So within the astral body there is the mental body which, says Mrs. Besant, is of finer material than the astral as the astral is finer than the physical. This is the body which answers by its vibrations to our changes of thought. The mental body may be refined by fitting disciplines as it is coarsened by evil thoughts. These thoughts may become "veritable diseases and maimings of the mental body incurable during its period of life." These bodies we discard in due time, the physical at death and the astral when ready to enter the heaven world. What becomes of the mental body Mrs. Besant does not say. Beyond these are bodies which belong to man's timeless existence, curiously named and obscurely defined. There is apparently a causal body which is possibly the vehicle of will and, more involved still, a super-spiritual body which is the reality of God deep within us, and the carrier and vehicle of our supreme and enduring personal values. All this is a curious enough mingling of psychology, a subtle materialism, and unbounded speculation; it is equally beyond proof and denial, though for the proof of it the theosophist offers the testimony of those whose senses are so refined by peculiar disciplines as to see in and about physical form a play of light and colour which are themselves the revelation of mental and emotional states. We literally go about, according to this testimony, "trailing clouds of glory" or of gloom. While for the denial of it there is the deep-seated protest of Western reason, that personality, complex as it is, cannot possibly be so bafflingly complex as this. _The West Accepts Suffering as a Challenge and Looks to Personal Immortality for Victory_ We are, therefore, according to the theosophist, emanations from the Divine; deeply enveiled and much enshrouded within us is a timeless and changeless self descended from the mysterious All which lies back of all things and under high compulsion to seek again, in some vast turning of the wheel of Being, that from which we sprang. Theosophy becomes more understandable in its practical reaction upon life, for this many veiled self is deeply involved in forces and states to which it is not really akin, and since it suffers greatly in being so involved the end of existence is, in discipline and ascent, to be set free from the pain and weariness of conscious existence, and to be absorbed in the changeless peace of that ultimate reality out of which we have issued and back again to which we are destined to go. We cannot be insensible to the vast scope of such a speculation as this for in one form or another there are, in all religion and in the deeper yearnings of life, elements akin to it.