in life a brilliant sun varying in size from that of a large pea to a perfectly gorgeous sun-shining diamond three inches in diameter.—A ball of dazzling white fire!—and this is the soul—the being par excellence, the tremendous human mystery. It has a double consciousness; one facing time and its accidents and incidents; the other gazing square and straight right into eternity. For its hither use it fashions material eyes; for its thither use every one of a myriad rays darting from it is an eye whose powers laugh Rosse's Telescope to scorn! But there arises a fog from the body which mainly so envelops this central point that the eyes are veiled; sometimes in magnetic or other sleep the clouds shift, and then one or more eyes glance over infinite fields, and momentarily glimpse the actualities of space, time, possibility and eternity. [Were I, at this point to reveal what I know of soul, its destiny, nature, and the realities of the ultimate spaces, this world would stand agape! but I resist the temptation, and go on with this book.]
This central ball draws its supplies from space, air, ether, and being mystic and divine, directly from the Lord of the universe,—the Imperial Mystery,—Infinite and Eternal God. [About which mystery the Savans are as greatly at fault as they are concerning the facts of growth.] It breathes; has its tides, its diastole, systole, flux and ebbs; and, being compelled to gaze on the outer world through opaque glasses, diseased bodies, it takes but distorted views of things, and scarce ever can rely upon the absolute truth of what the senses tell it; from which results mistakes, confusion, misapprehensions, crime, and whatever else of evil betides its fortunes here.
The breath of the body is atmospheric air, which air is more or less penetrated with the ether of space, the breath of God, and the magnetism of the heavens surrounding the entire material universe. On these it subsists; and when it means a thing it discharges a portion of its own sphere, its divine nerval life toward the object of its desire and attention; and the vehicle is magnetism, and magnetism is that specific vif or fluid life manufactured by the sexual apparatus of either gender, as said before. The thing conveyed by it is the purpose of a soul; the result, a certain yielding of any other
