New Thought Archives at New Thought Library

wholly pliant under the plastic power of life. If we could fully conceive its circuits, there is nothing open to our senses so wonderful as an animal organism --- for instance, the human body. It is physical, yet so far from physics; explicable, yet with so many incomprehensible terms; complex, yet so concurrent in its parts in a way most direct and simple; restful, yet each instant full of invisible action and a life that never wearies. The food, through primary and secondary channels, under forces the most simple and forces the most subtile which the physical world offers, finds its way to every most minute part of the body; it there passes into compounds of great variety, and yields energy for the performance of functions very diverse from each other, yet most intimately united in their results. The processes of destruction and reconstruction are coetaneous, and minister to each other in constant reactions through the entire circuit, the gas that passes from the lungs yielding in its very last change one more unit of heat.

In the animal, food is quickly converted into fluid, and in the circulation of the blood carried to every part of the body. In these several parts, it is transformed into a great variety of solids, which, in turn, as growth proceeds, lapse once more as waste into the blood, or pass off in other ways as fluids. Thus an unending current builds up and takes down the body of the animal and provides alike the energy for both results.

The superintending life, as an invisible presence, presides over all, knits together the parts in an immediate