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He then con

I thanked him, and begged him to do so. "tinued: You may not yet understand your present self and organization sufficiently to know that we can at an instant be at Earth, or anywhere else we may will. But this is true, as I have before intimated to you. Doubtless you noticed that after we first met, and then beheld this company of our brothers, and desired to be here, we were here instantly, upon the volition. Just so quickly can we be anywhere we will to be. But should you this instant be at Earth you could not re-enter into an experience of it, nor could you even perceive your own dead body, if that be its condition."

I replied: "I can't comprehend your meaning. I know I am myself. I am fully conscious of myself and of my continued existence. I know it was I who yesternight on Earth ate of food; but just now it seems I sat about the hearth, and talked, and laughed, and then lay down to sleep, as I told you. I see it all so plainly. I see the chair in which I sat. I see the clock on the mantel. I see my dearly loved ones. I see you and others here. I am talking to you. I perceive your thoughts addressed to me, and I behold your forms. Then why do you say to me who am conscious of all this, that, should we be at Earth this instant, I could recognize nothing of my former material surroundings? Nay, not even my poor dead body, if this be its condition?"

To this Ariel answered: "This may now be meaningless to you, but in answer I must tell you that pure Mind and Spirit cannot again experience (except in forms of thought and memory) material forms and compounds, in which the mind was formerly admixed. You may comprehend, and study, matter in all its substantial analyses, in its ultimate parts, in its essences and in its laws; but you cannot experience it as formulated, organic aggregations and organizations: to do this you must again become a part of it.

"You might study your body in its elements as an organic compound of so much oxygen and other gases, as so much

ash; but you cannot even perceive its organism and its form, and its color, and its expression.

"You, having lived admixed with matter, were by your dual existence a part of matter; and through the organs and senses of a material body your pure Self, your Mind, was enabled to perceive sensations arising from material affections.

"These sensations, of whatever kind, arose from affections or motions in the sensory or brain, and there the mind took cognizance of them. These sensations, which your mind perceived, were only the signs, symbols, or translations of material phenomena into the forms to be recognized, and interpreted, by thought. Without the media of the body and its organs and senses, the mind could never have received the sensations, which by it were translated into thought; and, therefore, could not have had cognition of the material sphere and of its phenomena. God's material spheres of this universe could never have been known, and realized, by minds created by Him, unless minds have been created admixed with

matter.

"Some of these brothers, who are here with us, never were admixed with matter, as you and I were, and notwithstanding my utmost endeavor, I have never been able to assist them to a conception of the qualities of matter. There is Brother Meoön from the sphere Orion, who was created pure Mind, just as you perceive him now, he can speak for himself as proof of what I have just told you."

Brother Meoön, who had up to this time been silent and thoughtful, bending his benign intentness upon me all the while thought to me: “What Brother Ariel has taught you is indeed true. So often have I with all my power listened to him as he in the eloquence of pure thought discoursed to me and others about the material things, beauties and phenomena, as he expressed it, of your and his former abode, Earth. With all the power of my thought I have questioned him, and with all the power of his thought he has answered me;

but I have never yet been able to conceive of what he teaches. So often have I felt in spite of myself, O, that the great, creative Spirit had seen fit to have given me for a time at least a 'dual existence,' as Brother Ariel expresses it, so that I too could know what is 'matter' and what is 'earth,' what is 'hardness' and what is 'weight,' what is 'cold' and what is 'heat,' what is eating' and what is drinking,' what is 'weariness' and what is sorrow,' what is 'pain' and what is 'suffering,' what is 'sleep' and what is 'death'! All these things and thousands more I know not, nor can I conceive, nor ever will!"

Thus Brother Meoön thought, and as I perceived his communication, I was constrained to respond: "Why, Brother Meoön, judging by this almost complaint which you make, I feel somewhat inclined to believe that you nearly know what sorrow is at least."

