Thus every person born into the world is regarded as a variant of the cosmical elements, a concrete symbol in himself, born under horoscopical conditions which are part of his greater environment and related to a world of life in which, for good or ill, he is required to function in terms of his own nature. Hence the statement, which I hold to be inviolable, that the planets affect us only in terms of ourselves. The superman will have to be content to take incarnation as he finds it. Without lying idle on the shelf for some ages he cannot wait for the stars in their courses to wheel into position for the striking of the perfect die. In all ages and nations there are such things as horoscopical misfits, where the individual finds insuperable difficulty in the way of perfect expression of character. But if we all try to do our best in the circumstances allotted to us, we shall give to the personal symbol a new and a better value than it has hitherto possessed. It is this fact of human perfectibility that gives to astrological interpretations an ever increasing interest. We see how the anciently destructive forces of the planet Mars are converted by human evolution into the executive ability of the man of action. How the ostentation of the Jovian plutocrat is changed to the benevolence of the true philanthropist, and how even the mean sordidness of the ancient Saturn becomes the constructive carefulness of the social economist. And from the remnants of this old universe of ours, maintaining its cosmic integrity for ever, there shall at length be evolved “a new heaven and a new earth.” For as the expression of divine Ideation, the universe is the revelation of God to man, and this His handwriting in the heavens means more than all the wisdom of all the ages has yet deciphered. Cosmic Symbolism, of which here we are only dealing with the crudest elements, will hereafter come to be regarded as the subject of man’s highest intuitions, the embodiment of a perfected wisdom. Only when the last word of the last chapter of the Gospel of Nature has been read and understood will the heavens be rolled away as a scroll and the Word be fulfilled which said: “Behold I make all things new!” For our God is in the making. CHAPTER XX IN THE LUMBER ROOM Almost every home has a lumber-room, a place where all the out-of-date articles, derelict furniture, oddments of all sorts, are stored. Nobody ever goes there except the man who wants a bit of stuff to fit something, one of those quaint little notions that inventive men with time on their hands are always at work upon. And almost every mind has its lumber-room. The world has a huge depository of this sort. Into this lumber-room of forgotten things I would have you come with me, you who are interested in odd ideas.