quired by the laws of tension, pressure, and resistance of the plane in which it is functioning.

But I and my body are so compactly dovetailed that it is only by an effort of my imagination that I am able to consider them as apart. Furthermore, what I call my life is limited by and conducted according to the character of this physical machine whose own consciousness conceives itself a unit. If man be in reality a spirit and independent of his organism, why does n't he know it as a fact? One might suggest that mankind is in the midst of facts of which it knows nothing, and that we humans are so busy exercising our faculties of purpose and will that we have not stopped long enough to disentangle within our own beings the principles we utilize in all our works. Undeniably we are creative beings and we are surrounded by entities, instruments, and machines of our own invention and manufacture. These are all made of materials of the earth and in form and mechanism imitate our own or other natural structures. Instruments developed by our purpose to extend our powers, they too exist apart on their own terms and are limited by their own properties, just as our bodies

are.

What is an automobile but a machine created by man for the purpose of moving swiftly his physical body and his possessions from one place to another? It has the equivalent of a bony structure, the chassis; it explodes gasolene (life energy) compressed in its cylinders to make its wheels turn; and its works and parts are inclosed in an outer protection of wood or steel (flesh and skin) called the motor body. To measure time, the energy of a steel spring is uncoiled against the resistance

of a series of wheels which conduct a minute and a second hand at regulated pace from one arbitrary division of space to another on a dial. The instrument in its skin of wood or metal we call a clock or a watch. Everywhere substitutions and parallelswhat nature does in bone, blood, tissue, and skin, or in fiber, sap, bark, and flowers, we humans simulate in wool, metal, clay, or stone, and we animate these machine forms of ours by compressing and expanding the energy stored in coal or water or gasolene.

Consider a telegraphic system, with its electric batteries, sending-instruments, conductors, wires, poles, and receiving-machines-what is it if not a mechanism to convey speedily information, a thought form, from a station here to a distant somewhere else? Written words are converted into electric waves which traverse the wires to their destination, and, arriving, are stepped down and back to written words, roughly paralleling what happens in man's physical organism when the mind projects a thought or a purpose into the brain instrument which mirrors it in words and impels these in waves along the nerves to the hand that reproduces them on paper by pencil or ink, forms perceptible to the physical senses. merely an electrical impulse being carried along down from the higher energy plane of its origin to the dense physical plane of its expression-"the word being made flesh."

And the process

I hear near by the echoes of a phonograph reproducing the voice of Caruso in the great aria of "Cavalleria Rusticana." But Caruso is dead, yet lives in these golden tones. I see a room in a Jersey factory building in which the great tenor is projecting from his lungs,

larynx, and lips a stream of air assembled in a sound pattern which, gathered in a horn, causes a tiny diaphragm to palpitate, which transfers its motions to a needle on a revolving wax disk, tracing itself in an equivalent pattern of wavy lines and varying curves. Only another transfer of vibrations from a higher to a lower denser medium. And these wavy lines, reproduced on a hundred thousand records, can, by the retracing of a tiny needle, render back to life the very breath and passion of the singer. Curiously, the instrument for modulating air into forms of beauty that was Caruso lies moldering in a tomb in Naples, while the quality or principle that was his message has been given immortality.

One distinguishes quite readily between the carpenter and his chisel, between the driver and the locomotive, between the piano and Paderewski, but it is hard for the individual person to realize that his own physical organism, with whose processes he seems to be so completely identified, is also a machine. Unconsciously, however, we all recognize the truth. The manner in which we talk about the strength or weaknesses of the organs of our bodies, as of things apart from ourselves, however unescapable, is evidence that the ego is not deceived. Suppose your arm or leg or some of the inner mechanisms that attend to the innumerable chemical or plumbing affairs of the body gets out of order and requires repair. You take yourself to a hospital, as you remove your automobile to a garage, and the surgeon sets about adjusting your trouble. If you were present while the necessary operations were being performed, you would be uncomfortable, so the expert sticks a

cone of chloroform over your nose and mouth, and off you go into the wide open spaces. When the valve that turned off your consciousness is opened, the job is over, and you find yourself back at the wheel of the machine. You are the identical person that fled, and it is the same body. While you were absent, its blood circulated, its heart beat, and its nerves communicated to the brain register all the shocks and thrills inevitable to the disturbance of its tissues, which you would have interpreted as pain if you had been there. The telephone may ring forever if there is no "I" to hear.

