that thought and feeling are the causes, and forms and conditions
the effects. When we have learnt this lesson we have grasped the
foundation principle on which individual specialization of the
generic law of the creative process becomes a practical
possibility.

New Thought, then, is not the name of a particular sect, but is
the essential factor by which our own future development is to be
carried on; and its essence consists in seeing the relation of
things in a New Order. Hitherto we have inverted the true order
of cause and effect; now, by carefully considering the real
nature of the Principle of Causation in itself--causa causans as
distinguished from cause causata--we return to the true order and
adopt a new method of thinking in accordance with it.

In themselves this order and this method of thinking are not new.
They are older than the foundation of the world, for they are
those of the Creative Spirit itself; and all through the ages
this teaching has been handed down under various forms, the true
meaning of which has been perceived only by a few in each
generation. But as the light breaks in upon any individual it is
a new light to him, and so to each one in succession it becomes
the New Thought. And when anyone reaches it, he finds himself in
a New Order. He continues indeed to be included in the universal
order of the cosmos, but in a perfectly different way to what he
had previously supposed; for, from his new standpoint, he finds
that he is included, not so much as a part of the general effect,
but as a part of the general cause; and when he perceives this he
then sees that the method of his further advance must be by
letting the General Cause flow more and more freely into his own