fficulty in fighting its way through; but if every
one of the mob could be changed suddenly into a ghost, there would be
little to retard it. And as each interior entity is more rare, active,
and volatile than the outer and as each has relation with different
elements, spaces, and properties of the Kosmos which are treated of in
other articles on Occultism, the mind of the reader may conceive--though
the pen of the writer could not express it in a dozen volumes--the
magnificent possibilities gradually unfolded to the neophyte.

Many of the opportunities thus suggested may be taken advantage of by
the neophyte for his own safety, amusement, and the good of those around
him; but the way in which he does this is one adapted to his fitness--a
part of the ordeal he has to pass through, and misuse of these powers
will certainly entail the loss of them as a natural result. The Itchcha
(or desire) evoked anew by the vistas they open up will retard or throw
back his progress.

But there is another portion of the Great Secret to which we must
allude, and which is now, for the first, in a long series of ages,
allowed to be given out to the world, as the hour for it is come.

The educated reader need not be reminded again that one of the great
discoveries which has immortalized the name of Darwin is the law that an
organism has always a tendency to repeat, at an analogous period in its
life, the action of its progenitors, the more surely and completely in
proportion to their proximity in the scale of life. One result of this
is, that, in general, organized beings usually die at a period (on an
average) the same as that of their progenitors. It is true that there
is a great difference between the actual ages at which individuals of
any species die. Disease, accidents and famine are the main agents in
causing this. But there is, in each species, a well-known limit within
which the Race-life lies, and none are known to survive beyond it. This
applies to the human species as well as any other. Now, supposing that
every possible sanitary condition had been complied with, and every
accident and disease avoided by a man of ordinary frame, in some
particular case there would still, as is known to medical men, come a
time when the particles of the body would feel the hereditary tendency
to do that which leads inevitably to dissolution, and would obey it. It
must be obvious to any reflecting man that, if by any procedure this
cr