rance deal blows even more terrible,
for into the wounds they make they instil the poison of revolt and
despair.

The action of multiplicity, and of its creators, the "contraries,"
engenders still other causes of suffering. Every being lives both for
others and at their expense. For instance, physical bodies are obliged
to replace with food and nourishment those particles which the various
functions of life cause them to lose. The vegetable kingdom takes its
constituent elements from the mineral kingdom, and itself serves as
food for large portions of the animal kingdom; up to this point
physical pain has not manifested itself, though there is a momentary
arrest of evolution for the animistic essence which represents the
individual in the destroyed vegetable. A portion of the animal kingdom
feeds on its own members; man, too, extorts from this same kingdom a
very heavy tribute; here, the arrested evolution of the victims is all
the more important, inasmuch as their stage of evolution is higher,
and the existence of a nervous system brings the possibility of
suffering, suffering which certain influences[21] either diminish or
suppress altogether, when caused by animal destructiveness, but which
may become intense when it is man who is the sacrificer.

Among the causes of pain, arising from multiplicity there is also the
physical, mental, and moral action exercised by the solidarity of all
beings. By exchanging, with those that come into contact with us, the
products thrown off by our visible and invisible bodies, we are the
dispensers of good or ill-health. Everyone, for instance, is aware of
the far-reaching effects of an evil intellectual and moral example;
physical contagion, in spite of the torture it inflicts, is far less
to be dreaded than moral contagion. The spiritual qualities alone do
not form a leaven of evil; they are not the double-edged instruments
we meet with elsewhere. The reason of this is that they belong to the
plane of Unity. But it is none the less true that, though the
presence of a highly developed soul is a help to younger souls within
its reach and influence, its powerful vibrations may, from certain
points of view, prove fatiguing to those still at the foot of the
ladder of evolution. This is one of the many reasons that have given
rise to the saying that it is dangerous prematurely to enter the
"circle of the ascetics."

But the most powerful causes of pain, due to multiplicity, are the
ig