that anything in Nature can be inorganic, and know of no “dead atoms,” whatever meaning science may give to the adjective.  The law of biogenesis, as ordinarily understood, is the result of the ignorance of the man of science of occult physics.  It is accepted because the man of science is unable to find the necessary means to awaken into activity the dormant life inherent in what he terms an inorganic atom; hence the fallacy that a living thing can only be produced from a living thing, as though there ever was such a thing as dead matter in Nature!  At this rate, and to be consistent, a mule ought to be also classed with inorganic matter, since it is unable to reproduce itself and generate life.  We dwell so much upon the above as it meets at once all future opposition to the idea that a mummy, several thousand years old, can be throwing off atoms.  Nevertheless, the sentence would perhaps have gained in clearness if we had said, instead of the “life-atoms of jiva,” the atoms “animated by dormant Jiva or life-energy.”  Again, the definition of Jiva quoted above, though quite correct on the whole, might be more fully, if not more clearly, expressed.  The “jiva,” or life, principle, which animates man, beast, plant, and even a mineral, certainly is “a form of force indestructible,” since this force is the one life, or anima mundi, the universal living soul, and that the various modes in which objective things appear to us in Nature in their atomic aggregations, such as minerals, plants, animals, &c., are all the different forms or states in which this force manifests itself.  Were it to become—­we will not say absent, for this is impossible, since it is omnipresent—­but for one single instant inactive, say in a stone, the particles of the latter would lose instantly their cohesive property, and disintegrate as suddenly, though the force would still remain in each of its particles, but in a dormant state.  Then the continuation of the definition, which states that when this indestructible force is “disconnected with one set of atoms, it becomes attracted immediately by others,” does not imply that it abandons entirely the first set, but only that it transfers its vis viva, or living power—­the energy of motion—­to another set.  But because it manifests itself in the next set as what is called kinetic energy, it does not follow that the first set is deprived of it altogether; for it is still in it, as potential energy, or life latent.* This is a cardinal and basic truth of occultism, on the perfect knowledge of which depends the production of every phenomenon.  Unless we admit this point, we should have to give up all the other truths of occultism.  Thus what is “meant by the life-atom going through endless transmigration” is simply this:  we regard and call, in our occult phraseology, those atoms that are moved by kinetic energy as “life-atoms,” while those that are for the time being passive, containing but imperceptible potential energy, we call “sleeping atoms;” regarding, at the same time, these two forms of energy as produced by one and the same force or life.