Visible matter, which stands to us at the present moment for the universe, and which certain classic doctrines consider as the origin of all things—movement, life, thought—is only a word void of meaning. The universe is a great organism controlled by a dynamism of the psychical order. Mind gleams through its every atom.
The environment or atmosphere is psychic. There is mind in every thing, not only in human and animal life, but in plants, in minerals, in space.
It is not the body which produces life: it is rather life which organizes the body. Does not the will to live increase the viability of enfeebled persons, just as the giving up of the wish to live may abridge life and even extinguish it?
Your heart beats, night and day, whatever be the position of your body. It is a well-mounted spring. Who or what adjusted this elastic spring?
The embryo is formed in the womb of the mother, in the egg of the bird. There is neither heart nor brain. At a certain moment the heart beats for the first time. Sublime moment! It will beat in the child, in the adolescent, in the man, in the woman, at the rate of about 100,000 pulsations a day, of 36,500,000 a year, of 1,825,000,000 in fifty years. This heart that has just been formed is going to beat a thousand millions of pulsations, two thousand millions, three thousand millions, a number determined by its inherent force; then it will stop and the body will fall into ruins. Who or what wound up this watch once for all?
Dynamism, the vital energy.
What sustains the earth in space?
Dynamism, the velocity of its movement.
What is it in the bullet that kills?
Its velocity.