Man rests upon matter, has his roots in it, and draws his physical sustenance from it, like a plant, but his soul reaches up through the realm of the spiritual plane by plane to the Divine, from which it draws its entire life.
We can conceive that the Divine influx into man's soul is direct from above, whereas it would appear, from the influx of heat and light and power through the natural sun of our solar system into the solar realm, that the material body receives its life from God through the natural sun. As the material is grosser than the spiritual, or soul life, there would not be any penetration of the spiritual by the grosser influx from the material, whereas there could be and obviously is a penetration of the material by the spiritual. Spirit can in a sense flow into and manifest itself through matter, while matter cannot flow into spirit.
We are discussing the origin of the soul, and we have urged that, if the soul's life is from God—if, indeed, all creation is from Him, then the soul-form itself, which we have seen is man's receptacle of life, is also from Him. As man continues to be man after the death of the material body, and lives as a man forever when the
