“Can you tip tables with us?” Lois inquired.
“Yes, probably; but that’s a clumsy way of doing it. Some of you can run a planchette. None of you are likely to get anything like this.... This fluency of reception is hardly to be expected. We can talk, however.... You can always get me, for the essential intercourse, and somehow we’ll get it across.”
“I want you to give your father something like the ‘stop—look—listen’ reminder to me,” his mother said.
“All right; but I can’t do it in cold blood. Let me cogitate, and I’ll try to think up a password that can’t fail to accomplish the desired effect. You and Dad are the same purpose in essentials, but your force is differently applied and can’t be approached in the same way.”
“How far down in the scale does the possession of a soul go?” Mr. Wylie asked, presently. “How about animals?”
“There is no such thing as soul, in that sense. All purpose is force. All force personified is individuality. All individuality is eternal. The development is unequal. The undeveloped force finds quicker development here. But the force that has been developed to a point of intelligence in your life, and is not actively put to work, goes down in the scale, is deterrent, and has to work just as hard to get back as the force that never has developed at all.”
“Where does the force animating babies come from?” I asked. “What was little Dick before he was little Dick?”
“That’s what I want to explain, if I can. The force that manifests itself in animals is a grade higher in force than the vegetable manifestation, and that higher than inanimate stone and metal. The force of an animal comes here, to swell the forces that become individual and human through birth, but individuality begins with human consciousness. All force that is not human may eventually become human, but there is no persistence of individuality until birth as a human and more or less productive force begins it. Animals do not produce anything but their kind. Only man creates, and that is the eternal attribute.”
“Is there a struggle between purposes to enter a new-born human?”
“Many purposes are latent in every human being from birth. None is in absolute possession. Life on your plane is one perpetual struggle between the eternal warring purposes. No newly born child has chosen. The training of a child should, from the first, be a preparation for battle, for daily—almost hourly—choice. Diligence, vigilance, purpose to work unceasingly and against all disintegrating influences, determination to construct and to progress in spite of anything, mental, moral, physical, or material—these are the essential things in training a child to live forcefully and eternally.”