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have only a transmissive function. They open successively the various pipes and let the wind in the air-chest escape in various ways. The voices of the various pipes are constituted by the columns of air trembling as they emerge. But the air is not engendered in the organ. The organ proper, as distinguished from its air-chest, is only an apparatus for letting portions of it loose upon the world in these peculiarly limited shapes. My thesis now is this: that, when we think of the law that thought is a function of the brain, we are not required to think of productive function only; we are entitled also to consider permissive or transmissive function. And this the ordinary psycho-physiologist leaves out of his account...... As the air now comes through my glottis determined and limited in its force and quality of its vibrations by the peculiarities of those vocal chords which form its gate of egress and shape it into my personal voice, even so the genuine matter of reality, the life of souls, as it is in its fulness, will break through our several brains into this world in all sorts of restricted forms, and with all the imperfections and queernesses that characterize our finite individualities here below."-Human Immortality, pp. 28-36.
CREATION.
The truth is that Spirit, Life, or Intelligence, is a self-subsistent reality, and quite independent of matter and its forms; Materialism has taken a great leap in the dark in regarding it as a product of matter.
It would be a mistake to imagine that we are the first in the field of research; in reality, every age has produced its thinkers who have devoted themselves whole-heartedly to the study of the problem. Perhaps it is not easy to excel certain mystic researchers in their investigation into the nature of Reality, or Life, underlying all appearances of matter. We can only admire their untiring zeal and their power of discernment. They have conceived the atom of physical matter, not to be a simple unit, devoid of parts, but to be composed of smaller fragments, and these, again, to be not simple, but complex combinations of still minuter particles.
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