eries which work in actual appliances. I know that the sun is
hot. But I won't be told that the sun is a ball of blazing gas which
spins round and fizzes. No, thank you.

At length, for _my_ part, I know that life, and life only is the clue
to the universe. And that the living individual is the clue to life.
And that it always was so, and always will be so.

When the living individual dies, then is the realm of death
established. Then you get Matter and Elements and atoms and forces and
sun and moon and earth and stars and so forth. In short, the outer
universe, the Cosmos. The Cosmos is nothing but the aggregate of the
dead bodies and dead energies of bygone individuals. The dead bodies
decompose as we know into earth, air, and water, heat and radiant
energy and free electricity and innumerable other scientific facts.
The dead souls likewise decompose--or else they don't decompose. But
if they _do_ decompose, then it is not into any elements of Matter and
physical energy. They decompose into some psychic reality, and into
some potential will. They reenter into the living psyche of living
individuals. The living soul partakes of the dead souls, as the living
breast partakes of the outer air, and the blood partakes of the sun.
The soul, the individuality, never resolves itself through death into
physical constituents. The dead soul remains always soul, and always
retains its individual quality. And it does not disappear, but
reenters into the soul of the living, of some living individual or
individuals. And there it continues its part in life, as a
death-witness and a life-agent. But it does not, ordinarily, have any
separate existence there, but is incorporate in the living individual
soul. But in some extraordinary cases, the dead soul may really act
separately in a living individual.

How this all is, and what are the laws of the relation between life
and death, the living and the dead, I don't know. But that this
relation exists, and exists in a manner as I describe it, for my own
part I know. And I am fully aware that once we direct our living
attention this way, instead of to the absurdity of the atom, then we
have a whole _living_ universe of knowledge before us. The universe of
life and death, of which we, whose business it is to live and to die,
know nothing. Whilst concerning the universe of Force and Matter we
pile up theories and make staggering and disastrous discoveries of
machinery and poison-gas, all o