Oliver Wendell Holmes has so beautifully voiced that aspiration
and its consummation in the lines:
“Build thee more stately
mansions Oh! my soul,
As the swift seasons
roll,
Leave thy low-vaulted
past;
Let each new temple, nobler than the
last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more
vast.
Till thou at length art
free,
Leaving
thy outgrown shell by life's unresting sea.”
[pg 054]
Chapter III. The Visible and the Invisible
World
The
Chemical Region.
If one who is capable of consciously using his spiritual body
with the same facility that we now use our physical vehicles should glide away from the
earth into interplanetary space, the earth and the various other planets of our solar system
would appear to him to be composed of three kinds of matter, roughly speaking. The densest
matter, which is our visible earth, would appear to him as being the center of the ball as
the yolk is in the center of an egg. Around that nucleus he would observe a finer grade of
matter similarly disposed in relation to the central mass, as the white of the egg is
disposed outside the yolk. Upon a little closer investigation he would also discover that
this second kind of substance permeates the solid[pg 055]earth to the very center, even as the blood percolates through the more
solid parts of our flesh. Outside both of these mingling layers of matter he would observe a
still finer, third layer corresponding to the shell of the egg, except that this third layer
is the finest most subtile of the three grades of matter, and that it inter-penetrates both
of the two inner layers.