the cosmic soul acts like the soil and gives it nourishment. Looking at
it in this way the old exponents of these things regarded the Active
principle as Masculine, and the Passive as Feminine, the one generating
and the other nutritive, corresponding to the words _rouah_ and
_hoshech_, the expansion and compression principles in the Hebrew text
of the opening verses of Genesis.

If then we posit this impersonal Soul of the Universe as the living
principle dwelling in the substance of the etheric Universal Medium it
will account for a good many things. If it be asked why we should assume
the presence of a living principle in the Universal Substance the answer
is in the maxim "Quod ex Vivo Vivum," what proceeds from Life is living.
Then as we see by our diagram, Anima Mundi equally with Animus Dei
proceeds from the original Substantive of Life, and therefore, on the
principle of the above maxim, that like produces like, Anima Mundi must
also be a living thing whose vehicle is the Universal Substance.

We may picture then, the response of the indwelling Soul of the
Universal Medium to our Thought, as starting corresponding vibrations in
the Substance of the Medium, just as our own thought, acting through the
vibratory system of our nerves, causes our body to make the movement we
intend. But perhaps you will say: How can this be, seeing that by the
hypothesis the Soul of the Universe is Impersonal, and therefore
unintelligent? Well, it is just this fact of having no thought of its
own, that enables us to impress our thought upon it and cause it, so to
say, to "take on" an intelligence relatively to the subject of our
thought, much in the same way that the impersonal soul in the human
subject "takes on" or reflects the thought of the hypnotist, and not
infrequently develops it to a far greater extent than the original
thought of the operator expressed. Such a hypothesis--and I think some