The tone of a person’s health is determined by the state of the etheric movements characteristic to himself.

If the vibrations underlying the body life are full and harmonious according to their individual character for a person, his organs are all sound and active.  He possesses physical tone.  If there is a similar fullness and harmony within his mental life, he must exhibit health of mind.  If a corresponding condition obtains in the moral personality, the highest health of the deeper self prevails.

These three individualized varieties of ether-movement in man mutually interact and determine one another’s character.  I know that this law does not always seem to operate.  Poor minds and wrong morals are sometimes found in apparently healthy bodies, and great minds and noble spirits in feeble bodies.  But the bodies of the one class do not represent the finest physical health, involving coarseness, flabbiness, susceptibility to disorder, etc., etc., and are not contradictions of the law.  Moreover, the inner life is not always fully expressed by apparent departures from right living:  as you may frequently see in some sudden burst of nobility, generosity, tenderness, heroism, in those who possess sound bodies but are outwardly not particularly refined.  The rough exterior may hide a splendid germ of true spiritual manhood or womanhood.  Could we look deeply into the physical nature, we should always find the law holding good that our three-fold ether-movements do influence and in the long run determine one another for weal or ill.  Where the inner self is right yet the physical tone weak or disturbed, we should perceive, if we had the “spirit of discernment,” that the better life within has surely influenced and ennobled the essential nature of the body.  It should be remembered that two confusing factors prevail where a fine spirit dwells in a diseased body:  first, the thought-life of centuries has, so to speak, warped the character of the inherited body and its vibrations to such an extent that they may not, perhaps (I do not know), be altogether reformed within a human lifetime; secondly, the thought-life of the individual, however nearly right in many respects, is wrong in one particular, the belief, feeling, conviction—­an inheritance of ages—­that disease of the body must necessarily obtain in some cases at least, no matter what the inner life may be.  This conviction is a tremendous force for harm.  Invalids accept it as true, and try to be reconciled.  But it is not true.  The belief prevails, and so prevents the real truth from appearing:  that perfect health is the primary intention of the nature of things for all.  When we can believe this magnificent truth, we shall be able to see that right vibrations underlying the mental and moral personality must tend to reform wrong vibrations underlying the body.