Legend
< Soul and Spirit (continued from page 1-136) >
enjoying spirit to us after her death.
Recurring to elementary spirits how beautifull it will be if it turn out that they are waiting for incarnation to turn themselves (Undine-like) into immortal beings! How completely in accordance with all principles of perpetual upward development.
“So that the notion, so old yet so new to most, is not confined to those whose names are most associated with it in America. The notion that these elementaries are waiting for incarnation is that which is affirmed by the Occultists. Substantially they say that spirit passes through various stages of progression until it arrives at the condition of ‘rudimental man,’ endowed with all the mental but with none of the moral qualities of humanity. It has no soul, and so no conscience. That comes at incarnation by the inbreathing of the Divine Breath, and not till then is the heritage of immortality given. The elementaries have imperfect wills, and can be easily guided by an immortal man, i.e., by one born on this or other inhabited earths, and so endued with superior faculties. They assert, further, that they do interfere very materially in the affairs of our world, and are the authors of many of the lower phenomena of Spiritualism. Every careful observer must have noticed in circles constituted without any due regard to conditions, a class of manifestations which may be described as Puck-like freaks, or the gambols of an unembodied entity, destitute of moral consciousness, mischievous rather than distinctly evil. Such can hardly be referred to the action of undeveloped human spirits, for the tricks are not such as a man, how-ever uneducated or foolish, would be likely to do. They leave on the mind a distinct sense of being referable to a source not human. These, say the Occultists, are the pranks of the elementaries. They will plague those who allow themselves to be plagued; but they are the servants, obedient helpers of those who know their power, and will command them. And through it all, they themselves are progressing onwards to that phase of incarnation when they shall become ‘living souls.’
“Is it so? If it be, much light is thrown on vexed questions. If it be, man needs to know it, not to shirk it, and as Mrs. Britten says—scream ‘We know enough. We will stop our ears for fear we should hear too much.’ If it be, then the grand theory of evolution applies to all created things; and God is consistent with Himself in all spheres of His action. Man, by virtue of his immortality, is the lord of these inferior spirits, and when he knows his power, is in possession of the key to the secrets of nature which the Ancients had, and which we have lost.
“If it be only a dream, well; it will pass away, and we shall none of us be any worse for having swept away some of the cobwebs which from earliest days till now have hung about the subject of the intercourse between earth and that which has been thought to lie beyond it. For myself, I only say that the dream has one merit that dreams generally lack; it is very vraisemblable and coherent.”
Dr. Wyld on the Philosophy of Spiritualism
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Editor's notes