And as of the 
 rock, so of every other material object per- 
 ceived by the senses, including drugs of what- 
 ever character or class. They all possess 
 character, but it is of the crudest, and becomes 
 nil when brought into collision with the finer 
 forces on the mental plane. The highest 
 controls by virtue of being highest. If this 
 were not so, then there could be no progress, 
 no growth. If the lowest had power to com- 
 mand the highest, then, indeed, would the race 
 be without hope, and utter annihilation and a 
 B
 
 iS THE HIGHEST HAS TOWER 
 
 dreamless sleep be of all things most desir- 
 able. 
 
 But it is not so. The higher forever 
 dominates the lower ; and the preservation, 
 indefinitely and at will, of the coarser elements 
 of the body through the action of the finer 
 the mental, is possible of accomplishment.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 FROM THE STANDPOINT OF PERSONAL 
 EXPERIENCE 
 
 I HAD written a good many pages in this book 
 — not those which appear at the beginning as it 
 is at present arranged, but others further on — 
 when a friend asked permission to read them. 
 As he was a man whose literary ability I 
 greatly respected, I gave him the manuscript. 
 When he returned it he said, " You must not 
 make this a heavy book. You know that it 
 is to be the book of life, and, therefore, it must 
 be a live book." 
 
 " But how ? " I asked. 
 
 " You must write it from the standpoint of 
 your own experience," he said. " Then you 
 would put yourself in it, as well as your 
 ideas." 
 
 I hesitated. I am always somewhat daunted 
 by the charge of egoism ; and one cannot in- 
 troduce one's self into one's writings without 
 being open to this accusation. 
 
 Then I reflected a little while, and I said, 
 19
 
 20 THE STANDPOINT 
 
 " Surely there is nothing that holds the reader 
 like the personality of the author. His ideas 
 may be fine, but they are all the finer if he 
 vitalises them by putting himself into them." 
 
 I am not a person to treat lightly such a 
 suggestion as my friend made. No one places 
 more value upon the word " alive " than I do. 
 If I read a book, it must be a live book, or I 
 lose interest in it and cannot finish it. 
 
 This aliveness is not only the great charm of 
 books, but of everything else. Artificial flowers 
 can be made quite as beautiful as the real ones, 
 but who cares for them ? They are not alive ; 
 they do not call out your affection. 
 
 The one charm above all other charms, when 
 I see a new face, may be expressed by the 
 word " aliveness." Beauty and even superior 
 intelligence dwindle into insignificance in com- 
 parison with the look of vital power to which I 
 am referring. After all, this look of vital power 
 is beauty ; and it is intelligence, too ; so my 
 comparison falls dead. 
 
 I do not think I exhibited more vitality than 
 other children when I was a child ; if I did, it 
 was not in the ordinary way, for I never climbed 
 a tree in my life, nor did any other Tom-boy 
 act that I can recall. Indeed, if it shall ever 
 be written of me, " She is the woman who
 
 OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCE 21 
 
 conquered death in the body and thereby re- 
 deemed the race," my biographer will have 
 nothing remarkable to record of my youth. I 
 was a responsible child, and was much trusted by 
 my mother. But the best part of me was that 
 I had no appetite for what is called the truth. 
 I had the most marvellous imagination, and 
 could not be impressed for any length of time 
 with the actual condition of my surroundings ; 
 but lived in air castles, of which I surely was 
 as great an architect as ever existed. I can 
 recall how, when my mother was scolding and 
 threatening me with severe punishment, and 
 sometimes administering it, I would be adding 
 to the last chapter of some wonderful romance 
 that was passing through my mind, so utterly 
 absorbed in my thoughts as not to be aware 
 of what she was saying or doing. 
 
 I think that I was born without any con- 
 ception of death, though the thought was 
 engrafted upon my thought as I grew up. 
 But this was because I was not old enough • 
 neither was my experience ripe enough, to 
 reason upon it. I did reason on it when I 
 became older, and I cast the belief of its power 
 entirely out of my mind. 
 
 " What power is there in death," I said, 
 " when death is not a power at all, but the
 
 22 THE STANDPOINT 
 
 absence of all power ? Life is power, and death 
 is nothing but a contradiction of life." 
 
 For years and years I puzzled my brain 
 over this thought. I read the Bible, thinking I 
 should find in it the sure way. I did not find 
 it, for it is not there ; but I found many things 
 that illuminate my way now, though they did 
 not do it then. . I had to ascend to a higher plane 
 of thought than I- had previously attained, in 
 order to make a safe application of the things I 
 found in it. 
 
 The Old Testament interested me most, and 
 it still does ; for truly it points to the kind of 
 immortality that I have always been searching 
 for — immortality in the flesh. In the meantime 
 the years were doing their worst for me. I was 
 growing old, in spite of the fact that I cherished 
 my dream of ultimate conquest over the enemy 
 that had, so far, submerged the entire race. 
 
 During all these years which were passing so 
 rapidly my ideas were dreamlike, and had not 
 yet taken the form of an absolute determination 
 to conquer death. I could see quite clearly, I 
 thought, that the people were going on to the 
 time when the)' would conquer death, but I 
 placed this time far away off in the future — 
 not knowing that the hour for the execution 
 of a hope comes with the birth of the hope.
 
 OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCE 23 
 
 So I kept reading the Bible and praying to 
 the God of the Scriptures until my whole life 
 became one unbroken aspiration for truth. I 
 had been a church member, but got nothing 
 from this experience except disappointment ; 
 the heaven of the future was not the thing I 
 was searching for ; just to think of my soul 
 and its after-death salvation made me im- 
 patient. " Others," I said, " may comfort 
 themselves on a promise, but I will not invest 
 my hope in that which requires me to yield up 
 what I have, and desire to keep, for that which, 
 even if attained, I may not find desirable ; for 
 how could any reasoning creature really desire 
 the heaven depicted by the orthodox clergy of 
 fifty years ago? 
 
 And yet I was in the dark about the final 
 outcome of my ideas. I knew nothing of how 
 they were to be executed, though I clung to 
 them with the greatest tenacity, and tried many 
 an experiment in working them out. 
 
 At one time I was strong in the belief that 
 the favourite disciple of Jesus was still living on 
 the earth ; some words that Jesus spoke at his 
 last meeting with John the Divine induced me 
 to believe this, and I built up a theory about it 
 that would read like a romance if I should write 
 it out.
 
 24 THE STANDPOINT 
 
 My husband laughed at me for my beliefs, 
 though I only told him a very few of them. 
 I had no idea that he himself had imbibed 
 them, until he came to me one day with beam- 
 ing eyes, and brought a paper containing a 
 strange theory concerning the power of the 
 race to overcome death. It was founded on the 
 Bible account of creation ; but, beyond show- 
 ing me that there were others besides myself 
 who were striving for the conquest of death, it 
 did me no good. And yet it did me good in 
 one way ; the circumstance itself revealed the 
 fact that my husband was with me in the 
 thought, though he had never admitted it. 
 This strengthened me, and we got in the habit 
 of discussing the matter together. 
 
 I think I have never seen any one who dreaded 
 death so much as he did, unless it was the little 
 child we lost when she was only nine years old, 
 and whose terror concerning it she must have 
 inherited from her father. For my part, I did 
 not have it at all. I have never met any one so 
 entirely free from this fear as I have always 
 been ; but, in spite of this absence of fear, there 
 is no one living more determined than I am to 
 overcome death. With me it is just as if the 
 life principle itself kept pouring its vitality into 
 me, and thus asserting itself through my body,
 
 OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCE 25 
 
 whether I cared or not. And, in a sense, this 
 was the case, only I did care ; I did recognise 
 it, not only bodily, but in a dim way I recog- 
 nised it intellectually ; and my salvation lay in 
 this fact. At least, it will lie in this fact when 
 I am saved ; and it would be difficult to con- 
 vince me that I am not being saved at the 
 present time. But for feeling my own power 
 in the matter of conquering death, I would not 
 now be writing this book. I am as sure that 
 this power is vested in my brain and body as 
 I can ever be of anything in the world.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE EFFORT OF JESUS TO OVERCOME DEATH 
 
 Ur to this time — I was fifty years old, or 
 thereabouts — my search for eternal life was con- 
 fined to persons and things outside of myself. 
 I was constantly looking for some one who 
 knew more on the subject than I did, in order 
 that I might hitch myself to his ideas and get 
 a free ticket, as it were, into the promised land. 
 I had tried religion without success, and had 
 besought the help of God until I grew to be 
 ashamed of myself, feeling that God must be 
 too tired of me to tolerate my petitions any 
 longer. These words are not written irrever- 
 ently ; they are absolutely true. We judge 
 others, even those in the highest places, by 
 ourselves, and I knew how it would be with 
 me. Certain people in my experience, who 
 had been dependent on me, and to whose 
 borrowing and begging I had at first responded 
 freely, but with whom, as the thing continued, 
 I became first annoyed and then disgusted, 
 furnished me with a reason for believing as 
 I did. So it came about that I felt a little 
 
 26
 
 EFFORT OF JESUS TO OVERCOME DEATH 27 
 
 bashful in approaching the " Throne of Grace," 
 and I finally quit it. 
 
 But before I quit I had " searched the Scrip- 
 tures " until I became convinced that they could 
 do nothing for me, except in a general way. 
 They showed me — so I believed — that they 
 were the compendium of the best thought 
 furnished by the world's greatest thinkers of 
 an early age, on the very subject I was spend- 
 ing my life investigating ; namely, the conquest 
 of death, not in an unknown future life, but 
 here on our own planet. I followed this idea 
 through the various books of the Old Testa- 
 ment, and saw how, by slow degrees, the feeling 
 of postponement stole in upon the writers, until 
 at last they concluded that they could not save 
 themselves, but that sometime in the future, and 
 as the result of a certain line of descent, a man 
 would be born with power to conquer death for 
 the whole race. When this idea became fixed 
 in their minds, their hopes went away from 
 themselves and centred in a time yet to come. 
 This state of thought — this postponement of 
 effort — was so ruinous that the lives of the 
 people, from lasting many hundreds of years, 
 dwindled to less than a hundred. The reason 
 of this will be explained farther on, when I 
 show the importance of having the thoughts
 
 28 THE EFFORT OF JESUS 
 
 and hopes that the body and brain generate 
 express themselves in and through the body, 
 instead of gadding away from their proper seat 
 of action and leaving the body to starve. It is 
 an unknown fact at this time that thought feeds 
 the body, but this is one of the greatest of the 
 new truths just beginning to dawn on the race. 
 
 Recently, as it seemed to me, as I continued 
 to read the Bible, the first idea held by the 
 old thinkers, the idea that death in the body 
 could be conquered, dwindled out completely ; 
 and all their hopes now pointed to the future 
 coming of the person on whom their salvation 
 depended. Then Jesus came, and though his 
 coming was not in the line of descent prophe- 
 sied, this line being on Joseph's side and Jesus 
 being the child of Mary, he was nevertheless 
 accepted by enough of the people to become 
 a great character of history, and to project his 
 influence two thousand years into the future. 
 
 It is my belief that Jesus taught, as nearly 
 as he dared, the conquest of death in the body. 
 He realised that the faith of the old prophets 
 and seers had departed, and he knew the 
 savagery of the people too well to try to change 
 their opinions by any sudden declaration of 
 his belief. And yet there are times when his 
 belief comes out in his sayings. For instance,
 
 TO OVERCOME DEATH 20. 
 
 when he was preaching in the Temple and the 
 Jews said to him, " Our fathers taught different 
 from this," Jesus answered, simply, " Your 
 fathers are dead." It was equivalent to saying, 
 if your fathers had taught what I teach, they 
 would have been alive to-day. 
 
 The account of the life of Jesus is too brief 
 to give any fixed opinion of him or his views. 
 I have my own opinion, which I shall give. 
 All down the ages there have been men who 
 thought themselves favoured of God, and who 
 believed that they could build up a kingdom 
 of which they would be the head. Some one 
 has written a book called " The Sixteen Cruci- 
 fied Saviours." The history of any one of these 
 would stand for all of them. They were all 
 the sons of virgins, begotten of God ; and, if 
 I am not mistaken, every one of them was 
 murdered for his opinion's sake. An account 
 of one is an account of all, which is a fact 
 to shake the faith of every person who prefers 
 truth to fiction. 
 
 Jesus claimed to be the person predicted in 
 the Old Testament, of whom his biographers 
 made such clumsy statements, as that he did 
 thus and so that it might be fulfilled as 
 predicted in the Scriptures, as if he sought 
 the Scriptures to find out what he was to claim
 
 30 THE EFFORT OF JESUS 
 
 and how he was to act. Nevertheless, though 
 it seems a contradiction, he had a certain 
 amount of conviction regarding his claim, and 
 the conviction grew constantly stronger as his 
 power to speak the healing word that cured 
 the people's diseases increased. I have no 
 doubt he became a marvel to himself, and 
 gradually established his claims in his own 
 mind. His disciples believed in him in pro- 
 portion as his belief in himself increased, until 
 the full force of the entire number of them 
 became an almost irresistible power among the 
 people. 
 
 When Jesus began to see unmistakably, as 
 he thought, that he could overcome death, and 
 when threatened and evidently in great danger, 
 he refused to make an effort to escape, though 
 he might easily have done so. When his 
 disciples, who knew that the officers were after 
 him, urged him to go away and thus avoid 
 death, he said something like this to them : 
 " Oh ! ye of little faith ; knowest thou not that 
 my Father can send more than twelve legions 
 of angels and take me from the cross ? " 
 
 If these words mean anything, they mean 
 that Jesus expected that which would justify 
 his faith in his claims. They point unmis- 
 takably to the fact that he was working
 
 TO OVERCOME DEATH 3 1 
 
 a grand coup de main that would establish 
 him at once and forever, in his own and 
 the world's belief, that he was the Son of 
 God and had a right to stand at the head of 
 all men, the Saviour and King — the crowned 
 Prince of Peace. 
 
 We find still further confirmation of this in 
 the last words he ever spoke. He had waited 
 in agony for hours, and the help he expected 
 had not come ; life was ebbing rapidly, and 
 the end had almost been reached, when he 
 cried out, " My God, my God, why hast thou 
 forsaken me ? " 
 
 It seems a strange thing that people do not 
 see the truth in the Bible statement ; but the 
 people are not doing their own thinking to any 
 great extent. They are going to begin to do 
 it very soon, and when they do, we shall see 
 and know and do things that are now con- 
 sidered impossible.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 HOW I TRIED TO BOLSTER UP MY HOPE BY 
 SEARCHING FOR OTHERS WHO WOULD 
 BELIEVE IN IT 
 
 In the last chapter I referred to the fact that 
 in my search for an escape from death, I kept 
 constantly looking for some person or persons 
 who had gone farther on this line of thought 
 than I had done, and who, therefore, knew 
 more about it. I actually unearthed several 
 fossils, each of whom had some idea to which 
 he was married, and which never expanded 
 beyond its then shape and size. One woman 
 whom I met by appointment, after several 
 quite sensible letters had passed between us, 
 actually told me that she was the Virgin Mary, 
 resurrected and appointed to save the race. 
 Several experiences of this kind threw me back 
 on myself for personal investigation. No one 
 ever called me a fool, even though I made no 
 concealment of my hopes. I talked my ideas 
 to my neighbours, and made many converts 
 among them, and was acknowledged as a leader 
 in thought as far as I was known. People 
 
 32
 
 SEARCHING FOR OTHERS 33 
 
 who themselves had quietly cherished the hope 
 I had begun to exploit abroad came long 
 distances to see me and hear what I had to 
 say, and left me entirely convinced of the 
 possibility of the thing, though I frankly ad- 
 mitted that I did not know how it was to be 
 done. I always declared that I was growing 
 up to a knowledge of it, and that nothing in 
 life could stand in the way of my discovering it. 
 
 And nothing has done so ; and I have dis- 
 covered it. 
 
 Year after year slid by, and found me always 
 a more interested searcher than before. Year 
 after year I was compelled with greater force to 
 abandon all hope of help from other people ; I 
 was being turned home toward myself, and at 
 last began to get a growing conviction of the 
 fact that there was no help for me but in 
 myself. 
 
 What a revelation this would have been had 
 it come to me suddenly. But it could never 
 have come in this way. It was a matter of 
 brain development, and slow development, at 
 that. How was it possible for a woman whose 
 whole life had been enslaved by service to 
 others, and who was crushed, as such women 
 generally are, to have confidence in her own 
 ideas, and to believe in herself as the discoverer 
 C
 
 34 SEARCHING FOR OTHERS 
 
 of a truth that would bring salvation ; a truth 
 that would light the world with the blessedness 
 of undying hope ? It was not in me to think 
 this, or even to accept the thought when others 
 spoke of it who believed in me. It is true that 
 — led away from all sense of personality when 
 fired by the full scope of the idea — I would talk 
 of it with such vitality as to bring conviction 
 to nearly all who heard me. I talked with great 
 fervour when aroused, but when alone, and the 
 thought came to me that I — poor little I — was 
 really and truly the leader in so tremendous a 
 thing as that which was to conquer death in 
 the bodies of the people, I would shrink from 
 it and reject it ; reject the glory of it, even 
 while seeing that it was true, and that every 
 atom of my body and brain was full of such 
 confirmation as I could not wholly disbelieve. 
 But, though I could not disbelieve it, since 
 it was born in me like the lily in the bulb, 
 and was growing out of me just as the 
 lily grows out of the bulb, I yet could and 
 did ignore the sense of personality that would 
 have forced the conviction of ownership upon 
 me. I knew that an understanding of how 
 to conquer death was in my grasp, and was 
 unfolding more and more to my perception, 
 but, while I cherished this great fact, I yet
 
 WHO WOULD BELIEVE IT 35 
 
 kept my thought from dwelling upon its great- 
 ness ; or rather, perhaps, it was so big that 
 my unaccustomed thought, not yet free from 
 the world's old beliefs in the power of death, 
 could not grasp it. 
 
 I think I should have felt more com- 
 fortable, in the circumstances, if some other 
 person had been developing the idea, and I 
 had been accepting it second-hand. I must 
 say of myself that I had no desire to become 
 famous ; there were certain things I wanted 
 to do, certain problems I wanted to solve ; 
 but it was not for popular applause that I 
 was working. Indeed, I shrunk from notice, 
 and, unless swept to the front by the force 
 of my thought, I was always in the back- 
 ground. As a child, I had shunned attention ; 
 I was usually so busy carrying out my own 
 ideas, or thinking my own thoughts, that I 
 wished to be left alone. I am this way even 
 now ; I am never lonesome, and I court 
 solitude ; but if my solitude is broken in upon 
 by pleasant people, I enjoy their company as 
 much as any one. I am fond of people. All 
 expressions of life are engaging ; but man, 
 who stands at the head and represents the 
 best of everything below him — what shall I 
 say of him ? I am not satisfied to say simply
 
 36 SEARCHING EOR OTHERS 
 
 that I love him ; I see in him such possibilities 
 of unfoldment that I look upon him as the 
 miracle of all time ; and he excites my wonder 
 and stimulates my admiration to the highest 
 point of grandeur. 
 
 With this feeling about others (I may say 
 all others, since even the most degraded tramp 
 contains the seed of immortal growth) it is no 
 wonder that I turned my thoughts inward upon 
 myself, and began to admit to myself, in spite 
 of my natural timidity, that I, too, was capable 
 of everything that my mind could suggest to 
 me as possible of attaining. 
 
 I am sure that no one will look upon this 
 as egoism or vanity, since I did not set myself 
 up above others or value my powers above 
 the powers of others. But I did begin to value 
 my own powers in proportion as I discovered 
 the powers of others ; for I could not help 
 seeing that the race is a unit, and that the 
 same law of vital force runs through us all, 
 making us all brothers. And gradually I 
 began to claim my own. I was growing into 
 a proper sense of my own valuation. I was 
 beginning to sec such strength in myself that 
 I no longer desired to lean on another ; I was 
 approaching a position of individualism ; and 
 I say now, and shall prove it farther on, that
 
 WHO WOULD BELIEVE IT 37 
 
 strict individualism is the salvation of every 
 member of the race, and that there is no 
 salvation outside of it. It is individualism 
 that conquers death. 
 
 It is the insanity of egoism that causes 
 men to claim that they are the specially 
 endowed messengers of God to a dying world. 
 There are several of these persons who are 
 flourishing in a small way at this time, and 
 making a good living out of their dupes ; but 
 their influence is growing more and more 
 limited as the process of individualisation in 
 the people goes on. I can readily understand 
 the situation ; there having been a time when 
 I myself was so weak in self-confidence that I 
 searched for a leader ; but with an under- 
 standing of the law, the preposterous claims of 
 these modern Christs became at once apparent. 
 There are others who are yet in the condition 
 that I once was in ; they are filled with the 
 desire for something different from the old-time 
 ideas about salvation, but have been taught 
 from infancy to regard themselves as " creeping 
 worms of the dust," unworthy of even decent 
 treatment from the hands of the God who is 
 supposed to have created them ; they are 
 weak ; they must lean ; and the)' lean on any 
 inflated, deluded, and deluding creature with
 
 38 SEARCHING FOR OTHERS 
 
 sufficient egoism to publish his claims to the 
 world. And so our modern messiahs make 
 their appearance and flourish for a time before 
 their course ends in such characters as Weary 
 Walker and Dusty Rhoades. 
 
 My mind being filled with thoughts relating 
 to the subject of conquering death, I soon — 
 without an effort — tested public opinion of a 
 highly cultured order on the subject. I had 
 left California by this time, and was living in 
 Chicago and doing editorial work on a paper 
 there. Of course, I found many acquaintances 
 of a very superior degree of mental ability, and 
 we discussed all the leading ideas of the day. 
 My opinions on every subject except that of 
 the conquest of death were kindly accepted by 
 my friends, but they rejected the idea that 
 eternal life could be achieved in this world, and 
 especially at this time. Some of them were 
 willing to accept the theory if its fulfilment 
 could be put off a few hundred or thousand 
 years, but none of them could be induced to 
 consider the possibility of it in the present 
 generation. These were educated people ; they 
 were college-bred men, and their minds were 
 stuffed full of what the world calls learning ; 
 and "learning" is the fit name for it — it is far 
 from being wisdom.
 
 WHO WOULD BELIEVE IT 39 
 
 It was here that I saw the difference between 
 the natural mind and the mind that had been 
 thrown out of its natural direction by filling it 
 with what is called learning. In my previous 
 association with the people of the little place 
 where I lived, I found many original thinkers 
 and reasoners ; minds that were not over- 
 crowded with the rubbish of dead centuries, 
 but fresh and vital and able to do original 
 thinking. These were the minds I impressed 
 with my ideas ; and when I contrasted the 
 two different casts of mind as I have described 
 them, I valued book learning less than ever. I 
 had never valued it very highly. I wanted to 
 delve down in the ground ; I wanted to get to 
 the root of things and discover the cause of 
 growth. I knew that I must find the law of 
 growth or I would never conquer death. 
 
 I have found it, and I shall make the whole 
 thing so clear in these pages that a child can 
 understand it. 
 
 In regard to what I said about the indiffer- 
 ence of my book-learned friends to my ideas 
 concerning the conquest of death, I must refer 
 to an experience that seems strange. It only 
 required a slight acquaintance with a man or 
 woman to find out just what reach of mind he 
 or she possessed. In most people I soon came
 
 40 SEARCHING FOR OTHERS 
 
 to a mental dead wall beyond which I could 
 not go, and beyond which there would have 
 been no use of going, because there was nothing 
 there. Those persons carried within themselves 
 the stamp of death ; they had not advanced 
 far enough in ideal lines of thought to release 
 the dead weight of the old. 
 
 But there were other minds into which I 
 could look down and down the perfectly clear 
 depths, and find no obstacle to the upward 
 moving current of life, which has its rise in the 
 beginning of the person's individuality. These 
 persons never rejected a thought because it was 
 new ; they were always ready to consider it, 
 and accept it if their reason confirmed it. 
 
 From the intellectual capacity of some, when 
 contrasted with this quality of luminosity of 
 others, I perceived that a portion of the race 
 had progressed far enough to throw off the 
 incubus of disease and death, as soon as more 
 knowledge should be evolved on the subject 
 and that another portion of it had not.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE GROWTH OF PUBLIC OPINION IN THE 
 DIRECTION OK THE CONQUEST OF DEATH 
 
 It was nearly twenty years ago that I severed 
 my connection with the paper that I was then 
 on and with the friends I made while there, 
 and I have often wondered if these friends 
 have relaxed their opposition to what they 
 called my pet hobby. I doubt not that many 
 of them have. The idea is no longer regarded 
 as absurd ; it has become one of intense interest 
 to millions of people. The interest in every- 
 thing written on the subject is so great that it 
 threatens to become a mania. Every city in 
 America has its Century Clubs, and its Live-For- 
 ever Clubs, and they have spread to the country, 
 and the villages are discussing them. The books 
 that have been written on this subject, and almost 
 forgotten, have been revived, and new editions 
 of them are on the shelves of the bookstores. 
 
