worse thing come upon thee." (John v: 14.) To the woman who had a spirit of infirmity for eighteen years, calling her to him, he said, "Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity." (Luke xiii: 12.) And wherever in the language used by Jesus, the will seems to express itself in an imperative form, the real meaning is an affirmation, and the original is usually capable of that translation. When the leper of Capernaum said to him, "If thou wilt, thou canst make me clean," he replied "I will it; be thou clean"; that is, thou art clean a form of expression which is based on the recognition of the fact, that in his inner being, his immortal self, he was free from the leprosy, and that it had an existence only in the body, which is no part of man. It is only an illusory veil which conceals the real man from view. The affirmation of Jesus, addressed to the inward man, was responded to by the man's will, and there was awakened in him a consciousness, a feeling of the truth of it. Thus the will exhibited its true nature, as a reactive principle, a responsive echo of thought. It is the Verily, the Amen of the New Testament; a word derived from the Hebrew Amuna, meaning truth. The rabbins believed it to possess a wonderful power. Its full significance is, when it is the response to an affirmation, "That is truth, and I believe it." It is proper to remark, in closing, that a strong will-force makes no more exertion in a silent curative effort, directed to ourselves or others, than the mind makes in believing and affirming that two and two are four. All labored effort, all strain, all struggling is not will, but the lack of it. We should recognize the fact, the eternal verity, that the thing to be done, as the cure of a malady, or anything that may be viewed as the "good pleasure" of God, is from this very fact, in an effort to become an actuality. And the attitude of the will towards it is properly expressed by the word fiat, which means "let it be done or become." "If we ask anything according to his will, we know that he heareth us." (I John v: 14.) The thing to be done, the object to be effected is like a spiral spring which is pressed down by a weight laid upon it. Yet there is a tendency in it to rise, and it will do so, and assume its cone-like form as soon as the obstruction is removed. We are potentially already what we ideally aspire to and long for, and will some time become so actually. For an idea that has life in it will assert itself. All the volition that is necessary in making a psychological impression upon a patient is that of a wish or benevolent desire, expressing itself in an affirmation. This is the radical meaning of the word volition, from the Latin volo, to wish. This adds to the thought — the mere intellectual conception - an element of life-force. The influence of desire or emotion is to give intensity to the thought, to render it more vivid, or living, as the word means. Desire alone is powerless; and thought alone is lifeless and inefficient. They must be combined into a harmonious unity. In the language of the Hermetic philosophy, they must be made into a cross, in which the upright line is the intellect, and the horizontal or base line is the love or the emotional nature. This makes a living force, what Swedenborg calls the power of truth from good. It may be represented by the light of winter which is in excess of heat, and the life of the world is then dormant. In spring, the light, which answers to the truth, is equally combined with heat, which corresponds to love, and everything starts into life. In every genuine act of faith there is a union of thought and emotion, or an intellectual conception and a feeling that it is true. This is what makes it the "word of power." It is taught in one of the sacred books of the Hindus, the Atharva-Veda, that the exercise of such will-power is the highest form of prayer, and it is instantaneously answered. For we realize in proportion to the intensity of our desire and the strength of our faith freed from all doubt. For desire is the incipiency of the thing or state desired, and faith is its full fruition. CHAPTER XVII. THE UNIVERSAL LIFE-PRINCIPLE, AND ITS OCCULT PROPERTIES AND USES. WE see everywhere in nature the indications of a universal and intelligent force which governs the world. We behold, in whatever way we look, "The tokens of a central force, Whose circles, in their widening course, - It is the common bond and life of nature, and exhibits a conatus to repair the hurts of every living thing, of plants and animals, from the mushroom to the sovereign of an empire. It is the office of the physician to influence, direct, and control the universal principle of life, to come to its aid in its curative endeavor, and to intensify its action and diminish or increase its quantum. Says Lord Lytton, who, if not an adept, was deeply versed in the arcane philosophy of the East, "To all animate bodies there must be one principle in common, – the vital principle itself. What if there be one certain means of recruiting this principle? And what if that secret can be discovered?" (A Strange Story, p. 104.) Van Helmont, to whom science owes a debt of gratitude the world has never paid, was the discoverer of hydrogen gas, and he affirms that the life-principle is of the nature of a gas, a word which etymologically signifies spirit, like the German geist. In this sense, that of a universally diffused and omnipresent and omniactive substance of life, the assertion of Van Helmont was made, and only in this sense can it be accepted. It is stored up in exhaustless and overflowing abundance in the bosom of nature. It cannot be destroyed, or increased, or diminished. It cannot be created or annihilated. It is one and indivisible, and can be controlled in its lower degrees of manifestation by the intelligent will of man, which is the highest form of its develop. ment and expression. It is identical with what is called magnetism, which is a word of Persian origin, and signifies the "wisdom-principle." The life-principle is in itself without quality, and is a blind force obedient to a controlling influence. It is submissive to the will of the spiritual man, and servilely obeys it. It acts according to the direction given to it by our imagination, and tends to realize our idea, as the hand and brush of the painter follow the image which they copy from his mind. Of this universal life-principle Madam Blavatsky observes: "We breathe and imbibe it into our organic system with every mouthful of fresh air. Our organism is full of it from the instant of our birth, but it becomes potential only under the influx of will and spirit." (Isis Unveiled, vol. i., p. 616.) This invisible and ubiquitous life-principle, the anima mundi of Plato, and the magnetic agent, has occult properties and potencies in it that few know anything about. It obeys our thoughts and takes quality from them. It answers to the human voice, and yields to the impulse of our will, and even understands the meaning of traced signs and motions of the hand, especially if they are correspondences. However incredible this may seem, it is nevertheless true, as Baron Du Potet, the prince of modern magnetists, affirms. But why should it not be so, since the rational soul of man, the immortal psyche, is only the highest expression of the universal soul or the intelligent life-principle in nature? And when the soul is closely united to this universal force it possesses, if we only but knew it, a marvellous power. It is then, as it were, the general in command of the universal living energy to direct it to the accomplishment of a desired result. Life is everywhere. A desire of recovery is a search after life, and this, as Emerson says of power, is an element with which the world is so saturated there being no chink or crevice in which it is not lodged that no honest seeking need go unrewarded. All matter is animated and acted upon by invisible agencies, of which heat and light are the most apparent. But these are only expressions on the plane of sense of the invisible and imponderable life-principle. Heat in its spiritual essence is a feeling, and light is truth. "This conscious life, is it the same When spring makes green her native dells? " (Whittier.) In his "Coming Race," a work which contains many hints respecting the Oriental occult science, Lord Lytton denominates the universal life-principle and primal force, which the Hindu adepts call the akasa, by the unusual name of vril, and says that in vril his underground people thought that "they had arrived at the unity in natural energetic agencies." Like the akasa of the Hindu transcendental science, it is a sort of "atmospheric magnetism," and controllable by the imagination and will of man. It is the "occult air" of the Kabalists, and is called by the Jewish prophets "the breath of God" and "the breath of life." Its nature, hidden properties, the laws of its action, and how to control it, was undoubtedly a part of the esoteric teaching in the prophetic schools. It is clearly mentioned in the celebrated vision of the dry bones in Ezekiel, "Come from the four |