is such thoughts as these, also, that give us courage to answer the question we only dared to ask before. For in very truth this is the

purpose of life; and this is the long-sought purpose of Art.

With this thought in view one can afford to smile at the talk sometimes heard nowadays of the death of the imagination and the decadence of Art,—knowing that the Spirit of the Universe is infinite and that its nature is to give. "The burden of the bibles old" has not yet ceased to roll out of the heart of nature; and likewise the great epic poem is still to be written. We, to-day, have a vision of a universe, beside which the psalmist's was a child's globe. We have seen, with the eye of the spirit, "the process of the suns"; seen the blazing planets whirling through eternity; seen the carving of mountains and the spreading of the seas, the dawning of life and the birth of the soul, the pageant of history and the march of mind. We have gazed into the future and dreamed of the ages when the spirit shall rule, when the veil that hides the Deity shall be rent away and all things. shall be One.

We give this vision to the Coming Artist for his theme. We bid him to write the Hymn of Humanity and sing it to the Music of the Spheres.

UPTON B. SINCLAIR, JR.

If thou workest at that which is before thee, following right reason. seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract thee, but keeping thy divine part pure, as if thou shouldst be bound to give it back immediately; if thou holdest to this, expecting nothing, fearing nothing, but satisfied with thy present activity according to nature and with heroic truth in every word and sound which thou utterest, thou wilt live happy. And there is no man who is able to prevent this.-Marcus Aurelius.

Our human laws are but the copies, more or less imperfect, of the eternal laws, so far as we can read them, and either succeed and promote our welfare or fail and bring confusion and disaster, according as the legislator's insight has detected the true principle or has been distorted by ignorance or selfishness.-Froude.

The soul contains the event that shall befall it.-Emerson.

AN APPEAL TO WOMANHOOD.

Up from the marshes and the fens, from the salt marshes and the bayous, from the rice fields and the swamps, from the woodland and the pastures, from the clearing and the coppice, comes the plaint of the feathered martyrs-the martyrs whose woes are all but unrecorded, whose sufferings are almost unheard, who die innocent of all but beauty.

The little ones, the frail ones, the spirits of the air, appeal to the women, to whatsoever in them is womanly, to whatsoever in them is motherly, to all gentleness, to all tenderness-to all that is human, to all that is divine; beseeching that they may live in peace and be unmolested; imploring pity! imploring mercy! imploring justice! We serve you and you spurn us; we cheer you and you deny us; we love you and kill us. you You who profess a religion that is based on love, is there in your hearts, then, no love for us?

You who ask

us, then, our

favors of Him who made us all, will you not grant lives? You who love, you who suffer, can you not feel for us who do the same? You who bring forth children, cherish them, work for them, is it nothing that we, too, make our homes and tenderly care for our little ones? When you bend beneath the burden of some fresh sorrow, then think of us who suffer at your hands. When you

are elated with some new joy and would express your gratitude, then say a word for us. You who have but loving tenderness for your husbands and your brothers, remember us, your little brothers.

We see you upon the streets and in the churches; we see you praying for the dying; and upon your hats we see the corpses of our children and our parents. Long have you been insensible to us; now listen to the Truth. We are the messengers of peace and the symbols of the spirit. Whenever you sacrifice us you sacrifice your nobleness to your vanity; whenever you deny us freedom you thereby enslave yourselves. For the cruelty you show us you suffer the tyranny of your unconquered selves; for your thoughtlessness towards us, you remain unthinking to your own best interests; for our prof

fered love which you reject you shall one day pray in sorrow.

You

have been deaf to our plea, but you must hear us; we are calling— ever calling to you, to awaken from your dream; we exhort you to be true to what is best within you, true to what is merciful and what is just, true to what is womanly and what is noble.

The Intelligence that is around and within us inspires us to speak the truth to you, to tell you that without Love there can be no true art; for that which does not spring from love is not art, but gross deformity. If we are beautiful it is because of the Spirit of Life which animates us; and when you sever that thread, there is naught left to you of beauty but only the deserted temple, the token of your desecration. When you would decorate yourselves with the bodies of your victims you revert to what is barbarous, you become as the untutored savage with his crude and horrid ornaments. The clothes bespeak the woman and her degree of cultivation; we would have you stand for culture and what is refined in art and life; we would have you dress as becomes the mothers of a noble race.

