34 METAPHYSICS 



humanity the truth of its eternal destiny, and the absolute 

 necessity, consequently, for it to live in the full conscious- 

 ness and belief that that destiny must inevitably be 

 determined during its brief interval of individual life, and 

 before the dissolution of its mortal and immortal parts 

 has been effected by universal fate or decree. 



In continuation, we claim that the universal belief of 

 the psychologically normal and healthy human being in 

 the existence of a hereafter is justified, and absolutely 

 called for, by the continuous " knockings of the human 

 heart on the bars " of the human intellect and reason, in 

 " longing desire for an after life," the patiently sifted and 

 reverently pronounced u findings " of science, the clearly 

 and firmly expressed messages of holy writ, the story of 

 countless secular attempts of unaided, but far-seeing and 

 deep-thinking men, as told by themselves after they have 

 endeavoured to fathom the " riddle of the universe," and 

 especially as these all conspire to prove the same truth, 

 solidity, and reality of the belief in, and hopes from, that 

 cardinal possession of every unit of the great human family. 



Moreover, in extension of these remarks, we would 

 observe that the media or paths along which man has 

 been evolved, being primarily, from the inorganic elements 

 of the earth's crust, by their organised arrangement, union 

 with, and working by vital energy, and thereafter by the 

 opening up of lines beyond these, through the nervous 

 system, which rules and dominates the material organism, 

 by ways of access into the less tangible and ponderable 

 regions of the material universe, as, for instance, along 

 the universal ether, which inter-penetrates all space and 

 substance, including the human body. Along this medium, 

 the ether, the sense of sight has been made to appreciate 

 the existence of material organisms at incalculable dis- 

 tances, and to realise the presence of astral bodies which 

 may have long since ceased to exist in the state they did 

 when their messages were despatched to earth. 



This latter statement must be, we think, surely about 

 as inconceivable and incomprehensible by the uneducated 

 intelligence of man as is the great induction of meta- 

 physical science to the educated intelligence, that the 

 immaterial part of man is inevitably destined to progress 



