7.  The secret of thought in relation to health is the claim of the white life consciously put forth for physical well-being.  In explanation of this principle, let us try to obtain certain true conceptions concerning the material and pyschic nature of man.

All existences come to being through the activity of one Infinite and Eternal Reality.

The medium in which all material existences exhibit is the universal ether of science, vibrations in this medium constituting light, heat, electricity, magnetism, etc., etc.

So far as we can think, the ether is a manifest, perhaps a primary manifest, of Infinite and Eternal Reality.

It is coming to be scientific to hold that matter reduces in its last analysis to electricity and is a complex form of vibrations of the ether within the ether.  Matter is not merely pervaded by the ether; it is a state of the ether.

Matter, then, is a manifest of Infinite and Eternal Reality.

Life is a phase of the activity of matter.  If we think of matter in its grossest form, nearest to us in the process of evolution, life may be regarded as an entity different from that matter.  We do somehow feel that matter and life are distinct realities.  But if we think of matter as a complex form of etheric vibrations, nothing forbids our saying that life also is a form of vibration of the ether within the ether.  With this view in mind, we shall think of matter and life as comparatively simultaneous manifests of the ether, life, however, appearing only when the state of etheric vibrations resulting in matter has reached a stage in which vibrations resulting in life can be possible.  We should then say that life is a product of etheric vibrations emerging through those that have resulted in matter; that is, life is a product of material activities.  This view cannot justly be called materialism because Life is, then, also a manifest of Infinite and Eternal Reality.

We do not scientifically know any sort of mind that is not exhibited through matter.  The human mind always exhibits through a human body.  What we call mind is a complex of states of consciousness engaged in various activities.  Consciousness involves certain physical activities within us.  If nothing were acting within, we should not be conscious.  This has always been true.  The first dawn of consciousness in Nature involved activities within the organism.  If we think of that first faintly conscious existence as a mass of crude matter, then the self and its body will appear to be distinctly separated in reality.  But if we think of that body as a manifest of etheric vibrations in which life-vibrations also obtained, there is nothing to forbid our saying that consciousness was equally a product of such vibrations.  If so, the psychic factor was a form of vibrations of the ether within the ether—­and so, when it appeared, had evolved to higher forms, was consciousness.