rded,
if our philosophy is to remain boldly and shamelessly anthropomorphic,
as possessing, even as our own, the basic attribute of sensation.

But since their essential invisibility, and consequent upon this their
ubiquity under the dominant categories of time and place,
precludes any possibility of their incarnation, we are compelled to
postulate that their complex vision's attribute of sensation, in the
absence of any bodily senses, finds its contact with "the objective
mystery" and with the objective "universe" in some definite and
permanent "intermediary" which serves in their case the same
primal necessity as is served in our case by the human body.

If no such "intermediary" existed for them, we should be
compelled to relinquish the idea that they possessed a complex
vision at all, for not only the attribute of sensation, but the
attribute of emotion also, demands for its activity something that
shall represent the human body and occupy in their objective
"universe" the place occupied by our physical bodies in our
"universe."

As we have already shown, this primary demand for the "eternalizing
of flesh and blood" is a demand which springs from the profoundest
depths of the soul, for it is a demand which springs from
the creative energy itself, the eternal protagonist in the
world-drama. We must conclude, therefore, that although
these super-human children of Nature cannot in the ordinary sense
incarnate themselves in flesh and blood they can and do
appropriate to themselves out of the surrounding body of the ether,
and out of the body of any other living thing they approach, a
certain attenuated essence of flesh and blood which, though
invisible to us, supplies with them the place of our human body.
This, therefore, is the "intermediary" which, in the "invisible
companions" of our planetary struggle, occupies the place which is
occupied by the physical element in our human life. And this is
evoked by nothing less than that "eternal idea of the body," or
"that eternal idea of flesh and blood," which the creative energy of
love demands. A very curious and interesting possibility follows
from this assumption; namely, that by a process which might be
called a process of "spiritual vampirizing" the same creative
passion which demands satisfaction in the eternalizing of "the idea
of the body" actually suffers, by means of its vivid sympathy with
living bodies, the very pains and pleasures through which these
bodi