, the
vulgar popular religion of the great body of the ignorant, who were
allowed to reverence animals as divine. As shown correctly by Sir
Gardner Wilkinson, the initiated priests taught that "dissolution is
only the cause of reproduction .... nothing perishes which has once
existed, but things which appear to be destroyed only change their
natures and pass into another form." To the present case, however, the
Egyptian doctrine of atoms coincides with our own occult teachings. In
the above remarks the words, "The life-atoms of the Jiva," are taken in
a strictly literal sense. Without any doubt Jiva or Prana is quite
distinct from the atoms it animates. The latter belong to the lowest or
grossest state of matter--the objectively conditioned; the former, to a
higher state--that state which the uninitiated, ignorant of its nature,
would call the "objectively finite," but which, to avoid any future
misunderstanding, we may, perhaps, be permitted to call the subjectively
eternal, though, at the same time and in one sense, the subsistent
existence, however paradoxical and unscientific the term may appear.*
Life, the occultist says, is the eternal uncreated energy, and it alone
represents in the infinite universe, that which the physicists have
agreed to name the principle, or the law of continuity, though they
apply it only to the endless development of the conditioned.

But since modern science admits, through her most learned professors,
that "energy has as much claim to be regarded as an objective reality as
matter itself"** and as life, according to the occult doctrine, is the
one energy acting, Proteus-like, under the most varied forms, the
occultists have a certain right to use such phraseology. Life is ever
present in the atom or matter, whether organic or inorganic--a
difference that the occultists do not accept. Their doctrine is that
life is as much present in the inorganic as in the organic matter: when
life-energy is active in the atom, that atom is organic; when dormant
or latent, then the atom is inorganic.

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* Though there is a distinct term for it in the language of the adepts,
how can one translate it into a European language? What name can be
given to that which is objective yet immaterial in its finite
manifestations, subjective yet substantive (though not in our sense of
substance) in its eternal existence? Having explained it the best we
can, we leave the task of finding a more appro