A characterization of Âkâsha will serve to show how inadequately it is represented by “ether.” In dimension it is ... infinite; it is not made up of parts; and colour, taste, smell, and tangibility do not appertain to it. So far forth it corresponds exactly to time, space, Îshvara [the “Lord,” but rather creative potency and soul—Anima Mundi] and soul. Its speciality, as compared therewith, consists in its being the _material cause of sound_. Except for its being so, one might take it to be one with vacuity.(448) It is _vacuity_, no doubt, especially for Rationalists. At any rate Âkâsha is sure to produce vacuity in the brain of a Materialist. Nevertheless, though Âkâsha is certainly not the Ether of Science—not even the Ether of the Occultist who defines the latter as one of the principles of Âkâsha only—it is as certainly, together with its primary, the cause of sound, a psychical and spiritual, not a material cause by any means. The relations of Ether to Âkâsha may be defined by applying to both Âkâsha and Ether the words used of the God in the _Vedas_, “So himself was indeed (his own) son,” one being the progeny of the other and yet itself. This may be a difficult riddle to the profane, but very easy to understand for any Hindû—even though not a Mystic. These secrets of the Astral Light, along with many other mysteries, will remain non‐existent to the Materialists of our age, in the same way as America was a non‐existent myth for Europeans during the early part of the mediæval ages, whereas Scandinavians and Norwegians had actually reached and settled in that very old “New World” several centuries before. But, as a Columbus was born to re‐discover, and to force the Old World to believe in antipodal countries, so will there be born Scientists who will discover the marvels now claimed by Occultists to exist in the regions of Ether, with their varied and multiform denizens and conscious Entities. Then, _nolens volens_, Science will have to accept the old “superstition,” as it has several others. And having been once forced to accept it, its learned professors in all probability—judging from past experience, as in the case of Mesmerism and Magnetism, now re‐baptized Hypnotism—will father the thing and reject the name. The choice of the new appellation will, in its turn, depend on the “modes of motion”—the new name for the older “automatic physical processes among the nerve fibrils of the [scientific] brain” of Moleschott—and also, most likely, upon the last meal of the namer, since, according to the founder of the new Hylo‐Idealistic Scheme, “cerebration is generically the same as chylification.”(449) Thus, were one to believe this preposterous proposition, the new name of the archaic truth would have to take its chance on the inspiration of the namer’s liver, and then only would these truths have a chance of becoming scientific!