242 SYDNEY T. KLEIN, F.L.S., P.R.A.S., ON 



felt it was soft and it gave you pleasure ; later on when you 

 were older you had it in your arms, and you felt the first 

 intimation of that wonderful aropyt] which manifests itself in 

 most children in their love for dolls, it was delightful to cuddle,, 

 and that it purred ; later on you found that it played with a 

 reel of cotton and that it could scratch, make horrid noises, and 

 many other things which make up the life of a cat and connect 

 it with its surroundings. All these thousand and one facts are 

 now drawn out, by analysis in Time and Space, in a long line, 

 and are placed one in front of the other, but the thought started 

 by the word cat was a fair example of an instantaneous- 

 creation. One other example of an instantaneous thought : — 

 Let us suppose a large room fitted with, say, a hundred 

 thousand volumes comprising all the knowledge gained by every 

 specialist in every science concerning the plan of Creation. In 

 our finite minds, under the limits of Time and Space, the word 

 representing that library would start, when uttered, an 

 instantaneous thought analogous to that of our last example^ 

 according to the knowledge that each individual had already 

 acquired of the contents of those books, but this knowledge had 

 only been gained by taking down each volume separately and 

 reading one book at a time, beginning; at the beginnino' and 

 taking each page in succession, and a lifetime would not suffice 

 to enable us to read them all, whereas if our knowledge were 

 complete, if we were omniscient, the word representing the 

 contents of that room would start an instantaneous thought 

 comprising not only every book, but every chapter, page, word, 

 letter and punctuation contained in that library or in one 

 which comprised all knowledge from the beginnmg to the end 

 of Time. 



May we not carry the analogy even further and see that as. 

 our conception of a cat was made up of numberless small 

 acquisitions of knowledge, some of which had to be discarded or 

 eliminated as errors from our minds as our knowledge grew, 

 and as each true fact became confirmed and impressed upon our 

 brain, it made itself a ijerinanent record, so in this wonderful 

 thought of the Great Eeality, whose mind may be said to be 

 omnipresent, each individual soul is a working unit in the plan 

 of creation ; each unit as it gains a knowledge of the will or 

 intent of the Deity forms for itself a personality helping 

 forward the work towards its fulfilment ; without that knowledge 

 tliere can be no personality, no unit in the great completed 

 thought, no life hereafter ; may we not even carry the analogy 

 one step further and see that, as in the case of our conception 