We look to you for the courage of right convictions to defy an ignoble fashion and express simplicity and truth in dress-to stand for us the oppressed, the hunted children of the air. And we would have you impress upon your children how noble a thing is love, how grand a thing it is to be kind to all that lives.

Thus do we speak in mournful yet trusting accents to the loving hearts of all true women, asking that we be kept no longer without the pale of your ethics and religion, asking that in your hearts you make a place for us your little brothers.

STANTON KIRKHAM DAVIS.

Thou hast received the maxims by which it behooves thee to live; and dost thou live by them? What teacher dost thou still look for to whom to hand over the task of thy correction?-Epictetus.

Wisdom is not created by man; it must come to him, and cannot be purchased for money nor coaxed with promises, but it comes to those whose minds are pure and whose hearts are open to receive it. — Paracelsus.

THE DIFFERENT PLANES OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

(Concluded.)*

Now let us turn to our second conclusion, which is, in substance, that the universe of matter represents the exterior, the outer aspect, of a universe of mind; that body and mind are only two views of the Ultimate Reality; that all matter-body-is mind interpreted outwardly, symbolically. As we have previously observed, every outside, or exterior, must have a corresponding interior; and vice versa. But the inside and the outside of things are known in very different ways; so different, in fact, do they appear, that few people associate the two.

They recognize a world that is all exterior, and another that is all interior, without attempting to account for this duality. Thought seems to be excluded from an objective world, and matter from a subjective one. From a materialistic standpoint the essential nature of the outer is unknowable; only the inner can be known. We know with axiomatic certainty that whatever we conceive to be inner, e. g., thought, emotion, must be capable of some sort of outward representation. What, then, is the appearance of emotion, when we contemplate it symbolically, outwardly, objectively?

A literal definition of emotion is "moving out "; this is well calculated to suggest the way in which emotion must appear in any conception of things as outer. The experience of emotion is one of arousing, stirring into activity of forces previously in a state of apparent repose. How would such activity appear, if extended in a spatial world? According to the psychic conception, you are susceptible of mental emotion; according to the material conception, you are capable of bodily motion or vibration. You wish to suggest a thought to some friend who, after the materialistic fashion, you imagine to be many miles distant. Yet you regard yourself, the thinker, as psychic, and your friend, the recipient of thought, as psychic, too. In this instance, communication appears to be established between *Continued from Page 467.

two bodies separated in space; also (another aspect of the same occurrence), between two thinkers, psychic personalities, non-extensive, into whose relations the factor of space cannot possibly enter. The first picture is evidently incomplete, we miss something; a medium of communication is lacking. Surely some phenomenon imperceptible to the senses must be assumed to supply the deficiency. We have already referred to the fact that an omnipresent ether occupies all space, and that it is in a state of ceaseless vibration. Here, then, we discover a link connecting the two bodies between which communication is supposed to be established. Both pictures are now complete. According to the outer conception, some sort of an elastic medium, capable of transmitting vibration from brain to brain, is a necessary factor in the operation. According to the inner conception motion is impossible; for no such element as distance is recognizable.

By this time it must be tolerably evident that the doctrine of the influence of mind upon matter owes its origin to comparisons of phenomena which are wholly misleading. Man is neither material body plus a mind, nor mind plus a material body. For a long time science has labored to find the basic principle of life in electricity, or some other material force. Scalpel and crucible have been called into service, in vain efforts to discover a mind-substance in a material body; but always with the same result that attended our scrutiny of the rosebud in search of the inside we know it must have. Thought is not vibration; nor does it cause vibration, any more than the inside of a circle causes its outside. Vibration is the most comprehensible term we can find to denote the equivalent of thought in an outer, spatial order of things—in `other words, its symbol.

We may mingle the inner and outer conceptions, and so bring about endless confusion of thought; but, to be entirely consistent, we must abide either by the one or the other view-point, in dealing with any particular phenomenon, regarding everything either as material or as mental.

We may then roughly define motion as the external aspect of emotion. Now, let us extend our observations a little further. Many people are skeptical regarding astrological influences; they do not