presence of a certain cause, and all negative conditions from the absence
of such a cause. A condition, whether positive or negative, is never
_primary_ cause, and the _primary_ cause of any series can never be
negative, for negation is the condition which arises from the absence of
active causation. This should be thoroughly understood as it is the
philosophic basis of all those "denials" which play so important a, part in
Mental Science, and which may be summed up in the statement that evil being
negative, or privation of good, has no substantive existence in itself.
Conditions, however, whether positive or negative, are no sooner called
into existence than they become causes in their turn and produce further
conditions, and so on _ad infinitum_, thus giving rise to the whole train
of secondary causes. So long as we judge only from the information conveyed
to us by the outward senses, we are working on the plane of secondary
causation and see nothing but a succession of conditions, forming part of
an endless train of antecedent conditions coming out of the past and
stretching away into the future, and from this point of view we are under
the rule of an iron destiny from which there seems no possibility of
escape. This is because the outward senses are only capable of dealing with
the relations which one mode of limitation bears to another, for they are
the instruments by which we take cognizance of the relative and the
conditioned. Now the only way of escape is by rising out of the region of
secondary causes into that of primary causation, where the originating
energy is to be found before it has yet passed into manifestation as a
condition. This region is to be found _within ourselves_; it is the region
of pure ideas; and it is for this reason that I have laid stress on the two
aspects of spirit as pure thought and manifested form. The thought-image or
ideal pattern of a thing is the _first cause_ relatively to that thing; it
is the substance of that thing untrammelled, by any antecedent conditions.

If we realize that all visible things _must_ have their origin in spirit,