Then Ariel continued:

"Now, Brother," (they all called me Brother, for they yet knew not my name), "you perceive this testimony from Brother Meoön, and I could have thousands to so testify to the fact that pure spirit, which has never been admixud with matter, cannot comprehend gross matter and its material phenomena. You and I, in the wisdom of our blessed Father, were impinged upon matter, connected with, and associated in, it, in such a wonderful way that we were mysteriously enabled to comprehend it, experience it, feel it, and know it and then to interpret, and translate, it into the forms of pure thought."

"Then our existence was of a dual nature, of spirit or mind or substantive-force and matter mysteriously conjoined?" I inquired.

"Yes, that is wherein our nature differed from that of these always pure, psychic Beings here. If you remember, early in the researches of philosophy, this wonderful truth of our being was announced. The learned Plato, so revered here, and beloved, taught this truth. He affirmed that we

were a substance of mind and a body of matter,—two counterparts entirely different and distinct in every quality and essential; one material, and the other non-material substance, and in that sphere the one dependent upon the other.

"For a long æon the world wrangled over whether anything should or could be denoted substance except the gross matter, which, as we here know, is distinct in its nature from pure substance. These celestial and ethereal realms,these innumerable, pure, psychic forms,-infinite in variety and extent and forces, comprise the highest and grandest forms of substance, vastly removed from the corruptible and perishable grossness of the material spheres. Matter in its natural state is deadness, inertia. It has no power or force in and of itself. It would forever have remained inert and dead if the substantive-forces of the ethereal elements, the powers of the Immanent Mind, had not been mysteriously diffused into it. It was at first formless, motionless, structureless, forceless. The scientific thought of the world was a unit on this view, even before I took my departure hence. Yet we see that while the natural state of matter was deadness, inertia, now there is no single particle of matter at rest. There was a mighty ethereal, initial impulse, that thrilled through the dry bones of the material, infusing and awakening multiple life and forces, and fitting the grosser spheres for the habitation of etheriel Mind, the pure substance, which the Creative One intended should be impinged into them.

"Later on in the earth's history, other great thinkers, and then the Blessed Christ, messenger to Earth, taught distinctly the doctrine of a pure spiritual Substance, indwelling in the gross material, and He taught that that gross 'flesh and blood of the material form could not inherit these psychic realms.

"Then the thought of the world was so carried away with the doctrine of the actuality and persistence of the psychic

Then came

Substance or Reality, that there arose Minds who taught that no material things were real, but were only the Ideas or Imaginings or Creatures of Mind. Such Minds as Descartes, Berkeley, Kant, Jacobi, Fichte and others were thus carried away. Hume demolished their Ideal-Monism. August Comte, who, fearing the chaotic state of Metaphysics brought about by Hume's battle with Idealism, went to the other extreme and taught the doctrine of Positivism, that nothing was real but the material and its demonstrable phenomena. Following in his track came the school of the Materialists in the nineteenth century.

"To us here, in these upper realms, who once thought on earth, the tenets of materialism seem entirely without philosophical foundation. I will prove this more at length in my discourse in the Temple, which occasion will soon arrive. But looked at and studied, even from a standpoint of physiology, from a study of the actions and functions of the bodily senses themselves, the materialistic teaching that the gray matter in the head, called the brain, was the thinking power, or mind, or ego, in man, was entirely untenable, and plainly so.-However I am afraid, my brothers, that this discussion, so removed from your pure contemplation here, will not interest you."

"Yes," "yes," "go on," 'go on," "go on," exclaimed a number.

"We will it. We will it."

“Then for a little while I will teach on; for I set out to explain to our brother, newly come here, why he could not again be at Earth and see, and know, his dead body, which - remained behind him; and these thoughts are necessary to teach him the reasons.

"The human organism possessed organs for the reception of the light-force or motion, and others for the reception of the sound-force or motion, and others to receive and enjoy the effluvia of material substances, called there taste and smell; and another called feeling which perceived the quality