 There is the beginning of a groundswell of 
 
 inquiry on the subject ; th> whole thinking 
 
 public is slowly awakening ; and as it does it 
 
 draws its hopes from the distant heaven of 
 
 41
 
 42 THE GROWTH OF 
 
 delusive promise to the prospect of present 
 salvation. Who does not know that " a bird 
 in the hand is worth two in the bush " ? and 
 who is going to walk in the dark when once he 
 has glimpsed the rising sun ? 
 
 Introspection is a neglected art. If man 
 would look within himself in his search for 
 truth, he would gain more useful knowledge 
 than all the colleges and all his travels through 
 foreign countries could give him. 
 
 Nay, more ; the man who goes outside of 
 himself in his effort to gain wisdom bankrupts 
 himself ; and the knowledge he acquires may 
 delude, instead of leading him in the direction 
 of highest truth. Nothing can possibly lead 
 any man to a higher growth but the under- 
 standing of himself. 
 
 What is the most important thing man can 
 possess? I answer, it is himself. And when I 
 say himself, I mean his body, and not his soul. 
 Men have been soul-saving for thousands of 
 years, and all that time the body has been dying 
 of neglect. 
 
 Is the body of no importance, that we can 
 afford to ignore it in this way? Is it true that 
 the soul can exist without the body ? Who 
 really knows anything about the soul ? And 
 who does not know something about the
 
 PUBLIC OPINION 43 
 
 body ? We, at least, know from observation 
 and practical tests that the body exists, and 
 that it is a very convenient thing to have ; 
 we know that it is a machine or a combination 
 of machines through which we transact all the 
 business connected with life, and without which 
 we would have no life on the terrestrial plane 
 where we execute all the desires that make life 
 worth living. 
 
 That we know almost nothing of ourselves, 
 our resources and undeveloped powers, is because 
 for thousands of years we have devoted our 
 time and talent to exploring the soul — or some 
 imaginary thing we call the soul — to the utter 
 neglect of the bod)', which there is no doubt 
 about our possessing. Owing to this blunder 
 we know almost nothing about our bodies, 
 and absolutely nothing of our souls, in spite 
 of the fact that we have claimed to know so 
 much about them for so long a time. 
 
 The soul — admitting its existence, which I 
 am more than willing to do — is a secondary 
 matter on our present plane of life ; we are in 
 a world where bodies, and not souls, do the work 
 which is necessary to be done, in order that 
 our lives be protracted in the fulfilment of those 
 desires which belong to the body, and which 
 are essential to its existence here.
 
 44 THE GROWTH OF 
 
 We run this wonderful engine, the body, in a 
 way that would shame a ship's captain in the 
 command of his boat. The captain would want 
 some knowledge of his vessel in order that 
 he might control her properly and keep her 
 from drifting at the mercy of wind and tide ; 
 but man — who owns the greatest piece of 
 mechanism in the world, a piece of mechan- 
 ism that combines within itself every law of 
 mechanics known and unknown — makes no 
 effort to understand it, and has no conception 
 of the hundredth part of its meaning, or of 
 the thousandth part of its worth to himself. 
 
 What it is that lies behind this mechanism, 
 no one knows. What the " I " that is always 
 speaking for itself may be, is a secret. Whether 
 this "I," which says, " My body," is really the 
 body's very self, or some unseen thing hidden 
 in the body or behind the body, no one can 
 tell. The assertion " I " stands for the man, 
 and the " I " not only says, " My body," but 
 it says, " My soul," also. Is the " I " one with 
 the soul or one with the body? Or is it the 
 intelligent union of both ? 
 
 For my part, I believe that the " I " is all 
 the soul a man has, and that it is the sum- 
 total of the body's entire life ; its memory, in 
 fact ; its record of all the bodv's transactions,
 
 PUBLIC OPINION 45 
 
 and that it is one with the body, the body 
 being the external expression of it. The " I " 
 records all the experiences through which a 
 man passes ; and if it takes note of these ex- 
 periences and reasons on them, it becomes wiser 
 every day. That the " I " says, " My body," is 
 only a habit of speech, and does not prove that 
 the body is one thing and the " I " another. 
 
 It is because I perceive the truth of the 
 above statement that I have grown into a 
 conviction of the immense importance of the 
 body. The body is the man, and the man 
 is adapted to the place he occupies now ; his 
 body correlates the needs of his life here, and 
 this fact leaves the soul out of this treatise. If 
 the soul is needed in another world, we will 
 find it there. 
 
 What is the greatest desire of the human 
 being? Let us be honest with ourselves. It is 
 not for the salvation of his soul. We desire the 
 salvation of our souls if it proves impossible to 
 save our bodies ; but first of all we want our 
 bodies saved. The most delightful heaven the 
 imagination of genius has devised does not 
 allure us so much as the remnant of this bodily 
 life with all its trials and sufferings. 
 
 " All that a man hath will he give for his 
 life." It has always been so, and with the
 
 46 THE GROWTH OF 
 
 growing refinement of the race it becomes 
 more so. In the early history of the race men 
 yielded their lives far more readily than they 
 do at this time. Would a man of the present 
 age die for opinion's sake, as the heroes of old 
 once did ? No, he would deny everything in 
 order to save his life, wisely thinking that life 
 was far more valuable than opinion, as, indeed, 
 it is. 
 
 Life is above all things ; life right here, 
 handicapped by our environments, and blurred 
 in every conceivable way by our ignorance, 
 is still more valuable than all else. 
 
 In spite of the body's disabilities, and the 
 pain that racks it, and the penury that starves 
 it, we yet value it so much more than the 
 prospective heaven of the future, that we will 
 not end it voluntarily, though we might do so 
 at the cost of a meal, and with less pain than 
 an ordinary spell of indigestion. Does this 
 mean nothing? Do not all things mean some- 
 thing? I assert that the simple facts I am 
 stating will prove to be the most important 
 truths of which the mind can get any concep- 
 tion, when once understood. 
 
 The inherent force and determination which 
 always point in one direction, which begin in 
 the elementary life-cells themselves and increase
 
 PUBLIC OPINION 47 
 
 with every step upward in race growth, have 
 a meaning that no power of imagination can 
 ever extend to its legitimate limits, for, indeed, 
 it has no limits. 
 
 This force and this determination are ex- 
 pressed in the love of life in the body, and 
 the avoidance of the body's death. They are 
 manifested in every object in all the world. 
 They manifest in the lowest forms no less 
 than in the highest, as all persons must have 
 observed many times. Turn over the half 
 decayed piece of wood, and see with what 
 hurrying fear the little creatures under it rush 
 to safe places out of our sight. And the 
 vegetables and trees also ; note with what 
 tenacity of life they mend their broken limbs, 
 and go on growing in spite of the most adverse 
 conditions. Even the crystals and rocks strive 
 to assume shapes and enter into conditions of 
 greater permanency. 
 
 It is the love of life — not of soul life, but 
 of body life — and the hope of prolonging it 
 that makes cowards of us all ; in fact, it is 
 the love of life that prompts every action we 
 ever will or can make. No principle within 
 us is so strong as this. " All that a man hath 
 will he give for his life." 
 
 Looking through nature everywhere it is
 
 48 THE GROWTH OF 
 
 the same ; the one great desire, first of all, 
 is for life ; after that come the minor desires. 
 Often when it is necessary to kill something, 
 my sympathy is so drawn into the effort of 
 the creature to save its own life, that I become 
 weak and faint and seem to partially die with 
 it. At least, there is an approximation in my 
 feelings toward this extreme point, and it shows 
 how high my valuation of life is. 
 
 Down through the ages all men have accepted 
 — apparently without thought — the belief that 
 death was an unavoidable thing ; they have 
 accepted this belief in spite of their desire to 
 live. I say all men ; yet, as I have pointed 
 out, there have been exceptions, the writers 
 of the Old Testament having unquestionably 
 had faith in the power of the body to conquer 
 death sometime in the future, if not in their 
 time. 
 
 The two facts — the desire to live, and the 
 belief of the people that it is impossible to 
 prolong life eternally in the body under pre- 
 sent conditions — are at the foundation of all 
 religions. P2very creed in the world has been 
 projected by the human brain, because, first, 
 the desire to protract life was an unconquer- 
 able thing ; and, secondly, because it did not 
 appear possible to attain it here.
 
 PUBLIC OPINION 49 
 
 Suppose that men had seen the possibility 
 of overcoming death here, and had gone to 
 work to realise that possibility, would they 
 have projected a place of future abode for 
 themselves after this life was over ? It would 
 never have been over ; then what need would 
 they have had for a creed to save them in 
 a hereafter? They would have laboured to 
 strengthen themselves in the present ; to fortify 
 and improve their external conditions, and to 
 improve and develop the mighty tool for doing 
 this ; the only tool any man ever owned or 
 ever will own — his body. 
 
 I have said that as the race refined death 
 became a greater terror to it ; this is because 
 man's increased knowledge of the body has 
 rendered the body more sacred to him. He 
 begins to perceive not only the uses of the 
 body, but the beauty of it, and the happiness 
 to be gotten through it, and his valuation of 
 it increases with his knowledge of what it is 
 worth to him ; of not only what it is worth 
 now, but of what it would be worth under 
 more favourable circumstances. His hopes are 
 for his body ; his desires are centred upon 
 its perpetuation. In proportion as his respect 
 for his body increases, and his desire for the 
 perpetuation of life in this world keeps growing, 
 D
 
 50 THE GROWTH OF 
 
 his concern for his soul and for the heaven of 
 the future decreases. 
 
 It is this direction of growth in the race, all 
 pointing to farther development here and now, 
 that is causing the churches to go empty on 
 Sundays ; it is at the bottom of the complaints 
 that the clergy are making, though they are not 
 aware of it. The preachers are searching in a 
 hundred different directions for the reason of 
 the decline of religious influence, and because 
 they have not yet looked in the right direction 
 they have failed to find the cause. At a recent 
 meeting in Brooklyn where man)- of the leading 
 ministers of the country were in council, there 
 were those among them who actually said that 
 the indifference to Sunday service was the 
 absence of fear of the devil and hell, which 
 had become almost obliterated from the public 
 mind ; and they advised taking up this old 
 piece of idiocy, and again working it in order 
 to get their churches filled. It also came out 
 at this council that there were nearly five 
 thousand Congregational preachers who were 
 without charges. 
 
 These facts are stated here in order to 
 strengthen my argument concerning the growth 
 in the race in its valuation of life in the body, 
 and of its increasing indifference to the promises
 
 PUBLIC OPINION 5 I 
 
 of a future heaven. The race is becoming more 
 practical every day. It really does not know 
 why it is neglecting the religious services upon 
 which it was wont to give such regular attend- 
 ance ; it only knows that the Sunday sermon 
 does not interest it as the Sunday papers do ; 
 and as the growing intelligence of the age has 
 — unconsciously to itself — dulled its fear of the 
 devil, it is not afraid to do what its inclination 
 leads it to do. 
 
 Loss of interest in the next world, which has 
 come from an increased interest in this world, 
 is responsible for all the complaints the ministers 
 are making about the falling off of church in- 
 fluence. Concentration is killing theology ; it 
 is drawing the powers of the intellect to the 
 work of the present hour ; it is bringing the 
 scattered forces and the far roaming hopes 
 home, and centring them upon what there is 
 to do here in this world, and now. The 
 visionary is doomed ; the practical has arrived.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 EVERY HOPE IS THE SURE PROPHECY OF 
 ITS OWN FULFILMENT 
 
 In looking back I now sec that a belief in death 
 as a fixed and unalterable fact never had full 
 possession of me. I doubt whether in a true 
 sense it really has full possession of anyone ; 
 for, while it seems real enough so far as the 
 dying of other people is concerned, we rarely 
 think of it as being an inevitable reality to 
 ourselves. It always seems a far-off and 
 shadowy possibility, but not an irresistible 
 fate, such as a man feels it to be who is 
 under sentence of death for some crime. 
 
 And yet reason, so far as our reason is based 
 on observation, tells us that death is as certain 
 to come to us as to the condemned felon in his 
 cell. And why are we so little disturbed by it? 
 Is it because we anticipate life beyond the 
 grave? The felon also anticipates this; and 
 moreover his expectations for happiness in 
 another world are usually as bright to his 
 imagination as ours can be. Then why does he 
 dread death while we do not? It is because 
 
 52
 
 THE FULFILMENT OF HOPE 53 
 
 he realises that to him it is inevitable, while 
 we can never quite bring ourselves to do so. 
 
 Our reason, based on observation, admits 
 that it is inevitable. No person has ever 
 escaped death yet ; but in spite of this fact 
 there is some hidden impulse within us that 
 denies the inevitableness of it. And this 
 hidden impulse betrays the presence, deep 
 down at the very foundation of individual 
 existence, of some unseen spring of ever- 
 present vitality, the discovery of which will 
 overcome death. We feel it though we do 
 not see it ; we know it to be true though as 
 yet it has never been proved ; and there is an 
 undefined something in man that exists more 
 by feeling than by seeing, and so death is 
 inwardly rejected, while verbally accepted. 
 
 If man accepted the belief of death in even- 
 part of his consciousness, in his inner as well as 
 his outer self, he would feel about it very much 
 as the condemned felon does. It would occupy 
 his every thought and render him unfit for any 
 effort in life, except a preparation for death. 
 In short, the certain knowledge of coming 
 death would be equivalent to present death, 
 so far as the uses of life are concerned. 
 
 But men are not expecting to die ; their 
 lives prove it ; they are intensely interested in
 
 54 HOPE THE PR( IPHECY 
 
 a thousand schemes of activity on the earth 
 plane ; and they find their greatest happiness 
 in bettering their conditions and in surrounding 
 themselves with objects that are beautiful and 
 pleasing. And these objects do surely give 
 them happiness, which, even though it may 
 be fleeting, stimulates them to greater efforts 
 in the same direction, and ends in the further 
 accumulation of treasures such as the clergy 
 caution us against, and which certainly are not 
 those we are requested to lay up in heaven. 
 Everywhere and all the time in these latter 
 years men are living more and more in the 
 present ; and the wisdom of this has already 
 borne results in the increase in the average 
 length of human life, which is becoming greater 
 every year. 
 
 " Death is inevitable." Men almost univer- 
 sally say this ; but their words do not touch 
 their own convictions ; they do not excite any 
 emotion within them. It is only when they feel 
 its icy touch that they begin to have even the 
 slightest realisation of it as applicable to their 
 own cases. As soon as they begin to feel that 
 death is impending, their fears are aroused and 
 they seek to escape from it. 
 
 That they do fear it and seek to escape from 
 it is proof conclusive that there is a way of
 
 OF ITS OWN FULFILMENT 55 
 
 escape. There is no truth in the cosmic growth 
 of the race more true than that every hope is the 
 sure prophecy of its own fulfilment. 
 
 No matter whether we take the evolutionary 
 view, that man created himself, or the Scriptural 
 view, that he was created by a personal God, 
 the very fact that his hope stretches forward 
 into the future is absolute assurance that the 
 future exists, and that it exists for the purpose 
 of fulfilling man's desires. This thought came 
 to me before I had the intellectual grasp to 
 follow it out in all its details, and thereby to 
 prove it conclusively to myself. But I never 
 ceased to believe and to trust it with all the 
 force of my nature ; and it was my solace in 
 hours that were dark as midnight. I accepted 
 it as truth, never for a moment clouding it with 
 doubt, even before I had followed it out to the 
 absolute knowing. I felt that it was invulner- 
 able, long before I found out why it was so ; 
 long before my reasoning faculties were suffi- 
 ciently awakened to understand it fully. There 
 was the statement just as I have made it. 
 Every hope is the prophecy of its sure fulfil- 
 ment — a mighty and incontrovertible truth, that 
 became a part of my brain structure and eventu- 
 ally worked its way to externals, and left its 
 impress upon every atom of my body. It took
 
 56 HOPE THE PROniECV 
 
 the form of a fixed principle that each succeed- 
 ing experience confirmed, until I began to feel 
 the power of a conqueror, and was lifted from 
 a position of pitiful weakness and self-distrust 
 to one of unswerving strength. In this posi- 
 tion fresh vitality was generated by my body, 
 which poured its power into my heretofore 
 sluggish brain, until by slow degrees the whole 
 problem of growth was unfolded. 
 
 There is many another expression that helps 
 to unfold the problem of growth or life, but 
 not one of them struck me with such force as 
 this. Every hope is the sure prophecy of its 
 own fulfilment. 
 
 And why ? Because hope is related to the 
 thing hoped for ; this being so, it is inseparable 
 from it. Suppose that there is a God that 
 made us, and that He is great and wise and 
 above all things good and true, then how would 
 it be possible for Him — our Father — to plant 
 a lie deep down in the first impulse of our 
 individual lives, that would prove a most de- 
 ceptive allurement, holding out promises that 
 He never intended should be realised ? Could 
 anyone believe in God and accept this fact? 
 
 But suppose we reject the belief in special 
 creation, and dwell for a moment upon the 
 theory of evolution ; there will be no difference
 
 OF ITS OWN FULFILMENT S7 
 
 in results. If the life-cell, or the first principle 
 of individualised life, whatever it may be, 
 contains the essence that later, under higher 
 development, expands into this hope, then the 
 hope points to the time of realisation and to 
 the conditions that will render realisation pos- 
 sible, as surely as the grain of wheat planted 
 in the ground will germinate and unfold itself 
 until the full prophecy of its being is fulfilled. 
 
 Hope, which is an expression of the law of 
 growth in a man, cannot possibly point to that 
 which does not exist. It always streams forth 
 in the direction of the object which is correlated 
 to it ; of the object which is its complement, 
 and the acquisition of which fixes it in living 
 substance as a new creation. 
 
 The idea that projects life beyond the grave 
 does not fully allay the fear of death ; nor 
 does the promise of heaven, with all its attrac- 
 tions, reconcile us to it. So long as even a 
 modicum of the old vitality lasts, we prefer this 
 troublesome and poverty-stricken world to the 
 "spheres of the blest." It is only when the 
 vitality is too low to permit further resistance 
 to death that men, as a rule, become reconciled 
 to go. To be sure, there are abnormal instances 
 where men's imaginations have been so stimu- 
 lated by descriptions of the world to come,
 
 58 HOPE THE PROPHECY 
 
 that the\ r have let go the hold they had upon 
 this one, and have seemed anxious to go. But 
 we all admit that men, in such conditions, are 
 unbalanced. 
 
 We do not want to die — this is the plain 
 fact. We do not want to die, no matter how 
 hard life seems, or how enchanting the future 
 is painted for us. We not only do not want 
 to die, but we do not expect it. Death always 
 comes upon us as a surprise. 
 
 The race believes that it believes that an 
 implacable and inexorable God has passed 
 sentence of death upon it ; it also claims to 
 justify God in having done so ; but its position 
 is self-deceptive, and its actions contradict its 
 assumed belief in God's power and wisdom. 
 It is constantly seeking remedies by which it 
 can thwart God's purpose in killing it ; and, 
 deep down in the soul of it, it rests more hope 
 in the power of a pill than in the power of God. 
 
 It has its body tinker and its soul tinker; 
 and it clings to its body tinker until hope 
 deserts it, and then, in despair, it turns to its 
 soul tinker. And when a loved one has 
 passed through the veil and from out our 
 sight, though we say, "He is happy now; 
 he is in the bosom of God, and sorrow, sick- 
 ness and death shall touch him no more," we
 
 OF ITS OWN FULFILMENT 59 
 
 weep and refuse to be comforted. And I say 
 that it is not the mere pain of separation that 
 wrings our hearts, for he might have gone to 
 another country, or even to another planet, 
 and if he had gone alive, we would not have 
 felt as we do. 
 
 And this feeling we have for him — what is 
 it; and why is it what it is? 
 
 Now, listen : It is the intuitive perception 
 of a truth that has not yet been made apparent 
 to our reasoning faculties. It is because death 
 is a violation of some natural principle, with 
 which we are not yet acquainted. And, be- 
 cause it is a violation of some natural principle, 
 some innate possibility of infinite value, hidden 
 at present from our dwarfed perceptions, we 
 are rent asunder by it, and cannot reconcile 
 it with our long accepted belief that death is 
 a blessing in disguise. It is human nature 
 overturning human religion. 
 
 It seems to me, judging by my own feelings, 
 that if man actually knew that death was to be 
 his doom, from which there was no possibility 
 of escape, he would so dread the event as to 
 make life one protracted horror, and would 
 be prompted to hasten the thing in order to 
 relieve himself from the thought of it ; just as 
 men condemned to hang will hang themselves
 
 60 IIOrE THE PROrilECY 
 
 iii their cells to get the fearful catastrophe off 
 their minds. 
 
 The fact is, men do not anticipate death 
 for themselves, whatever they may do for 
 others. Undefined in their own minds, there 
 remains fixed forever that intuitive perception 
 of immortality, which belongs to the unchang- 
 ing and undying life-principle of which they 
 are the expression, or the visible manifestation. 
 
 Undefined by themselves, I say ; so undefined 
 is it, so misunderstood by them, and yet so 
 potent that out of it, out of this simple, intuitive 
 perception, this vague feeling of immortality, 
 has arisen every theological creed ever yet 
 projected for the perpetuation of individual 
 life in another stage of existence. Thinkers and 
 reasoners on this subject actually believe they 
 have accepted as inevitable the death of the 
 body, but they still hold fast, with unswerving 
 tenacity, to the feeling of immortality which 
 the)' find implanted in all men ; and they 
 have, as a last resort, endowed each individual 
 of the race with a soul that is supposed to live 
 beyond the death of the body. This soul they 
 have provided, out of their ample imaginations, 
 with many and various modes of escape from 
 annihilation. 
 
 Theology offers another world to us as a
 
 OF ITS OWN FULFILMENT 6 1 
 
 substitute for its unconquerable desire to live. 
 It was the best thing that could be clone in 
 the past, while man was so ignorant of the 
 powers of his body ; but this ignorance is 
 beginning to pass away, and the splendours 
 of the heretofore misunderstood functions of 
 the body are on the verge of asserting them- 
 selves in a manner that will soon astonish the 
 world. 
 
 The belief in the power of death belongs 
 to the unawakened intelligence of a baby race, 
 not yet grown to even the faintest conception 
 of what it is, or what it can do. 
 
 Religion is but the pointing of infallible 
 intuition, indicating the fact that there is a 
 road through the untrodden wilderness of 
 fast-coming thought, which experience must 
 traverse, but which has never yet been traversed ; 
 and which, when once traversed, will put an 
 entirely new face upon our implanted belief 
 in immortality. 
 
 Man may possess a soul that lives beyond 
 the body, and I hope and believe that he 
 does ; but I know that he possesses a bod)-, 
 and I know, and am proving individually, that 
 this body possesses the power to conquer all 
 its disabilities and save itself here, in the 
 present world, and in the present generation.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE ENDLESS CREATIVENESS OF THE 
 HUMAN INTELLIGENCE 
 
 I AM familiar with the phenomena of spiritual- 
 ism, and I will say that it — of all the theories 
 extant — furnishes by far the best basis of belief 
 in life beyond the grave. Spiritualism is not 
 humbuggery. It is a genuine thing. Spirits, 
 or what seem to be spirits, do make themselves 
 visible to spectators under certain conditions. 
 The only doubt concerning the matter is not 
 in the genuineness of these apparitions, but in 
 the character of them. Man)- a time, when 
 entirely alone, they have appeared to me ; and 
 at first I thought them veritable messengers 
 from the other side. 
 
 Later, I did not know whether they were 
 genuine spirits of the departed, or thought 
 images, projected by my own mind. Not that 
 they were unreal, for they were not ; they 
 were not pictures ; they were tangible shapes, 
 and lasted for several minutes at a time ; but 
 were they spirits? 
 
 At this time the human mind begins to reveal 
 
 62
 
 ENDLESS CREATIVENESS 63 
 
 itself to me as a mighty, but an unknown thing ; 
 as the seed germ of a power whose possibilities 
 no one has ever tested, or ever will entirely 
 test, because its unfoldment must go on for- 
 ever. 
 
 That the human mind is a great creative 
 power I do know ; that its power to create is 
 absolutely limitless I believe. 
 
 By " creative power," I mean the power of 
 making manifest the wonders that are capable 
 of being manifested out of the unseen life- 
 principle, the animating spirit of all creatures 
 and all creations ; the possibilities existing in 
 latency in the Law of Being, or the Principle 
 of Life, or the Law of Attraction ; these 
 wonders, which depend for their manifesta- 
 tion upon individual recognition. 
 
