Life line

“ The line of life, the line of the head, the line of the heart, the line of fortune and that of the liver, figure freely in fortune-telling of modern drawing-rooms by women who ought to be in Holloway gaol, but are not. ”

“ Interpretation.—When straight and not dissected by obscure little lines, denotes a healthy body; if extending only to the hollow of the hand, or short, it denotes a short life, or full of disease; the longer this line, the longer may the life be; if cut at end poverty in old age. ”

“ There is no absolute line of demarcation between these three life spheres, just as there is DO difference between the material and the spiritual life. The three life spheres do, however, form sharply defined grades or epochs within the unified and indivisible universal life. ”

“ It is just as if you separated the organs of the human body and then expected them to produce life. You must open wide the channels of sympathy and communication between them, you must make channels for the tides of life ”

“ Truly do we carry in us, each human of us alive on the planet today, the incorruptible history of life from life's beginning. This history is written in our tissues and our bones, in our functions and our organs, in our brain cells, and in our spirits, and in all sorts of physical and psychic atavistic urgencies and compulsions. ”

“ In that moment of experience, when at the portals of the unknown we found Life instead of death, and health that we never before had, we saw dimly the grand truth of those inspired pages, recording spiritual Life and its every idea, harmonious and eternal. ”

“ As the seed is cast into the bosom of nature in order that its energies may be called forth and its destinies accomplished, so do you cast yourselves into active life, determined in it to exercise, and by exercise to increase those mental powers that the training of the past has given you—determined that by continual accessions to your knowledge, the stream of thought shall be kept flowing constantly within you and bearing health, activity and growth into the very recesses of your being. ”

“ Life Force.—To every thinking mind the question often recurs, What makes the fragrant flower so different from the dead soil from which it grows? the trilling bird, so vastly superior to the inert atmosphere in which it flies? What subtle power paints the rose, and tunes the merry songster's voice? To explain this mystery, philosophers of olden time supposed the existence of a certain peculiar force which is called life, or vital force, or vitality. ”

“ Was it that the struggle of things to survive produced as a sort of necessary by-product these intense preferences and appreciations, or was it that some mystical outer thing, some great force, drove life beautyward, even in spite of expediency, regardless of survival value and all the manifest discretions of life? ”

“ I said to you before, and I felt at the time that it was rather beyond you, that "each one of our organs is a distinct being, which has its particular nature and special office, its separate life consequently; and our individual life is the sum total of all these lesser lives, independent one of the other, but which nevertheless blend together, by a mysterious combination, into one common life, which is diffused everywhere, but can be apprehended nowhere in particular." ”

“ But these wanderings in the soul's workshops, and these analyses of the forces that play on it, give us far too cold or too technical a view of that richly various and dynamic thing, the real regenerated life. ”

“ Survival of the Fittest.—The survival of the fittest, in the fierce struggle for life, is the best known and most universally recognized factor of the evolution of the organic kingdom. The manner in which this factor operates especially in successive differentiation, and the increasing specialization of each differentiated form, in causing the tree of life to branch and again branch continuously, each branch pushing its shoot as far as possible in its own direction, are well understood. ”

“ The essences and life of all that the parent may eat and drink, or breathe—as perfumes, odors, and so forth—are gravitative to the precious point; and so the monad unfolds, and its envelopes grow; the one destined to become a living, active soul—the other, the temple of flesh and blood, in which it will, for three score years and ten, more or less, exercise and improve its faculties and powers. ”

“ The living being, as they maintained, is composed of soul and body. The intellect has its seat in the heart, the liver serving as the central organ for the blood, which they considered to be the true life principle. ”

“ The will-to-live, the struggle for survival, the élan vital, libido, etc., are only new names given to the impelling forces of the growth-urge in its higher stages; but these have become types and symbols, if a bit anthropomorphic, of all the more basal and earlier processes by which the homogeneous tends to differentiate itself. Thus we may conceive the universe as being from the first in labor to produce life. Everything that lives hungers to do so more intensely and as for man “’tis life of which our nerves are scant, more life and fuller—that we want.” ”

“ Sentiment, sentimentality, taste, fashion, daily speech, acquired science, and transmitted tradition cleanse, soil, model, or deface the changing shell of mutable mortality, and nothing which appeals to that shell alone can have permanent life; but the prime impulses of the heart are, broadly speaking, the same in all ages and almost in all races. ”

“ The purpose of these outlines, suggestions, analogies, and inferences, is to show that this life is a period of gestation, in close analogy and comparable with that of the child in utero; that with the web and woof of character, organ and function, impulse and use, opportunity and destiny, we are building a spiritual body, the immediate vehicle of the soul, as literally as is the physical body on the outer material plane; that the laws of Spiritual health and vitality are as concrete, apprehensible, and demonstrable as those of physiology. ”

“ This same grain taken as food by two persons will be converted into the body of a criminal in the one case, and into the body of a saint in the other, each after its kind; and its kind is determined by the inner life of each. And what again determines the inner life of each? ”

“ I stop to say that, during the months past, as before, her life had gone sweetly, pleasantly, without ruffle or labor or care or sickness, or division, even, into hours and days and nights,—a flowing onward, like time,—an existence so serenely perfect as not to be a subject of consciousness. ”

“ Why," she adds, "is death, the gateway out of life, any more dignified or pathetic than birth, the gateway into life? Or why is the taking of earthly life a more awful fact than the giving of life?" Mrs. ”

