The same fatal defects apply to the materialistic theory of the non-existence of a soul independently of the body. For admitting that experience and wisdom might be transmitted to the race as its heritage, yet the race itself must eventually perish, and with it all the fruits of the sufferings of its units. Materialism merely removes the difficulty one step, and leaves life none the less a farce because this now assumes colossal proportions. It is quite as unjust for the race to die, even after millions of years, as it is for the individual to do so after one life. Both results argue the non-existence of any design in nature, and relegate the whole problem of human life to either pure chance, or else the barbarous whim of some Jehovah, who creates and destroys men and worlds as the humor suits him. No sane man can deny the evidence of intelligent design in nature. His imperfect physical senses make this plain, and the most powerful microscope or telescope only adds to the evidence already at hand. The more deeply one searches the more abundant the proofs become. This is admittedly the law of the physical plane.

Having reached the mental or spiritual plane, does nature now suddenly fly in the face of her former methods and hand the guiding reins over to blind fate or blinder chance?

Materialism is particularly unhappy, also, in applying its negative hypothesis to its own grandest and most sweeping generalizations. It proudly announces that ex nihilo nihil fit, and then assumes an intelligent, reasoning soul as starting into existence "out of nothing," and departing into the same unreasonable and impossible limbo when certain processes pertaining to the bodily form cease to be active. The indestructibility of matter, the correlation of force, the conservation of energy, the law of evolution - all are in hopeless irreconcilability with the materialistic theory, as they also are to the one - birth hypothesis. Matter, force, and intelligence are, as has been pointed out, but three aspects of the One Reality, the CAUSELESS CAUSE, and their separation under any condition is absolutely unthinkable. If matter is indestructible, then the material base of the soul is indestructible; if force is always conserved, then this includes psychic or soul force; if energy is eternal in its action, then intellectual energy cannot be excluded; if evolution be a fact in nature, then it includes the larger fact that its processes are necessarily infinite in duration.

But materialism fancies it sees a loophole for avoiding these conclusions in the fact that matter, force, and energy reappear as things apparently differing from their former modes of manifestation. Granted; but these apparent differences are only the masks which the one actor assumes upon taking differing parts. It is the same actor, whose real identity is always one throughout the entire performance. It is not claimed by Theosophists that the soul functions in the same manner when using the sense organs of the body as it does when this limitation is no longer interposed. But it is always the soul, and nothing else, although its phenomena are necessarily modified by the form of matter with which it is temporarily associated. Heat and light are none the less one because differing conditions cause them to display differing modes of motion; and no mode of motion which links the material aspect of nature to the spiritual has ever been traced to a transmutation into any form of intelligence. The two are opposite facets of the ONE, and can never interchange on the plane of manifestation. It is for this reason that the soul must persist as intelligence; its force can only be conserved by that which is essentially itself in properties.

Scientists claim that atoms of matter can never escape from the laws of affinity; that atoms of iron, for instance, will ever be attracted to iron atoms, and that no power can destroy that particular property which constitutes the atom iron, instead of, for example, gold, although it may be so buried among other atoms as to be entirely indistinguishable by our coarse physical senses. So intelligence must follow the same law, by all the evidence of analogy. The soul represents, in its "I am I" manifestation, an ultimate division (if we may be allowed the term) of intelligence, and must retain its "I am I" qualities under whatever associations it may find itself; just as truly, as reasonably, and as certainly as that the ultimate material atom whose properties constitute it iron can never be destroyed nor changed into something which is not iron. If the one is law on the material, the other is equally law on the psychic plane. The physical atom represents the unit of matter; the "I am I" represents the unit of consciousness.

From both, the idea of magnitude or extension in space is excluded.

Certainly, the "I am I" can not be conceived as limited by the size or any other physical qualities of any body with which it is associated. It is, as we have said, the unit of Consciousness - the true basis of all manifestations of intelligence in nature, as the atom is the unit of matter, and the physical basis of all material forms.

So with materialistic concepts of evolution. As we have pointed out, there is just as great a defect in logic, and as fatal a disagreement between the hypothesis and the fact that design pervades every department of nature, in annihilating a race, as there is in predicating the annihilation of the individual soul. If uncounted millions of individuals are to be sacrificed to perfect a glorious race, only for this, too, to be ultimately annihilated, then the evil and unreason of creation are only magnified, not removed.

But once admit the fact of reincarnation, and observe how the apparent chaos of injustice changes into the most beautiful harmony. Apparently discordant and irreconcilable phenomena are marshaled into orderly array; confusion and injustice disappear, and life assumes a deeper and more significant meaning. The terrible inequalities of birth, utterly inexplicable by the single- birth, and still more so by the materialistic, hypothesis, are shown to be the result of causes set in operation by the soul itself in former incarnations, and not the careless or stupid incapacity of some personal god playing at creation, and making a sad mess of it. The wretch born of drunken and vicious parents, amid such surroundings as make virtue practically a miracle, foredoomed to a life of want and woe, has created such attractions in former lives as render it impossible for him to be born under any other conditions. No cruel fate nor blind chance has been the slightest factor in bringing about the result. Just as surely as the magnet turns to the north, so surely will the helpless soul be drawn to those parents having the greatest sum of similar attractions.