n awful unreality, and is real only to the false thought
which entertains or holds it. If life is real--and infinite mind must
itself be life--then death becomes the opposite unreality. And, as
Jesus said, it can be overcome. But were it real, _no power_, _divine
or human_, _could ever overcome or destroy it_!"

"Seems to me," remarked Haynerd dryly, "that our study so far simply
goes to show, as Burke puts it, 'what shadows we are and what shadows
we pursue.'"

Hitt smiled. "When the world humiliates itself to the point that it
will accept that, my friend," he said, "then it will become receptive
to truth.

"But now let us go a little further," he went on. "The great Lamarck
voiced a mighty fact when he said, 'Function precedes structure.' For
by that we mean that the egg did not produce the bird, but the bird
the egg. The world seems about to pass from the very foolish belief
that physical structure is the cause of life, to the great fact that a
_sense_ of life produces the physical structure. The former crude
belief enslaved man to his body. The latter tends to free him from
such slavery."

"You see, Doctor," interrupted Carmen, "the brain which you were
cutting up the other day did not make poor Yorick's mind and thought,
but his mind made the brain."

The doctor smiled and shook a warning finger at the girl.

"The body," resumed Hitt, "is a manifestation of the human mind's
activity. What constitutes the difference between a bird and a steam
engine? This, in part: the engine is made by human hands from without;
the bird makes itself, that is, its body, from within. So it is with
the human body. But the ignorant human mind--ignorant _per se_--falls
a slave to its own creation, the mental concept which it calls its
physical body, and which it pampers and pets and loves, until it can
cling to it no longer, because the mental concept, not being based on
any real principle, is forced to pass away, having nothing but false
thought to sustain it."

"But now," interposed Haynerd, who was again waxing impatient, "just
what is the practical application of all this abstruse reasoning?"

"The very greatest imaginable, my friend," replied Hitt. "A real thing
is real forever. And so matter can not become non-existent _unless it
is already nothing_! The world is beginning to recognize the
tremendous fact that from nothing nothing can be made. Very well,
since the law of the conservation of energy seems to be established