fact that those experiences were
for the most part the results of our ignorance of spiritual law. But if
we realise the true law of Being we shall rise above these mechanical
conceptions. We shall not deny the reality of the body or of the
physical world as facts, knowing that they also are Spirit, but we shall
learn to deny their power as causes. We shall learn to distinguish
between the _causa causta_ and the _causa causans_, the secondary or
apparent physical cause and the primary or spiritual cause, without
which the secondary cause could not exist; and so we shall get a new
standpoint of clear knowledge and certain power by stepping over the
threshold of the mechanical and entering into the spirit of it.

What we have to do is to maintain our even balance between the two
extremes, denying neither Spirit nor the mechanism which is its form and
through which it works. The one is as necessary to a perfect whole as
the other, for there must be an _outside_ as well as an _inside_; only
we must remember that the creative principle is always _inside_, and
that the outside only exhibits what the inside creates. Hence, whatever
external effect we would produce, we must first enter into the spirit of
it and work upon the spiritual principle, whether in ourselves or
others; and by so doing our insight will become greatly enlarged, for
from without we can see only one small portion of the circumference,
while from the centre we can see the whole of it. If we fully grasp the
truth that Spirit is Creator, we can dispense with painful
investigations into the mechanical side of all our problems. If we are
constructing from without, then we have to calculate anxiously the
strength of our materials and the force of every thrust and strain to
which they may be subjected, and very possibly after all we may find
that we have made a mistake somewhere in our elaborate calculations. But
if we realise the power of creating from within, we shall find all these
calculations correctly made for us; for the same Spirit which is Creator
is also that which the Bible calls "the Wonderful Numberer."
Construction from without is based upon analysis, and no analysis is
complete without accurate quantitative knowledge; but creation is the
very opposite of analysis, and carries its own mathematics with it.

To enter into the spirit of anything, then, is to make yourself one in
thought with the creative principle that is at the centre of it; and
there