ent and unrecognized,
are combining to throw a new illumination on not only the aspects, but
the purposes of life. Man is coming into enlightenment concerning the
environment of the spiritual world as one more immediately controlling
him, as well as one far more profound and significant, than the
environment of matter and of ether. As things go, the chief emphasis has
always been placed upon the material environment. Man has not
infrequently been willing to sell his soul for a mess of pottage--his
chief concern being, not the loss of his soul, but the gain of the
pottage. He has been willing to exchange the entire devotion of all his
energies for a finer and more resplendent quality of food, clothing, and
shelter,--for a palace in which to live, for private cars and steam
yachts in which to go about, and all the paraphernalia accessible to the
multi-millionaire. But it is not all that these possessions typify which
constitutes his most important environment. It is that degree of the
spiritual world with which his own quality of spiritual life is fitted
to ally itself. "The life of the organism consists in its power of
interchanging energy with that of its environment," says Frederic W. H.
Myers,--"of appropriating by its own action some fraction of that
pre-existent and limitless power. We human beings exist, in the first
place, in a world of matter," he continues, "whence we draw the obvious
sustenance of our bodily functions. We exist also in a world of ether;
that is to say, we are constructed to respond to a system of laws,
ultimately continuous, no doubt, with the laws of matter, but affording
a new, a generalized, a profounder conception of the Cosmos. On this
environment our organic existence depends as absolutely as on the
material environment, although less obviously,--but ... within, beyond
the world of ether, as a still profounder, still more generalized aspect
of the Cosmos, must lie, as I believe, the world of spiritual life."

This world of spiritual life, a deeper reality, a profounder realm of
energy than the ethereal world, is the true environment of the spirit
even while embodied in physical form; and the secret of all success, of
all achievement, of all progress, of all happiness, is to discover
increasing means by which we may thus relate ourselves to our native
realm. Science and Psychical Research are supplementing Religion; are,
indeed, incorporating themselves into Religion as vital factors of the