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CHAPTER XXI
THE INNER SOUL
Consciousness
Our preceding studies have demonstrated that the soul is an emanation from the absolute. Our lives
have for their aim the increasing manifestations of what is divine in us, and the growth of the empire it is
called upon to exercise over what is within and without, by the aid of its latent energies. We can obtain this
result by divers method - by science or by meditation, by work or by moral force. The best procedure is to
utilize all those modes of application, each supplementing the others. But the most efficacious method of all is
introspection, self-analysis. Add to this the breaking of material fetters, the union with God in spirit and in
truth, and the firm determination of self-improvement, and we will discover that all true religions, all profound
philosophies find their source in this same formula. Outside of this, doctrines, cults, forms, and practices are
but exterior vestments which hide the soul of religion from the eyes of the masses.
The soul is united to the great universal Soul of which it is a vibration. This origin of the soul, this
participation in the divine nature, explains the grasps and centralizes the perceptions and transmits those to the
soul, which registers all, and disengages those which are useful. But beneath this sensorium of surface is
another hidden one, which discovers and regulates the things of the metaphysical world. It is this profound
unknown sense, unused by the majority of men, that certain experimenters designate under the name of the
sublimal consciousness.
The greater part of the world's wonderful discoveries in the physical domain were ideas perceived first
through intuition. For long Newton had entertained the thought of universal attraction, and then the fall of an
apple gave his physical senses the objective demonstration. Just as there exists in us a physical sensorium
which puts us en rapport with material beings and things, so certain men possess a spiritual sense, by whose
aid they penetrate the domain of invisible life. After death, as soon as the veil of flesh falls, this sense becomes
the only center of our perceptions, and it is in the extension and the growth of this spiritual sense that lies the
law of our psychic evolution, the renovation of our being, and the secret of its interior illumination.
By this law we detach ourselves from the relative and illusionary, from all material contingencies, to
attach ourselves more and more to the immutable and the absolute. So experimental science will always be
insufficient, in spite of the advantages it offers and the conquests it realizes, if it does not complete itself by
intuition and interior divination which enables us to discover the essential truths. A marvel surpassing all other
exterior marvels is this marvel of ourselves. It is this mirror hidden in man which reflects all the universe.
Those who are absorbed in the exclusive study of phenomena, in the pursuit of changing forms and
exterior facts, often fail to listen to the inner voices and to consult the faculties which develop in the silence.
That is why the things of the invisible, the impalpable and the divine, imperceptible to so many scientific
minds, are sometimes perceived by the ignorant. The most wonderful book is ourselves - the infinite is
revealed therein. Happy is he who can read it! All this domain remains closed to the positivist who disdains the
only key by which it can be opened. He tries to experiment by physical senses and material instruments in that
which escapes all objective measures. As a deaf man reasons about the rules of melody - a blind man about
optical laws - so this man, with exterior senses, reasons about the worlds and beings metaphysical.
Once let the interior senses awaken in him and shine, then compared to the light which inundates him,
earthly science, so great to his eyes before, will shrink into insignificance. After this light came to Professor
William James of Harvard, the eminent psychologist, he said: 'All human experience in its vital reality pushes
me irresistible to go outside of the narrow limits wherein science pretends to shut us. The real world is richer
and more complex than that of science.'
Many men of science have come to the realization that the initial cause of sensation is not in the body,
but in the soul. The physical senses are but gross manifestations of inner hidden senses. Professor Lombroso,
of the University of Turin, wrote in The Arena, June 1907: 'Until 1890 I was the most opinionated adversary of
spiritualism! Then, as a physician, I came in contact with the most curious phenomenon which had ever been
presented to my attention. I was called to attend a young daughter of a high officer in my native town. This girl
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