Page:The Other Life.djvu/45

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the other, like a circle within a circle, but they have no tangential points. They are wholly distinct or discrete. One is physical substance, the other is spiritual substance. They can never be transmuted into each other.

Spiritual substances are really alive, and are the only causative, sensitive, organizing forces in the universe. Physical substance, or matter as we call it, is of itself always inert or dead, being merely a plastic material moulded into definite forms by inflowing spiritual substances. Thus the natural world is caused by and represents or corresponds to the spiritual world. So the natural body is caused by and represents or corresponds to the spiritual body in which the soul is manifested.

We therefore reverse the creed of the materialist, who says that affections and thoughts are the result of physical organization, the invisible secretions of the brain. On the contrary, the brain with its subtile and wonderful forms is simply the result of affections and thoughts—the condensation of material particles around a more living brain, which pulsates in spiritual atmospheres, and which is the true "dome of thought and palace of the soul."

This spiritual body is not the soul, but an organic human form composed of indestructible spir-