ncrete time and
space.

Some feeble idea of it may perhaps be obtained by comparing it with
electricity, which, though the cause of various phenomena: heat,
movement, chemical action, light, is not, _per se_, any one of these
phenomena, undergoes no modification from their existence, and
survives them when the apparatus through which they manifest
disappears.

We shall set up no distinction between this Soul, which may be called
the universal Soul, and the individual soul, which has often been
defined as a ray, a particle of the total Soul, for logically one
cannot imply parts to the Absolute; it is illusion, limitation on our
part, which shows us souls in the Soul.

_Bodies_ are "aspects" of the Soul, results of its activity--if,
indeed, the Infinite can be said to be either active or passive; words
fail when we attempt to express the Inexpressible. These bodies, or,
more precisely, the varied forms assumed by force-matter[2] are
aspects of the Soul, just as light or chemical action are aspects of
electricity, for one cannot suppose anything outside of infinite
Being, nor can anything be imagined which is not a manifestation of
the abstract Whole.

Let us also define _Consciousness_.

Taken absolutely, it is Being, the Soul, God; the uncaused Cause of
all the states which, in beings, we call states of consciousness.

This limited consciousness may be defined as the faculty a "centre of
life" possesses of receiving vibrations from its surroundings. When,
in the course of evolution, a being is sufficiently developed to
become conscious of a separation between its "I" and the object which
sends it vibrations, consciousness becomes self-consciousness. This
_self_-consciousness constitutes the _human_ stage; it appears in the
higher animals, but as it descends the scale of being, gradually
disappears in non-individualised consciousness.

In a word, absolute Consciousness is one, though, as in the above
example, it is manifested differently, according to the differences in
the vehicles which express it in the concrete world in which we live.

The Soul, _per se_, is beyond the reach of beings who have not
finished the pilgrimage of evolution. To know it, one must have
attained to the eternal Centre, the unmanifested Logos. Up to that
point, one can only, in proportion as one ascends, feel it in oneself,
or acknowledge it by means of the logic which perceives it through all
its manifestations as the universal Mover