The Hidden Power And Other Papers upon Mental Science. Thomas Troward

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      life and being.

      And so on through every degree, from the lowest depths of ignorance to

      the greatest heights of intelligence, a man's life must always be the

      exact reflection of that particular stage which he has reached in the

      perception of the divine nature and of his own relation to it; and as we

      approach the full perception of Truth, so the life-principle within us

      expands, the old bonds and limitations which had no existence in reality

      fall off from us, and we enter into regions of light, liberty, and

      power, of which we had previously no conception. It is impossible,

      therefore, to overestimate the importance of being able to realise the

      symbol _for_ a symbol, and being able to penetrate to the inner

      substance which it represents. Life itself is to be realised only by the

      conscious experience of its livingness in ourselves, and it is the

      endeavour to translate these experiences into terms which shall suggest

      a corresponding idea to others that gives rise to all symbolism.

      The nearer those we address have approached to the actual experience,

      the more transparent the symbol becomes; and the further they are from

      such experience the thicker is the veil; and our whole progress consists

      in the fuller and fuller translation of the symbols into clearer and

      clearer statements of that for which they stand. But the first step,

      without which all succeeding ones must remain impossible, is to convince

      people that symbols _are_ symbols, and not the very Truth itself. And

      the difficulty consists in this, that if the symbolism is in any degree

      adequate it must, in some measure, represent the form of Truth, just as

      the modelling of a drapery suggests the form of the figure beneath. They

      have a certain consciousness that somehow they are in the presence of

      Truth; and this leads people to resent any removal of those folds of

      drapery which have hitherto conveyed this idea to their minds.

      There is sufficient indication of the inner Truth in the outward form to

      afford an excuse for the timorous, and those who have not sufficient

      mental energy to think for themselves, to cry out that finality has

      already been attained, and that any further search into the matter must

      end in the destruction of Truth. But in raising such an outcry they

      betray their ignorance of the very nature of Truth, which is that it can

      never be destroyed: the very fact that Truth is Truth makes this

      impossible. And again they exhibit their ignorance of the first

      principle of Life--namely, the Law of Growth, which throughout the

      universe perpetually pushes forward into more and more vivid forms of

      expression, having expansion everywhere and finality nowhere.

      Such ignorant objections need not, therefore, alarm us; and we should

      endeavour to show those who make them that what they fear is the only

      natural order of the Divine Life, which is "over all, and through all,

      and in all." But we must do this gently, and not by forcibly thrusting

      upon them the object of their terror, and so repelling them from all

      study of the subject. We should endeavour gradually to lead them to see

      that there is something interior to what they have hitherto held to be

      ultimate Truth, and to realise that the sensation of emptiness and

      dissatisfaction, which from time to time will persist in making itself

      felt in their hearts, is nothing else than the pressing forward of the

      spirit within to declare that inner side of things which alone can

      satisfactorily account for what we observe on the exterior, and without

      the knowledge of which we can never perceive the true nature of our

      inheritance in the Universal Life which is the Life Everlasting.

      What, then, is this central principle which is at the root of all

      things? It is Life. But not life as we recognise it in particular forms

      of manifestation; it is something more interior and concentrated than

      that. It is that "unity of the spirit" which _is_ unity, simply because

      it has not yet passed into diversity. Perhaps this is not an easy idea

      to grasp, but it is the root of all scientific conception of spirit; for

      without it there is no common principle to which we can refer the

      innumerable forms of manifestation that spirit assumes.

      It is the conception of Life as the sum-total of all its undistributed

      powers, being as yet none of these in particular, but all of them in

      potentiality. This is, no doubt, a highly abstract idea, but it is

      essentially that of the centre from which growth takes place by

      expansion in every direction. This is that last residuum which defies

      all our powers of analysis. This is truly "the unknowable," not in the

      sense of the unthinkable but of the unanalysable. It is the subject of

      perception, not of knowledge, if by knowledge we mean that faculty which

      estimates the _relations_ between things, because here we have passed

      beyond any questions of relations, and are face to face with the

      absolute.

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