 The three terms, Law of Being, Principle of 
 Life, and Law of Attraction — spirit of all things 
 — are different modes of expressing the same 
 thing. There are times when one of these 
 modes of expression seems best adapted to 
 convey my meaning, and times when the other 
 modes seem best. But for this I would simplify 
 the matter by using one of these expressions 
 only ; and, really, it would be more strictly 
 correct to do so ; but I have become so in the 
 habit of using the three terms indiscriminate!}-
 
 64 ENDLESS CREATIVENESS 
 
 that I must beg the reader's indulgence, and 
 keep on with it. 
 
 Individual recognition of a power heretofore 
 existing in latency in the unseen spirit of life 
 may be called a creation. The power to re- 
 cognise is the power to create, if, by the word 
 creation, we mean the making manifest that 
 which has always existed, but has not existed 
 for us, because our intelligence had not ripened 
 to the point where we could see it. 
 
 By recognition, then, the subjective power 
 embodied in the life-principle, the spirit of all 
 manifested creatures, becomes an objective 
 creation, or use, or knowledge ; it becomes 
 manifest or made visible. 
 
 The spirit of all things is self-existent ; all 
 truth already exists. The universe is a whole ; 
 it is complete ; nothing remains to be added to 
 it. It is the absolute allness of being. 
 
 The word truth is another name for life. 
 Man, in his individual capacity, is the recog- 
 niser of truth. He correlates truth, or the 
 principle of being, to the extent of his capacity 
 to recognise it. By his recognition of it, he 
 shows it forth in his person. A man is as he 
 believes. This is so because he is all mind. 
 The entire argument in favour of man's power 
 to conquer death rests on the fact that he is
 
 OF HUMAN INTELLIGENCE 6$ 
 
 mind — active, vital, undying mind — and that 
 there is no dead matter, as has been supposed. 
 
 All things which we call matter are re- 
 solvable into one and the same element, as I 
 conclusively proved in a former treatise, that 
 element being thought, mentality, mind. Forms 
 change ; the body may perish, but life, mind, is 
 immortal. 
 
 Man, being a mental statement, shows forth 
 in his personality as much of the truth of being 
 as he has the intelligence to recognise ; that is, 
 as much of the power of truth, or the Principle 
 of Attraction, as he can understand, he makes 
 manifest, gives form to, in his person. It is by 
 his power to recognise that he creates or gives 
 form to that which always existed potentially, 
 but was heretofore formless. 
 
 Thus, in the absolute sense, there is no new 
 creation ; in a finite sense creation is continu- 
 ous, and will never cease. When men know 
 their power it will be their privilege to forever 
 make visible, in the objective world, the powers 
 that exist in the infinitude of being, or the 
 principle of life, in such form as they will. 
 
 The human mind is constantly revealing new 
 good, or new uses, or new knowledges, out of 
 the Law of Being, simply by recognising them 
 as possibilities to be attained. 
 E
 
 66 ENDLESS CREATIVENESS 
 
 Thus, a faint conception of some power 
 beyond that which has ever yet been mani- 
 fested by any member of the race flits through 
 a man's mind, only to be discarded as absurd 
 and impracticable. But it comes again, and 
 stronger ; and yet again, and more powerfully 
 still, until he begins to give it credence. At 
 this point his mind goes on exploring trips 
 into unprospected realms of thought, and 
 brings home much evidence to sustain him in 
 his growing belief, until, at last, he knows that 
 a thing, heretofore considered impossible, is 
 possible ; and he goes to work and demon- 
 strates it to others. We call his work a crea- 
 tion, and in a limited sense it is a creation. 
 
 The creative power is the power to recognise 
 the possibilities for development existing in 
 the spirit of life, or the Principle of Attraction ; 
 it is a power vested in intelligence ; and it is 
 by this power alone that nature, with man 
 at its head, exists ; it is by this power that 
 nature, with man at its head, is on the road 
 of endless progression through an infinite realm 
 of ever-widening possibilities. 
 
 Life is thought to be dual, simply from the 
 fact that it is both seen and unseen. On its 
 unseen side there is the law of being, otherwise 
 called the Law of Attraction, or the principle
 
 OF HUMAN INTELLIGENCE 6j 
 
 of life — the spirit of life. On the seen side 
 there is this same law of being made manifest, 
 individualised, personified, by its own recogni- 
 tion of its powers of individualisation. 
 
 All nature — every living form, everything 
 that is visible or external — is intelligence ; it 
 is that which has recognised the unseen moving 
 power, or the Principle of Attraction ; and that 
 which recognises is mind, or intelligence. 
 Therefore, the whole objective universe is 
 mind ; living, thinking mind, and not dead 
 matter. All the substances we see or feel, or 
 that in any way appeal to our senses, are 
 mind, and not matter. Mind or intelligence 
 ranges the entire visible universe ; it is real 
 substance ; we handle it ; we weigh and 
 measure it ; we cut it into lengths for building 
 material ; we melt it and run it into bars for 
 our railroad cars to run on ; our cars and 
 everything we manufacture are made out of 
 various conditions of the one substance of 
 mind. 
 
 Mind, in its myriad forms, ranges every 
 degree from solid iron and granite to the 
 rarest ether. 
 
 The diamond is one condition of mind ; the 
 perfume of a rose is another condition of the 
 same substance ; and thought is still another
 
 68 ENDLESS CREATIVENESS 
 
 condition of it, and the most subtle and 
 powerful condition that we know of. 
 
 The most difficult task the metaphysician 
 has to perform, is that of rendering apparent 
 to the conception of the student the fact that 
 mind or intelligence is an actual substance, 
 that can be seen and handled. 
 
 We have always believed mind to be an 
 unsubstantial thing ; a principle that invaded 
 the dead substance of matter and imparted 
 a temporary show of life to it ; but we have 
 never conceived the fact that it is matter 
 itself. 
 
 We have never conceived the fact that 
 matter is mind ; that matter is the visible 
 side of the law of being ; or, in other words, 
 that it is the law's recognition of itself, as 
 light may be said to be heat's recognition of 
 itself. 
 
 But this is so, and must be so, because no 
 logical philosophy can admit the idea of 
 deadness in the universe. The universe is 
 a universe, and not a diverse. It is all life, 
 pure life; there is not a dead atom in it. If 
 there were even one atom of death in it, or 
 the possibility that there would ever be one, 
 the universe would not be a whole, and it 
 could not endure.
 
 OF HUMAN INTELLIGENCE 69 
 
 But it is a whole ; it is the unchanging prin- 
 ciple of life ; it is — on its unseen or spiritual 
 side — the Law of Being, or the Principle of 
 Attraction ; the law or principle whose one 
 function is to draw or to unite. It is love in 
 its unalloyed essence ; and the recognition of 
 it is intelligence, or mind, expressed in a 
 million varying beliefs, ranging the entire visible 
 creation. 
 
 The tree is the externalisation of the Law 
 of Being, or the Principle of Attraction, to the 
 extent of the tree's intelligence. The tree shows 
 forth as much of the good or the life embodied 
 in the Law of Being as it can recognise. 
 
 All potentiality, all power, all possibility, 
 reside in the spirit or Principle of Being. To 
 conceive of, imagine, think or desire a thing 
 without giving it form, calling it out of the 
 unformed Principle of Being is, therefore, an 
 impossibility. That which we conceive, we 
 create ; that which we imagine to be, is ; that 
 which we have ceased to believe, no longer 
 exists to us, and never can until we again 
 accept it as being a truth. 
 
 Every belief assumes a form — the form of 
 that particular belief. No matter how short- 
 lived the belief may be, or how frail, if it is 
 a belief at all, it is, for the time being, a
 
 JO ENDLESS CREATIVENESS 
 
 recognition of the possibilities resident in the 
 spirit of being. In conceiving a form, we create 
 it within the one universal substance, wherein 
 all creation takes place, the primary or mental. 
 
 A belief differs from a thought only in the 
 matter of fixedness ; a thought is a transient 
 thing, unless it becomes fixed in a belief, and 
 then it is more permanent, and, therefore, more 
 apparent ; it is a fraction of the spirit of being 
 in more decided objectivity than a mere passing 
 thought. 
 
 Our thoughts, then, are real things ; and 
 though usually invisible, being in a great 
 measure under the control of our bodies — 
 which are the sum -total of our fixed beliefs 
 — they are too frail and fleeting to assume 
 the substantial appearance of bodies. Never- 
 theless, they are real substance and have form 
 at their inception ; and, though invisible, they 
 do become objective to our bodies, and go 
 forth as living, but probably as short-lived, 
 entities. 
 
 Thoughts are real because they are intellectual 
 conceptions of something ; and there can be no 
 intellectual conception that is not, in its degree, 
 a recognition of that which is — a recognition of 
 some phase of the Principle of Being. There 
 can be no recognition of that which is not, and,
 
 OF HUMAN INTELLIGENCE 7 1 
 
 therefore, even the frailest and most fleeting 
 thought has form, whether we see it or not. 
 
 But there are certain conditions of a man's 
 mind, usually conditions of negation, conditions 
 of abstraction, during which he is not noticing 
 what is transpiring in his mind, when it is 
 possible for his thoughts to express themselves 
 without the help, or even the cognisance, of 
 the person by whom or from whom they are 
 expressed. In this way they may abstract 
 enough of a man's mentality or body to make 
 themselves visible, not only to the man him- 
 self, but to others. 
 
 The first time I saw " a spirit " was when a 
 student at a Catholic school. It was a bright 
 moonlight night, and about twenty of us had 
 taken a run from the hall door, down through 
 the crisp snow, to an old tree that grew near 
 the house. I stood for a few minutes quite 
 apart from my companions, and found myself 
 looking up into the tree in that condition of 
 thought which is almost entirely unconscious 
 of itself. I was looking at a woman, who was 
 standing far out on one of the limbs of the 
 tree, and who was balanced lightly on one 
 foot, with her other foot swinging, and her 
 arms raised as she held a pale, blue scarf that 
 the wind filled and swung to and fro. I stood
 
 ■J 2 ENDLESS CREATIVENESS 
 
 looking at this marvellous sight without one 
 particle of fear or wonder, or any other feeling 
 that I can recall. The woman's dress was like 
 that of a ballet girl, and the limb on which her 
 foot rested was not larger than a riding whip. 
 
 But, as I continued to look, without any 
 special interest in the sight, I was conscious 
 of the babble of voices kept up by the other 
 girls, though unconscious of what they were 
 saying, until one of them cried out, " Oh ! 
 look up in the tree." A momentary silence 
 ensued, broken by the simultaneous rush which 
 they made toward the house. In another 
 instant I became conscious of the situation, 
 and, turning, I ran after them, becoming more 
 frightened with each step. 
 
 Was this a spirit, or was it a projection from 
 myself? 
 
 Since then I have had many experiences 
 similar to this, and they are all marked by 
 the same absence of a certain part of myself, 
 that prevents the feeling in me of fear or 
 wonder, or any emotion whatever. The re- 
 membrance of things of this kind has often 
 frightened me after they have passed, and I 
 have many times felt a great dread of their 
 recurrence ; but never once have I been fright- 
 ened, or even astonished, at the time.
 
 OF HUMAN INTELLIGENCE 73 
 
 In the same frame of mind — a condition in 
 which I, the person of the house, seem to be 
 almost out of my house — I have heard voices 
 that spoke to me ; but they never told me 
 anything beyond what I could have conceived 
 without them. 
 
 But, perhaps, the most singular of these 
 experiences has been a manifestation of a 
 power that lifts me up, and makes me feel 
 that I do not weigh an ounce. I have lain 
 in bed in a room where the light burned 
 brightly, and have been lifted — bed and all — ■ 
 until I could touch the ceiling with my hand. 
 I have sat on a stout table and been lifted 
 with the table until my head touched the top 
 of the room. 
 
 Friends have said that such marked and 
 various manifestations as these could not be 
 accounted for, except on the theory of spirit 
 agency. 
 
 But I am not convinced of this, though I 
 would have been glad to accept such a con- 
 viction if I could have rested in contentment 
 upon it. The very wonders of the human 
 mind, as they begin to disclose themselves to 
 me during the years I have been devoting 
 myself exclusively to its study, have made it 
 impossible for me to rest such phenomena
 
 74 ENDLESS CREATIVENESS 
 
 upon the generally accepted conclusions of 
 spiritualism. 
 
 This chapter is the first of several chapters, 
 all of which aim at the establishment of the 
 principles on which I base my belief in the 
 power of man to conquer death. I hope I 
 have made it clear that the whole visible 
 universe is mind in different forms of ex- 
 pression, but, lest I have not, I will venture 
 to repeat. I say there is no such thing as 
 " dead " matter. That which we call matter 
 is but varying expressions of the one omni- 
 potent, omniscient and omnipresent mind, or 
 mentality ; that which was and is and ever 
 will be ; that to which nothing can be added, 
 neither taken away. The unseen is as much 
 " matter " as the seen. The seen is as certainly 
 " mind " as the unseen ; the two are one in 
 endless round of varying expression, in which 
 there is never any death of life, but only 
 changing forms of life. The flint which is 
 to-day — the flint of which you say, " It is 
 matter, it is dead " — to-morrow shall have 
 crumbled, shall have become earth ; shall have 
 been absorbed into the stalk of growing wheat ; 
 shall have been eaten, and in the brain of 
 man be retransformed into its original element ; 
 that from which all things have birth — namely,
 
 OF HUMAN INTELLIGENCE 75 
 
 mind. All things, therefore, are mind ; nothing 
 but mind ; always and forever mind ; no differ- 
 ence what the form assumed may be. 
 
 When I say that all is mind, or that there 
 is no such thing as matter, I mean that there 
 is no dead thing — nothing that is not of and 
 resolvable into mind ; mentality ; potentiality ; 
 that which, though not discernible by the 
 physical senses, yet contains all that is or can 
 be. I do not mean that matter is nothing, 
 that it has no existence. I mean that in its 
 last analysis it is mind, intelligence, and it is 
 not dead ; nor can it ever die. 
 
 The infinite mind is measureless. It is 
 omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. In it is 
 all potentiality, the all of all, and outside of 
 it nothing is or can be. Does life exist, and 
 the desire for life in man ? It exists also in 
 the infinite, and it was the desire that called 
 forth form, which first caused the invisible to 
 become visible ; which caused mind to assume 
 the form of rock and tree and animal, and 
 finally of man. 
 
 And when men clearly perceive this truth, 
 and when the knowledge of it shall have be- 
 come truly a part of them — shall, as it were, 
 have infused their conscious selves, will they 
 not know that they can control that which they
 
 ?6 ENDLESS CREATIVENESS 
 
 are? Knowing is being. When men know that 
 they are deathless the}' will have become so. 
 
 If man and all nature were dead matter, then 
 there would be good reason for death to hold 
 the sceptre over life ; but the fact that what 
 has previously been called dead matter is an 
 ever -living, ever -progressive substance, which 
 constantly evolves individual life out of itself, 
 cannot fail to destroy the power of death as 
 soon as the truth and the law are made known. 
 
 In order to make all clear I must show the 
 reader something of the wonderful powers 
 vested in mind. I have spoken of what 
 appeared to be spirits, but which may simply 
 prove to be some, as yet, misunderstood 
 function of the mind. As I go on I shall 
 speak of other things that prove the almost 
 undreamed-of power of mind ; I do so in order 
 to show that there is nothing impossible to the 
 human mind, and in this way lead the reader 
 to see that death is not going to be a difficult 
 thing to conquer, since its conquest only 
 depends upon the farther expansion of our 
 minds. And this expansion depends exclu- 
 sively on our own effort.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 ALL GROWTH IS A REVOLT AGAINST THE 
 CLAIMS OF THE SO-CALLED LAW OF 
 GRAVITATION 
 
 No man has tested the powers of his own mind ; 
 no man knows its mysterious complications, or 
 dreams of the strange seed lying dormant 
 within it, and capable of springing up into the 
 blossoming and fruitage of such wonders as it 
 would be madness even to name in these pages. 
 But in these years of study that I speak of, 
 enough has been revealed to me of the giant 
 power sleeping in the brain of the race, to keep 
 me from wandering off to other worlds for a 
 solution of its exceptional actions. Many 
 things concerning it that will seem fabulous to 
 others, I know to be true ; and, indeed, so 
 great have become my conceptions of its possi- 
 bilities, that at this time I have pulled up all 
 the stakes that have ever, to me, environed 
 it, and have established it in my belief as re- 
 spondent in all particulars to that omnipotent, 
 omniscient and omnipresent principle of life 
 that men call God.
 
 78 THE SO-CALLED LAW 
 
 I think it will readily be seen how — there 
 being no nothing, and thoughts being things — 
 a thought may appear in objectivity from 
 the thinker, and thereby become discernible by 
 the physical senses of the thinker, to others 
 who may be present. 
 
 The same thing may be said of the voices we 
 hear. 
 
 But these explanations go for nothing, so 
 long as it remains that some seemingly invisible 
 power can overcome the law of gravitation in 
 the human form, and lift it from the earth with 
 evident ease. 
 
 This matter remained a mystery to me for 
 years, until I learned that man had the power 
 to become master of the law of gravitation, after 
 which he could float in the air at his will. 
 
 "But," some one remonstrates, "you had no 
 knowledge of this power, and yet you floated ; 
 therefore, it must be that some power outside 
 of yourself lifted you." 
 
 For a long time I reasoned this way myself; 
 and I believed that I was lifted by spirit power. 
 
 But after a time I considered how it had ever 
 been, that some seemingly accidental exhibi- 
 tion of a new power had come as a forerunner 
 to open the eyes of men to a new possibility 
 within themselves ; and I began to see that
 
 OF GRAVITATION 79 
 
 this experience of mine might belong to this 
 same class of premature revelations. 
 
 I could readily admit that if it were in a 
 man's power to overcome the law of gravity 
 (so-called), accidental conditions of thought 
 might arise within him, unanalysed by him- 
 self, that for the time being would lift him 
 into the air. 
 
 The more I thought about it, the more I 
 became convinced of it. The more I reasoned 
 on the law of gravitation, the law which seems 
 to draw all things to the centre of the earth, 
 the more clearly I saw that it was the Law 
 of Attraction in its action upon — so-called — 
 dead matter ; and that there was no power 
 that could of itself draw anything toward the 
 earth's centre, provided the thing to be drawn 
 did not want to be drawn in that direction. 
 
 That any substance or thing, no matter how 
 powerful, could refuse to obey this law, proved 
 at once that there was a higher power than the 
 law, or else that the law was not understood. 
 
 Of course, I at once assumed that the law 
 was not understood. 
 
 The law of gravitation is that power which 
 draws towards the centre of the earth ; but 
 what is the Law of Attraction ? 
 
 I answer that there is but one law, and I
 
 SO THE SO-CALLED LAW 
 
 shall call it the Law of Attraction. The — 
 so-called — law of gravitation is the negative 
 action of the Law of Attraction. In other 
 words, it is the Law of Attraction in its action 
 upon what is called dead matter ; it is power- 
 less upon all substances in proportion to the 
 intelligence of the substance. It cannot compel 
 the intelligent will of any creature to obey it. 
 Indeed, I may state it in this way ; that while 
 the law of gravitation, the law that draws to 
 the earth's centre, is operative upon mind in 
 its unawakened condition, it is powerless to 
 act on mind in which a will has been developed. 
 As weak a thing as a blade of grass obeys 
 its own will ; a will that leads it upward instead 
 of downward toward the earth's centre. I saw 
 it rise out of the earth, and begin its little 
 journey toward the sun. I saw as feeble a 
 thing as a crawling worm overcome the earth's 
 attraction, and mount a tree trunk, climbing 
 upward in obedience to its own awakening per- 
 ceptions of the Law of Attraction expressed 
 in itself as will power. 
 
 I saw that while "dead matter," which is 
 mind unconscious of its own will, was held to 
 the earth's centre, that " live matter," which is 
 mind conscious of its own will, was on a journey 
 in another direction.
 
 OF GRAVITATION 8 1 
 
 Then there is no law that holds objects to 
 the earth's centre, provided the objects have a 
 will to travel toward the sun. This so-called 
 law is the law of inertia ; the law of death to 
 the dead ; or, in strict truth, it is the absence, 
 as nearly as can be, of the Law of Attraction, 
 which is the only law of life ; the law of growth. 
 
 The law of gravitation is the negative pole 
 of the Law of Attraction, or the law of being. 
 
 The peach ripens and falls ; it falls toward 
 the earth. Why ? 
 
 Because it is so much inert substance, and it 
 is drawn to a larger body of inert substance. 
 If the peach had been larger and heavier than 
 the earth, it would have drawn the earth to it. 
 
 In bodies of equal deadness, by which I 
 mean bodies that are equally lacking in con- 
 sciousness of will, the power to draw each other 
 is dependent on their size and weight. But 
 once introduce into inert mind (matter) the 
 vitalising principle of conscious will, and the 
 whole statement is changed. Size and weight 
 have nothing to do with the drawing power ; 
 the conscious will is under obedience only to 
 its own desire. The latent power slumbering 
 in matter has awakened, and it has come under 
 obedience to the Law of Attraction. 
 
 It has evolved a will that its intelligence 
 F
 
 82 THE SO-CALLED LAW 
 
 recognises as its leading power, and it goes to 
 any place toward which the will may point, 
 whether toward the earth or away from it. If 
 it goes away from the earth, as all advanced 
 life does in its growth, it goes as far away as its 
 intelligence permits it to go. That is, it goes as 
 far as it believes that it can go ; its belief in this 
 particular marking the limit of its intelligence. 
 Flying creatures are more unlimited in their 
 belief in this one matter than the creatures that 
 remain on the earth. And it is because they 
 do realise more of the Law of Attraction than 
 other creatures that they have sprouted wings. 
 The law of cosmogony expresses itself in con- 
 formity with a belief in the Law of Attraction ; 
 and evolution has steadily proceeded on this 
 principle from the first effort of individualism 
 to man. 
 
 The Law of Attraction is the law of gravita- 
 tion raised from a basis of unconscious life or 
 ignorance of life, to a conception of life in 
 which the will becomes the principal factor, 
 and elects for itself the direction in which it 
 shall be attracted. Intelligence refuses obedi- 
 ence to mere bulk and weight, and follows any 
 attraction that seems good to it. 
 
 A grain of sand is under obedience to the 
 law of gravitation ; the earth holds it to itself.
 
 OF GRAVITATION 83 
 
 But imagine the grain of sand changed to a 
 minute insect ; it instantly declares its freedom 
 from the law that influences the grain of sand, 
 and lifts itself up above the earth. And it will 
 retain its independence of the earth until it 
 dies ; then the earth, by the law of deadness, 
 in which bulk and weight make the attraction, 
 claims its own, and the insect lies helpless 
 upon it. 
 
 The whole tendency of evolution is from 
 inertia to activity ; from deadness to life ; from 
 obedience to the law of inert or unawakened 
 substance — the law of gravitation — to the in- 
 telligent attraction which is the law of awakened 
 or conscious substance. 
 
 In strict truth there is no dead substance, 
 because all substance holds life in latency ; but 
 until the latent life-principle begins to express 
 itself intelligently, this substance is under 
 obedience to the law of gravitation only. 
 
 But, as substance does express itself more 
 and more intelligently, the law of gravitation 
 loses its force, and the Law of Attraction is 
 substituted. Thus all individual lives work out 
 their own freedom through intellectual growth. 
 
 Intellectual growth is the liberation from the 
 law of gravitation, which is the law of death, or 
 rather the no-law of life ; because death has no
 
 84 THE SO-CALLED LAW OF GRAVITATION 
 
 law, but is simply the negation of the Principle 
 of Attraction, which is the law of life. 
 
 Alan becomes more free from the — so-called 
 — law of — so-called — dead matter with every 
 acquisition of intelligence he makes ; and he is 
 now approaching a plane of knowledge, where 
 he will realise that by the Law of Attraction 
 he can break his allegiance to the earth and 
 float in the air. And this will simply be the 
 beginning of his exploits in this direction. 
 
 As I — from some peculiar and accidental 
 consciousness of this great truth — actually 
 floated in the air, so the time will come in 
 which I shall learn how I did it ; and thus be 
 able to do it again. 
 
 It is probable that in my then negative 
 condition a higher sense of freedom took 
 possession of me, which my uneducated 
 faculties would have denied, and thus frus- 
 trated the phenomenon, but that — for the time 
 being — they were inoperative, and did not 
 put in their ignorant protest.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE ONE MIGHTY FACTOR IN RACE GROWTH 
 IS THOUGHT 
 
 MAN is a compendium of all the lives that 
 have existed before him ; but he does not show 
 forth the full power of all those individual lives. 
 He is — in his present stage of development — 
 a compromise of them all. 
 
