A careful analysis of the meaning of this will show that it begins and ends in the domain of abstract thought. To use a figurative expression, it does not touch the ground anywhere. If our bodies and their needs, if the earth and its products which minister to those needs, if, in brief, the material universe really comprised the _all that is_, such a thought as is contained in the passage quoted could never have come into being. For it has no practical relation to things as such. Yet there is nothing especially obscure about it. It was written for men and women of ordinary intelligence, who are supposed to take an interest not merely in sacred truths, which, indeed, are not dealt with in the article from which I quote, but the structural forms containing those truths. All of which, rightly interpreted, points to another phase of existence, which is either near to or far from us according to the stage of our development, a phase which may become measurably real to us even before we enter fully upon it, and which has the strongest possible claims upon our attention. CHAPTER XXII. There is no more fruitful source of error to the student of occult philosophy than the assumption which he continually makes, that the race and the individual may be treated as one when their relations to a higher power are being considered. It appears that the study of the laws of chemistry may be partly responsible for this. A molecule of any substance, having in itself all the properties of that substance, may be reasoned upon and regarded as though it were, as it is, an epitome of the mass. In the same way it is assumed that man, the individual, is an epitome of the race, and that, in endeavoring to obtain a philosophical view of him, we may pass in review before the mind what we know of the race, and what we know of the individual in a general way, without drawing any line of distinction between what is true of the one and what is true of the other. Now, while this mental process may have a certain value when both are considered externally, those who attempt to solve the deeper problems of the race or the man, by means of it, are sure to fall into error. It is not borne in mind that our race is scarcely conscious of itself as a unit, and if it were, it would in the present state of knowledge regard itself as alone in the universe, flying through space on a revolving globe with enormous velocity, along an unknown orbit. There may be other inhabited worlds peopled by other races of beings, but as a race we do not know this to be true; and only a dim perception of the survival of a few of its own members that have lived their little lives and passed away since time began, relieves the sense of isolation with which the race looks out into the surrounding darkness.