Such ignorant objections need not, therefore, alarm us; and we should endeavour to show those who make them that what they fear is the only natural order of the Divine Life, which is "over all, and through all, and in all." But we must do this gently, and not by forcibly thrusting upon them the object of their terror, and so repelling them from all study of the subject. We should endeavour gradually to lead them to see that there is something interior to what they have hitherto held to be ultimate Truth, and to realise that the sensation of emptiness and dissatisfaction, which from time to time will persist in making itself felt in their hearts, is nothing else than the pressing forward of the spirit within to declare that inner side of things which alone can satisfactorily account for what we observe on the exterior, and without the knowledge of which we can never perceive the true nature of our inheritance in the Universal Life which is the Life Everlasting. II What, then, is this central principle which is at the root of all things? It is Life. But not life as we recognise it in particular forms of manifestation; it is something more interior and concentrated than that. It is that "unity of the spirit" which _is_ unity, simply because it has not yet passed into diversity. Perhaps this is not an easy idea to grasp, but it is the root of all scientific conception of spirit; for without it there is no common principle to which we can refer the innumerable forms of manifestation that spirit assumes. It is the conception of Life as the sum-total of all its undistributed powers, being as yet none of these in particular, but all of them in potentiality. This is, no doubt, a highly abstract idea, but it is essentially that of the centre from which growth takes place by expansion in every direction. This is that last residuum which defies all our powers of analysis. This is truly "the unknowable," not in the sense of the unthinkable but of the unanalysable. It is the subject of perception, not of knowledge, if by knowledge we mean that faculty which estimates the _relations_ between things, because here we have passed beyond any questions of relations, and are face to face with the absolute. This innermost of all is absolute Spirit. It is Life as yet not differentiated into any specific mode; it is the universal Life which pervades all things and is at the heart of all appearances.