saw; I was
conscious of it when it became active in my mentality. So with sound;
when I let the book drop, I was conscious of my thought of sound. If
the book had been dropped in a vacuum I should not have been conscious
of a thought of sound--why? Because, as Mr. Hitt has told us, the
human mind has made its sense-testimony dependent upon vibrations. And
yet, there is a clock ticking up there on the wall. Do you hear it?"

"Yes," replied Haynerd; "now that you've called my attention to it."

"Ah, yes," replied the girl. "You hear it when your thought is
directed to it. And yet the air was vibrating all the time, and, if
hearing is dependent upon the fleshly ear, you should have heard it
incessantly when you were not thinking of it, as well as you hear it
now when you are thinking of it. Am I not right?"

"Well, perhaps so," assented Haynerd with some reluctance.

"We hear, see, and feel," continued the girl, "when our thought is
directed to these processes. And the processes are wholly mental--they
take place within our mentalities--and it is there, within our minds,
that we see, hear, and feel _all_ things. And it is there, within our
minds, that the universe exists for us. It is there that we hold our
world, our fleshly bodies, everything that we call material. _The
universe that we think we see all about us consists of the mental
concepts, made up of thought, which we hold within our mentalities_."

Haynerd nodded somewhat dubiously. Carmen proceeded with the
exposition of her theme.

"Whence come these material thoughts that are within us? And are they
real? Can we control them? And how? They are real to us, at any rate,
are they not? And if they are thoughts of pain and suffering and
death, they are terribly real to us. But let us see, now that we can
reason from the basis of the mental nature of all things. We have
agreed that the creative principle is mind, and we call it God. This
infinite mind constantly expresses and manifests itself in ideas. Why,
that is a fundamental law of mind! You express yourself in your ideas
and thoughts, which you try to externalize materially. But the
infinite mind expresses itself in an infinite number and variety of
ideas, all, like itself, pure, perfect, eternal, good, without any
elements or seeds of decay or discord. And the incessant expression of
the creative mind in and through its numberless ideas constitutes the
never-ending process of creation."

"Let me add her