 The power of all of them, and vastly more 
 power, lies stored in his brain, but it has not 
 yet been expressed in his personality. It is in 
 his power to express, and by his intelligent 
 belief in its presence he will be able to ex- 
 press it. 
 
 Belief in self is the key that unlocks all 
 this stored power. If I did not believe I 
 could draw a bucket of water out of the well, 
 I would never draw it. If I did not believe 
 I could write an article, I could never write 
 it. The paralytic believes he cannot move 
 his hand, and he does not move it. The 
 mental healer, in his treatment of this 
 disease, does not even think of the hand ; he 
 directs his thought to the patient's brain, and 
 85
 
 86 ONE MIGHTY FACTOR 
 
 corrects his mistaken belief in his own power. 
 All disease is of the brain. A belief in disease 
 is the brain's own under-estimate of its power. 
 The brain has weakened in its belief of what 
 it is and what it can do, and the body shows 
 forth the brain's error. 
 
 A woman came to me one day with the 
 sickness of a decade in every part of her body. 
 Long years of a life totally unappreciated by 
 others, and a lack of self-esteem on her own 
 part, had brought her to the condition in which 
 I saw her. Her wonderful eyes, and the entire 
 wreck of her queenly beauty, impressed me 
 greatly. A few minutes' conversation showed 
 me the situation. I did not offer to treat her ; 
 I told her how beautiful and how great she 
 was. I told her what splendid possibilities I 
 saw in her mind ; she knew I was telling her 
 the truth, and she was well in that hour. Day 
 by day from that time her body showed forth 
 her renewed trust and confidence in her own 
 intellect ; her individuality strengthened until 
 the negations that had once submerged and 
 held her under, became the servants that 
 ministered to her uplifting. 
 
 The intellect is the shaping power in the 
 body. It is true that the body builds the 
 brain ; but the brain reciprocates by building
 
 IN RACE GROWTH 8? 
 
 the body. Every higher thought a man has 
 records itself in some added power in the 
 body ; and if this could go on day by day, 
 the body would become more and more 
 a revised expression of a revised mode of 
 thinking. 
 
 And just so, in the opposite direction, the 
 body may and does deteriorate. 
 
 How is it that the man of science can take 
 an animal's skull, and from its shape tell us 
 just what the animal was like, and what it 
 fed on, and all the particulars concerning it? 
 It is because the brain shapes the body ; and 
 when he gets a correct idea of the brain from 
 the shape of the skull, he has no difficulty in 
 describing the animal that owned it, and naming 
 the family to which it belonged. 
 
 Familiarity with the correlation between the 
 brain of the animal and the different members 
 of the body of the animal, also enables these 
 men of science to work the same problem 
 backward. They will take any well-defined 
 bone of the animal and describe all the animal's 
 clearly marked characteristics. The relation 
 between the brain and the different parts of 
 the body is exact. 
 
 Surely there is a big lesson in this for him 
 who thinks. From the very earliest forms of
 
 88 ONE MIGHTY FACTOR 
 
 organisation clear up to man, there has been 
 a steady increase of brain power, and a steady 
 improvement in the shape of the head. Not 
 in a single instance has there been a sudden 
 jump from low to high. And never has there 
 been any real retrogression. There have been 
 instances in race growth which seemed like 
 retrogression, but which were truly a kind 
 of a retrogressive progression ; being but a 
 temporary halt in the upward journey of the 
 incessant brain, or a going back a few paces 
 to bring up the lagging forces. 
 
 There is no missing link. Race growth has 
 been as even and steady as the growth of a 
 child from infancy to manhood. And the one 
 factor in its growth has been thought. 
 
 Let no one imagine that thought is confined 
 to human beings alone. All creatures think. 
 Animals think ; plants think ; and even crystals 
 think. They think the thoughts that render 
 them obedient to the operation of the Law of 
 Attraction, by whose power they are drawn 
 into certain forms. The grass thinks ; it 
 aspires or desires, and its aspirations or de- 
 sires find a ready response in nature, and the 
 result is growth. Every upward step in the 
 scale of creation is marked by a greater power 
 of thought in the creatures ; and this greater
 
 IN RACE GROWTH 89 
 
 power of thought produces more powerful 
 creatures. And so thought, even in its low- 
 est forms, expressed in desire, relates the 
 creature, under the ever active Principle of 
 Attraction, to that which it desires ; and the 
 stones emerge into gigantic vegetation ; the 
 vegetation becomes concentrated into a drop 
 of protoplasm ; the protoplasm, by the same 
 potency of thought, expressing the ever-grow- 
 ing desire for an enlarged life, greater happi- 
 ness and greater freedom, sprouts a digestive 
 system ; puts forth from its body the necessary 
 instruments by which to supply the digestive 
 system with food ; eyes, ears, claws, legs, 
 members both offensive and defensive, until 
 the ripened man, with his noble brain, is here. 
 
 And still the same system of growth goes 
 on. The ripened man is man only in his form ; 
 the strength and character of his animal pro- 
 genitors have passed into his brain and live 
 there in disguise, or show forth in cunningly 
 devised methods for the attainment of that 
 power which the beasts — his forefathers — took 
 by force of muscle and cunning. Society is a 
 compromise based on fear, and religion is a 
 superstition founded also on fear. 
 
 And yet this condition is only an attitude 
 in race growth, and it is all right for the stage
 
 90 ONE MIGHTY FACTOR IN RACE GROWTH 
 
 of growth it represents. It is not the desirable 
 thing any more than the bitter and unripe peach 
 is the desirable thing ; but it is on the way to 
 becoming the right thing. It will always be 
 becoming more and more the right thing ; for 
 it, like the individuals that compose it, is on 
 the road of endless progression — forever ripen- 
 ing but never ripe ; forever incarnating in itself 
 more and more of the vast possibilities latent 
 in the law of being — the Principle of Attraction 
 — but never exhausting the fulness of the law, 
 and, therefore, never ripe.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 MAN HAS NO FETTERS BUT THOSE OF HIS 
 OWN IGNORANCE : AND NOTHING BUT 
 HIS OWN INTELLIGENCE WILL LIBERATE 
 HIM FROM THEM 
 
 To think in the old ruts is to remain in the 
 old conditions. 
 
 To think expansively is to grow endlessly in 
 the direction of freedom and happiness. 
 
 Death is not growth. It solves no problem. 
 
 Man at this time is all that his animal pro- 
 genitors are, and more. The strength of muscle 
 which they exhibited, finds its expression in 
 him, in his brain and not in his muscle. The 
 quality of every faculty they possessed is con- 
 densed in his brain ; in ceasing to become 
 animal, and in becoming more and more man, 
 the attributes that expressed themselves in the 
 body of animals express themselves with ten- 
 fold more force in the brain of the man. 
 
 In fact, the process of growth has been a 
 
 process of brain making. The awakening of 
 
 life from the inertia that holds it obedient to 
 
 that downward attraction, called the law of 
 
 9i
 
 92 MAN HAS NO FETTERS 
 
 gravitation, has been one steady advancement 
 of all things toward brain ; toward the power 
 to think ; toward the freedom that thought 
 alone can insure ; toward the conquest of en- 
 vironment that thought alone can master. 
 
 I am not making an exaggerated statement 
 when I say that the road of life, the road of 
 progress, is from a belief in that inert substance 
 we call matter, to a belief in mind. 
 
 This inert substance we call matter, and 
 which is under the (so-called) law of gravita- 
 tion, is, in point of absolute truth, all mind or 
 brain or thought ; but it is unawakened mind, 
 and, therefore, unconscious or " dead " mind ; 
 mind whose powers are latent or unexpressed. 
 
 The steady effort of the ages has been to 
 liberate this substance from its unconscious 
 obedience to the law of gravitation — the law 
 of the dead to the dead — by awakening it to 
 a consciousness of its power to think ; thus 
 demonstrating to it that it is mind, living and 
 active and free, subject to the Principle of 
 Attraction only. 
 
 I cannot repeat too often the great fact that 
 there is no dead matter ; that there is no death 
 in the universe ; that what is called dead 
 matter is unawakened mind ; that every atom 
 in the world is mind, either awakened to a
 
 BUT THOSE OF IGNORANCE 93 
 
 sense of its own power, or holding its power 
 in the unconsciousness of latency. It is on this 
 mighty truth that man's salvation depends. 
 
 What we call matter is the recognition of 
 something. Every atom of it is a magnet. A 
 magnet is that which recognises the Principle 
 of Attraction within itself. If the recognition 
 is so feeble that it yields obedience only to that 
 comparatively unintelligent force expressed in 
 bulk and weight, it recognises bulk and weight, 
 and yields its recognition to it, and is then said 
 to be under the law of gravitation. 
 
 But no matter what it recognises, the fact 
 that it recognises anything at all proves that 
 it is mind. Dead matter cannot recognise. 
 Recognition is a faculty of mind. 
 
 The law of being, the Principle of Attraction, 
 exists. No one knows anything about it except 
 that it exists. 
 
 It is that unseen principle running through 
 all things, to whose power man can add 
 nothing. It is unchangeable. Our recogni- 
 tion or comprehension of it changes constantly, 
 but it never changes. 
 
 All nature, with man at its head, is the 
 recognition or the comprehension of this 
 principle. Not a perfect recognition or com- 
 prehension of it — it can never be perfectly
 
 94 MAX HAS NO FETTERS 
 
 comprehended — but a partial and constantly 
 improving and growing" comprehension of it. 
 
 Men call this Law of Attraction God ; but 
 the word is unscientific and misleading. Sub- 
 stitute the word " law " for " God," in Pope's 
 lines, and they would explain all. 
 
 "The universe is one stupendous whole 
 Whose body nature is, and law the soul.'' 
 
 As our bodies are the perception, or the 
 understanding, or the recognition of our spirits, 
 so is all nature the perception, or the under- 
 standing, or the recognition of this infinite spirit 
 — the unseen life-principle which I call the 
 Law of Attraction or the law of being. 
 
 Understanding, recognition,' the power to 
 perceive, does not belong to anything but 
 mind ; therefore, all visible things are mind ; 
 no matter how apparently dead this substance 
 called matter may seem, the Law of Attraction 
 is latent in it, and in the farther process of 
 evolution it will recognise the fact, thus proving 
 that it is mind. 
 
 And mind, no matter how crude it may be, 
 is one form of brain, out of which the higher 
 or governing brain proceeds ; the brain which 
 begets the intelligent will ; whose mandate 
 governs the entire bodv.
 
 BUT THOSE OF IGNORANCE 95 
 
 It may be said that nature is all brain 
 ranging numberless degrees from coarse to fine, 
 from the crudest substance to the highest 
 thought, as water ranges from solid ice to the 
 invisible gas generated by steam. 
 
 That wonderfully volatile fluid we call elec- 
 tricity is, in its own way, a certain form, and a 
 very vital form, of recognition of the Law of 
 Attraction, and is, therefore, mind, brain, intelli- 
 gence or thought. 
 
 Nature, being in all particulars the recogni- 
 tion of that vital principle called the Law of 
 Attraction, it will be seen that she is all mind, 
 whose power to grow lies in her continued 
 power to think more intelligently than she 
 has previously thought. 
 
 Our visible world has now thought itself up 
 to its present position, which is a higher point 
 of intelligence than it has ever before reached. 
 From the fiery mass that it was in our first 
 knowledge of it, where the Law of Attraction 
 between the atoms seemed so feeble in its 
 power, because so little recognised, that it 
 appeared to be rather a law of repulsion, on up 
 through every grade of ripening recognition of 
 the law, with its consequent forms of greater 
 intelligence — we have come to this, our present 
 plane of thought.
 
 96 MAX HAS NO FETTERS 
 
 And yet here, in spite of our past record, 
 with its unflagging development in every direc- 
 tion, there are thousands of our people who 
 affirm that the world has ceased growing. 
 
 Or, rather, I may say, there are tens of 
 thousands — nay, millions — who do not know 
 that the whole visible world is a growth in the 
 understanding of the law of being ; who do not 
 believe it ; and who are, therefore, unprepared 
 to accept the statement that its position in 
 growth is still in infancy, and that its power to 
 keep on growing is endless. 
 
 But, whether they accept it or not, it is true ; 
 and no truth even approaching the glory of this 
 truth has ever been announced before. 
 
 The visible world grows by its acquisition of 
 intelligence, or rather, by its development out 
 of itself of more and more power to recognise 
 the unfailing, the infinite possibilities of the 
 Principle of Attraction, which is the law of 
 being. 
 
 Thus, the potency of mind increases daily, 
 and as it increases its environments give way, 
 and happiness and freedom come more readily 
 within its grasp. 
 
 The idea that the race has achieved even a 
 minimum of the power that is in store for it is 
 absurd.
 
 BUT THOSE OF IGNORANCE 97 
 
 The idea that the race must continue to wear 
 its fetters because they are " God-imposed " is 
 still more absurd. 
 
 Man has no fetters but those of his own 
 ignorance, and nothing but intelligence will 
 liberate him from such fetters. 
 
 You may take from him every visible environ- 
 ment ; you may heap him with wealth ; you 
 may place him in high position ; but, unless 
 he has come into the saving knowledge which 
 an intellectual perception of his own boundless 
 resources yields him, he is not free. Ignorance 
 still holds him and will pull him down to old 
 age, feebleness and the grave. 
 
 And what but these — old age, feebleness and 
 the grave — are our real fetters? What have 
 we gained though we conquer everything else, 
 and these remain? It may be that the spirit 
 survives the body, as spiritualism believes it 
 has demonstrated ; but even in this case, a 
 man's sphere of activities is removed from his 
 workshop, the earth ; and his death is a break 
 in what should be an unbroken line of growth. 
 
 I do not believe that true, healthy growth 
 can proceed through the tortuous weakness 
 of old age, decrepitude and death. True intel- 
 ligence, the farther recognition of the Law, 
 which alone is growth, is not in these condi- 
 G
 
 98 MAN HAS NO FETTERS 
 
 tions. Nothing is in these conditions but the 
 denial or the non - recognition of the Law ; 
 which is a slipping back from a certain condi- 
 tion of incarnate intelligence into a condition 
 of ignorance, wherein the previous condition of 
 intelligence, the incarnate condition of it, is 
 denied or cancelled. 
 
 Even in this denial or cancellation of the 
 previous condition, it may be that the spirit 
 survives, and I believe that it does ; but I do 
 not believe that the person has gained by the 
 change ; indeed, I feel certain that he has 
 lost ; and, though the loss may not be irre- 
 parable, yet it is a mighty loss and ought to 
 be avoided. 
 
 And it can be avoided. 
 
 If I did not know that the loss of the body 
 — which is the condensed bulk of the man's 
 beliefs — could be avoided, I would never have 
 written so much as the first line of this book. 
 
 But I do know it. 
 
 I have frequently been asked to establish 
 this statement by producing an instance in 
 which some one had conquered death. 
 
 There was a time when there was no animal 
 life on this planet at all ; did the fact that 
 there was none then form a true basis of belief 
 that there would never be any ?
 
 BUT THOSE OF IGNORANCE 99 
 
 Because the cave-dwellers had never produced 
 a Plato, was that a valid reason for supposing 
 there would never be one ? 
 
 Those who are limited to a belief that the 
 race is ripe, and that there will be no farther 
 development than there has already been, are 
 in no condition either to deny or affirm the 
 statements I am prepared to make on this 
 subject. They do not know that the race is 
 a growth. They have never examined its past 
 history ; this history that began millions of 
 years before it actually appeared in its present 
 form ; and their opinions, as weighed against 
 the opinion of one who has learned the situa- 
 tion by heart, are absolutely worthless. 
 
 I have studied this matter of race growth 
 for many years. I began to be the race's 
 champion and defender when a child. I was 
 scarcely out of my teens before a burning sense 
 of disgust for the foolish and false theologies 
 of the day took possession of me. I knew 
 that we were not wilful sinners against a 
 higher power, but simply ignorant children 
 feeling our way through intellectual darkness, 
 and stumbling at every step. Without knowing 
 it, having no positive information by which to 
 bolster up my belief on this subject, I simply 
 held to it because it was part of me, and I
 
 IOO .MAN HAS NO FETTERS 
 
 could no more get rid of it than I could get 
 rid of my head. It became the dominant force 
 of my existence, and the chief source of my 
 vitality. In the midst of sickness, it kept me 
 whole ; in positions that would have been death 
 to another, I was unscathed. 
 
 In point of fact, it was nothing more than 
 a larger seeing, a deeper recognition of the Life 
 Principle, than that possessed by the average 
 person. 
 
 Having more life, I felt more life, and death 
 seemed farther away and more indefinite to 
 me than to others. 
 
 As I grew older, the possibility of avoiding 
 it entirely began to take form in my intelli- 
 gence. It was not that I feared death, for 
 it never seemed sufficiently real to fear. The 
 idea of overcoming it came to me as a part 
 of my growth, in which it seemed better to 
 acquiesce consciously, so that I might thereby 
 note every step of its progress. Naturally 
 observant and introspective, I was curious 
 about it ; all my interest was aroused and 
 something firmer than interest ; a deep-seated 
 determination to carry the thing through to 
 success became a fixed factor of my mind. 
 
 It is strange how, by simply holding an 
 idea or belief, it aggregates to itself certain
 
 BUT THOSE OF IGNORANCE IOI 
 
 mental building material, until it stands im- 
 pregnable and apparently deathless. This is 
 now the condition of my belief in the possi- 
 bility of immortality in the flesh. I have not 
 read books, I have not sought outside of myself 
 for reasons to strengthen my position ; I have 
 held to it simply because it has held to me ; 
 and out of my own organism has been unfolded 
 the course of reasoning by which I have demon- 
 strated its truth to myself. I believe in it as 
 firmly as I believe in my personal presence in 
 this room ; and the world is going to believe 
 it before many years shall pass. 
 
 It is true that the spirit of Malthus is wide- 
 spread at this stage of human development, and 
 questions are frequent as to what will become 
 of the earth's overflowing population if im- 
 mortality in the flesh should become possible. 
 The natural Malthusian is one who has not 
 penetrated even to the slightest degree into the 
 realm of the ideal, where alone immortality in 
 the flesh can become possible. He does not 
 know that life, when lifted from its belief in 
 the deadness of matter, enters the thought 
 realm, in which the supply is equal to the 
 demand. 
 
 But this is so. As soon as a man steps up 
 from a belief in matter as dead substance, and
 
 102 MAN HAS NO FETTERS 
 
 perceives that all is life, and that every form of 
 life is on the wing, as it were, from lower to 
 higher, and that there is no stagnation possible 
 to growth — he will then know that the earth 
 will not be overcrowded by a too rapidly ac- 
 cumulating population. 
 
 The old saying that " there is room at the 
 top" applies here. The pioneers in civilisation 
 or in thought always find themselves rather 
 lonesome than otherwise. The space outside 
 the herds is unlimited. Especially is this true 
 in the realm of thought ; the realm of the ideal, 
 which we are now on the verge of entering. 
 
 It is true that the world would soon become 
 overcrowded, if people should keep producing 
 children who would never die, unless some way 
 should be provided for them to leave the earth. 
 
 But the entire range of creation is open to 
 man, and there is nothing but his ignorance of 
 his own powers and privileges that will keep 
 him in one place. 
 
 It is true that no God will ever interfere in 
 his behalf to lift him into more enlarged spheres 
 of activity ; but no God will ever prohibit him 
 from lifting himself into these spheres. 
 
 Indeed, such lifting is correlated to the man's 
 lifted and enlarged thought. As the man ex- 
 pands in his thought life, he will be met by
 
 BUT THOSE OF IGNORANCE IO3 
 
 more expansive conditions ; and the possibility 
 of fettering him to one point in the universe 
 will cease. It is by thought expansion that a 
 man's fetters fall from him. 
 
 Thought is the conqueror of everything that 
 hampers and binds. It cannot make even the 
 smallest conquest over its surroundings, that it 
 does not come at once into relation with ex- 
 ternal conditions better suited to its enlarged 
 sense of freedom. 
 
 Indeed, it almost seems as if these freer con- 
 ditions constantly pressed in on the thought 
 of the race, as if consciously resolved to be 
 recognised. 
 
 The croakers of the world cried out that the 
 coal beds were becoming exhausted, and that 
 the race was doomed in consequence. A wider 
 range of thought was correlated by the sub- 
 stance of electricity, and the world came out 
 of its nervous chill on the subject of coal. 
 
 Because balloons have proved a failure, does 
 anyone suppose that the air will never be navi- 
 gated ? Even if gas and machinery fail to 
 accomplish this thing, there is a power latent 
 in man's organism that will do it ; namely, the 
 power of thought, to which all substances are 
 negative. 
 
 Immortality in the flesh would be neither
 
 104 MAN HAS NO FETTERS 
 
 possible nor desirable if man were to remain 
 the helpless and ignorant creature that he 
 now is. 
 
 It would not be desirable because the universe 
 can furnish no excuse for the perpetuation of 
 ignorance. It would not be possible, because 
 ignorance is death already ; at least, it is the 
 nearest approach to death that life renders 
 possible. 
 
 To keep the race forever alive in its present 
 animalised condition, would be to perpetuate 
 ignorance ; to keep it as a stagnant pool in the 
 heart of universal progression ; and this could 
 not be. Perpetual change is the order of life. 
 He who catches on to higher thought and holds 
 it with a faith so firm that it crystallises into 
 belief, is on the upward move, where higher 
 influences meet him, and fix his thought in 
 tangible substance. 
 
 He who turns from his higher thought, doubt- 
 ing its practicability, pinches himself into con- 
 stantly lowering conditions, until he is pinched 
 out. There is progression for the one, and, at 
 least, a temporary retrogression for the other ; 
 but there is no standing still. Therefore, im- 
 mortality in the present status of universal race 
 thought here in this world is not possible now. 
 
 But the dawn of it is here. The beginning
 
 BUT THOSE OF IGNORANCE 105 
 
 of that credence in the human ideal, which 
 alone will usher it in, is here. It is here for 
 no less a reason than because woman, with 
 her strongly intuitional nature, has come to 
 the front. Woman has brought the morning 
 of a new era with her ; and, as her feet obtain 
 firmer standing in the slushy quagmire of the 
 world's present condition of thought, the morn- 
 ing of her day will brighten into the full 
 splendour of a noon that will arrest and hold 
 the entire interest of the millions of dying 
 souls about us. 
 
 This much is already accomplished. The 
 beginning of the dawn is here. Universal 
 thought has begun to move. A ripple runs 
 along the full length of its connected links, even 
 though it is only the few who stand in the 
 front that are capable of seeing the light that 
 shines so brightly ahead. 
 
 If this movement had to be confined to our 
 earth, as the Malthusians all must imagine, 
 then its scope would be so small as to furnish 
 a reason for their doubts. But, because man's 
 growth is limitless — and by his ever-increasing 
 power of thought I know that his growth is 
 limitless — the fact shadows forth the possibility 
 of his leaving the earth when he shall have 
 learned how to do so.
 
 106 MAN HAS NO FETTERS 
 
 More than this. In the economy of nature 
 the time will come when generation will lose 
 itself in regeneration. 
 
 Conditions adapt themselves to each other. 
 When one thread is spun out, there is 
 another thread waiting there to meet the out- 
 stretched hand of him who has resolved to 
 go ahead. To him who is not so resolved, 
 and who does not know his power to go on, 
 though the thread is there, it is not there for 
 him, because he does not see it. And so he 
 falls, not because life was lacking, but because 
 the individual intelligence with which he should 
 have grasped it was wanting.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 DESIRE THE ORGANISING PRINCIPLE 
 
 Since the first two atoms came together under 
 the Law of Attraction and produced the earliest 
 specimen of individual life upon our planet, the 
 vitality of the race has been slowly ripening 
 up to the point where immortality in the flesh 
 could become a possible thing. As the vital 
 powers have ripened, conditions have also 
 ripened, to meet the needs of more vital 
 creatures, and thus the supply has been equal 
 to the demand. 
 
 Indeed, the saying that the supply is equal 
 to the demand is grounded in the Principle 
 of Attraction. It is one of the absolute truths. 
 
 Whether what I call the life of immortality 
 in the flesh is desirable or practical hinges 
 on one point. If the substance all about us 
 that we see in existing forms of life, the forms 
 of minerals, plants and animals is dead matter, 
 infused by living spirit, then our only hope 
 of prolonging our lives will be by some method 
 that will release the spirit from the matter. 
 107
 
 IOS DESIRE IS 
 
 And this position is accepted as the truth 
 almost the whole world over. 
 
