The youngest lawyer, fresh from law school knows more about the
most intricate cases, in his own estimation, than the judges upon the Supreme Court bench
who spend long hours, weeks and months, seriously deliberating over their decisions. But
those who, without having studied, think they understand and are fitted to discourse upon
the greatest of all sciences, the science of Life and Being, make a greater mistake. After
years of patient study, of holy life spent in close application, a man is oftentimes
perplexed at the immensity of the subject he studies. He finds it to be so vast in both the
direction of the great and small that it baffles description, that language fails, and that
the tongue must remain mute. Therefore we hold, (and we speak from knowledge gained through
years of close study and investigation), that the finer distinctions which we have made, and
shall make, are not at all arbitrary, but absolutely necessary as are divisions and
distinctions made in anatomy or chemistry.
No form in the physical world has feeling in the true sense of
that word. It is the indwelling life which feels, as we may readily see from the fact that a
body which responded[pg 061]to the slightest touch while instinct with life, exhibits no sensation
whatever even when cut to pieces after the life has fled. Demonstrations have been made by
scientists, particularly by Professor Bose of Calcutta, to show that there is feeling in
dead animal tissue and even in tin and other metal, but we maintain that the diagrams which
seem to support his contentions in reality demonstrate only a response to impacts similar to
the rebound of a rubber ball, and that must not be confused with such feelings as
love,hate, sympathy and aversion. Goethe also, in his
novel “Elective Affinities,” (Wahlverwandtschaft), brings
out some beautiful illustrations wherein he makes it seem as if atoms loved and hated, from
the fact that some elements combine readily while other substances refuse to amalgamate, a
phenomenon produced by the different rates of speed at which various elements vibrate and
an unequal inclination of their axes. Only where there is sentient life can there be
feelings of pleasure and pain, sorrow or joy.
The
Etheric Region.
|