causeless cause.

Every combination of these atoms, whether a knife, a leaf, an
animal, an earth, a sun, or a star, has this soul and oversoul.

Once the idea of what is meant by these terms becomes clear, the
difficulty in understanding them vanishes. The study of man is
physical in its lower branches; metaphysical only in its highest
and last analysis. The study of the Monad is metaphysical from
start to finish. The two studies are apt to be confused, because
metaphysically they are often joined for study, the teacher
taking it for granted that the pupil fully understands the simple
and easy physics of the problem of humanity.

This, in crude and bold outline, is the story of creation to the
fall of man according to the ancient physics, translated into the
words and phrases of modern physics. The latter, in the latest
discoveries of modern science, seem to have stolen a shive
from the ancient loaf in the expectation that it would not be
detected. Each and every step forward that modern science has
made in the past twenty years, each and every discovery of every
kind in the physical field, has been but the affirmative of some
ancient doctrine taught in the temples of the East before "Cain
took unto himself a wife."




Chapter Ten