The present progress of invention in labor-saving devices call for a greater intelligence than the handling of the pick and the shovel, and this is being evolved; and this great living vibratory energy or force which created man and evolved his intellect and his will, man has in turn harnessed for his use, reducing the necessity for excessive manual labor; and he will have more time for the arts and sciences. The “man with the hoe,” will become the man with the electric plow and cultivator, and instead of hard, laborious work, these wonderful electric inventions will eventually reduce all labor to mild recreation and enjoyment. This wonderful electric force has now become a servant and is willing and eager to give its restless energy to man. It is the power that Tennyson says is “closer to you than breathing, nearer than hands and feet.” It is your universal father ready to give whatsoever you ask; but man must study to know this power, and learn its natural movements in order to come into the full benefit of his rightful heritage of this primal force by which he was evolved into conscious existence. The blight of fear has retarded the human race from coming into its heritage of knowledge concerning this primal substance and force of the universe—Electricity. Every effort of science to explain phenomena has been frowned upon and opposed by theology, which is the child of fear and conscience. Man has been kept in swaddling clothes which have prevented his growth to maturity. But thanks to the change of nurses during the recent centuries his clothes have been changed so frequently that he has had an opportunity to grow lusty, and all the efforts of nurses to keep him in leading-strings today are unavailing. He is outgrowing fear and superstition that has so long strangled science. And science is destroying fear by its revelations of the workings of natural law, which in the field of electrical discovery is making its most rapid strides. CHAPTER VII Death Its Relation to Life. Its Immortality. Its loving purpose. Its Relation to Evolution. “To die, to sleep,—To sleep! perchance to dream! ay there’s the rub.”—Shakespeare. In preceding chapters I have so frequently made the statement that life and death are one and the same, that it seems almost superfluous to say another word on the subject. But I am willing, even at the risk of seeming pedantic, to re-state the argument, which is not only simple and easy of comprehension, but at the same time both scientific and rational. Without desiring to enter upon the realm of metaphysics in this book, it will be sufficient to say that we use the term Life in its fullest sense, and not in the restricted one of consciousness. Consciousness itself being but one expression of life.