Furthermore, the amount of resistance that a lamp interposes to the free
circulation of the current through it has its effect upon the light it
gives. One lamp may yield a fine light, and another on the same circuit
may afford but poor illumination: the one expresses well, and the other
ill. So, too, with the grass, one patch may be free-growing and another
may be but poor stuff: one expresses well, and the other feebly. In the
same way with ourselves, if our bodies have the life force circulating
freely they express robust health: and if the force find but a
constricted channel, then our bodies express health in scanty measure
and approximate more to disease than to the normal well-being. Our
bodies are no more independent organisms than is the lamp bulb: they
express the spirit which is the essence of the self, and when that self
withdraws the body is as dead as the grass or the worn-out bulb. Yet the
failure of the bulb casts no reflection upon the generating station, for
the current is still there. We do not need to assume that the current
has failed, for in that case it would fail alike for every bulb upon the
circuit. If every form and phase of life were to expire and cease at a
given moment, we might then, and then only, be justified in assuming
that spirit had ceased to be: but in that case there would be but little
need for us to worry about the point.
We may imagine spirit as the driving force behind everything, as the
urge towards evolution, as the pent-up intelligence which ever seeks one
variation and then another. Then, when one variation appears, more
appropriate to its surroundings than others, this, because of its
fitness, survives. As human beings we are individualised fragments of
the great universal spirit. There is only the one life and the one
spirit, but there are diversities of gifts to enable that spirit to be
expressed. The grass expresses it in its luxuriance, its colour, and
its growth: the birds in their song: and the whole of what we are
pleased to term the lower creation bespeaks this spirit in the daily
activity. When this expression ceases, the thing that was once alive is
dead.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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