formed what we call "habits," and hence the importance of controlling our
thinking and guarding it against undesirable ideas.

But on the other hand this reactionary process may be used to confirm good
and life-giving modes of thought, so that by a knowledge of its laws we may
enlist even the physical body itself in the building up of that perfectly
whole personality, the attainment of which is the aim and object of our
studies.




XV.

THE SOUL.


Having now obtained a glimpse of the adaptation of the physical organism to
the action of the mind we must next realize that the mind itself is an
organism which is in like manner adapted to the action of a still higher
power, only here the adaptation is one of mental faculty. As with other
invisible forces all we can know of the mind is by observing what it does,
but with this difference, that since we ourselves _are_ this mind, our
observation is an interior observation of states of consciousness. In this
way we recognize certain faculties of our mind, the working order of which
I have considered at page 84; but the point to which I would now draw
attention is that these faculties always work under the influence of
something which stimulates them, and this stimulus may come either from
without through the external senses, or from within by the consciousness of
something not perceptible on the physical plane. Now the recognition of