al perceptions, and the purpose of this work
is to indicate some of the steps necessary to reach
their threshold. Through its extraordinary beauty
of style and the clearness of its statement it will
appeal to a wider portion of the public than most
works of a Theosophical character. It speaks to the
Western World in its own language, and in this
fact lies much of its value.

Those of us who have been longing for something
"practical" will find it here, while it will
probably come into the hands of thousands who
know little or nothing of Theosophy, and thus meet
wants deeply felt though unexpressed. There are
also doubtless many, we fancy, who will be carried
far along in its pages by its resistless logic until
they encounter something which will give a rude
shock to some of their old conceptions, which they
have imagined as firmly based as upon a rock--a
shock which may cause them to draw back in alarm,
but from which they will not find it so easy to
recover, and which will be likely to set them
thinking seriously.

The titles of the five chapters of the book are,
respectively, "The Search for Pleasure," "The
Mystery of Threshold," "The Initial Effort," "The
Meaning of Pain," and "The Secret of Strength."
Instead of speculating upon mysteries that lie at the
very end of man's destiny, and which cannot be
approached by any manner of conjecture, the work
very sensibly takes up that which lies next at hand,
that which constitutes the first step to be taken if
we are ever to take a second one, and teaches us its
significance. At the outset we must cope with
sensation and learn its nature and meaning. An
important teaching of _Light on the Path_ has been
misread by many. We are not enjoined to kill out
sensation, but to "kill out _desire_ for sensation,"
which is something quite different. "Sensation, as
we obtain it through the physical body, affords us
all that induces us to live in that shape," says this
work. The problem is, to extract the meaning which
it holds for us. That is what existence is for. "If
men will but pause and consider what lessons they
have learned from pleasure and pain, much might
be guessed of that strange thing which causes these
effects."

"The question concerning results seemingly
unknowable, that concerning the life beyond the
Gates," is presented as one that has been asked
throughout the ages, coming at the hour "when the
flower of civilization had blown to its full, and when
it