m of life
cannot be approached without studying death. Any one failing to perceive
the importance of occult science may distrust the manner in which it
studies sleep and death. Occult science is, however, capable of
appreciating the motives from which such distrust arises. For there is
nothing incomprehensible in the assertion that man exists for an active,
purposeful life, that his acts depend on his devotion thereto, and that
absorption in such conditions as sleep and death can result only from a
taste for idle dreaming, and can lead to nothing else than vain
imaginings.

The refusal to accept anything of so fantastic a nature may readily be
regarded as the expression of a sound mind, while indulgence in such "idle
dreaming" is accounted morbid, and a pursuit fit only for people in whom
the joy and ardour of life are lacking, and who are incapable of "real
work." It would be wrong to set this assertion aside at once as an
injustice, for it contains a certain grain of truth. It is one quarter
truth, and must be completed by the remaining three quarters belonging to
it. Now if we dispute the one quarter which is right, with one who
recognizes that one quarter quite distinctly but who does not dream of the
other three quarters, we only rouse his suspicions. For it must be indeed
granted absolutely that the study of that which lies hidden in sleep and
death is morbid if it leads to weakness or to estrangement from real life.
No less must we admit that much of that which has always called itself
occult science in the world, and which is even now practised under that
name, bears the impression of what is unhealthy and hostile to life; but
this certainly does not spring from _genuine occult science_.

The real fact of the matter is this, that just as a man cannot always be
awake, so neither is he sufficiently equipped for the actual conditions of
life, in its entire range, without that which occult science has to offer
him. Life continues during sleep, and the forces which work and labour
during the waking state draw their strength and refreshment from that
which sleep gives them. It is thus with the things under our observation
in the manifested world. The boundaries of the world are wider than the
field of this observation; and what man recognizes in the visible must be
supplemented and fertilized by what he is able to know of the invisible
world. A man who did not continually renew his exhausted forces by sleep,
would br