Court bench who spend long hours, weeks and months, seriously deliberating
over their decisions. But those who, without having studied, think they
understand and are fitted to discourse upon the greatest of all sciences,
the science of Life and Being, make a greater mistake. After years of
patient study, of holy life spent in close application, a man is
oftentimes perplexed at the immensity of the subject he studies. He finds
it to be so vast in both the direction of the great and small that it
baffles description, that language fails, and that the tongue must remain
mute. Therefore we hold, (and we speak from knowledge gained through years
of close study and investigation), that the finer distinctions which we
have made, and shall make, are not at all arbitrary, but absolutely
necessary as are divisions and distinctions made in anatomy or chemistry.

No form in the physical world has feeling in the true sense of that word.
It is the indwelling life which feels, as we may readily see from the fact
that a body which responded to the slightest touch while instinct with
life, exhibits no sensation whatever even when cut to pieces after the
life has fled. Demonstrations have been made by scientists, particularly
by Professor Bose of Calcutta, to show that there is feeling in dead
animal tissue and even in tin and other metal, but we maintain that the
diagrams which seem to support his contentions in reality demonstrate only
a response to impacts similar to the rebound of a rubber ball, and that
must not be confused with such feelings as _love_, _hate_, _sympathy_ and
_aversion_. Goethe also, in his novel "Elective Affinities,"
(Wahlverwandtschaft), brings out some beautiful illustrations wherein he
makes it seem as if atoms loved and hated, from the fact that some
elements combine readily while other substances refuse to amalgamate, a
phenomenon produced by the different rates of speed at which various
elements vibrate and an unequal inclination of their axes. Only where
there is sentient life can there be feelings of pleasure and pain, sorrow
or joy.

_The Etheric Region._

In addition to the solids, liquids and gases which compose the _Chemical
Region_ of the Physical World there is also a finer grade of matter called
Ether, which permeates the atomic structure of the earth and its
atmosphere substantially as science teaches. Scientists have never seen,
nor have they weighed, measured or analyzed this substance, but they