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Florence and Henry were delayed and did not arrive until after four. But before that we had already gathered about the table, and found it hard to restrain ourselves from beginning the discussion. I said to the children that I thought we would not speak of immortality to-day, as there was too much that came before. I asked them whether they were anxious to get to it. They were very anxious. Florence said: “It is such an important subject.” Ruth said: “I believe we will all agree on immortality.” I answered her that just there I thought we might disagree most. Marian said she had definite ideas on the subject. I can see that Henry has indefinite and theological ideas.

I then read aloud the little paper Marian had written on our talk of the previous week:

“On Sunday, October 18th, our club, the Seekers, held its second meeting. We first discussed our ideas of God. We reached the conclusion that God is our divine self, that through God we can perceive, but we cannot perceive God. This seems to me a very beautiful idea. I think our discussion on this subject was particularly nice, because we did not try to limit God by any attributes, for he is infinite. We also discussed progress. I understood it much better this week than last. The aim of progress is to reach a clear understanding of our fellow-beings; we hope that, sometime, there will be sympathy and understanding among all men, for we each have a divine self, which will not reach perfection until it is in perfect accord with all the other people’s. We discussed good and evil, and decided that evil is that which we outgrow, and which might once have seemed good, but which now seems bad because we have found something better. Good is the progress that we are making toward our goal of common understanding. Unhappiness and accidents, etc., are incidental to progress, and will occur less and less frequently. I enjoyed this meeting of the club very much.”

We now reviewed all the conclusions we had reached. Then I was glad to have them speak once more of good and bad, and ask many questions. Ruth said she was not sure of being convinced. She said: “I talked it over with mother. It seems to me I sometimes put my thought into your words, and imagine you have said what I mean, when perhaps you haven’t. Please repeat that again, about good and bad.” Ruth is always afraid she may be weakening in her own ideas, and tries not to be convinced. I strove to impress upon her that my idea might include hers.

I said: “You see now that the thought I want to give you is an unanswerable religion, which is not new, but larger than all the old beliefs.”

Marian asked: “Large enough to include them all?”

“Yes, just that. Did you ever think of the old word, holiness, h-o-l-i-n-e-s-s? I know another word that to us would mean holiness, a different holiness.”

“You mean w-h-o-l-e?” said Marian.

“Yes, to be whole and complete.”

Now as we spoke again of good and bad, we came upon the interesting question of disease.

“How can that be explained as a part of progress?” asked Marian.

Virginia, with her usual misconception on this subject, said that disease helped us forward because through it scientists came to know and understand many things about life. Henry, still more off the track, said that disease led to a knowledge of medicine.

“Henry’s idea,” I answered, “we cannot consider, because, of course, the only virtue of medical skill is that it cures disease, and if there were not disease we would not need medical progress. But Virginia’s idea is true in a certain sense. It is quite true that disease impelled people to use the microscope, to discover themselves physically, to learn of the infinitude of minute creatures in the universe; and so it led to a larger knowledge of life, because the infinitely little makes our world just as vast as the infinitely big. But this only shows that we made progress out of disease, as we make progress out of all things, because the will of life, the will to go forward, is within us. It does not show how disease itself can be the result or price of progress. That is a difficult question, but I seem to see it clearly, and I will try to explain it to you. None of you, except perhaps Virginia and Alfred, have a clear idea of evolution, and I would like to spend one meeting in explaining it, because it is so essential. Don’t you think so?”

“Yes,” they said.

“But I can’t go into this question of disease without explaining something of evolution to you now. I will try to make it clear: Each individual is different. As animals progressed and went forward, those parts which were newest were also more unstable, because they were ready to change more. These parts were most apt to become diseased, or, rather, weakened, because progress might be in any direction, and had to feel its way.” It was difficult for me to explain this to the children, who were so utterly unprepared, and I said much more. Even so, I don’t think Marian and Ruth understood it thoroughly, and I shall have to repeat it when we speak of evolution. I said I did not believe the germs of disease ever entered any part unless that part were weakened or imperfect. I said: “Take as an example the human brain. Suppose that two children were born with brains slightly different from others. One might turn out to be a genius, and the other to be eccentric and even insane, because progress feels its way in all directions. So disease, coming to the new unstable parts, would be the necessary cost of progress.”

