priate term for it to our
learned English occultists.

** "Unseen Universe."
----------

Therefore, the expression "life-atom," though apt in one sense to
mislead the reader, is not incorrect after all, since occultists do not
recognize that anything in Nature can be inorganic, and know of no "dead
atoms," whatever meaning science may give to the adjective. The law of
biogenesis, as ordinarily understood, is the result of the ignorance of
the man of science of occult physics. It is accepted because the man of
science is unable to find the necessary means to awaken into activity
the dormant life inherent in what he terms an inorganic atom; hence the
fallacy that a living thing can only be produced from a living thing, as
though there ever was such a thing as dead matter in Nature! At this
rate, and to be consistent, a mule ought to be also classed with
inorganic matter, since it is unable to reproduce itself and generate
life. We dwell so much upon the above as it meets at once all future
opposition to the idea that a mummy, several thousand years old, can be
throwing off atoms. Nevertheless, the sentence would perhaps have
gained in clearness if we had said, instead of the "life-atoms of jiva,"
the atoms "animated by dormant Jiva or life-energy." Again, the
definition of Jiva quoted above, though quite correct on the whole,
might be more fully, if not more clearly, expressed. The "jiva," or
life, principle, which animates man, beast, plant, and even a mineral,
certainly is "a form of force indestructible," since this force is the
one life, or anima mundi, the universal living soul, and that the
various modes in which objective things appear to us in Nature in their
atomic aggregations, such as minerals, plants, animals, &c., are all the
different forms or states in which this force manifests itself. Were it
to become--we will not say absent, for this is impossible, since it is
omnipresent--but for one single instant inactive, say in a stone, the
particles of the latter would lose instantly their cohesive property,
and disintegrate as suddenly, though the force would still remain in
each of its particles, but in a dormant state. Then the continuation of
the definition, which states that when this indestructible force is
"disconnected with one set of atoms, it becomes attracted immediately by
others," does not imply that it abandons entirely the first set, but
only that it transfers its vis viva, or living pow