The astral plane is the plane of desires, emotions, and passions; that is to say, the plane of those influences (forms of the universal will), which become manifested as desires, emotions, and passions in the animal organism, and if we were to enter this subject, it would bring us within the realm of the supersensual but nevertheless actual kingdom of living elemental powers belonging to the soul of the world. If our eyes were opened to the perception of thoughts, it would be seen how a continual thought-transference is taking place among individual minds, influencing and determining their actions, even if they are not aware of it, causing not only individual moral diseases, insanities, obsessions and crimes, but whole epidemics of such kinds. There is an immense field for investigation for the psychologist; not for that kind of “psychologists” who imagine that insanity is under all circumstances a disturbance of the functions of the brain from physical causes, but for those who can realise that the functions of the brain may be disturbed by the disordered action of the mind; for although in many cases of brain disease it is as difficult to determine whether the disorder of the mind or that of the brain existed first, as it would be to answer the question, which existed first, the hen or the egg? nevertheless a lesion of the tissues of the brain does not take place without a cause, and this cause in the majority of such cases comes from the sphere of the emotions and thoughts. If there is no mind, there can be no mental disease. If mind is something (even if it were, as some imagine, the product of the physiological function of the brain), it must be something substantial, and being something substantial, it is able to produce substantial effects; moreover, its actions show a certain order and harmony, which go to prove that mind has an organisation. If this order and harmony be disturbed, discord, disease, insanity will be the result. Without the presence of mind nothing would come into existence; without the consciousness in the All, no brain would be able to manifest consciousness, and this is what Paracelsus means when he says:— “Whatever exists upon this earth, also exists in the _firmament_ (space). God does not make clothes for men, but he gives them a tailor. (Forms do not grow by accident; but they are the ultimate result of the action of the constructive power in nature.) The essence of things is hidden in space; existing invisibly in the _firmament_, and impressing itself upon material substances, when it becomes visible by entering within our sphere of perception.” (“Meteorum,” I. 4.) Thus we have in the _Ens Astrale_ a field in which exist the causes of numerous kinds of diseases; the thorough understanding of which requires a still deeper penetration into the secrets of nature and a higher conception of its constitution than is at present presented by the natural sciences of this day.