This respect and admiration, however, do not militate against our liberty to choose or reject many things, or to reserve them while we wait for further light. When we are told, for instance, that the Cosmos is guided by an infinite series of hierarchies of sensient beings, each having a mission to fulfil, which are the agents of the Karmic and Cosmic laws; when it is added that each of these beings was a man in an earlier Manvantara, or is preparing to become one in the present or in a future Manvantara, that they are perfected men, or nascent men, and that, in their higher and less material spheres, they do not differ morally from terrestrial human beings save in that they do not possess the sense of personality and of emotional nature; when, lastly, we are assured that what we call unconscious Nature is in reality a complex of forces manipulated by semi-intelligent beings (Elementals) directed by the High Planetary Spirits (Dhyani-Shohans), whose total forms the Word Manifest of the non-manifest Logos and constitutes at the same time both the intelligence of the universe and its immutable law, we can do homage to the ingenuity of these speculations, as to that of thousands of others which perhaps embrace the truth more closely than our best and most recent scientific hypotheses; we are free to take what we please from them and to leave what we please. All this, I grant, is by no means proved, is not verified, or cannot be verified, save in certain details, whereas the great fundamental outlines will probably always escape the control of our unequipped intelligence. But what we must, I repeat, admire without reserve is the prodigious spiritual edifice offered by the sum total of this revelation, the immense intellectual effort which, since the dawn of humanity, has attempted to unravel the unfathomable chaos of the origin, structure, progress, direction and end of the universe and which appears to have succeeded to this extent, that hitherto nothing has been found that equals it, or is not inspired by it or, often unconsciously, returns to it. 15