the same time. So all the great discoveries and inventions have been made by men in different parts of the world at about the same time. Our thoughts and ideas are recorded on the imperishable tablet of the universal intellect, and through this become contagious. This is a principle of the Hermetic philosophy, which has more influence on human life and its manifestations than has been recognized by modern science.

It is to be observed that the powers of the soul increase in proportion as it is freed from the influence of the body. The intermediate or intellectual soul can be affected either by the higher spirit or by the lower animal soul and the body, as was taught by Plato. And to teach the initiate how to liberate the soul from the body and set it free from the distorting influence of the senses was one of the aims of the esoteric science of the ancients,—a subject to which we shall recur in our next lesson. The potency of the will and the imagination in a state of ecstasy was an idea familiar to the old occult philosophy, and is mentioned by Paracelsus and Van Helmont, the fathers of modern magnetic science. But the state which was called by the Neo-Platonists ecstasy is not necessarily an abnormal one, but is in reality only the intellectual soul acting independent of the body. There are persons who can enter into this condition at will, and act from a higher or interior degree of the mind, and thus be "endued with power from on high."

CHAPTER XIII.

ON THE TRIUNE NATURE OF MAN, AND THE FREEING THE SOUL FROM THE BODY.

THE doctrine of the triune nature of man is one of the oldest doctrines of philosophy, and is absolutely fundamental in a true spiritual science. It was an occult doctrine, and was revealed in the fullest degree only to the highest initiates, or the "perfect," as they are called by the apostle Paul. In the Kabala man is viewed under the three divisions, or distinct regions, of mental being, named spirit, soul (ruach), and crude spirit (nephesh). The latter is the "serpent" of Genesis, and designates the principle of sense, and the mere animal mind or man. The body was very properly viewed as no part of man, as all its elements belong to the so-called external world. Man is identical with mind, as the term is from a Sanscrit word meaning to think. Man is mind; and each degree of the mind is man as he thinks and acts on either of three discrete planes of being.

In the Platonic philosophy,-which professedly was borrowed from the arcane science and religion of India, Egypt, and the East, man, or mind, is viewed under the three degrees of pneuma (spirit), psyche (soul), and thumos (animal and irrational soul). The spirit, sometimes called nous, was considered as the real man, or man as he exists in the divine idea; and as it is generated by the Father (pure thought), and is the first emanation from the "Unknown," it possesses a nature kindred and even homogeneous with the Divinity, and is capable of beholding the eternal realities. The lowest degree is the blind

animal life-principle, or soul, technically called thumos. The word is derived from the verb úw (thuo), meaning to burn and also to sacrifice. It means, also, to move with a rapid, violent, impetuous motion, and hence was considered the seat of all disordered and vehement passions, such as govern the life of animals. In the New Testament Psychology it is called the flesh and the carnal mind, and to be under its dominion is death. It is the sensuous mind, the seat of all sensation, as many animals have the senses more acutely developed than man. All its perceptions are illusory and fallacious, a false seeming. Life on this plane, the basement story of conscious being, is a dream, rather than a reality, when the innermost divine spirit is latent, and not developed into conscious activity. Plato, in the "Republic," represents such men as captives in a subterranean cave, with their backs turned toward the light, and who can see nothing but the reflected shadows of things, and yet think them actual realities. In order to the perception of the real truth of things, we must rise to a higher plane of thought and life.

The intermediate degree, or distinct region of mind, which is situated between the two extremes of mental existence, and which is capable of being influenced by either the higher or the lower, the inmost divine spirit or the irrational animal soul,-was called psyche, or the rational soul. When freed from the distorting influences of the physical senses and the selfish animal passions, and disencumbered of the body, it is the Logos or Word,—the true light of every man that cometh into the world. It dwells in the "intelligible world," the world of ideas and of enduring realities. It is the region of creation and of formation. It is the true object of all education to free the soul from the trammels of the body, and raise it from the plane of sense to the perception of the real and the enduring, in the place of the mere seeming, the ever-changing, and the evanescent. This is the liberty wherewith the Christ, the inward Word, makes us free (Gal. v. 1). It is the "Justice,"

or right thinking of the Kabala, a rectitude of mental perception, called by the apostle Paul the righteousness which is of faith. For faith is the action of the mind above the plane of

sense.

Swedenborg's doctrine of degrees, or of three discrete regions of the mind, was borrowed and reproduced from the Hermetic philosophy. He says: In every man there are from creation three degrees of life, the celestial, the spiritual, and the natural." ("True Christian Religion," sec. 239.) These degrees constitute three distinct ranges or planes of life, or three worlds or heavens. In another place, Swedenborg says: "I have been instructed concerning these degrees of life, that it is the last degree or life which is called the external or natural man, by which degree man is like the animals as to concupiscences and phantasies. And that the next degree of life is what is called the internal and rational man, by which man is superior to the animals; for by virtue thereof he can think and will what is good and true, and have dominion over the natural man by restraining and also rejecting its concupiscences and the phantasies thence derived; and moreover, by reflecting within himself concerning heaven,-yea, concerning the Divine Being, which the brute animals are altogether incapable of doing. And that the third degree of life is what is most unknown to man, although it is that through which the Lord flows into the rational mind, thus giving man a faculty of thinking as a man, and also conscience, and a perception of what is good, and elevation from the Lord towards himself. But these things are remote from the ideas of the learned of our age." ("Arcana Celestia," 3747.) This doctrine of degrees bears a close resemblance to the Platonic views given above.

The Alchemists, who were simply Hermetic philosophers, writing in a language wholly unintelligible to those who had not the key to it, made the triune nature of man and all things to consist of salt, mercury, and sulphur. Salt was the universal menstrum, the prima materia, from which all concrete things

spring, and to which they are reducible, and is the body of man as to its primal substance. Mercury was the symbol of the rational soul, the true anima mundi, the Logos, or creative Word in man. Sulphur was the secret fire or spirit in the system of the Alchemists. The three united into a unity, which is the true spiritual or illuminated state, was the philosopher's stone, and the white stone of the Apocalypse. (Rev. ii. 17.) It was the true magic mirror or translucent "spiritseeing crystal." The term for crystal in Greek is, when divided into twin or half-words, as follows: chryst-allos, and means that the philosopher's stone is the Christ within, in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Christ within is the great mystery of the Gospel. (Col. i. 27.) "Know," says Synesius, "that the quint-essence and hidden thing of our 'stone' is nothing less than our celestial and glorious soul, drawn by our magistery (instruction) out of its mine, which engenders itself, and brings itself forth."

Dr. Justinus Kerner, in his life of Madam Hauffe, the Seeress of Prevorst, following the Kabala, makes our inner man to consist of geist (spirit), seele (soul), and nerven geist, or nerve spirit, a semi-intelligent life-principle. The nerven geist answers to the Kabalistic nephesh, crude spirit, and being only of a semi-spiritual nature, is that which renders the rational soul visible as an apparition. It is the astral body, and by means of it the soul is enabled to affect material objects, make noises, and move articles. In short, it can speak to the inner ear of a person, using the universal æther as its vibrating atmosphere. The adept or true illuminatus can free his soul from the body at any time, for he has attained to the liberty of the sons of God (Rom. viii. 21), and can clothe the soul with the more subtle elements of the crude spirit or nephesh, and go where he pleases, and produce effects, as interiorly speaking to a person, communicating to him an idea and an inward impulse to an action, imparting to him a sense of his presence, and sometimes becoming visible to him. In this state a man is invested with