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Whoever starts picking his way through the bundle of intricate mechanisms in which he himself is infolded is actually in the position of chasing a substantial phantom. Literally, man is his body, and yet he can be detached from it. Another can operate its organisms during his absence. From its life and its processes he is apart, and yet if the connection between them and him be severed, life and its processes cease, and he is dead. As he explores the mystery further, he discovers that he controls only a quarter of the physical instrument by which he is identified, and that his lungs, liver, heart, stomach, glands, and the balance of the organs conduct their important and subtle functions independent of his knowledge or consent. Science informs him that the whole structure in which he lives is continually consuming and renewing itself and that he is virtually made over every seven years. He seems to have about the same responsibility for the machine that he bears to his motor-car. He must shelter and fuel it and observe

no more than its passenger.

Remember that I am exploring for spirit, not the amorphous, intangible essence which I had gathered from my religious teaching, but a definite, potent factor exercising intelligence. Assuming that the path of this argument is straight, there is justification for assuming that I am not this body of mine, but a citizen of a different order entirely, who resides in it and to whose needs and purposes it responds. That "I," then, must be the spirit, and the spirit must be a dynamic entity in which originate the ideas, thoughts, aspirations, and feelings that are expressed through my body. It must also be my sense of individuality through which I distinguish myself from the other human forms that surround me. It is what I am about rather than what I appear.

Having thus established my true identity, it is necessary to analyze my relations with this bone, nerve, and tissue instrument that represents me. All my contacts with life are through its limbs and sense organs. My eyes see only what is within the four walls of the room in which I sit, whereas my mind is aware of adjoining rooms of the house of which these are a part and of the great city in which it is situated. There must be, then, some law that limits my physical perceptions to objects of their own density. Light is vibration of the ether. Our eyes are tuned to take in light between the range of red rays, 398 trillion vibrations per second at one end of the spectrum, and violet rays, which vibrate 764 trillions the second at the other. Our ear instruments record vibrations from 40 to the second up to an ultimate 20,000, the latter being far

My body seems to be a biological counterpart of a radio set with receivers, condensers, coils, and batteries composed of tissue and nerve fiber which collects sound and light waves, broadcasted from every object and person in the world, and recomposes them in my consciousness as words and pictures. I have no direct contacts whatever. I listen in. What I see and hear represents not the sights and sounds of the universe, but only so much as the range of my instrument enables me to catch. I am, then, at the receiving end of an electro-chemical system with nerves for wires and ganglia for accumulators taking up and distributing the power generated by the twenty-eight trillion body cells for the operations I transact. Furthermore, the flesh and bone material of which this vital battery of mine is constructed is simply an aggregate of atoms each with its nucleus and attendant electrons circulating in prescribed order and orbit round the sun.

Science has discarded solids in their ultimate structure. It has discovered a universal pattern of these positive nuclei and negative electrons, infinitely small centers of electrical energy revolving at terrific speed, and they are the constituents of myself, the earth, and all it contains and the other worlds that hang in space.

Here at the basis of created things are the twins, positive and negative electricity, the two poles of all the batteries in the universe, and the offspring of their union, be it in a dynamo or a physical organism, is power, motion, product-life in all its innumerable manifestations. Two diverse principles that may be identified as nucleus and electrons, male and female, or con

tent and carrier, the word and the flesh, cause and effect, present in every one of the infinite modifications of thought and matter. We are all familiar with the terms spirit, soul, and body, the blessed trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Substitute therefor the common factors of all reproduction man-woman-child, owner-mill-fabric, driver-engine-motion, project-planproduct, and note the endless stream of creations endowed with purpose and form in mind or tissue wombs issuing into objective reality by the interaction of these Protean twins.

