(5) Everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is _conscious_: _i.e._, endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception. We men must remember that, simply because _we_ do not perceive any signs of consciousness which we can recognize, say, in stones, we have no right to say that _no consciousness exists there_. There is no such thing as either “dead” or “blind” matter, as there is no “blind” or “unconscious” Law. These find no place among the conceptions of Occult Philosophy. The latter never stops at surface appearances, and for it the noumenal Essences have more reality than their objective counterparts; wherein it resembles the system of the mediæval Nominalists, for whom it was the universals that were the realities, and the particulars which existed only in name and human fancy. (6) The Universe is worked and _guided_, from _within outwards_. As above so it is below, as in heaven so on earth; and man, the microcosm and miniature copy of the macrocosm, is the living witness to this Universal Law, and to the mode of its action. We see that every _external_ motion, act, gesture, whether voluntary or mechanical, organic or mental, is produced and preceded by _internal_ feeling or emotion, will or volition, and thought or mind. As no outward motion or change, when normal, in man’s external body, can take place unless provoked by an inward impulse, given through one of the three functions named, so with the external or manifested Universe. The whole Kosmos is guided, controlled, and animated by almost endless series of Hierarchies of sentient Beings, each having a mission to perform, and who—whether we give them one name or another, whether we call them Dhyân Chohans or Angels—are “Messengers,” in the sense only that they are the agents of Karmic and Cosmic Laws. They vary infinitely in their respective degrees of consciousness and intelligence; and to call them all pure Spirits, without any of the earthly alloy “which time is wont to prey upon,” is only to indulge in poetical fancy. For each of these Beings either _was_, or prepares to become, a man, if not in the present, then in a past or a coming Manvantara. They are _perfected_, when not _incipient_, men; and in their higher, less material, spheres differ morally from terrestrial human beings only in that they are devoid of the feeling of personality, and of the _human_ emotional nature—two purely earthly characteristics. The former, or the “perfected,” have become free from these feelings, because (_a_) they have no longer fleshly bodies—an ever‐numbing weight on the Soul; and (_b_), the pure spiritual element being left untrammelled and more free, they are less influenced by Mâyâ than man can ever be, unless he is an Adept who keeps his two personalities—the spiritual and the physical—entirely separated. The incipient Monads, having never yet had terrestrial bodies, can have no sense of personality or _Ego_‐ism.