The more complicated an organism the wider its environment, and to the degree of its susceptibility the more liable to resolution into inorganic matter, unless a corresponding degree of ability to protect itself from danger continues to accompany its evolution. In the case of man, knowledge of how to maintain his bodily health must keep pace with intellectual development if the balance between physical consciousness and psychical apprehension is to be properly sustained. Psychical apprehension can be translated into physical comprehension only through the medium of sense, and appreciation of the meaning and value of spiritual life through the medium of the brain. Health of body is necessary for[73] health of mind, and the co-operation of mind and body is necessary for the apprehension of spiritual truths. Now consciousness, both in its physical and psychical aspects, is manifested by the response of an organism to its environment, and in the case of organisms characterised by the possession of brain, more particularly by the power to register sensation. Human consciousness is achieved largely by an ability to perceive and register contrast in the impressions conveyed to the understanding, and it is the exercising of this faculty which leads to an established recognition of Moral Law. Appreciation of the existence of shadow and darkness presupposes the existence of light, and distinction between these contrasts is summarised by the sense of sight. In like manner, the perception of truth rests upon the power to recognise falsehood, and an estimation of what constitutes honesty on a corresponding idea of dishonesty. The sensation of pleasure is obtained from the possession of a correspond[74]ingly acute capacity to feel pain, discrimination placing value on either polaric contrary proportionate to the sensory capacity involved. In short, the register of abstract qualities is more or less dependent upon an appreciation of their antitheses—the moral worth of virtue being determinable by the degree of perceptive discrimination displayed in recognition of its contrast. Just as vision is a result of light, only known to us as vision and formulated as such by reason of its contrast or absence, darkness, which spells blindness, so the idea of good is only known to us by force of its contrast, evil. Registration of the alternating sides of the swing of this polaric machinery of sense makes for an advance in moral and spiritual, as well as in physical consciousness. Evil, on the moral plane of consideration, is as entirely a result of ignorance and absence of good as blindness on the physical plane of actuality is the consequence of perpetual darkness, or insensibility to light. The negative elements of both conditions possess a potential possibility[75] of transmutation into positive elements—the operation of psychical and physical alchemism forming the dual revelation of a God of Love, whereby those who are blind in spirit and body