Note.—­The figures 3, 4, 5, 6, refer to the corresponding figures in the Medallion of Inflection.

The hand placed horizontally, the back uppermost pirouetting on the wrist alternately in pronation and supination, thus passing from force to feebleness and from feebleness to force, characterizes irritability. [Compare Delaumosne, pages 114-118.]

[Illustration:  Chart of Man.  Human Nature.]

[Illustration:  Chart of the Angels.  Angelic Nature.]

The Nature of the Colors of Each Circle in the Color Charts.

Red, Blue and Yellow.

Red is the color of life.  Indeed, this is asserted by fire, by the heat of the blood.

Blue is the color of the mind.  Is not blue the color of the sky, the home of pure intellects, set free from the body, who see and know all things?  To them everything is in the light.

Yellow is the color of the soul.  Yellow is the color of flame.

Flame contains the warmth of life and the light of the mind.  As the soul contains and unites the life and the mind, so the flame warms and shines. [Compare Delaumosne, page 157.]

The Attributes of Reason.

The human reason, that haughty faculty, deified in our age by a myriad of perverse and commonplace minds known under the derisive and doubly vain title of freethinkers, is but blind, despite its high opinion of its own insight.  Yes, and we affirm by certain intuition that man’s reason is not and cannot be otherwise than blind, aside from the revealing principle which only enlightens it in proportion to its subordination; for, abandoned to itself, reason can only err and must fatally fall into an abyss of illusions.

The melancholy age in which we live but too often offers us an example of the lamentable mistakes into which we are hurried by misguided reason, which, yielding to a criminal presumption, deserts without remorse the principle super-abounding in life, light and glory.

To understand such an anomaly, to explain how reason, which constitutes one of the highest attributes of man, is so far subject to error, it is essential to have a thorough apprehension of the complexity of its nature.  What, then, is the real nature of the reason so little studied and so illy known by those very men who raise altars in its honor?  Let us try to produce a clear demonstration.  And let us first say that reason does not constitute a primary principle in man; for a primary principle could never mistake its object.  Neither is it a primary faculty; it is only the form or the manner of being of such a faculty, and thus cannot be a light in itself.  The rays by which it shines are external to it in the sense that it receives them from the principle which governs and fertilizes it.  Still, let us say that, although neither a principle nor a faculty, reason is none the less, with conscience, of which it forms the base, the noblest power of man; for this