 Dead matter can never be permanently en- 
 livened by spirit, nor is it desirable that spirit 
 should load itself down with something that 
 is forever dead. Moreover, if this is the true 
 condition, it never has been necessary for 
 spirit to be so loaded with the dead weight 
 of matter ; and the entire combination has 
 been a very grave mistake, ruining, or, at least, 
 deferring, the happiness of every spirit that 
 ever entered the material life. 
 
 If I knew this to be the true situation, I 
 would never move my hand to save my own 
 life ; I would look forward to the time when 
 my spirit would drop its load of death, as the 
 chained and barred prisoner looks forward to 
 the hope of freedom. 
 
 Long and earnestly I pondered the subject 
 of dead matter with its infusion of living spirit, 
 and wondered why a union of two things so 
 diametrically opposite to each other should be 
 either necessary or desirable. Presently I knew 
 that it could not be ; because, if matter is dead, 
 then the Law of Attraction cannot exist in it, 
 and it is absolutely immovable by any force 
 whatever. It has no power to respond to any- 
 thing ; it is helpless ; without the principle of
 
 THE ORGANISING PRINCIPLE 109 
 
 cohesion ; and entirely useless in the building 
 of worlds or of men. 
 
 In this thought, which I knew to be correct, 
 I touched the negative pole of the truth I was 
 seeking. 
 
 If matter was a dead substance, it was dead, 
 and there was no inherent power in it, and no 
 latent life. It was simply dead, and had no 
 place whatever in the universe of uses. That 
 the substance called matter did exist there was 
 no denying, even through the visionary process 
 of Christian Science. The substance existed ; 
 it was an ever-present and an indispensable 
 reality. 
 
 " Indispensable " — this was a fortunate word. 
 Dead matter could not be indispensable ; the 
 sooner dead matter and every form of death 
 should be dispensed with, the better. 
 
 What, then, was the substance called dead 
 matter? Did it have life of itself? I answer — 
 yes. 
 
 Then, if it has life of itself, what need has 
 it of the infusing spirit which seems to be a 
 different thing from it ; the infusing spirit that 
 only infuses it a few years and then deserts it, 
 leaving it to be again infused by other spirits, 
 or to remain forever helpless? 
 
 The more I pondered on this subject, the
 
 I 10 DESIRE IS 
 
 more I became convinced that matter had life 
 of itself. 
 
 To have life is to be capable of thought. 
 This proposition brought me face to face with 
 the great truth that every atom in the universe 
 had power to think. In other words, that every 
 atom was transfused with the Principle of 
 Attraction, and responsive to every other atom ; 
 and on this fact alone rested the possibility of 
 organised forms. 
 
 By slow degrees and never-ceasing thought, 
 I found myself in an immaterial universe ; that 
 is, in a universe where all is living, active, vital 
 intelligence, or mind, or thought, or brain, or 
 knowledge. 
 
 Each atom was not a dead thing infused by 
 something else ; it was not a dead thing that 
 yet had the power to recognise the transfusing 
 principle of life within it ; if it were dead it 
 could not recognise anything. But still it 
 existed, and was responsive to other atoms ; 
 what, then, was it ? 
 
 It was mind itself; and mind, which is the 
 recognition of the Law of Attraction, or the 
 law's recognition of itself — substance ; actual 
 substance, to be seen and handled ; to express 
 in its own appearance its own belief in the law, 
 or as much of the law as it could comprehend.
 
 THE ORGANISING PRINCIPLE III 
 
 Here, all in an hour, the whole system of 
 evolution opened up to me. The external 
 world, the world of mind, is in constant effort 
 to express more and more of the law of being, 
 the Law of Attraction, which is the principle 
 of life; the unseen side of itself; the positive 
 and unchangeable I AM ; the constantly grow- 
 ing recognition of which gives ever-improving 
 expressions of itself, from the smallest and 
 weakest individualised life up to man ; and 
 from man as he now stands in his ignorance 
 and helplessness, up through an unending 
 process of improvement, by a constant acquisi- 
 tion of new truths, or an ever-widening recog- 
 nition of the power of the Law. 
 
 The Law of Being, or of Attraction, is to 
 the visible universe what heat is to light. It 
 is the magnetism in the magnet. Every atom 
 is a magnet, and the external or visible part 
 of it is the magnet's recognition of itself, just 
 as light is heat's recognition of itself. 
 
 All power is in the law. 
 
 By all power, I mean all power of organisation. 
 
 In our first knowledge of the world, as stated 
 before, the atoms were so widely diffused as 
 to be almost beyond the reach of each other's 
 attraction. Ages passed ; and the law — always 
 constant to itself in its drawing power — had
 
 I 12 DESIRE IS 
 
 condensed the fiery mass somewhat ; had 
 brought the atoms closer together, so that its 
 drawing influence began to have a greater 
 effect. Then, as the ages went by, the drawing 
 power overcame the distances more and more, 
 and masses began to assume form. 
 
 Through this same process, always increasing 
 in strength, the world was brought to a condition 
 where it became possible for higher conceptions 
 of the Law to be formed. Rocks adhered ; waters 
 gathered themselves together ; a blade of grass 
 put up its daring head, and the first protest 
 of intelligence against bulk and weight, the 
 first rebellion against death, recorded its tiny 
 oath. 
 
 But the poor baby life did die ; recognising 
 nothing but the first faint monition of endless 
 individuality, its little effort lost itself to become 
 merged in another and greater effort. 
 
 And so one species merged into a nobler 
 one ; one genus disappeared, because its power 
 to recognise nothing farther of the possibilities 
 of the Law became its environment ; an en- 
 vironment that nothing but dissolution could 
 break. 
 
 But always the power of the Law was drawing 
 the atoms to closer cohesion ; and the atoms 
 thus cohering were, by their very existence,
 
 THE ORGANISING PRINCIPLE I I 3 
 
 proving the greater potency of individuals to 
 recognise the Law of Being or the Principle 
 of Attraction. 
 
 And so the recognition of the Principle of 
 Attraction or of Being has proceeded right 
 through the ages ; and so it can continue to 
 proceed. 
 
 And although recognition of the Principle 
 of Attraction is the externalising power, the 
 power that makes visible, or marks the show- 
 ing forth of its capabilities, it is a fact that 
 up to the present time, this recognition has 
 been an unconscious recognition ; by which I 
 mean a recognition that has expressed itself 
 in uses, and not a recognition that could give 
 a logical account of itself, and thereby become 
 a conscious recognition. 
 
 Life has heretofore proceeded entirely on the 
 unconscious plane. It has proceeded in the 
 individual by the individual's recognition of 
 his own personal desires. 
 
 Desire is the organising principle ; from first 
 to last it has been so. 
 
 The recognition of desire is the recognition 
 of the law as expressed individually. It is 
 the individual's recognition of the magnetic 
 or attracting power which he sees within him- 
 self. He recognises this attraction or magnet- 
 ic
 
 I 14 DESIRE IS 
 
 ism in himself, and it becomes the law of his 
 individual life. It is that unseen something 
 within him that always cries out for some- 
 thing more than he already possesses. It is 
 the Principle of Life ; the growing principle ; 
 and his recognition of it has brought him 
 steadily up through the centuries from the 
 lowest condition imaginable to his present 
 form, intelligence and strength. 
 
 In obedience to his unconscious recognition 
 of this life-principle expressed individually as 
 desire — he, as the tiny drop of protoplasm, 
 acquired a digestive system and all the ap- 
 pendages necessary to supply it with food. 
 
 In obedience to his love of life, or his desire 
 to have his life perpetuated, his organism pro- 
 duced a reproductive system ; which as yet only 
 serves a part of his purpose ; since it is only far 
 enough evolved to perpetuate his kind without 
 perpetuating himself. 
 
 While generation proceeds in one unbroken 
 stream on the unconscious plane of life, re- 
 generation is not possible except upon the 
 conscious plane ; a plane that the race is now 
 on the verge of reaching. 
 
 All growth depends upon the recognition of 
 the law ; but no thing, and no man, can recog- 
 nise the law in its fulness. Man only recognises
 
 THE ORGANISING PRINCIPLE I I 5 
 
 the law in himself, as it is expressed in his desire 
 for something more than he possesses. 
 
 The recognition of my desires is the recogni- 
 tion of the Law of Attraction in my own life, 
 as separate and apart from the Law of Attrac- 
 tion expressed in other lives. 
 
 The desires I see in myself are evidence of 
 my own self-hood. They form my ego. That 
 I am not in all particulars like my neighbour 
 is because my desires differ from his ; I recog- 
 nise in the law more good than he does, and 
 thereby show forth an organisation superior to 
 his ; or I recognise less good, and show forth 
 an organisation inferior to his ; or both of us 
 may recognise an equal amount of good, but of 
 different kinds, and may show forth organisations 
 equally good, but different from each other. 
 
 And this has been the case all down the 
 scale of being. A blade of grass shows forth 
 as much good as it recognises ; so does a 
 tree, a horse, or an angle worm. 
 
 Our bodies are the records of our beliefs ; 
 and just to the extent that we have believed 
 in our desires, which are of the Law, indivi- 
 dualised within us, we have been true to the 
 Law, or the principle of growth, and have 
 manifested that which seemed good to us ; 
 therefore, I say that as much " good " as we
 
 I 1 6 DESIRE IS 
 
 have recognised in the Law, we have shown 
 forth in our bodies ; thus making our bodies 
 the record of what we desired and believed in. 
 
 The forms of life have been growing more 
 complex from the first inception of the first 
 form, which was nothing more than the cohe- 
 sion through the Principle of Attraction of 
 two or three of the primordial life-cells. 
 
 They have been growing more complex, be- 
 cause as they aggregated to themselves more 
 and still more of the life-cells, their desires 
 became more numerous. This increase in the 
 number and character of their desires was all 
 the time making more powerful magnets of 
 them ; and so evolution proceeded. 
 
 Every visible manifestation of life — mineral, 
 plant and animal — is self-created. 
 
 Life may be called two-fold, even though 
 it is a unit. It may be called two-fold because 
 there is a seen and an unseen side to it. On 
 the unseen side we have the Law of Being 
 or the Principle of Life, which is the Law 
 of Attraction. No man knows anything about 
 it except that it exists. We sec its effects in 
 the magnet ; we see that ever)- life-cell is a 
 magnet, and we know that it is both external 
 and internal ; both seen and unseen ; both 
 positive and negative. The positive side being
 
 THE ORGANISING PRINCIPLE WJ 
 
 the Law, which is unchanging ; the negative 
 side being the recognition of the Law, which 
 is the external side, and which is constantly 
 changing through the increasing or lessening 
 power of individual recognition. 
 
 The more an individual recognises of the 
 power of the Law, the more positive he be- 
 comes. Man, recognising more of the power 
 of the Law than any other creature, is positive 
 to all other creatures ; and being positive to 
 them, he is their master. They supply him 
 in all his many wants. He cuts down the 
 magnificent tree and holds its individuality 
 in subservience to his needs ; he kills the 
 animal and eats its flesh in order to satisfy 
 his desire for food ; he becomes greater and 
 stronger all the time by sacrificing lives that 
 are negative to him. These lower lives pass 
 constantly into his life ; his life would pass 
 into some life higher than his own, but for 
 the fact that his constantly growing brain 
 renders unnecessary any life higher than his. 
 If his brain found its limitation in serving 
 a non-expanding range of uses, like those of 
 the cow or the horse, then nature would beget 
 an organisation superior to his, into which the 
 increasing knowledge of the growing race 
 misht extend.
 
 I I 8 DESIRE IS 
 
 But it is not necessary from the fact that 
 man keeps growing and increasing in know- 
 ledge all the time ; in this way proving that 
 he has no limitation. In consequence of this 
 fact there will be no higher organisation, ex- 
 cept that into which his present organisation 
 will expand by the farther expansion of his 
 intelligence ; or his farther recognition of still 
 greater power existing in the Law. 
 
 Intelligence or mind is the visible substance 
 of the universe ; it is simply the recognition 
 of the Law of Being, which is the Law of 
 Attraction, or the Life-Principle. 
 
 Another statement of this idea would be 
 that the words "love" and "intelligence" are 
 an explanation of it all — love being the un- 
 seen principle of cohesion. The idea expressed 
 in this manner is not new ; it forms the basis 
 of Swedenborg's theory, a theory that he fails 
 to carry out into particulars in his very vol- 
 uminous writings. 
 
 The entire trend of thought is from physical 
 to metaphysical ; and it cannot be otherwise, 
 since race growth is in this direction. 
 
 A belief in the physical as dead matter is 
 all that now holds the race back from the 
 most rapid and startling growth. Freedom — 
 the goal of the world's desire — lies just ahead,
 
 THE ORGANISING PRINCIPLE 119 
 
 and here we remain, tethered to a mistake, 
 a mistake that could not hold us one moment, 
 but for the fact that we are all mind, and that 
 our mistakes are our bodies. Our mistakes 
 are our beliefs ; they are our fixed modes of 
 thought. Therefore, they are our beliefs ; and 
 belief is the body of the individual. The body 
 is not the record of our beliefs ; it is our beliefs ; 
 it is the sum-total of all our beliefs ; for belief, 
 being a mental thing, is real substance ; and, 
 whether belief is true or false, it is a substantial 
 thing so long as it lasts. 
 
 Believing ourselves living spirits chained to 
 dead matter is a mistake as potent to hold us 
 down to what we call the law of gravitation, 
 as if matter really were a dead substance, 
 instead of being what it really is— pure mind, 
 the recognition of the Law of Being — from 
 which it is inseparable. 
 
 The inseparableness of substance from the 
 Law that is its invisible partner, when once 
 seen in its true light, immediately suggests 
 the idea of immortality in the flesh ; especially 
 when taken in connection with the fact that 
 man is self-creative. 
 
 Indeed, but for man's belief in the deadness 
 of matter, and his still more foolish belief that a 
 God made him, he would even at this time be
 
 120 DESIRE IS THE ORGANISING PRINCIPLE 
 
 diseaseless and deathless ; he would, even now, 
 be on the road of endless progression, led ex- 
 clusively by his desires for happiness. He would 
 be trusting the Law, and externalising his desire 
 — which is the Law individualised in him ; and 
 his body would be showing forth greater power 
 and beauty daily. He would be on that plane 
 of thought where his body (which is the con- 
 densed form of his thought) would be growing 
 each day into a new and ever-beautifying 
 revision of his new and beautifying acquisition 
 of intelligence.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 BELIEFS : BOTH FIXED AND UNFIXED 
 
 I NOW leave it to the reader to say whether 
 death is a necessity of our organisation, or a 
 desirable thing, since spirit and matter are not 
 two separate substances ; and I will return to 
 again consider what seems to be the spiri-t 
 forms described so frequently by Spiritualists, 
 and seen by thousands of people. 
 
 Our bodies are the condensed forms of our 
 thoughts, or our beliefs. Thought and belief are 
 in some degree synonymous ; both are forms of 
 recognition ; both are mental expressions. A 
 thought seems not to have the fixed character 
 of a belief; but it may become a belief, and in 
 doing so it will take its place among other 
 fixed beliefs, and be a part of the visible body. 
 Belief is simply thought that becomes fixed. 
 The body is thought, but it is thought that is 
 fixed ; thought whose correctness is not ques- 
 tioned, and (on the mental plane, where we do 
 really exist, whether we are aware of it or not,) 
 becomes visible. Fixed thought is belief; and 
 belief is visible thought expressed in a thousand 
 
 121
 
 122 BELIEFS 
 
 different forms, each form being" its own in- 
 dividual recognition of the possibilities con- 
 tained in the Law of Being. 
 
 Thought — before it becomes fixed in belief — 
 is invisible to our undeveloped perceptions ; it is 
 a reality, though intangible, just as the perfume 
 of flowers and many other ethereal substances, 
 which we are not able to perceive except by 
 their effects. 
 
 And yet the power to see these fine sub- 
 stances is latent among the undiscovered 
 possibilities that will some time awaken within 
 us. Even now we get occasional evidences 
 of their existence, when we are off our 
 guard against everything but the common- 
 place and orthodox attainments of the present. 
 We sometimes forget that we believe in nothing 
 but what we call " established facts," and in 
 these moments of forgetfulness, it may be that 
 some mighty power within us steals a march 
 on us, and shows itself in something unex- 
 pected to, and even unacceptable by, our 
 " sober senses." 
 
 Then it is not impossible that the thought 
 which has so far mastered us as to render us in a 
 measure unconscious of what we are thinking, 
 and watchful of the action of our mind, should 
 suddenly appear before us in the objective.
 
 BOTH FIXED AND UNFIXED 1 23 
 
 It is a living thing ; each atom of its frail 
 being is transfused by the Law. For the time 
 being, it actually has an individuality of its 
 own ; an individuality quite negative, however, 
 to that of its creator, myself, for instance, and 
 holding its objective form in ready obedience 
 to my caprice. 
 
 This is the real condition : I have been in 
 a reverie, a careless state of mind, when my 
 thoughts were shaping themselves uncontrolled 
 by my will. My will, which is my ego, being 
 off guard, there is a tendency to disintegration 
 in my body — the sum of my fixed beliefs. 
 Then, stray thoughts, beliefs which are not 
 fixed, may start up from the careless or in- 
 dolent brain, and actually become sufficiently 
 fixed to be visible. In becoming thus partially 
 fixed, they draw upon the fixed beliefs (my 
 body), which for a time are in a measure 
 unfixed. 
 
 And here we have the double presence, the 
 second part)', which may either be an exact 
 resemblance of ourselves, or the resemblance 
 of some picture that exists, or has existed, at 
 some previous time in the mind. 
 
 I recall an occasion when for a few hours 
 I was so exceedingly negative that these 
 thoughts took objective form by the hundred.
 
 124 BELIEFS 
 
 They were literally annihilating me, and 1 was 
 too weak to resist them. My life seemed to 
 be passing out into them, when the physician 
 was called, and by giving me a stimulant 
 re-established the ego in my organisation, 
 which actually appeared to call into itself and 
 absorb every one of the wandering shapes 
 that were disintegrating my body, and thus 
 becoming objective to me. 
 
 That thoughts are things is a fact that 
 cannot be disputed. We might as well say 
 that ether did not exist, because it is invisible, 
 as to say that thought is nothing because it 
 is not seen under ordinary conditions. 
 
 There is no nothing. Wherever the Law of 
 Attraction is recognised, even in the feeblest 
 manner, there, though unseen, exists the form 
 of that recognition. Recognition is form. 
 Recognition is the making visible of the Law. 
 The Law is the only thing that can be re- 
 cognised. It may be recognised in weakness 
 or in strength ; but wherever it is recognised, 
 no matter whether the recognition is weak or 
 strong, a manifestation of it is inevitable. 
 
 Whether this explanation will apply to every 
 phase of spirit materialisation or not, I cannot 
 say. Nor have I given it in the hope that it 
 will do so ; for there is no pleasanter thought
 
 BOTH FIXED AND UNFIXED 1 25 
 
 to me than that our loved and dead do really 
 live after they have left this sphere, and can 
 return to us again. 
 
 Nor does the fact that our thoughts may 
 take shapes which — under certain conditions — 
 become objective to us, invalidate the claim 
 of Spiritualism, that the spirits of the dead 
 can return and take form. 
 
 My real object in saying what I have said 
 is to prove to the reader what I know to be 
 true ; that there is no nothing ; and that 
 thoughts are things. I also wish to establish 
 the fact that the human mind is an unpro- 
 spected field, and that no one has even the 
 faintest idea of its latent powers. 
 
 In the matter of being lifted from the floor, 
 to which I alluded a few pages back, in con- 
 nection with other Spiritualistic phenomena, 
 I wish to say that this, too, may be, and is, 
 a power that belongs to man ; one that he 
 can exercise at will when he comes to know 
 more of himself and his relation to the Law 
 of his beinsr.
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 THE LAW OF ATTRACTION 
 
 In attempting to define the seeming difference 
 between the law of gravitation and the Law of 
 Attraction, I showed that this seeming differ- 
 ence was a difference in the degree of intelli- 
 gence in the objects that were attracted. I 
 showed how the words l> death to death " 
 would explain the law of gravitation, and 
 " life to life " would explain the Law of 
 Attraction ; in short, that the law of gravitation 
 was the negative pole of the Law of Attraction, 
 since its effects were manifested in objects too 
 ignorant of the Law of Attraction to be lifted 
 by it. 
 
 I said that with the first awakening of intel- 
 ligence, which in all objects, from a grain of 
 sand up to a man, is the recognition of innate- 
 desire, the objects were lifted upward instead 
 of being held downward. The Law of Attrac- 
 tion is therefore the Law of Life in evolution, 
 while the law of gravitation is the same law 
 of life in latency. All is life either in action 
 or with its powers of action latent. 
 
 126
 
 THE LAW OF ATTRACTION 12/ 
 
 Therefore, the law of gravitation is the Law 
 of Attraction ; but being the negative pole of 
 the Law, it seems to be rather a denial of the 
 Law than the Law itself. 
 
 The law of gravitation glides by impercep- 
 tible degrees into the Law of Attraction. They 
 are the same Law, the seeming difference being 
 the different degrees of intelligence that recog- 
 nise it. 
 
 The speck of mould lies close to the earth. 
 It does not recognise the principle of life within 
 it. That principle of life is desire. The Law 
 in individual expression is desire ; and after a 
 time the speck of mould feels the monitions of 
 the law ; recognises the desire — the law — and 
 becomes what we call a living organism. It 
 was alive before, but did not know it. That is, 
 the Law of Attraction was in it because it is in 
 all things ; but the recognition was wanting ; 
 or, rather, the degree of recognition within it 
 was too undeveloped for observation. 
 
 So long as the recognition was wanting, or 
 too feeble for expression, the speck of mould 
 was simply acted on. With stronger self- 
 recognition came the power of independent 
 action ; and then it became obedient to the 
 Law of Attraction within it as expressed in 
 its own recognised desire ; and with even this
 
 128 THE LAW OF 
 
 small amount of freedom it moved upward 
 from the earth. The law of gravitation in it 
 had developed into the Law of Attraction. In 
 strict truth, it had always been the Law of 
 Attraction, but was only the Law of Attrac- 
 tion to the intelligence that recognised it as 
 such. 
 
 Thus it is seen that a recognition of the Law 
 of Attraction emancipates from a belief in the 
 law of gravitation, or from the non-belief in 
 the Law of Attraction ; and thus intelligence 
 becomes master of death to the extent of its 
 power to recognise the Law of Attraction. 
 
 I shall have to go over this again in order 
 to make it clear. 
 
 There really is no law of gravitation ; that is, 
 if I am permitted to define the law of gravita- 
 tion as that power which draws all objects 
 towards the centre of the earth. For there is 
 no such power. 
 
 Every atom in the world is mind, intelligence, 
 recognition of the Law of Life within itself, that 
 when expressed at all is expressed in desire. 
 This Life- Principle which is expressed in the 
 individual as desire exists in latency in every 
 atom ; and it is no sooner recognised by the 
 atom than the atom acts in obedience to it. 
 The desire in the atom always leads away from
 
 ATTRACTION 1 29 
 
 the earth, and not down into it, showing that 
 the real attraction to which every desire points 
 is upward, and not downward. 
 
 The tree is attracted upward and goes on 
 being attracted upward, in obedience to its 
 desire, until its very roots — in a broad sense 
 — are freed from the earth, and it walks on 
 top of the earth in a form of greater freedom. 
 It may have a multitude of feet on the ground, 
 and may move with difficulty, but the same 
 Law of Attraction keeps growing upon its 
 recognition, until in the lapse of ages it stands 
 upon four feet. And so the power of recog- 
 nition goes on for ages again ; and it has so 
 far emancipated itself that it stands on only 
 two feet. 
 
 And still the power to recognise the Law, as 
 expressed in desire, goes on ; and the freedom 
 from the so-called law of gravitation continues. 
 
 This is the case to-day. It has been the 
 case always ; and who is there to limit its 
 progress in the future? 
 
 Man, as to his personality, is clear mind or 
 intelligence. He is the Law in the objective. 
 The Law as personified in desire is his sub- 
 jective side ; and the seeming two are one. 
 
 The Law is inexhaustible. Man's recognition 
 of the Law has its limitations, and these limita- 
 I
 
 130 THE LAW OF 
 
 tions establish his shape, and the shape of 
 every object in nature. 
 
 But though we see in man's present shape, 
 and in the power or lack of power manifested 
 by him, the limitations of his intelligence, yet 
 there is no valid reason why there should ever 
 be a limit to his intelligence, or his recognition 
 of the Law. The Law being limitless, his 
 power to recognise it is also limitless. And as 
 every fresh recognition of its power releases 
 him more and more from the deadness called 
 gravitation, and puts him more and more under 
 the influence of the Law of Attraction, which 
 is not towards the earth, but away from it, I 
 say the time is coming when he will float in 
 the air ; and that, too, without any foreign 
 appliances, and without any effort beyond the 
 simple recognition of the Law of Attraction. 
 In other words, he will float in the air because 
 he wants to. 
 
