cious souls, that we find
ourselves turning to these invisible companions whose supreme
"naturalness" is the test and pattern of all Nature.

And it is because our physical bodies in their magical mysteriousness
are so much more real than any rationalistic symbols, such as
circles, cubes, squares, wedges, pyramids, and the like, that
when we seek to visualize the actual appearance of these
"invisible companions," it seems much more appropriate to
image their souls as clothed, like the souls of plants, trees, grass,
planets, animals and men, in some tangibleness of physical form,
than in nothing but the insubstantial stuff of air or wind or vapour,
or "spirit."

But since all that we call "Nature" continually changes, passes
away in dissolution and is reborn again in other forms; and since
no physical body is exempted from death, it is apparent that if the
"immortals" possessed physical bodies such as our own, they also
would be subject to this law along with the rest of the universe.
But the generations of mankind come and go and the "invisible
companions" of men remain; therefore the "invisible companions"
cannot be supposed, except pictorially and in a symbolic sense, to
be subject to the laws which govern our mortal bodies.

It is this freedom from the laws which govern the physical body
and from all the intimate and intricate relations which exist
between our human soul and our human body, which makes it
possible for these companions of men to remain in perpetual
contact with every living soul born into the world. The difficulty
we experience in realizing the nearness to our individual souls of
these invisible companions, is due to a false and exaggerated
emphasis laid upon the material spectacle of nature.

This spectacle of the objective universe is undoubtedly one of the
ultimate realities revealed to us by the complex vision; but it is
only one of these ultimate realities. The complex vision is itself
another one of these; and the real existence of the soul is implied
in the activity of the complex vision. The reality of the external
universe, the reality of Nature, is so closely associated with the
activity of the soul that it is impossible to think of the one apart
from the other.

The soul's attribute of sensation is alone responsible for the greater
portion of this objective spectacle; for apprehended through any
other senses than the ones we possess the whole universe would be
transformed. It is onl