EEAL PERSONALITY OR TRANSCENDENTAL EGO. 145 



is wiped out, remove the greater part of it and the Pliysical 

 Ego is destroyed, though the body is as much alive as before ; 

 there is apparently nothing left but the physical life which 

 it has in common with all animals and plants and probably, 

 as strongly suggested by late discoveries in Kadio-activity, 

 even with what is called inorganic matter. Let me now put 

 before you a connection between the Transcendental Personality 

 and the Physical Ego, which I consider one of the greatest 

 miracles on earth, though of every -day occurrence. The Inner 

 Self of each one of us being part of the Eeality, and therefore 

 independent of Time and Space, is Omniscient ; it is from this 

 store of Knowledge that our Pliysical Ego is ever trying to 

 win fresh forms of thought and, in response to our persistent 

 endeavours, that Inner self, from time to time, buds out an 

 ethereal thought ; the Physical Ego has ali'eady prepared the 

 clothing with which that l3ud must be clad before it can come 

 into conscious thought, because, as Max Muller has shown us, 

 we have to form words before we can think ; so does the 

 Physical Ego clothe that Ethereal Thought in physical 

 language, and, by means of its organ of speech, it sends that 

 thought forth into the air in the form of hundreds of thousands 

 of vibrations of different shapes and sizes, some large, some 

 small, some quick, some slow, travelling in all directions and 

 filling the surrounding space ; there is nothing in those 

 vibrations but physical movement, but each separate movement 

 is an integral part or thread of that clothing. Another 

 Physical Ego receives these multitudinous vibrations by means 

 of its sense organs, weaves them together into the same 

 physical garment and actually becomes possessed of that 

 Ethereal Thought ; and this acquisition may in turn enable him 

 to win fresh knowledge from his own Pieal Personality. Xow 

 consider, in connection with this w^onderful phenomenon, the 

 fact already emphasized that it is not we who are looking out 

 upon Xature, but that it is the Eeality which is ever trying 

 to make itself known to us by bombarding our sense organs 

 with the particular physical impulses to which those organs can 

 respond ; and if we aspire to gain a knowledge of that which 

 is behind the Physical, it is clear that all our endeavours must be 

 towards weaving those impulses into garments and to learn from 

 them the sublime truths which the Eeality is ever trying to 

 divulge to us. 



In the last forty years we have entered upon a new era of 

 religion and philosophy, we hear no more of the old behef that 

 the study of scientific facts leads to Atheism or irreligion, we 



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