When a chimney is blown down, the builder notes the gap and builds another. His mind contains a picture of what ought to be there.
An architect does not deliver the whole plan of his building to each of the workmen. Each follows his ordinary work, being merely told where to begin and when to stop. When all of them have done their part the building is complete.
Why may we not suppose that the cutting-in-two of a mollusc constitutes some such appeal to some intelligence somewhere in nature as the missing chimney constitutes to the builder? The force flowing in the cells of the injured animal is thereupon directed to the work unexpectedly required. Science now speaks freely of human "subconsciousness," meaning sub-mental consciousness in man. And it knows that that sub-mental consciousness can, when properly called upon (and also habitually on its own account), do reparative work upon the body whose method is not comprehensible to the man himself. It is, within its limits, intelligent; it knows what it has to do and what it is wanted to do; and it commands the necessary forces—which are beyond the man's reach, owner of them as he may be or think he is.
This subconsciousness is embodied with the man, but is not the man and is not an ego. May it not be regarded as a part of nature-consciousness, focused in an organic body and with the intelligence necessary to do its work?
And it does not follow that the lower down the scale of mental intelligence is an organism, the lower down a parallel scale is this intelligence. What we call, when in our own bodies, the subconscious, may be just as fully present and just as intelligently at work, in the bodies of plants and animals.
If we say that the plan of repair and the plans of hereditary type are in the conscious intelligence of this diffused nature-mind, we are at any rate reasonably proceeding from the known and not glossing the unknown with mere words. The astral body of any plant or animal is its plan of structure in this nature-mind. It is subjective substance, just as is a picture in our own mind. And it contains the vital energy necessary for the guidance of the protoplasmic matter that will clothe it, an energy that guides but is not one of the physical forces. As an analogy from higher up the planes of being, conscience guides mental thoughts and desires but is not among their number nor of their nature. It is the divine-astral form or plan, of what the thinking man should be. On both planes the form and the guiding energy setting from it become the negative and positive aspects of one thing.
THE BIRTH OF DAY
by A. F. W. (Manchester, N. H.)
FROM the darkness, O Eternal One,