arrive at
some explanation far transcending this.

All phases of life express something, and we shall not be very far from
the truth if we regard that something as spirit. The grass, we say, is
alive: but its life consists in its ability to express that essential
something which we here term spirit. When it is no longer able to
accomplish this, the grass is still there, but we call it dead. We might
draw an apt parallel from the electric light bulb: this is nothing but a
possible source of light, until it is connected with the main supply
from the generating station. The seeming independence of the bulb is a
fiction, it has no true existence as a lamp until it expresses itself by
giving light. Yet the light is not its own light, and when the filament
breaks and the current can no longer circulate through the bulb it
ceases to be a lamp. It is, like the grass, dead: and for exactly the
same reason, that it can no longer express life or spirit.

Furthermore, the amount of resistance that a lamp interposes to the free
circulation of the current through it has its effect upon the light it
gives. One lamp may yield a fine light, and another on the same circuit
may afford but poor illumination: the one expresses well, and the other
ill. So, too, with the grass, one patch may be free-growing and another
may be but poor stuff: one expresses well, and the other feebly. In the
same way with ourselves, if our bodies have the life force circulating
freely they express robust health: and if the force find but a
constricted channel, then our bodies express health in scanty measure
and approximate more to disease than to the normal well-being. Our
bodies are no more independent organisms than is the lamp bulb: they
express the spirit which is the essence of the self, and when that self
withdraws the body is as dead as the grass or the worn-out bulb. Yet the
failure of the bulb casts no reflection upon the generating station, for
the current is still there. We do not need to assume that the current
has failed, for in that case it would fail alike for every bulb upon the
circuit. If every form and phase of life were to expire and cease at a
given moment, we might then, and then only, be justified in assuming
that spirit had ceased to be: but in that case there would be but little
need for us to worry about the point.

We may imagine spirit as the driving force behind everything, as the
urge towards evolution, as the pent-up intelligen