“ So the body and mind and soul are all one Life. There are no divisions in Nature. The form differs, but the essence is uniform. We classify for the sake of convenience and of clear statement. As Sir Oliver Lodge says, in “The Survival of Man”—“Boundaries and classifications must be recognized as human artifices,282 but for practical purposes distinctions are necessary” ”

“ Now it happens that I am a fluid sort of an organism, with sufficient kinship with life to fit myself in 'most anywhere. ”

“ But habits and instincts are as strongly inherited as structure, so that, as it appears to me, the study of life is, even from the orthodox scientific point of view, as important as the study of death. ”

“ The balance of mental and social, as well as of physiological, functions, is implied in the complex life of whose evolution we form a part. To say that we are to promote this balance of various functions, is to say nothing more than that we are to promote the life into which physical and mental and social factors enter. ”

“ As all the multiform varieties of plant life have one common soil from which to draw their sustenance, and by virtue of which they live and thrive, so all the varied activities of human life are rooted in, and draw their vitality from, one common source—the human heart. The cause of all suffering and of all happiness resides, not in the outer activities of human life, but in the inner activities of the heart and mind ”

“ And what do we mean by the unseen side of life? First, the thought forces, the mental and emotional conditions in the atmosphere about us that are generated by those manifesting on the physical plane through the agency of physical bodies. Second, the same forces generated by those who have dropped the physical body, or from whom it has been struck away, and who are now manifesting through the agency of bodies of a different nature. ”

“ And in harmony with that view of his life, you have surrounded him with comparative integrals, only subdivided by the tender hands of their immediate families and neighbours,—your squires and parsons, your Italian exile and his Jemima. With all these, life is, more or less, the life natural, and this is always, more or less, the life integral. Then comes the life artificial, which is always, more or less, the life fractional. ”

“ A single touch, by introducing into the body some morbid matter, may set up an immensely involved set of functional disturbances and structural alterations. The whole tenor of a life may be changed by a word of advice; or a glance may determine an action which alters thoughts, feelings, and deeds throughout a long series of years. In those still more involved combinations of changes which societies exhibit, this truth is still more conspicuous. ”

“ Living gateways as the sense organs are between ourselves and our ever-changing surroundings, both spiritual and material, they constitute the channels not only of our life-satisfaction, but of all our immediate knowledge as well. ”

“ By means of this indestructible ethereal body and the corresponding ethereal spheres of environment with the social life and relations in the spheres, the individuality and personal life is preserved forever."
The fact of life in whatever form means the continuance of life, even though the form be changed. ”

“ One question more we may look at for a moment. What can be gathered on the surface as to the process of Regeneration in the individual soul? From the analogies of Biology we should expect three things: First, that the New Life should dawn suddenly ”

“ And to it, as well as to life in the bare physiological sense, the principle of continuity through renewal applies. With the renewal of physical existence goes, in the case of human beings, the re-creation of beliefs, ideals, hopes, happiness, misery, and practices. ”

“ And here 'tis observable how the same act of man is made the condition both of his life and death: ‘put forth thy hand and pull and eat and die,’ or ‘put forth thy hand and pull and eat and live for ever.’ 'Tis not to be conceived that there was any physical virtues in either of these Trees whereby to cause life or death ”

“ But when we talk of the Life Force, the strong stream of physical immortality, which has replaced form with form and kept the stream unbroken through the ages, we ought to understand whereof we speak. ”

“ And all this time the book on Life that I thought I was writing was growing chapter by chapter into a defense of that book—a defense of Life—my life here by my fireside with my boys and Her, and the garden and woodlot and hens and bees, and days off and evenings at home and books to read, yes, and books to write—all of which I had taken for granted at twenty, and believed in with a beautiful faith at thirty, when I moved out here into what was then an uninfected forest. ”

“ We hope this period will settle the question, Which is the master of health, happiness, and being, — mind or body? Not a blade of grass springs up, or a spray buddeth within the vale, or a leaf unfolds its fair outlines, or a flower starts from its cloistered cell, only as the result of mind. ”

“ As well expect a hay infusion to become gradually more and more living until in course of the process it reached vitality, as expect a man by becoming better and better to attain the Eternal Life."
Our author then draws a strong parallel between the natural and spiritual kingdoms on this subject of biogenesis—"life from life." ”

“ When, however, we say that life is a property of protoplasm, we assert as much as we are justified in doing. Here we stand upon the boundary between life in its proper conception, as a group of phenomena having irritability as their common bond, and that other and higher group of phenomena which we designate as consciousness or thought, and which, however intimately connected with those of life, are yet essentially distinct from them. ”

“ The direction of life may therefore be roughly summed up in the two words “more life”—more both in quantity (have not both land and air been colonized during evolution?) and also in quality. More matter has been stolen from the lifeless and embodied in the living; and the living begins to be less helpless in face of the lifeless. ”

“ And that our whole physical life may lie soaking in a spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of Being that we at present have no organ for apprehending, is vividly suggested to us by the analogy of the life of our domestic animals. ”

“ Then, starting from that conception of life as the continuous adjustment of inner relations within the organism to outer relations in the environment—a conception of which he made such brilliant use in his Principles of Biology—he shows how the psychical life gradually becomes specialized in certain classes of adjustments or correspondences, and how the development of psychical life consists in a progressive differentiation and integration of such correspondences. ”

“ Here is the heart, the brain, of the vast social organism that has grown up from the germ of the first settlement; here has developed one of the great ganglions of the human world. Hither run all roads, hither set all currents, through all the vast regions round about. ”