as true.  The Priests of Isis were the only true initiates, and their occult teachings were still more veiled than those of the Chaldeans.  There was the true doctrine of the Hierophants of the inner Temple; then the half-veiled Hieratic tenets of the Priest of the outer Temple; and, finally, the vulgar popular religion of the great body of the ignorant, who were allowed to reverence animals as divine.  As shown correctly by Sir Gardner Wilkinson, the initiated priests taught that “dissolution is only the cause of reproduction .... nothing perishes which has once existed, but things which appear to be destroyed only change their natures and pass into another form.”  To the present case, however, the Egyptian doctrine of atoms coincides with our own occult teachings.  In the above remarks the words, “The life-atoms of the Jiva,” are taken in a strictly literal sense.  Without any doubt Jiva or Prana is quite distinct from the atoms it animates.  The latter belong to the lowest or grossest state of matter—­the objectively conditioned; the former, to a higher state—­that state which the uninitiated, ignorant of its nature, would call the “objectively finite,” but which, to avoid any future misunderstanding, we may, perhaps, be permitted to call the subjectively eternal, though, at the same time and in one sense, the subsistent existence, however paradoxical and unscientific the term may appear.* Life, the occultist says, is the eternal uncreated energy, and it alone represents in the infinite universe, that which the physicists have agreed to name the principle, or the law of continuity, though they apply it only to the endless development of the conditioned.

But since modern science admits, through her most learned professors, that “energy has as much claim to be regarded as an objective reality as matter itself"** and as life, according to the occult doctrine, is the one energy acting, Proteus-like, under the most varied forms, the occultists have a certain right to use such phraseology.  Life is ever present in the atom or matter, whether organic or inorganic—­a difference that the occultists do not accept.  Their doctrine is that life is as much present in the inorganic as in the organic matter:  when life-energy is active in the atom, that atom is organic; when dormant or latent, then the atom is inorganic.

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* Though there is a distinct term for it in the language of the adepts,
how can one translate it into a European language?   What name can be
given to that which is objective yet immaterial in its finite
manifestations, subjective yet substantive (though not in our sense of
substance) in its eternal existence?   Having explained it the best we
can, we leave the task of finding a more appropriate term for it to our
learned English occultists.

** “Unseen Universe.”
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Therefore, the expression “life-atom,” though apt in one sense to mislead the reader, is not incorrect after all, since occultists do not recognize