ned Reason. Conception creates
ideas which are the seed, that, in due time, will produce fruit after
its own kind. In a broad sense we may call it the Imaging Faculty, only
we must not suppose that this necessarily implies the visualizing of
mental images, which is only a subsidiary mode of using this faculty. An
"immaculate conception" is therefore the only means by which the New
Liberated Man can be born in each of us. The sequence is always the
same. The Will holds the Conception together, and the idea thus formed
gives direction to the working of the Law. But this direction may be
either true or inverted; and the impersonal Law will work constructively
or destructively, according to the conception which it embodies. In this
way, then, will-power may be used to hold together an inverted
conception--the conception that our personal force of will is sufficient
to bear down all opposition. But this mental attitude ignores the fact,
that the fundamental principle of creative power is the Wholeness of the
Creation; and that, therefore, the idea of forcing compliance with our
wishes, by the power of our individual will, is an inverted conception,
which, though it may appear to succeed for a time, is bound to fail
eventually, because it antagonizes the very power it is seeking to use.
This inverted use of the Will is the basis of "Black Magic," a term some
readers will perhaps smile at, but which is practised at the present day
to a much greater extent than many of us have any idea of--not always,
indeed, with a full consciousness of its nature, but in many ways which
are the first steps on the Left-hand Path. Its mark is the determination
to act by Self-will, rather than using our will to co-operate with that
continuous forward movement of the Great Whole, which is the Will of
God. This inverted will entirely misses the point regarding the part we
are formed to play in the Creative Order, and so we miss the development
of our own individuality, and retrograde instead of going forward.

But if we work _with_ the Law instead of against it, we shall find that
our word, that is to say our conception, will become more and more the
Word of Power, because it specializes the general Law in some particular
direction. The Law will serve us exactly to the extent to which we first
observe the Law. It is the same in everything. If the electrician tries
to go counter to the fundamental principle, that the electric current
always flows fr