 It is impossible to form anything like an 
 adequate idea of the power of the Law of 
 Attraction. Every form of organisation de- 
 pends upon it. Every organised form, accord- 
 ing to its needs, recognises the power of the 
 Law, and becomes just what it recognises ; or 
 shows forth in its external self that which it 
 perceives to be good.
 
 ATTRACTION 131 
 
 Recognition is the externalising power ; and 
 it is something that grows. The Law does 
 not grow ; but the recognition of the power 
 of the Law grows constantly in the mind of 
 the untrammelled thinker ; and this is why 
 life is a progression, and not a creation. 
 
 Nothing is created ; nothing ever has been 
 created. What we call creation is the thousand 
 forms of recognition of the power of the Law 
 of Attraction. 
 
 If recognition may be called creation, and 
 in one sense it may be so called, then forms 
 are self-created. 
 
 They are, at least, self-manifested. 
 
 It is a half-intuitive perception of this fact 
 that has started the belief called " free moral 
 agency." 
 
 If free moral agency means the power to 
 act independently of the Law, then there is 
 no free moral agency ; for the Law is one with 
 the power that exerts it ; and the nearest 
 approach a man can make to freedom is through 
 greater knowledge of the Law, or closer con- 
 formity with it.
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 THE EGO 
 
 " Out of the night that shelters me, 
 Black as the pit from pole to pole, 
 I thank whatever gods there be 
 For my unconquerable soul." 
 
 The much repetition of the foregoing pages 
 would be unpardonable but for the fact that 
 nothing short of repetition over and over again 
 would make the subject clear to those to whom 
 the idea is new. 
 
 There are two parts to this subject. One 
 relates to the Law of Being, or Attraction ; 
 the other relates to individual life under the 
 Law. 
 
 We know nothing of the Law except that 
 it is the moving spirit of all life, the Life- 
 Principle ; that it fills all space absolutely full, 
 leaving no room for the least particle of death. 
 We know that this Life- Principle is altogether 
 alive and vital, and altogether good, and as 
 it fills the universe, therefore, the universe is 
 altogether alive and vital and good. This 
 statement excludes the idea of either death 
 
 132
 
 THE EGO 133 
 
 or evil. And, indeed, there is no death and 
 there is no evil. 
 
 The Life-Principle, the Law, is the containant 
 of all possibilities. Man and all creatures ex- 
 ternalise in their own personalities these pos- 
 sibilities as rapidly as they recognise them. 
 
 Recognition makes apparent or visible those 
 possibilities of the Law, that were unapparent 
 or invisible before they were recognised. In 
 this sense — the sense of externalising or 
 making visible the possibilities of the Law 
 — the power to recognise may be called the 
 creative power ; and from this time on I shall 
 speak of it as creative. 
 
 Recognition, then, which is intelligence or 
 mind, creates. 
 
 I, therefore, come to the second of the two parts 
 of this subject ; that which relates to creation. 
 
 The old question in the catechism, " Who 
 made you ? " has never been answered correctly 
 except in one instance ; at least, there is only 
 one instance on record, and that will be found 
 in " Uncle Tom's Cabin." 
 
 When Miss Ophelia propounded the question 
 to Topsy, it was answered correctly : " Nobody 
 never made me. I 'spect I growed." 
 
 On the hypothesis that there is a personal 
 God, who, in spite of His personality — which
 
 134 THE EGO 
 
 means His limitation — still fills all space ; and 
 on the still farther hypothesis that He made 
 man and all the other creatures, I think it 
 must be admitted that, for an individual of 
 His power and boasted judgment, He made 
 a very poor job of it ; so poor that it is no 
 wonder He got tired of the work of His hands, 
 and gave us over to His coadjutor, the devil, 
 to hide it out of His sight. 
 
 Compare this theory with the theory that 
 the race is a growth, and that it takes no 
 step forward in the scale of being except by 
 recognition of more truth, or the gain of more 
 intelligence ; and compare it as it now stands 
 with what it was at the time of the cave 
 dwellers, and see if it, as its own creator, has 
 not the right to be proud of its work. 
 
 On the first hypothesis the work was finished 
 at one blow — as it were — and it was a wretched 
 piece of work. On the second hypothesis we 
 see the never - ceasing effort of intellect to 
 climb higher in the intellectual scale ; and as 
 a result, an unfinished, but a constantly pro- 
 gressing race ; a race that we admire and 
 respect because we know that it is where it 
 is by its own effort ; by its own unceasing 
 struggle with ignorance ; by the daily heroism 
 of its past as it journeyed through untrodden
 
 THE EGO 135 
 
 wildernesses of thought, without a solitary 
 guiding light except that which its slowly grow- 
 ing and hardly gained experience yielded it. 
 
 Take this glorious race just as it stands 
 to-day, still fettered and still clinging to its 
 chains, but still advancing slowly along the 
 road that promises relief from them, and com- 
 pare it with the cut-and-dried and finished race 
 that God made, and note the difference in your 
 feelings for the two. 
 
 In God's race there is no hope. It was 
 completed at its birth and has done nothing 
 but degenerate ever since. God made it de- 
 pendent on Himself; and it now finds itself in 
 the dilemma of an abandoned job ; God having 
 in a measure washed His hands of it and left it 
 to the tender mercies of its arch-enemy, whom 
 God also made, apparently for no other purpose 
 than that of a scapegoat for His own mistakes. 
 
 But the man-made race of evolution began 
 in the smallest possible way. It was not only 
 not perfect at its inception, but it was merely 
 the seed germ of a race. It had no God to 
 depend upon and no inspired guide to lead 
 it. It was self-creative and self-dependent 
 from the first, and it felt its slow but sure 
 way up from its beginning, through the dark- 
 ness of absolute ignorance. It had no guides
 
 136 THE EGO 
 
 but its mistakes. These mistakes which have 
 been imputed to it as sins have been its only 
 guide-posts to point it in the right direction. 
 And yet it has forged its way through earth 
 and air and fire and water and tempest, and 
 the dense blackness of its own intellectual 
 night, to its present standpoint, where it sees 
 the dawning of light at last. It has scored 
 its triumphs in the conquest of a myriad of 
 obstacles ; it has covered itself with bruises 
 and wounds too grievous to tell of; it has 
 left thousands of its numbers to mark each 
 upward step in its progress ; and it is here 
 to-day, blood-stained, sick and sore from its 
 head to its feet, but dauntless still, and covered 
 with the glory of its undying courage. 
 
 O, beautiful race ! A baby race even yet ; 
 still foot-bound in the long gowns of its in- 
 fancy, but ready now to tear away each hamper- 
 ing bond, and walk forth in the broad road of 
 an infinite freedom towards infinite wisdom. 
 
 Which will you have — the race that God 
 made, or the race that is now making itself? 
 
 Those who look upon the race to condemn 
 it, exhibit about as much judgment as one 
 who, coming to the orange tree at my window, 
 should taste the unripe fruit and pronounce 
 orange culture a failure.
 
 THE EGO 137 
 
 If God made the race, then there would 
 be no need for any action upon its part at 
 all. It is made and finished, and that is all 
 there is of it. But if the race made itself, 
 which it surely did, then it has an endless 
 work before it in making itself over in accord- 
 ance with its ever-enlarging and ever-beautify- 
 ing ideal. 
 
 And who will deny the presence of the ideal 
 in man ? Man, God-made, could have no use 
 for an ideal, since God's work must necessarily 
 be perfect ; it might have the power to re- 
 trograde, but it evidently could have no power 
 to progress. 
 
 And yet we find in man an ideal that is 
 always far ahead of his present attainment. 
 This would not be in him if God had made 
 him ; it would be in him if he had made 
 himself; it would be the beautiful implanted 
 hope ever leading him to higher growth, to 
 nobler attainment. 
 
 And this ideal is not only in man, but it 
 exists in every organised creature from the 
 lowest form of life on up through the scale 
 to man. It is the aspiration, the desire, the 
 Law incarnate, whose never-ending possibilities 
 are foreshadowed in the creature's intuitive or 
 latent powers of recognition. It is the very
 
 138 THE EGO 
 
 basis of growth in all creatures, and links all 
 creatures together on the road of infinite 
 progression ; proving not only the oneness of 
 the Law, but the oneness of the Law's recog- 
 nition of itself. For the Law's recognition of 
 itself is one, though expressed in individuals. 
 It is one unbroken chain of recognition that 
 establishes not only the brotherhood of man 
 with man, but the brotherhood of every ex- 
 pression of life with every other expression. 
 For as the Law is one, so the recognition of 
 the Law is one ; thus demonstrating the whole- 
 ness and infallibility of the universe. 
 
 Every life-cell is an ego. It is a seed germ. 
 When — under the Law of Attraction — two or 
 more of the life-cells unite, they come into 
 one understanding of the Law, not into two 
 or three understandings, and the two or three 
 egos become one ego, and possess greater 
 drawing power than the single life-cell. 
 
 This is shown in the common magnet. It 
 has its positive and negative pole and demon- 
 strates its power as a whole magnet. It may 
 be broken into a hundred pieces, and each piece 
 will be a perfect magnet with its positive and 
 negative pole. Weld the pieces together again, 
 and the many magnets become one magnet. 
 The magnetism is indivisible ; the recognition
 
 THE EGO 139 
 
 of the magnetism may be individualised ; and 
 it is individualised endlessly in the primordial 
 life-cells. The drawing together of the cells 
 and their cohesion in more complex forms is 
 individual growth. 
 
 In individual growth the drawing power of 
 the individual is constantly increased ; as it 
 increases it becomes constantly more positive 
 to the less complex individualities about it, 
 and masters them ; by mastering them it 
 unites their power to its own. The strength 
 of the conquered does, in a sense, pass into 
 the conqueror ; and so we have the law of 
 individual growth, which is by the survival of 
 the fittest. 
 
 The magnet's recognition of its own magnet- 
 ism is its recognition of the Law of Attraction 
 within it. 
 
 The man's recognition of desire within him- 
 self is the recognition of the Law of Attraction 
 within him. 
 
 The leading difference between the magnet 
 and the man is that, while both recognise the 
 Law of Attraction within themselves, the man's 
 recognition is of such a character as to give 
 birth to WILL ; the conscious ego ; while that 
 of the magnet has not advanced so far on the 
 road to consciousness.
 
 140 THE EGO 
 
 In the early stages of individual growth, the 
 creature's recognition of the Law of Attraction 
 within it is perceived to be simple desire. But 
 this desire is the basis of all future growth. 
 The more we gratify desire, the more it grows. 
 This is equivalent to saying, the more we re- 
 cognise the Law, the more of the power of the 
 Law we embody ; for the recognition of desire 
 is the recognition of the Law. 
 
 The desire thus recognised by the creature 
 has no moral character whatever ; nor has the 
 Law itself any moral character. Morality is 
 an external thing, and belongs to the intelli- 
 gence. 
 
 Desire is a purely selfish attribute. 
 
 What then, is the Law of Attraction, the Law 
 that men call God, a selfish principle ? 
 
 The Law of Attraction has no character 
 whatever ; it is neither selfish nor unselfish ; 
 it is simply the drawing power, wJiole and i>i- 
 divisible\ utterly regardless of morality or 
 individual rights. 
 
 With individualisation comes the conscious- 
 ness of the Law, taking the form of desire. It 
 is utterly selfish ; it is the ego ; it is the " I " in 
 a struggle with every other " I." 
 
 Its selfishness, from its first inception, is only 
 limited by its lack of power. It is its own
 
 THE EGO 141 
 
 centre of the universe, and its own effort is to 
 draw to itself all there is. 
 
 The selfishness of the creature increases step 
 by step with the development of higher and 
 still higher types of life. Why? Because de- 
 velopment is nothing else but the still greater 
 recognition of individual desire ; and desire is 
 the starting-point and the basic principle of 
 self; it is selfishness or selfhood. 
 
 The desire of the individual is only limited in 
 its selfish grasping after everything it sees by a 
 still greater desire ; the desire for a secure life. 
 
 So long as all creatures act from selfish desire, 
 there is one constant state of warfare, and the 
 world is under the dominion of fear. The de- 
 sire for peace and security dominates the desire 
 for possession, and gradually it becomes the 
 highest desire that justice shall reign, because 
 justice guarantees the greatest happiness. The 
 desire, without ever forsaking the central stand- 
 point of self, always bent on its own happiness, 
 has developed a better conception or a better 
 recognition of what it takes to produce happi- 
 ness. 
 
 Individual life rests exclusively on selfish- 
 ness ; the effort of each to attain its own ends ; 
 its own happiness. The best method of attain- 
 ing these ends, true happiness, is a matter of
 
 142 THE EGO 
 
 intellectual growth : a matter of greater recogni- 
 tion of the Law of Attraction ; the law of infinite 
 union ; the Law as expressed in greater and 
 more complex desires. 
 
 The renunciation of one individual to another 
 and the folly of self-sacrifice, become apparent 
 when it is seen that such renunciation and 
 sacrifice rest on the same foundation that all 
 our other actions rest upon. They are per- 
 formed for the purpose of yielding us the 
 greatest happiness, either here or hereafter. 
 
 So it happens that no man can resign the 
 ego. Let him cover it up as he will, it is 
 always the motor that moves him, and always 
 will be. What is religion but giving up some- 
 thing in the present in order that we may 
 get it in the future with infinitely compounded 
 interest? I am willing to give the heathen 
 the twenty dollars I have saved for the pur- 
 chase of a new dress, if I am convinced that 
 God is my security and will pay me back a 
 hundred-fold. It appears to me as a first- 
 class business transaction, and I will risk " the 
 sacrifice." 
 
 The mother love, that beautiful and tender 
 and holy feeling, is self-love. The child is 
 the object of the mother's desire ; probably the 
 very highest object of her desire ; and she
 
 THE EGO 143 
 
 holds it more tenaciously than anything 
 else. 
 
 Every form of love rests on desire ; rests 
 on the basis of self. Indeed, every good and 
 beautiful attribute has self-love for its starting 
 point ; self-love worked out through higher 
 and nobler recognition of the Law of Attrac- 
 tion, and individualised in higher and nobler 
 desires. 
 
 The growth of desire is the growth and 
 strengthening of the individual. 
 
 Society, when it shall have reached a more 
 ideal condition than at present, will have 
 reached it through the strengthening of the 
 individualities composing it ; and these in- 
 dividualities will have become strengthened 
 by a better recognition of their own selfhood 
 as expressed in their enlarged desire. 
 
 The total sacrifice of the selfish principle 
 as expressed in desire, if such a thing were 
 possible, would mean the destruction of the 
 ego, which would be annihilation. And this 
 is the impracticable and the impossible religion 
 preached from thousands of pulpits to-day, 
 whose effects are not the making of men, but 
 the prostitution of them to a mistaken renun- 
 ciation and self-deceptive and often a hypo- 
 critical humility. Religion is based on fear.
 
 144 THE EGO 
 
 And I now state boldly that everything in 
 this world that is based on fear must die. It 
 must die, that man may live and love and 
 expand to the glory of true and free individu- 
 alism through the power of love, whose very 
 nature is incompatible with fear. 
 
 The love that is preached from the pulpit 
 is an impossible thing in the character of the 
 religion that preaches it. And why ? 
 
 Because the religion itself is the most diluted 
 compound of weakness ever concocted for the 
 abject prostration of individuality. It is a 
 doctrine that teaches men to resign their own 
 strength, and to lean on the strength of 
 another ; a doctrine that ignores individual 
 power, and throws itself in abject helplessness 
 upon some imaginary power external to the 
 individual. In such circumstances the very 
 effort of a person to love his neighbour as 
 himself becomes a hypocritical pretence. He 
 is not capable of generating love ; love is the 
 child of freedom, and the slave of fear is 
 powerless to beget it. No one who is weak 
 in his own selfhood can give himself; and 
 this is love. No one who leans on a power 
 outside of himself can be anything but weak. 
 
 It is only when men come into a state of 
 freedom from the ripening of the ego, that
 
 THE EGO 145 
 
 it becomes possible for them to fulfil the 
 claims of the so-called gospel, and love others 
 as they love themselves. For love is the 
 overplus of strength, and they who lean and 
 beg will never be strong enough to generate 
 anything but a counterfeit representative of it. 
 
 Love is the outflow of individual strength ; 
 the outflow of the individual's very self; there 
 is no outflow to individual weakness ; nothing 
 but the absorptive drying up that we perceive 
 in stagnant water. 
 
 The time is fast approaching when men 
 will love ; and that, too, because self is the 
 moving spring of each person. When we shall 
 become free from fear through the growing 
 knowledge of our own power, we will see in 
 others only the qualities that attract us, and 
 we will flow out to them in desires for their 
 good. Beautiful deeds will become the spon- 
 taneous outgrowth of free souls. In an atmos- 
 phere of freedom, the kingdom of love will 
 be established. 
 
 We would love now if we were free and 
 strong ; but we are so fettered and so weak 
 and so full of fears for our own safety, that 
 we cannot get away from the clamouring ego 
 within us for an hour. We cannot come into 
 that condition of noble and lofty repose which 
 K
 
 146 THE EGO 
 
 enables us to say, " All things are well at home. 
 I will, therefore, go abroad and see if I cannot 
 make them better for my neighbours." This 
 would be love. It would be the superabundant 
 outflow of strength. 
 
 But why should I care — being happy myself 
 — whether others are happy or not? Am I not 
 under obedience to the law of selfishness? In 
 what particular is this personal ego I find within 
 myself to be served by serving others ? 
 
 I answer that in my still farther recognition 
 of the Law of Attraction I have come into 
 closer relationship with my neighbour ; the 
 drawing power of the Law has so shown me 
 his oneness with me that it has become my 
 desire to help him ; my whole nature has warmed 
 towards him, because the Law in its fuller mani- 
 festation is Love. My more complete recogni- 
 tion of the Law has filled me with love, and 
 love seeks an object ; it is the expression of the 
 Law of Attraction, and being full of it, my 
 happiness is best served by manifesting it in 
 noble words and generous deeds. And thus, 
 even in the execution of man's loftiest ideal 
 for the universal good, we see that he acts in 
 obedience to his self-love ; the love so mis- 
 understood and so condemned by the super- 
 ficial thought of the acre.
 
 THE EGO 147 
 
 The tendency of evolution is the perfecting 
 of individuality ; the concentration of power 
 in the ego. Man must learn that he is self- 
 creative, and that his only hope lies in this 
 fact ; that his only salvation is knowledge ; 
 that knowledge is a constantly growing power. 
 
 Seeing this to be so, let every human being 
 take fresh hope. 
 
 So long as salvation is supposed to depend 
 on another, it must always seems doubtful ; 
 and this doubt cannot but keep one more or 
 less under the influence of fear. 
 
 But when self-salvation is seen to rest on 
 self-dependence, on individual effort, then native 
 courage and will-power come to the rescue, and 
 a man shoulders the burden of his journey, and 
 trudges along the road of endless progres- 
 sion with faith in himself to overcome all 
 obstacles. 
 
 And in this frame of mind he grows stronger 
 every hour, no matter how rough the journey ; 
 the rougher the better, since every conquest 
 adds to his strength until he feels his position 
 to be God-like and irresistible.
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 ENDLESS PROGRESSION : ITS RETARDATION 
 
 BY FEAR 
 
 Self-dependence in the pursuit of wisdom 
 — this alone is growth. 
 
 Whenever a man is in a position that entails 
 the necessity of leaning on some external aid, 
 he is a dying man ; his tendency is downward ; 
 he is under the so-called law of gravitation. 
 Knock the props from under him ; then, if 
 he can stand alone, with faith in his own 
 unaided self, and with the resolution to follow 
 his highest aspirations, indifferent to the 
 criticisms of his neighbours, he has passed 
 the line that lies between the so-called law 
 of gravitation and the Law of Attraction, and 
 has entered the outskirts of a diseaseless and 
 deathless domain of pure life. 
 
 That this is a difficult thing to do, no one 
 can doubt. We look abroad and see disease 
 and death everywhere. They seem to be the 
 established order of nature ; to break away 
 from them looks an impossibility. We have 
 not yet discovered that there is no established 
 
 148
 
 ENDLESS PROGRESSION 149 
 
 order in nature ; we cannot yet realise that 
 nature is an ever-varying series of conceptions 
 of the Law, and that disease and death are 
 among these conceptions. 
 
 That they are mistaken conceptions, or con- 
 ceptions based on our ignorance of absolute 
 truth, has not occurred to us. We have not 
 yet found out that all is life, and that the 
 whole chain of growth, from the lowest organic 
 form, up to man, is a gradually growing con- 
 sciousness of this great truth ; this absolute 
 truth ; the most important of the few absolute 
 truths we know at this time. 
 
 The entire procession of organic forms, I 
 say again, has been but a series of gradually 
 enlarging perceptions of the undeniable truth 
 that there is no death, and can be none ; that 
 all is life. 
 
 Individual intelligence, individual knowledge 
 of this one mighty truth, is positive salvation 
 from disease and death. 
 
 That disease and death should be among 
 the conceptions of nature, is because nature 
 in its conceptions of the truth is a growth. It 
 cannot conceive the full possibilities of the 
 Law of Attraction in a moment, any more than 
 a peach can conceive the possibilities of its fully 
 ripened condition at the moment of its inception.
 
 150 ENDLESS PROGRESSION 
 
 Let us imagine that nature could be ab- 
 solutely perfect and beyond the possibility of 
 any farther growth ; that man, as a part of 
 nature, was also perfect. In this case, he would 
 have nothing more to desire, and no farther 
 incentive either to thought or action. Is there 
 anything desirable in such a condition ? Is 
 it not the most terrible form of death that 
 one can imagine? Dead, and yet conscious 
 of the situation ; dead and yet sufficiently alive 
 to know it. For my part, I should prefer an 
 eternal sleep. 
 
 On the other hand, look at nature with man 
 at its head as an ever-growing thing. Look 
 at the Law as expressed individually in desire. 
 In this condition there is always a future ; 
 there is always some happiness to be attained, 
 which, when attained, projects its hope of some 
 other and greater happiness. There is always 
 some obstacle of ignorance to be conquered, 
 the conquering of which brings a greater 
 consciousness of strength and power to him 
 who conquers. There is an ever - enlarging 
 object in life; an ever -enlarging hope for 
 that which lies beyond; an ever -enlarging 
 future, which, in passing behind us, strengthens 
 our position in the universe and confirms our 
 mastery more and more. There is always
 
 RETARDATION BY FEAR I 5 I 
 
 something to live for ; always an object to 
 stimulate effort, and always the deepening 
 and broadening and beautifying manhood and 
 womanhood that is the result of effort. There 
 is always the closer approximation of our 
 external selves to the glorious internal ideal 
 born of desire, and bringing us more and more 
 into a position of oneness with the Law of 
 Attraction, thus uniting us in love and har- 
 mony and power. 
 
 And in all of this growth, we will eventually 
 exhaust the latent powers of the earth, and 
 enter other spheres of thought and action, 
 whose possibilities will far transcend those of 
 the earth. 
 
 And on and on, through a never-ending series 
 of conquests in obedience to the ideal, which 
 allures forever to higher heights and to happier 
 happiness, and to tenderer and nobler love. 
 
 There is perfection, but man will never reach 
 it. It is an infinite thing and belongs only to 
 the Law, the unchangeable Principle of Life ; 
 the Eternal Unit ; the One. Man is many ; he 
 represents a million phases of the Law ; but 
 not the all of it. His happiness depends on 
 his finitehood ; on the absolutely limitless 
 capacity of his power to grow. 
 
 The basis of individual life is desire. Desire
 
 152 ENDLESS PROGRESSION 
 
 is the Law incarnate in the individual. It is 
 the diseaseless and deathless principle. This 
 fact shows that it is of the Law, and not of 
 the intelligence, or the recognition of the Law. 
 The desire exists whether it is recognised or 
 not. Indeed, it is very seldom that the desire 
 is recognised in a man in a way that will make 
 it apparent in his consolidated intelligence, 
 which is his body. 
 
 He desires and he recognises that he does 
 desire, but he does not recognise that his desire 
 is a power to be relied* upon. He desires, but 
 he fears to trust his desire and trusts his fear 
 instead ; thus giving the superior recognition 
 to his fear, and ignoring his desire. In ignor- 
 ing his desire, he in a measure paralyses its 
 effectiveness ; in recognising his fear, he makes 
 the fear paramount in his mind or his intelli- 
 gence, and it is the fear that is recorded in his 
 intelligence, and not the perfect desire. And 
 this is why these human intelligences — our 
 bodies — are so weak and wretched and diseased, 
 and why they die. 
 