Virginia said: “Young and new things are always most delicate. I had a palm with many leaves, and one was new. Now, the palm was left for a day against the window pane, and the young leaf died from the pressure of the glass, which did not at all hurt the old leaves.” This poetical and delightful little figure of speech made me wonder whether Virginia understood just what I meant.

We went over the question of good and bad, to Ruth’s satisfaction. And then I asked Henry, whose understanding of it I doubted, to tell me in what three ways the bad was a part of good and progress. His answer was clear and true:

“There is the bad, which is only bad because we now possess or know something better, the old good we have left behind us. Then there is the bad which is the direct result of progress and growth, such as accidents and disease. Then there is the use of bad which we make, to turn it into good, such as the knowledge we get from it, and, as Virginia said before, the sympathy and love which grow out of misfortune.”

“Now,” I said, “I would like some of you to tell me what you mean by those two words, matter and spirit.”

Henry, Virginia and Ruth were the only ones ready to answer.

Henry said that spirit is the soul. He quoted from a Sunday-school formula: “The spirit of man is in the image of God, and immortal.”

I said that those words did not mean anything definite to me. They might be true, but I did not understand them. Ruth said she did, and it was what she meant; that matter was, like the bad, something to be overcome and left behind.

“I think,” said Virginia, “that matter is the tool of spirit; the body is the servant of the mind.”

They began to argue, but I stopped them, saying: “I will first tell you what I think. Is there any matter without form? Has not all matter form, and is it not, therefore, as it were, something like an idea in the mind?”

Henry wanted to deny this, but thought a moment, and admitted that all matter had some form.

I went on: “I am a spirit, that is, a self; and I know things only in my spirit, because I see, hear, touch them. So I don’t believe in matter, so called, at all. I think that our forms, our bodies, and all forms in the universe are an expression of spirit or self.” I said expression was the means for reaching unity, that creatures could not come together unless they expressed themselves to each other, and that I believed all expression was for this purpose. I said, what is called matter, the material conditions of life, are the result of the action of spirit; our bodies, which seem so solid and material, are constantly changed, are not at all the same as matter, but only in form; we are reborn each day according to the spirit. I said that in this sense matter, so-called, was indeed something we were constantly leaving behind us, that every material condition was the result of a previous state of mind. This is true of all human things, and we cannot help thinking it is true of universal things. We know that fire burns, that planets whirl through space, that water runs, and we cannot help feeling these expressions of force to be the expression of something akin to will and spirit.

Virginia said, then there must be something much more than human sympathy and understanding, which we long to reach. I answered, I believed so, but I had not wanted to suggest it to them.

I said that all our present bodily conditions, the seemingly unalterable conditions called material, were the expression of will and spirit in the past, either of ours or others; that our very existence here, the existence of everything, was the result of will and desire.

Marian said: “I don’t think it is just that we should suffer and be, because of another’s will and spirit.”

Virginia answered: “It is fair. We are part of the whole.”

“That is so,” said Marian. “Of course.” It was a full and sufficient answer.

I said I believed that disease could be prevented, even if not cured, by thought, because will and desire controlled the body. I said: “We have our own destiny in our hands, we are free to do as we choose with the future, because will shapes everything.” I was delighted to find that the children had never heard the silly discussions about free will, and did not have to have that bugbear driven out. I said: “We are a part of the will of life.”

As another illustration of idea coming before form, I spoke of plants and seeds, how in the seed is the possibility, the idea of an infinity of trees.

