1human form?
2Common sense — not always the most common of the senses — will answer without hesitating: Life.
3Nevertheless, if we think a little, what that form lacks, at the instant we perceive it, cannot be Life (written thus with a capital, and in the attributive extension general consent gives it); for were it so we should have separated from the universal concept, Life, a part that is no longer Life — in other words, we should stand before a form separated from Life.
4Now: either Life is a universal attribute or it is not; if it is, no form can be deprived of life; if it is not, then it must be explained why some contain it and others do not.
5Such a privilege, if it exists, deserves to be explained.
6We prefer to escape the dilemma by making the synthesis of its opposed terms.
7It is the transcendent procedure which, by convention between the reader and ourselves, led us on other occasions to establish the conceptual sphere of the psychology we are commenting.
8Positive premise: Life is universal and animates all forms.
9Negative premise: Life is universal, but animates only some forms.
10Neutral premise: Forms are all expressions of life; and the fact of appreciating it in this or that form is due to our associating life with movement.
11We thus arrive at the true nerve of the matter: what is lacking in the cadaver is not precisely life, but movement — a modality of life, not its ultimate essence.
12The bond of union between the apparent inertia of the physical body and that which animates and vivifies it is called the etheric body; the energy whose vehicle is the etheric body, the astral body or plastic mediator; what acts upon the plastic mediator is the mental.
13The mind constitutes in its turn a new element of linkage between what dies and what can attain immortality — the soul; which in its turn is a manifestation of the one and immortal spirit that works in all these illusory divisions without being any of them.
14The complete exposition of each of the elements cited would carry us too far, and moreover exceeds our possibilities.
15We prefer to leave the commentary to those who, better informed than ourselves, will be able to make it with the required precision of ideas.
16We wish however to add a few words expressing our feeling or — if the reader permits us — our philosophical position before the profound teachings of C. P.
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Our translation, period-faithful. Citable as our translation, never as the source.