 To fear is as much a function of the intellect 
 as to hope. To fear is to believe something 
 that you do not wish to believe. Every belief 
 is a form of intelligence or ignorance (the 
 two words are off the same piece, being nega-
 
 RETARDATION BY FEAR 153 
 
 tive and positive poles of truth). To believe 
 what you fear is to make manifest a certain 
 state of mind ; it is a negative state of mind, 
 but this does not prevent it from being a belief; 
 and to believe anything whatever is to make 
 it manifest or visible ; whether it is a negative 
 belief, by which I mean a belief that denies 
 the absolute truth that all is life, or a positive 
 belief that affirms the infallibility of the Life- 
 Principle. 
 
 If a man believes that which he fears, his 
 belief is a traitor to his desire ; it is not at one 
 with his desire, and, therefore, it does not 
 properly clothe his desire or make it manifest. 
 
 There is no belief entirely free from the 
 recognition of the desire ; there must be some 
 recognition of desire in every belief, or else the 
 body of man's belief would scarcely cohere 
 enough to give him a personal appearance at 
 all. And men do trust their desires deep down 
 in their intuitional natures much more than 
 they are usually aware of; from this fact, they 
 live longer than would appear possible when we 
 consider how very much people seem to trust 
 their fears. Desire is so positive a thing that 
 it commands a certain amount of recognition, 
 even though it is unconscious or intuitive 
 recognition.
 
 154 ENDLESS PROGRESSION 
 
 Life, freedom from disease and old age, de- 
 pend entirely on the amount and kind of 
 recognition a man gives to his desire. One 
 man recognises his desire as something danger- 
 ous to his own salvation and to society, and 
 goes to work to crush it. This crushing process 
 usually strengthens the desire and thereby the 
 individual ; but it is apt to render him an in- 
 harmonious element in society, not because his 
 desire is evil, but because his mistaken intelli- 
 gence imputes evil to it. With this imputed 
 character, and with the recognition he has given 
 his desire in trying to crush it, he has become^ 
 a strong man in a mistaken direction. 
 
 For the desire is the Principle of Life in the 
 man. It points forever in the direction of 
 happiness ; it is altogether good and disease- 
 less and deathless, without knowing this fact. 
 It is a part of the altogether good and disease- 
 less and deathless Law, awaiting individual 
 recognition in order to become manifest or 
 visible on the external (the mental) plane, in 
 an altogether good and diseaseless and death- 
 less individual existence. 
 
 When a man — in order to attain some form 
 of that happiness toward which his desire is 
 always pointing — makes the mistake of injuring 
 another, it is not his desire that has erred, but
 
 RETARDATION BY FEAR 155 
 
 his intelligence. His desire never points toward 
 the injury of another ; it cannot possibly do so ; 
 it is a portion of the eternal unity, an intelligent 
 recognition of which leads to a condition of 
 unbroken harmony, undying brotherhood, and 
 ever-enlarging love. 
 
 The intelligence — which is the individualising 
 factor — does little else thus far in its growth 
 than make mistakes, as it gropes blindly in the 
 direction of the absolute truth that there is no 
 death ; that all is life. 
 
 The truth that all is life comes only with a 
 recognition of the Law of Attraction. Ever 
 since the first tiny creature, and before, the 
 trend of ages has been towards the knowing of 
 this truth. And now we know it. 
 
 To know it is to be conjoined to it in its 
 diseaselessness and deathlessness. To know 
 it is to be one with it. To know that it is 
 diseaseless and deathless is to know that it is 
 also sinless ; it is to know that the so-called 
 sins of the race have been like the so-called 
 diseases, nothing more than the mistaken beliefs 
 of a baby race, following the dim and murky 
 lights its half-awakened intelligence yielded 
 it, in the direction it thought would lead to 
 happiness. 
 
 No man desires to be a criminal. All men
 
 156 ENDLESS PROGRESSION 
 
 desire happiness. It is the mistaken efforts to 
 gratify a desire than can be nothing else but 
 holy, that create the mistaken appearance of 
 sin in the world, and fill it with poor, benighted 
 blunderers whom we call sinners. 
 
 Until the growth of intelligence in the race 
 shall demonstrate this to be true, society can 
 do no better than protect itself from the con- 
 sequences of these mistakes and their mistaken 
 perpetrators, as it is now doing. But a time 
 is coming when a true knowledge on this 
 subject will convert our state prisons into 
 colleges, where the truth will be taught. 
 
 More and more the power we have ascribed 
 to " God " — the Law — seems to be centring 
 in the individual. It is evolving through the 
 individual's organisation and is being expressed 
 by him ; and in proportion as it is so under- 
 stood and expressed, man trusts his fears less 
 and his desires more. 
 
 Man's organism is the intellectual laboratory 
 for the expression or the making visible and 
 available the power of the Law of Attraction in 
 our world of uses. 
 
 The power exists ; the Law exists ; but it 
 might as well not exist as to find in external 
 life no recognition of it. " Man is God's neces- 
 sity." The law is simply the invisible frame-
 
 RETARDATION BY FEAR I 57 
 
 work upon which man strings the wonderful 
 creations of his genius ; it is the infinite breath 
 of life that flows into his every thought, and 
 makes his thoughts external, visible existences. 
 
 It is true that without the Law, man could 
 not be ; but it is also true that without man to 
 interpret the Law, and so make it manifest 
 externally, the Law might as well not be. 
 
 The belief that the invisible is more important 
 than the visible is a mistake. The belief that 
 individual life, as it refines and spiritualises, 
 becomes less allied to the visible plane and 
 more allied to the invisible plane, is another 
 mistake. 
 
 Individual life as it refines and spiritualises 
 will attain a stability and a fixedness, a power 
 of cohesion and concentration on the visible 
 plane, infinitely greater than it now possesses. 
 It will be as much more solid than it is now, 
 as steel is more solid than water ; it will become 
 as much more delicate and compact as alabaster 
 is more delicate and compact than sand. The 
 refining principle that comes through the 
 growth of a superior intelligence will not dis- 
 integrate individuals, or cause them to dis- 
 appear from the external world. Intellectual 
 growth is the constant replacement of a low 
 grade of thought by a higher grade of thought ;
 
 158 ENDLESS PROGRESSION 
 
 it is the constant acquisition of new truth. 
 New truth relegates to the past every particle 
 of old truth, which in the light of the new truth, 
 has become error, and, therefore, useless. 
 
 Every atom of this truth, new and old, is 
 substance ; the identical stuff our bodies and 
 everything else we see are made of; and it 
 changes constantly. If we keep on learning 
 new truths, the substance of our bodies refines ; 
 grows stronger and more beautiful. If we 
 cease to learn, this substance dries up and 
 falls to the earth under obedience to the nega- 
 tive pole of the Law of Attraction, which says, 
 " The dead to the dead." 
 
 Jesus understood this and said, " Let the 
 dead bury their dead." The dead are bury- 
 ing their dead to-day all over the world. 
 But the life of a nobler intelligence has 
 appeared, and death itself is dying.
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 man's power to speak the creative WORD : 
 
 EVOLUTION OF THE IDEAL 
 
 THE visible universe is the universe of uses, 
 and man's theatre of ever- progressive action. 
 To pull out of his own brain, as the spider 
 pulls out of its body, an unending web of 
 creations ; creations that suggest other crea- 
 tions in a never-ending procession of higher 
 and still higher and more potent uses — this 
 is man's privilege and his destiny. 
 
 At a certain point in the acquisition of 
 intelligence, a man arrives at a wonderful 
 fact ; he perceives that he is personally crea- 
 tive ; sees that his spoken word has the 
 power of life in it ; that it heals the sick, 
 banishes old age and drives death away. 
 
 He does this through the power of the 
 Law made personal. 
 
 That man should be able to make the power 
 of the Law personal in himself is so wonderful 
 a truth that the world is not going to accept 
 it until it sees it demonstrated. But even now 
 the fact is being demonstrated in sufficient force 
 i59
 
 160 man's power to speak 
 
 to prove to the unprejudiced observer that the 
 statement I have made is true. 
 
 The people, as a whole, are not looking for 
 anything out of the common occurrences of life ; 
 their preachers and their teachers, their body 
 tinkers and their soul tinkers, are on top of 
 them, and are holding them down with a weight 
 as of mountains. When one poor, struggling 
 creature gets from under, and begins to breathe 
 the pure air of higher intelligence, he distrusts 
 it because of its very purity. He is afraid of 
 it ; its grandeur terrorises him ; he is tempted 
 to crawl back to his old stifling position in order 
 to obtain again that mental stupor he is fain 
 to call " his peace of mind." 
 
 The rapidly enlarging thoughts that spring 
 from his liberated brain can find no soil for 
 their germination ; as far as his vision can 
 reach, he sees but an arid desert waste, in- 
 capable of responding to his mental touch. ' 
 He grows hopeless ; the belief in himself and 
 his own ideas, that would make them manifest 
 in external form in spite of the most unfavour- 
 able conditions, is wanting ; the disregardful 
 world drifts over his genius and he is lost. 
 
 Belief is the clothing power of which desire 
 is the spirit or soul. 
 
 Belief is the fruit of intelligence. A man
 
 THE CREATIVE WORD l6l 
 
 believes what his intelligence shows him to be 
 true. His belief is his fixed perception of 
 certain facts. As his perception of facts 
 changes, his belief changes. 
 
 No one doubts this ; but when I say that 
 his body is a faithful record of his beliefs, 
 and shows forth every change of his percep- 
 tions, very few people will believe it ; and 
 yet it is true. 
 
 Beliefs with slight variations run in grooves 
 that produce established types. Cattle repre- 
 sent a certain set of beliefs, and we have 
 their type. Horses represent a set of beliefs, 
 differing somewhat from those of cattle, and 
 we have another type. Man represents another 
 set of beliefs — a more intelligent set of beliefs — 
 and they are faithfully registered in his higher 
 organisation. 
 
 There has been very little change in man's 
 beliefs for ages. In all important particulars, 
 he believes substantially what he believed thou- 
 sands of years ago. He represents the inherited 
 beliefs of many generations. His beliefs have 
 been somewhat changed in a few particulars, 
 but the body of his .beliefs is the same. He 
 believes himself to be a limited creature ; he 
 believes that God made him in His own image 
 and that God holds his destiny in His hand. 
 L
 
 1 62 man's power to speak 
 
 He leans on God or on some other imaginary 
 power ; and it is his disbelief in himself as 
 his own maker and the master of his own 
 destiny, that keeps him from farther marked 
 and substantial advancement in his beliefs. 
 
 His intellect is locked up within a limit of 
 his own making, and though he is slowly 
 widening this limit in spots, he is contracting 
 it in other spots, and his average growth out 
 of his fetters is very slow. 
 
 The belief lying at the root of all his 
 hampering beliefs is a belief in the deadness 
 of the matter out of which he thinks his body 
 is made. He carries the body of death with 
 him from the cradle to the grave. In spite 
 of his ever-present intuition that death is not 
 for him, he admits its existence in his external 
 senses, and he takes the consequences of the 
 admission, and dies. 
 
 The few years of his life are insufficient for 
 anything more than the round of ideas pursued 
 by his father ; and so he dies without having 
 found any new line of thought by which to 
 change his fixed beliefs. And thus, with human 
 belief in a state of stagnation, the race itself 
 is stagnant. It cannot improve in any de- 
 cidedly marked manner. 
 
 The idea that the race has reached its
 
 THE CREATIVE WORD 1 63 
 
 ultimate development is one of the most 
 absurd of all its ideas. It may be that the 
 human form has become a crude expression 
 of the shape best adapted to the highest use ; 
 and, in that case, there will be no higher race 
 of animal creatures than man. But if this is 
 so, and I believe it is, then the improvement 
 to be made in him by a constantly growing 
 belief in his own unlimited power will show 
 forth — not in any marked change in his bodily 
 structure — but in an ever-strengthening, refining 
 and beautifying process of his present structure. 
 A man can be just what he believes he can be, 
 after he understands the Law. He can do just 
 what he believes he can do, after he has come 
 into the understanding of being. 
 
 Therefore, personal power is simply a matter 
 of the understanding of truth ; simply a course 
 of mental training in the right direction ; the 
 direction towards freedom from every one of 
 his old hampering beliefs in his own limitation, 
 and a consequent emancipation from every 
 description of fear. 
 
 All power is in the knowing. By the word 
 power, I do not mean some abstract, far-away 
 force, but a present personal power ; a power 
 vested in the individual himself; the power to 
 be precisely what he wants to be, and to do
 
 164 man's power to speak 
 
 precisely what he wants to do. A man has no 
 limitations but those imposed by his ignorance 
 of his power. 
 
 This is because the external of man is belief. 
 What he believes, even in his ignorance of the 
 Law — he is. When he shall come into an 
 understanding of the Law, and know that it 
 does not circumscribe him in any direction 
 whatever, he can then consult his desires as to 
 what he desires to become, and, recognising 
 that the Law does not stand in the way of his 
 becoming what he desires to be, he slowly 
 begins to grow into it. He speaks the word 
 of bis own renewed creation. He begins slowly 
 to grow into the new form of life projected by 
 his ideal. 
 
 I say " slowly," because at first this complete 
 change of belief is very slow indeed. At every 
 step of his progress in it, he is met by the solid 
 wall of his previous beliefs, which have been 
 compacted in him by a thousand generations 
 of ancestors. He not only meets this solid 
 wall in himself, but he can scarcely take a step 
 outside of himself without meeting it in a still 
 more unyielding form from those in whom it 
 has never been shaken at all, and who turn 
 upon him like enraged beasts when they begin 
 to feel the change that is going on in him.
 
 THE CREATIVE WORD 165 
 
 Truly, he who would step up to a higher plane 
 in life must be brave, as well as faithful to the 
 best he knows. 
 
 And yet, to one who is thoroughly tired of 
 the world as it is — tired of its mediocre attain- 
 ments, tired of the entire range of its cheap and 
 wretched thought — any change, however diffi- 
 cult, seems a relief. The energies are stimulated 
 by it ; and under the stimulus greater hopes 
 are born and greater courage to insure their 
 ripening. 
 
 Anything more dismal than the eternal round 
 of small events that swarm our pathway from 
 the cradle to the grave, to be repeated in each 
 successive generation, I cannot imagine. No 
 wonder if death should be welcomed by the 
 weary pilgrim after his third or fourth journey 
 over this arid and unchanging scene. If a 
 continued existence has nothing better to hold 
 out to us as an inducement to our prolonged 
 lives here, I want nothing of it. 
 
 The same thing over and over and over for 
 thousands of years — this has been the history 
 of the race. A generation is born ; it drags 
 through untold hardships, gives birth to another 
 generation, and dies. 
 
 And, in the circumstances, it ought to be 
 glad to die. It has no incentive to live. More-
 
 166 man's tower to speak 
 
 over, there is no reason why it should live ; its 
 only use, so far as its growth has carried it, is 
 to propagate its kind in order that the highest 
 form of life on our globe shall not become 
 extinct until the knowledge of self-salvation, 
 through a continued growth, unbroken by 
 death, should come to it. 
 
 The possibility of this unbroken line of 
 growth in the individuals of the race has been 
 the ever-alluring, though never-defined hope, by 
 which it was possible for the generations to 
 repeat .themselves, until such time as human 
 intelligence had come to that point of develop- 
 ment where it could grasp the idea of perpetual 
 and undying growth, and hold fast to it until it 
 became fixed in these forms of personal beliefs, 
 which we call our bodies. 
 
 Indeed, evolution, in its whole course, has 
 flowed steadily up to this one hope ; or, rather, 
 because self-perpetuation was an ultimate pos- 
 sibility, all life has ascended the scale in one 
 unbroken stream of higher, and still higher, 
 forms towards its actualisation. 
 
 To believe it possible to live forever in con- 
 stant progression towards more refined and 
 more powerful conditions, is the beginning of 
 growth towards these conditions. This belief 
 is the seed germ in the primordial life-cell ; it
 
 THE CREATIVE WORD 167 
 
 has developed in us on the unconscious plane ; 
 that is, without any help from our reasoning 
 powers, until the present time. 
 
 The development of this seed germ can only 
 go a certain distance on the unconscious plane. 
 The time comes when unconscious growth — 
 having ripened an intellect of sufficient power — 
 demands the co-operation of that intellect ; or 
 at least, the recognition of its still latent possi- 
 bilities by that intellect ; or it develops no 
 farther. This is the period when a transition 
 from unconscious to conscious life begins ; in 
 other words, it is a transition from the plane 
 wherein life lived us, to the higher plane where 
 we begin to live ourselves, or to do our own 
 living by our own knowledge of how to do it. 
 
 The unconscious plane of life is that plane in 
 which we recognise the Law without knowing 
 what it is, and without giving it any special 
 thought. We simply recognise it as we make 
 it manifest through use. We perform all the 
 uses of life because life is in us ; but our 
 intelligences take no thought about it in any 
 way that can lead to practical results. We 
 know we live, and that is about all we do 
 know. 
 
 When unconscious life, as expressed in uses, 
 begins to become conscious life, it shows forth
 
 1 68 man's power to speak 
 
 in a strange and heretofore unknown awakening 
 of the intelligence ; which, as it proceeds, lifts 
 life from its unconscious plane, its plane of uses, 
 to a plane of conscious power in its own ability 
 to express itself in logical statements of itself, 
 and free from compulsory expression in those 
 uses, which, previously, had been its only mode 
 of expression. 
 
 It is emancipated from the position of 
 drudgery that was the natural result of its 
 ignorance of its own ability and power, into a 
 position of mastery, when its own logical state- 
 ment of truth, as it has learned it by self-intro- 
 spection, establishes its station in the world. 
 
 For instance, the man reasons this way : He 
 says, " I have got an understanding of the 
 power vested in the Law of Being ; or at least 
 an understanding of enough of that power to 
 know that nothing can circumscribe it. This 
 for the first part. For the second part, I per- 
 ceive that desire is the individualised expression 
 of the Law ; and that desire is made manifest 
 or visible in the external world by belief. I 
 have believed in the power of the Law uncon- 
 sciously, and that belief has manifested itself in 
 all the organs of my body, and in the senses that 
 relate me as an individual to the world of uses. 
 Having realised its power even before I learned
 
 THE CREATIVE WORD 169 
 
 to observe it and reason on it intellectually, now, 
 at this time, when I do observe it and reason 
 upon it intellectually, I am beginning to be 
 amazed at my own stupidity, and the stupidity 
 of the race, that so little should be understood 
 about it, 
 
 " For if an unconscious or dumb and blind 
 belief should have brought me up to my present 
 standpoint in creation, what will not a conscious 
 or intelligent belief do for me ; a belief, that, 
 knowing something of the Law, can co-operate 
 with the Law in its manifestation in my body?" 
 
 If the Law can manifest through blind belief, 
 as it does do, how much more powerfully can it 
 manifest through the intelligent belief that meets 
 its every manifestation with a ready understand- 
 ing of its meaning ? 
 
 The action of the law is correlated to the 
 action of the intelligence ; the greater the 
 activity of the intelligence, the greater the 
 activity of the Law in manifesting. So long 
 as the power of the law to manifest was con- 
 fined to the dumb intelligence of the body, an 
 intelligence that reciprocated only in added 
 functions to the body, it continued to build the 
 body until the body needed no more of those 
 functions that expressed life only in uses. It 
 had reached a shape of such proportions as,
 
 I/O MAN S POWER TO SPEAK 
 
 perhaps, best fitted it for its journey through 
 eternity. 
 
 But suppose the Law could — at this stage of 
 man's development — simply hold the man in 
 existence, without any farther attempt at the 
 recognition of truth on his part, what object 
 would be served in the economy of human 
 development ? 
 
 None at all. 
 
 We should have a race stagnant at the com- 
 pletion of its animal life ; a race not able to 
 go alone in its own growing strength, and not 
 worth carrying because of its helplessness, its 
 disease and deformity and brutality. Such a 
 condition would furnish us with a spectacle of 
 arrested growth on so huge a scale, as to be 
 beyond comparison with anything of the kind 
 ever witnessed in the universe. 
 
 But this is precisely the spectacle we have 
 been looking upon for thousands of years here 
 on this planet. What does it mean ? 
 
 It means that the Law reciprocates our 
 unconscious recognition up to a certain point 
 only, and never goes beyond that point. It 
 reaches that point with each generation. 
 Each generation then falls away from this 
 unconscious recognition ; it dies, and another 
 generation follows in its footsteps, to again
 
 THE CREATIVE WORD 171 
 
 cease its unconscious recognition of the Law, 
 and die. 
 
 And what cares the Law? The Law is 
 unheeding. The Law bends to no one's cries 
 or prayers. It is not generous ; it has no 
 moral quality ; it is simply the Principle of 
 Attraction ; the attractive and cohesive power 
 of the universe. It is unchanging; it simply 
 IS. "Men may come and men may go," but 
 it exists forever. 
 
 But in all these wretched rounds of the 
 ripening generations, the upper brain has been 
 building ; the brain that begins to realise and 
 trust and believe in the ideal. And what 
 has the ideal promised ? It has promised us 
 happiness ; and happiness means freedom in 
 its best sense ; freedom from the bonds that 
 have been festering more and more in our 
 worn senses as the ideal brain grew ; freedom 
 from all our past conditions. "Conditions" 
 is a word that, being interpreted by the new 
 meaning which the advancing truth has placed 
 upon it, is synonymous with " beliefs." For, 
 if a man is all mind, as to his personality, 
 then his conditions are his beliefs, and his 
 beliefs are his conditions. 
 
 And so the ideal brain is promising us 
 relief from the old beliefs, that have held u
 
 172 MAX'S rOWER TO SPEAK 
 
 so long in the ruts of dead but unburicd 
 thought. It is not only furnishing us with 
 new hopes, but it is showing us the feasibility 
 of trusting these hopes to their utmost ; and 
 trusting them, they will lift us away from 
 the broken generations that are the result of 
 our unconscious recognition of the Law, into 
 the one unbroken generation that will begin 
 as soon as we yield to the leadings of the 
 ideal, and place our trust upon the infinite 
 possibilities latent in the Law ; possibilities 
 we have never yet prospected for. 
 
 It is the growing brain, the development 
 of the ideal faculties, that gives us power at 
 this time to perceive more of the power latent 
 in the Law than we have ever before seen. 
 And as it is a fact that — the body being all 
 mind — the more we see of the power of the 
 Law, the more that power becomes incarnate 
 in us ; it, therefore, follows that the race is 
 going to accomplish the effort of centuries, 
 and cross the line between its unconscious 
 life of the past, and enter a condition of con- 
 scious life for the future. 
 
 The ideal faculty in its development makes 
 our desires seem plausible and possible of 
 realisation. No inferior faculty of the brain 
 has ever done this, or ever can do it. The
 
 THE CREATIVE WORD 1 73 
 
 ideal has not only opened the external world up 
 before us, and given us new incentives to life 
 and effort, but it has opened new departments 
 in the body that correlate the external ; that 
 are adapted to the external, and that — under 
 the Law of Attraction — will unite with the 
 external in a new growth, and a nobler 
 growth than the race has yet had. 
 
 There is no doubt at all that it has been 
 exclusively by the race's growing recognition 
 of desire, that the ideal faculties have been 
 built. The ideal brain is the new laboratory 
 which desire has formed for the expression 
 of its own peculiar characteristics. Desire 
 has formed it in order to make itself visible 
 and audible in the world of effects. Desire, 
 as a latent and greatly ignored function, 
 desired to be recognised by the individual 
 in whose economy it played so important a 
 part ; and in order to do this, it had to build 
 a laboratory in the human brain for the ex- 
 pression of itself. And so we have the faculty 
 of ideality. And it is the growth of this 
 faculty that is now pledged to lift us to a 
 recognition of the vast importance of the Law 
 of Attraction within us as expressed in desire. 
 
 It is teaching us even now, in spite of the 
 contempt heaped on our desires by generations
 
 174 man's power to speak 
 
 of theologians, to respect desire in ourselves 
 and others. It is teaching a few of us to 
 stand by our desires, and uphold them as we 
 would stand by and uphold our own lives ; 
 for we know that desire is the Life-Principle 
 within us, and that it is death to ignore it. 
 
 In speaking of desire, the Life-Principle in 
 man, it seems unnecessary to guard it against 
 the misapprehension that has always clouded 
 it in public opinion. Public opinion is a very 
 shallow stream ; and no defence that I can 
 make of a word which has lain so long under 
 the drifts of theological rubbish will be under- 
 stood. To the thinkers, I have only to repeat 
 what I said once before in these pages ; that 
 desire is the implanted Life-Principle, without 
 which no plant or animal, no organic form, 
 could ever move at all ; indeed, there could 
 be no organic form ; for the principle of 
 cohesion would not be expressed in individuals 
 were it not for desire. Desire points always 
 in one direction ; the direction of happiness. 
 