To represent the working of the universal law, follow the genesis of the Woolworth Building and note how it parallels the growth of a human being. It began in a millionaire's aspiration for a monument, and his potent purpose, intrusted to Cass Gilbert, the architect, became materialized as the Gothic business cathedral whose tower is the high landmark of Manhattan. The idea germ, the positive principle, lodged in the architectural womb, is conceived in form and nurtured with the structural knowledge the race has accumulated since man first sought shelter from the elements. Every detail of the great steel edifice, the place and shape of each stone, the size of every brick, the location of every foot of flooring, window, and door, were defined in mind and transferred to blue-prints before being handed over to the mills and manufacturers who molded the material, and the contractors, masons, and iron-workers who erected it. Emerging from the invisible into reality, adapted to the tensions and stresses of its location, it, like the human being, has identity, a controlling organism (brain) and is inhabited by a group of independent entities (the

organs), its tenants, who know neither Woolworth nor Cass Gilbert, but who, in performing their own function, contribute tithes of rent to the ownership, which in turn pays taxes to the city, State, and nation for the maintenance of the governmental apparatus and the conservation of the civilization which insured its being.

No microscope, no chemical reagent will detect in the structure a trace of the mentality that conceived the design or of the blue-print that was its embryo or of the purpose that actuated its creation or of the ownership that controls it. Abstractions all, expressions of mind energy, invisible as the Constitution and the other law structures which regulate our lives and actions. No one would think of identifying the Capitol at Washington or the White House as the Government of the United States, yet are they not the physical abode and brain and nervecenters from which its power radiates throughout the American body politic?

Inherent in any original simple idea must be all the intricate transformations it undergoes, just as the brain of the infant Lincoln held the seed that developed in the great President. The giant engines that propel the colossal bulk of the Leviathan across the Atlantic are but multiples of the principle that James Watt discovered watching the push of steam expanding from the spout of a tea-kettle. It is a long cry from Benjamin Franklin's experimenting with a kite in a thunderstorm to an Edison power-house, but his observations were the genesis of the whole modern system of lighting and communication. (Positive) purpose, operating through its transformer, mind, manipulates (negative) matter into form, and the offspring of the interac

tion is product, stamped with the image of its creator. And purpose proceeds continuously to manipulate its initial model until it evolves the true adjustment of intention to vehicle. Those of us who have lived during the period between Selden's experiments in exploding gasolene in a cylinder with an electric spark, through the early struggles of Henry Ford to the beautiful and tractable speedster of the highways, or the first trials of the Wright Brothers on the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk, to the 243 mile an hour aëroplane that won the last Pulitzer cup race, are witness to the changing and reshaping of chassis and engines, wings and body, in search of the form most accurately adapted to the pressures and resistances of the elements it must traverse.

But what if this positive energy be no more than a prototype of steam, a mere unidentified gas which, confined in a cylinder, pushes a piston and reverts back to its original water? What availeth the persistence of any force that does not carry memory?

For all the foregoing, I am only a member of the species that exhibits powers and characteristics called human, and may it not be that what I do and am are merely properties of the positive life energy operating in the biological cylinder, my body, through which they are expressed? When the cells of which it is composed disintegrate, may not my personality and the memories and contacts through which it identifies itself dissolve also?

But steam does carry both the memory and form of its origin. Having served man's purpose, it knows how to go back to the exact globular shape and content from which it was released by heat. Its exaltation from water to

vapor did not change its individuality; it merely intensified its power. Water is only the form assumed by the combination of two parts of hydrogen with one of oxygen under the atmospheric pressure, gravity pull, and mean temperature prevailing on the earth's surface. Cold increases its density, and it congeals as ice; fire expands it into steam. But though its state changes, its character holds. Coal-gas is charged with substances that can be converted into heat and light; mustardgas knows how to inflame the bodies exposed to its fumes; and there is nitrous oxid gas, the "laughing gas" of the dentists, that has the strange power of depriving me of consciousness.

All these vaporous forms were distilled from denser elements and are as invisible as electricity, yet somewhere in each is concealed its peculiar property, its memory, the individuality that makes it act as it does and identifies it through all the changes to which it may be subjected.

No one has ever seen a radio wave or the words it conveys or the pictures in the light rays on their way from the movie projector to the screen that intercepts and makes them visible.

Since most of the fruits, flowers, and vegetables of our gardens began as simple field plants and have been enriched and remodeled to their present perfection by the arts of men, it is obvious that vegetable tissue can retain and bequeath memory. Men made over the grape fruit, the American Beauty rose, and the thornless cactus, and every offspring of these creations is impressed with and carries the design of the gardener inventor. Whatever the arguments against acquired characteristics, Burbank, De Vries, and a hundred other plant architects have proved in