to
suppose otherwise is to suppose the reactive power of the universe to be
either unable or unwilling to produce the complete expression of its own
intention in the creation of man.

That it should be unable to do so would be to depose it from its place
as the creative principle, and that it should be unwilling to fulfil its
own intention is a contradiction in terms; so that on either supposition
we come to a _reductio ad absurdum_. In forming man the creative
principle therefore _must_ have produced a perfect work, and our
conception of ourselves as imperfect can only be the result of our own
ignorance of what we really are; and our advance, therefore, does not
consist in having something new added to us, but in learning to bring
into action powers which already exist in us, but which we have never
tried to use, and therefore have not developed, simply because we have
always taken it for granted that we are by nature defective in some of
the most important faculties necessary to fit us to our environment.

If we wish to attain to these great powers, the question is, where are
we to seek them? And the answer is _in ourselves_. That is the great
secret. We are not to go outside ourselves to look for power. As soon as
we do so we find, not power, but weakness. To seek strength from any
outside source is to make affirmation of our weakness, and all know what
the natural result of such an affirmation must be.

We are complete _in ourselves_; and the reason why we fail to realise
this is that we do not understand how far the "self" of ourselves
extends. We know that the whole of anything consists of _all_ its parts
and not only of some of them; yet this is just what we do not seem to
know about ourselves. We say rightly that every person is a
concentration of the Universal Spirit into individual consciousness; but
if so, then each individual consciousness must find the Universal Spirit
to be the infinite expression of _itself_. It is _this_ part of the
"Self" that we so often leave out in our estimate of what we are; and
consequently we look upon ourselves as crawling pygmies when we might
think of ourselves as archangels. We try to work with the mere shadows
of ourselves instead of with the glorious substance, and then wonder at
our failures. If we only understood that our "better half" is the whole
infinite of Spirit--that which creates and sustains the universe--then
we should know how complete our completeness is.