 That the individual makes most grievous 
 mistakes in seeking the happiness towards 
 which desire always points, is because the 
 individual in his external life is a mental 
 creature, whose only chance to grow is by 
 projecting experimental efforts here, there,
 
 THE CREATIVE WORD 175 
 
 and everywhere ; and by the results of these 
 experiments he judges for himself whether he 
 is right or wrong. In this way he has built 
 himself from the smallest possible life, up to 
 the most powerful life on our globe. And in 
 the same way he will go on building himself 
 until experience shall teach him that his highest 
 happiness hangs on the great moral law laid 
 down by Jesus : " Whatsoever ye would that 
 others should do unto you, do ye also unto 
 them." 
 
 In believing in my desires, I believe in the 
 Law of Attraction in my body. The Law of 
 Attraction is the power that holds the atoms of 
 my body in cohesion. In our unconscious life, 
 the Law acts without our knowing it ; it holds 
 the atoms of our bodies compact until we reach 
 the point of our highest development, or until 
 we are grown. Then, if our conscious knowledge 
 of its power could join on to our unconscious 
 knowledge of it, the power would still operate 
 to hold the atoms in such close relation to each 
 other that we would not grow any older. 
 
 But when we fail to recognise the Law in our 
 bodies as expressed in desire, then at the point 
 when the unconscious life drops us, we begin to 
 grow old. The growing old process is simply a 
 process of disintegration or falling apart of the
 
 176 MAN'S power to speak 
 
 atoms, because we do not begin the process of 
 conscious recognition, and the power vested in 
 unconscious recognition begins to fail. We are 
 then in a condition of negation, wherein the 
 atoms or cells lose their magnetic relation to 
 each other more and more. As this goes on, the 
 different organs of the body become deadened 
 to each other's magnetisms, and become slack 
 in their action, until the whole system gets to be 
 like an old machine, whose wheels have worn 
 smaller and smoother until the cogs do not act 
 in a way to move all its parts harmoniously. 
 This is the condition we call old age. 
 
 A similar condition may exist in youth. 
 There may be a non-recognition of the Law 
 of Attraction on the unconscious plane of a 
 child ; and the child may express the condition 
 in many forms of error called disease. And 
 every form of it is non-recognition, either con- 
 sciously or unconsciously, of the Law of Attrac- 
 tion in the individual as expressed in desire. 
 
 A sick person may have a hundred desires, 
 and the desire to live, more than all others ; but 
 even having the desire in its greatest develop- 
 ment, he does not trust it ; and it is powerless 
 to save him. 
 
 He must not only be conscious of his desire, 
 but he must know that desire is the saving
 
 THE CREATIVE WORD 1 77 
 
 power, and that to trust it fully, to believe in 
 it as a saving power, is to be saved. This is 
 what the Bible means when it speaks of the 
 saving power of God, and of how God will 
 save to the uttermost all who trust in Him. 
 The old prophets and teachers of that long 
 past age, when the Bible was written, had an 
 inkling of the truth of this matter. For their 
 God is the Law ; it is expressed in man in 
 desire ; and when comprehended and trusted, 
 the result is absolute and indestructible and 
 ever-refining and progressive life. 
 
 By the understanding of his own power as 
 related to the Law of Being, a man's spoken 
 word will recreate him. 
 
 M
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 
 HEALTH AND STRENGTH AND BEAUTY AND 
 OPULENCE ARE TO BE FOUND IN GREATER 
 FULNESS IN THIS NEW AND WONDERFUL 
 THOUGHT THAN IN ANYTHING ELSE IN 
 THE WHOLE WORLD 
 
 From the mental standpoint, disease is error ; 
 it cannot consistently be called anything else. 
 
 If all is life, as it surely is in absolute truth ; 
 and if man is an individualised understanding 
 of the life, then he may be said to be a mental 
 statement of the Law ; and a statement which 
 he himself has made. Not knowing the absolute 
 truth that all is life ; knowing, indeed, nothing 
 of the Law ; not being able to give anything 
 like a reasonable account of himself; simply 
 feeling that he lives — it cannot be otherwise 
 than that his statement of being should be 
 extremely weak, and full of errors. 
 
 Errors of intelligence are simply negations 
 or denials of the Law, through ignorance of 
 its existence. These negations or denials of 
 absolute truth show forth in a hundred forms 
 of weak and erroneous beliefs. The body being 
 
 178
 
 HEALTH, STRENGTH 1/9 
 
 mind, fixed beliefs, no matter how erroneous, 
 are recorded in it in the degree and character 
 of its weakness. 
 
 Everybody was ignorant of the Law. No 
 two persons were ignorant precisely in the 
 same way and to the same extent. So these 
 various shades and grades of ignorance were 
 so many different erroneous statements. These 
 beliefs were predicated upon a fixed conviction 
 in the perishability of matter. Beliefs based 
 upon the accepted idea that matter is perish- 
 able could not do otherwise than result in 
 death sooner or later. 
 
 The race takes the consequences of its beliefs ; 
 a thing it could not do but for the fact that it is 
 all mind, and that every man's body is a state- 
 ment of his beliefs, either acquired by himself 
 or inherited from his parents, or both ; modified 
 in nearly all instances by the beliefs of those 
 about him. 
 
 For, until a man has learned to think himself 
 out of the fixed beliefs of the race, by the re- 
 cognition of his own freedom through a know- 
 ledge of the Law, he meets with constant 
 environment from the opinions of others ; and 
 this environment does have its influence in 
 shaping him. 
 
 No man has anv mode of thought that is
 
 l8o HEALTH, STRENGTH 
 
 absolutely and unalterably fixed, until he comes 
 into the knowledge of the Law. Then all his 
 thoughts begin to adjust themselves to his 
 knowledge of absolute truth, and gradually 
 the entire bulk of his former fixed beliefs 
 (his body) begins to change. 
 
 It does not change its type, but its type 
 begins to relax, so as to admit of a series of 
 all-over improvements, corresponding with his 
 revised beliefs in absolute truth ; the truth 
 that all is life ; and, therefore, good and 
 desirable. 
 
 When a man arrives at the knowledge of 
 this one mighty and absolute truth, he has 
 a firm foundation under him for the first time 
 in the history of the race. He now has a 
 logical basis of fact from which to make a 
 new statement of himself. The statement of 
 himself which he has inherited is not, and 
 never has been, a statement for which he, as 
 a reasoning creature, is responsible. It is a 
 statement of the developing animalhood of all 
 the past, which has culminated in him, and 
 which he has accepted in unconsciousness of 
 the fact that he could make a statement that 
 would suit him better. 
 
 But he could make no better statement so 
 long as he believed himself to be a creation
 
 BEAUTY AND OPULENCE 151 
 
 of some force outside of himself. He could 
 make no better statement so long as he did 
 not know by what means his present state- 
 ment had been achieved ; he could not even 
 make any special change in the statement of 
 himself; he was helpless as a log in his ignor- 
 ance of the Law, and of his own power under 
 the Law. And so the same statement simply 
 kept repeating itself over and over as the race 
 proceeded, without any marked departure from 
 the fixed type, until now. 
 
 But now the greatest truth that has ever 
 dawned on the race is here ; the absolute truth 
 that all is life ; that disease, death and old age 
 are erroneous statements regarding life ; and 
 that this truth simply awaits universal recogni- 
 tion in order that its vitalising influence shall 
 be expressed in one unbroken current through 
 all the members of the race. 
 
 I refer again to that wonderful book, the 
 Bible. " Believe," says the Bible, " and you 
 shall be saved." How can belief save a man 
 unless he is all mind ? 
 
 Believe in whom ? 
 
 " Believe in God " ; these are the words. 
 
 Believe in the power of the Law ; these are 
 equivalent words. 
 
 God and man are one ; the Law and man
 
 I 82 HEALTH, STRENGTH 
 
 are one. God, the Law, is subjective man. The 
 race is God, the Law, made objective. 
 
 The Law being the unchangeable Life-Prin- 
 ciple, it cannot be diseased and it cannot die. 
 Intelligence may weaken in its recognition of 
 the Law on the unconscious plane, and this 
 weakening may be called disease. Or it may 
 cease to recognise it altogether on the un- 
 conscious plane, and this will be called death; 
 
 Is it really disease and death? Certainly not. 
 It is simply the individual cessation of any 
 farther power to recognise life ; but it is not 
 the death of life. 
 
 Non-recognition of life, life that is self-existent 
 and eternal, is no more evidence that death 
 exists than a blind man's belief in darkness is 
 evidence that there is no light. 
 
 Therefore, disease is error ; it is a mental 
 mistake, and it cannot rightfully be called 
 anything else. 
 
 If you knew your neighbour was labouring 
 under some mistaken opinion, would you pre- 
 scribe a porous plaster and a dose of calomel 
 in order to change it? Would you not, rather, 
 expect that the best course would be to reason 
 with him until you have convinced him that he 
 was in an error. 
 
 Even if his condition of error had culminated
 
 BEAUTY AND OPULENCE 1 83 
 
 in the almost total destruction of his mind, and 
 his conduct endangered the lives of those about 
 him, so that he had to be tied or put under 
 the influence of a narcotic, until such time as 
 the truth could be implanted in his intelligence 
 so firmly as to convince him of his mistake, 
 would not this course be more reasonable than 
 the former one ? 
 
 If I have made it clear that man, as to his 
 external or visible side, is mind, and not matter, 
 I know that every reader will answer, " Yes." 
 
 Being actually startled with this idea when it 
 was first presented to me, I kept experimenting 
 with it, until I demonstrated that it would work 
 perfectly in nine cases out of ten. 
 
 And perhaps the strangest part of it is, that 
 in making the argument that convinced the 
 patients of their error in believing in disease, 
 I always did it silently. I seldom spoke aloud 
 to any of them ; and when they were cured they 
 knew no more of my method than when they 
 first came. Some of them said God worked 
 through me to perform the cure. Others 
 believed that I had an exceptionally strong 
 " power in prayer," and did not know that 
 prayer and every other form of leaning and 
 begging were as far as possible from my 
 method. Some unusually ignorant people
 
 184 HEALTH, STRENGTH 
 
 thought it a species of witchery, and held me 
 in great awe. It came to be believed that 1 
 could raise the dead, and do many other things 
 that I was not able to do. The report of my 
 power over disease spread far and wide by word 
 of mouth, and people came to me from across 
 the continent, not only to be cured, but to know 
 how it was done. 
 
 It was done by thought transference, but it 
 was the transference of a very unusual character 
 of thought. 
 
 In the early pages of this book I tried to 
 establish the fact that thoughts are things. 
 They are substantial, though, usually invisible 
 entities ; and it is in the power of the thinker 
 to send them from him into the organisms of 
 others, where they are not only the messengers, 
 but the messages themselves, that are trans- 
 ferred from one brain to another. They leave 
 the strong and positive brain of the person who 
 is grounded in the belief that there is no disease 
 and no death, and they take their abode in the 
 brain of the one whose beliefs are so lacking in 
 knowledge of the absolute truth, as to render 
 him negative to higher thought forms than his 
 own ; and here they remain, carrying conviction 
 to the patient, of his mistake, and thus healing 
 him by changing his belief. In healing a
 
 BEAUTY AND OPULENCE I 85 
 
 patient, there are two points to be noticed in 
 the silent argument applied. 
 
 The first is a consideration of the fact that 
 disease of the body is of mental origin ; it is 
 the dis-ease, lack of ease, or mistaken concep- 
 tion of the Law showing forth in the body. 
 It is the fruit of mistaken reasoning made 
 apparent to the senses. This truth is universal. 
 But in spite of the fact that it is universal, 
 and, therefore, of the first importance, it goes 
 for nothing unless individual application can 
 be made of it. 
 
 The Law is one thing and the understanding 
 of the Law is another thing. The Law — in 
 its majesty — simply is. Man, who is the in- 
 dividualised interpreter of the Law, changes 
 perpetually ; changes in proportion as he knows 
 more and more. 
 
 It seems easier to define the Law than to 
 define the man. He is a bundle of desires. 
 By these desires, he is related to everything 
 that he desires. The existence of his desires 
 proves conclusively that what he desires exists, 
 and is for him. His desires — taken in the 
 aggregate — are the sure prophecy of their own 
 fulfilment. They point towards happiness, 
 and thus include health, opulence and beauty. 
 
 Under no influence imaginable but that
 
 1 86 HEALTH, STRENGTH 
 
 power vested in the Law of Attraction could 
 the man be related to the object of his desires 
 in a way to insure their fulfilment. He is, 
 therefore, allied to the Law of Attraction and 
 dependent upon it. 
 
 But he is not dependent upon it as a slave 
 is dependent on his master. He depends upon 
 it as a freeman depends upon his own efforts. 
 He knows that it will serve him in every 
 effort he may make. 
 
 These efforts are all intellectual ; they are 
 all of them the strivings of an earnest soul in 
 the pursuit of truth. Knowledge of truth is 
 the only saviour, and he knows it. Knowledge 
 of truth means greater knowledge of the power 
 of the Law. 
 
 This is what he desires ; greater knowledge 
 of the power of the Law. All of his desires, 
 even unknown to himself, tend to this. Each 
 acquisition of knowledge he may make helps 
 to liberate him from the bonds of his past 
 ignorance ; from the wretched beliefs that 
 made themselves manifest as disease, old age 
 and death. 
 
 Knowledge is power, and power is freedom, 
 and freedom is happiness. This is the happi- 
 ness that includes all those minor details of 
 health, opulence and beauty.
 
 BEAUTY AND OPULENCE 1 87 
 
 Therefore, as close a definition of man as 
 we can come to is to call him an ever-growing 
 desire ; approximating — in his growth — more 
 and more closely to a comprehension of the 
 power of the Law. 
 
 The more a man perceives of the power of 
 the Law, the more of that power he incarnates 
 in himself. He thus becomes, at every step 
 of his advancement, to use an old phrase, 
 " nearer to God " ; a state of at-one-ment with 
 the Law, that theologians would call making 
 the atonement. 
 
 Perceiving, then, that man is a bundle of 
 desires, all of which point to the attainment 
 of truth, we recognise his desires as legitimate ; 
 and in our silent reasoning with him we strive 
 to justify him in his own estimation by re- 
 moving the prejudice he has always had against 
 desire. 
 
 The masses of mankind are not only pre- 
 judiced against their own desires, but they 
 are afraid of them. Their knowledge of desire 
 is confined to the many mistakes heaped upon 
 it by the experimenting ignorance that neces- 
 sarily marks the growth of an infant race. 
 
 Therefore, to justify the patient, in the 
 promptings of his own spirit, as expressed in 
 desire, is one of the first efforts of the silent
 
 I 88 HEALTH, STRENGTH 
 
 argument made to him. He is doubtful whether 
 he has any true right to live at all. He sees 
 himself a bundle of desires, all leading — as he 
 believes — to narrow and selfish ends. He does 
 not see the great object towards which the race 
 is being drawn, and into which it will all be 
 harmonised ; his opinion of his own utility, as 
 a member of society, is more than doubtful ; 
 and he says, " I would like to live and get 
 well, if it is God's will" 
 
 His intelligence has yielded him no truth 
 that will justify his desire to live and get well ; 
 and so he leaves it for someone else to decide. 
 He is completely off his own base ; and in 
 endeavouring to rest upon another he has 
 become as a plant whose roots are pulled up 
 out of the ground, and can find no nourish- 
 ment in that condition. 
 
 And so it becomes the effort of the silent 
 argument addressed to him, to strengthen him 
 in his belief of himself; to justify his desires 
 to him, and to establish the ego firmly in his 
 thought. 
 
 This gives him mental strength, and as his 
 mental condition is his bodily condition it gives 
 him bodily strength. 
 
 To recognise desire in the patient is to 
 recognise what he fails to recognise in himself.
 
 BEAUTY AND OPULENCE 1 89 
 
 This recognition on the part of another has 
 the same effect in his body as if he recognised 
 it intelligently and consciously himself. And 
 so the patient may be healed without being 
 aware of the character of the great truth that 
 has been poured into his body. 
 
 His body, being to a degree a fixed thing, 
 possesses less vitality than his active thought ; 
 and very much less than the thought of the 
 person effecting the cure. The body of the 
 patient, then, is decidedly negative, in com- 
 parison with the living truth being poured 
 into it, and it gives an unconscious response 
 to it ; in the meantime, the patient's own 
 thought is comparatively untouched. At least, 
 it has not been sufficiently influenced by the 
 more positive thought of the healer to come 
 to an understanding of the truth, by which 
 the body is healed. 
 
 That the patient's thought is more or less 
 impressed by the healer's more positive thought, 
 is often proved by the questions he asks after- 
 wards ; but I have never known a case where 
 his thought — his active intelligence — received 
 the whole truth, as communicated silently by 
 the healer. The patient, in submitting himself 
 to the healer, does practically submit to him 
 his own beliefs, in order to have the healer
 
 190 HEALTH, STRENGTH 
 
 change them. But he does this when he con- 
 sults a physician ; the physician then proceeds 
 to change the patient's belief by his own more 
 positive belief in the power of medicine, and 
 he very often succeeds in doing it. 
 
 Where a person rejects the new truth, the truth 
 that there is no disease, and refuses to submit his 
 beliefs to manipulation by the mental method, he 
 creates a barrier that prevents the natural tend- 
 ency of higher thought to seek its level. But even 
 in this case, the higher and more positive thought 
 will eventually break clown the barrier and enter. 
 
 Even now, in this silent way, there can be 
 no high and positive thought generating any- 
 where that does not raise the average thought 
 of the entire race a little higher. 
 
 The patient who believes in the power of 
 another's thought to cure him removes all 
 barriers to the entrance of that thought, and 
 soon feels the effect of it. It was on this plan 
 that Jesus healed ; and it was his knowledge 
 of the matter that caused him to say, " Accord- 
 ing to thy faith, so be it unto thee." He made 
 no test cases of unbelievers ; he knew he was 
 hedged out of their minds. Nor did he heal 
 all he attempted to heal. For, "when he went 
 down into Capernaum, he did no mighty works 
 there, because of their unbelief."
 
 BEAUTY AND OPULENCE 191 
 
 Individuality is a very potent thing indeed. 
 It stands above all things except the Law. It 
 shall not be set aside and overcome even that 
 the person be made healthy and opulent and 
 beautiful. Clothed in the rags of error, and 
 too wretched to make farther effort in its own 
 behalf, it is still the seed germ of all future 
 growth ; its ego is obscured, but not destroyed ; 
 and no power can prevail against it until it 
 resigns itself. 
 
 I cannot enter the realm of your ego without 
 your consent. I may conquer you bodily and 
 make a slave of you, only to groan in despair 
 at the knowledge that the independent ego 
 within your breast scorns me, and holds fast 
 in its own right every thought that fortifies 
 the citadel where it resides — unassailable, in- 
 destructible, haughty. 
 
 A realisation of the majesty of the undying 
 ego is a strong point in the argument addressed 
 to the patient. The more it is dwelt upon, 
 the more firm and invincible it seems, and 
 the more irresistible its demands. Indeed, as 
 its strength grows upon one's thought, the 
 desires that proceed from it seem commands 
 that no power can disobey ; it becomes a 
 focus for the centralisation of all things desir- 
 able ; and to the opened spiritual sense all
 
 192 III' \I.TII, STRENGTH 
 
 things appear to be drifting to it in helpless 
 obedience to its calm mastery. 
 
 Thus is individuality more powerfully indi- 
 vidualised in the patient, until a sense of 
 strength comes to him that causes him to lose 
 sight of the negative beliefs that formerly held 
 a place in his mind ; and he knows that he is 
 well, though he knows not why. 
 
 And so the two points in removing his false 
 beliefs have been freely used ; sometimes one 
 and sometimes the other, as each in its turn 
 appeared the more impressive. 
 
 There are occasions when it is enough for 
 him who is required to make this silent argu- 
 ment to merely bring himself into a clear per- 
 ception of the fact that there is no disease and 
 no death. This is rising into the realm of 
 absolute truth, and seeing all things from that 
 standpoint ; but it is a universal and not an 
 individual argument. The individual argument 
 is that which perceives the ego, and makes 
 every effort to strengthen it by justifying its 
 desires to itself. 
 
 That thousands of cures are made by the 
 mental method, which I have faintly described, 
 no person who has taken the pains to investi- 
 gate the matter can doubt. The sweeping 
 charges brought acrainst the method rest on
 
 BEAUTY AND OPULENCE I93 
 
 no better foundation than ignorance and pre- 
 judice. Many people are wilfully blind, 
 believing it to their interest to learn no more 
 than they now know. For my part, I let go 
 all hold of the past years ago ; resolved to 
 remain no longer in the worn-out fields of 
 thought that I so heartily despised, no matter 
 where a fresher and braver line of thought 
 might land me. I was so tired of the dead 
 past, that I knew I had nothing to lose in 
 leaving it, and it was with a feeling akin to 
 that of the most reckless voyageur, that I 
 plunged into The New. 
 
 And who can tell of the reward that has 
 met me every day? 
 
 Each day the light shines a little brighter on 
 this wonderful journey through the realm of 
 The New. Old beliefs are fading fast. The 
 vitalising power of the new and positive truth 
 is literally making me over. Each opening day 
 is met by a brighter recognition of all the joy 
 it holds for those who are looking for joy, and 
 who are expecting the good, and not the evil ; 
 until little by little, and by slow degrees, all 
 power to recognise the evil is fading from my 
 intellect ; and only the power to perceive the 
 good is remaining. 
 
 Do you know what this means ? 
 N
 
 194 HEALTH, STRENGTH 
 
 It means that heaven really exists ; that It 
 lies all about our daily pathway ; and that — at 
 last — through the unveiling of our mental per- 
 ceptions, we are growing into a recognition of 
 it. There is now a more subtle suggestion of 
 beauty to me in the tiny seed-pod than there 
 was once in the splendid promise of a gorgeous 
 dawn, clothed in its translucent garments of 
 pink and amethyst and blue ; all trimmed with 
 gold-embroidered fleece of downy white. And 
 there is more happiness in the unexpected 
 flower by the roadside than the richest pageant 
 could once yield to me. 
 
 Heaven is here, but it only unfolds itself to 
 those who unfold to meet it. 
 
 I laugh at the idea of going to a heaven more 
 beautiful than this world, before we have learned 
 to see the beauty that meets us here at every 
 step. 
 
 What could we do with more beauty, when 
 we are blind to that which we have ? 
 
 Before closing this chapter I will answer an 
 objection that is often brought against the 
 mental method of healing. There is an idea 
 quite prevalent that any mental application of 
 power must be purely mesmeric or hypnotic. 
 
 Just what the relation of hypnotism to mental 
 healing is, I do not know ; but I know this :
 
 BEAUTY AND OPULENCE 195 
 
 that while the operator in hypnotism gains 
 control of his patient by the subjugation of the 
 patient's will to his own will, the mental healer 
 does nothing of the kind. 
 
 Indeed, what the mental healer does is just 
 the opposite. He knows that the entire result 
 of his efforts in healing depends on his power 
 to strengthen his patient's will. 
 
 The mental healer has learned the inestim- 
 able value of individual will, and has cultivated 
 his own will by a calm and logical perception 
 of its power and its value. He sees that it is 
 the bulwark of his own character, without 
 which he would take his position among the 
 negative forces in life, whose only use is to 
 be expended in the service of others. 
 
 He sees that his will is his only salvation 
 in a world whose law of growth is the survival 
 of the fittest, and it assumes such proportions 
 in his estimation that he looks on it as the 
 most important factor in his make-up. It 
 kept him in the ascendency on the brute 
 plane, and it is pledged to hold him on a 
 level with the most progressive on the intel- 
 lectual plane. 
 
 Realising, then, that the will is the man, he 
 immediately perceives that the trouble with 
 the patient is his failure to recognise his own
 
 I96 HEALTH, STRENGTH 
 
 will. Therefore, instead of trying to weaken 
 still farther the patient's will by subjugating 
 it to his own will, he begins to strengthen the 
 will of the patient by the mental argument 
 he understands so well. 
 
 Surely there is a power heretofore unrecog- 
 nised in the mind of man ; a power that 
 promises so much, that to neglect its in- 
 vestigation would be an infinitely greater piece 
 of folly than to turn indifferently from a col- 
 lection of treasures richer than anyone has 
 ever heaped up before. 
 
 To investigate this mighty subject is all 
 I ask of the reader. 
 
 Health and strength and beauty and opulence 
 are in it in greater fulness than can be found 
 in the whole world of thought outside of it. 
 
 This much I know. 
 
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