.

Its chemical elements, as they resolve themselves slowly back into
their planetary accomplices, are part and parcel of that general
"body of the earth" which is in a state of constant movement, and
which has the "soul of the earth" as its animating principle of
personality. And just as the human corpse, when the soul has
deserted it, becomes a portion of those chemical elements which
are the body of the planet's "personal soul," so do the dead bodies
of animals and plants and trees become portions of the same
terrestrial bodies.

Thus strictly speaking there is no single moment when any
material form or body can be called "dead." Instantaneously with
the departure of its own individual soul it is at once "possessed" by
the soul of that planetary globe from whose chemistry it drew its
elemental life and from whose chemistry, although the form of it
has changed, it still draws its life. For it is no fantastic
speculation to affirm that every living thing whether human or
otherwise plays, while it lives, a triple part upon the world stage.

It is in the first place the vehicle of the individual soul. It is in
the second place the medium of the "spiritual vampirizing" of the
invisible planetary spirits. And it is in the third place a living
portion of that organic elemental chemistry which is the body of
the terrestrial soul. Thus it becomes manifest that that "illusion of
dead matter" which fills the human soul with so profound a
melancholy is no more than an everlasting trick of the malice of
the abyss.

And the despair which sometimes results from it is a despair
which issues from no "dead matter" but from the terrible living
depths of the soul itself. It is from a consideration of the especial
kind of melancholy evoked in us by the illusion of "objective
deadness" that we are enabled to analyse those peculiar
imaginative feelings which sometime or another affect us all. I
refer to the extraordinary tenacity with which we cling to our
bodily form, however grotesque it may be, and the difficulty we
experience in disassociating our living soul from its particular
envelope or habitation; and the tendency which we have, in spite
of this, to imagine ourselves transferred to an alien body. For the
soul in us has the power of "thinking itself" into any other body it
may please to select.

And there is no reason why we should be alarmed at such an
imaginative power; or even associate its fantastic realization with