Virginia said: “In them spirit seems to be asleep, for it must be there.” She said all things slept sometimes, and while they slept the spirit worked in them.

Ruth was not in the least convinced. Indeed, the thing was not overclear. She said: “I still think matter is something to be overcome, something that binds us. Surely we will sometime be spirits without matter, altogether spiritual.”

I tried to show them that spirit without expression would be unthinkable, that though expression might not be what we call matter, it would still be some expression. I said: “Expression frees us.”

That was puzzling, and needed more explanation.

I asked Henry: “What is the object and aim of life?”

He answered vaguely: “I suppose it is spirit.”

“Now, what do you mean by that?” I asked.

He answered: “I suppose we don’t know what it is until we reach the truth.” Evidently he did not, but all the others did. They all spoke at once to explain to him that the object of life was complete understanding and love.

I said: “That is what expression is to get for us, for we express ourselves in form and thought, so that we may understand and be understood. And that is what I meant by freedom. I meant understanding, love and perfect adjustment. In one sense matter is binding, because we want more freedom. Matter, so called, is the physical condition which our will made in the past, and which we want already to surpass. Suppose that a man wrote a book in which he put all his ideas, and that when he finished the book he was forbidden to write or speak again; his ideas would grow afterward, and as he could not express them, he would think himself limited and bound by the book he had written. So material conditions are binding only because we want still more freedom, though they themselves were freedom at the time of their creation. In that sense, Ruth, you might call the body something which the spirit constantly wants to leave behind, because it is creating new forms for itself.”

Marian said: “It is as if there were a house with many rooms, and we thought we wanted to go only into the first; but each door made us long for the next room, and the next, so that we could never be satisfied.”

“And if one door were locked,” I said, “we would consider ourselves sadly bound, though we had thought we wished to go only so far. Suppose a man made a statue, that statue would be an expression of his spirit. But if the next instant he wanted to change it, to make, say, the lines of the arm more perfect, he could not do so by willing. He would have to make a new statue.”

“But that is different,” said Ruth. “The stuff he works in is still matter.”

I tried to explain how all creation is an inter-change of form, a flowing and influence. I tried to show them how all things whatsoever, even thoughts, are forms, and all form an expression.

Virginia said: “Those who write books, or do any great work, are immortal in that, because of their influence.” I answered her that all of us were immortal in this sense, that each thing had endless influence.

Marian asked the one unanswerable question, and I was delighted. She said: “Why was the Divine Self ever divided? How did we ever happen to need bodies and expression? Why did it not all grow together?”

She saw that contrast was needed for recognition. But why, she wondered, was anything at all? I answered her: “We said the other day that it did not matter whether the search for good were infinite or not. Neither does it concern us to know the unknowable, whether or how the awaking world began. But we do know it is awakening, what is the direction, what is the aim and desire of life. To me no more seems needed. We know how to go forward.”

“That is true,” she said. She spoke of old age and mental decay. She said she did not see why people lost, for no reason, the progress they seemed to have made. I answered her that I did not think they lost it, unless they did not try to keep it; that it is a thing one must work for at each moment.

“But why do they stop trying?” she asked.

“I don’t think they stop,” I said. “I think they never did try, but in youth such people merely had more stimulation from without.”

“Now, my grandfather,” she said, “was an intelligent man, and he is losing his memory.”

“Is he losing the valuable thing? Does he love you less, understand you less? Are you sure the memory he is losing is the thing he still needs?”

She saw what I meant. She was struck by it.

I went on: “One might lose the ability to do mathematics, when one had gained all there was to be got out of mathematics.”

She said: “I think you are right. I understand that.”

Now when Ruth insisted again that matter was something binding, something to be left behind, Alfred said:

“I don’t think it is binding.”

“Neither do I,” said Virginia.

“Neither do I,” said I, “for we can always express ourselves in a new way. The man who has written a book is not dumb afterward.”

The meeting was very short and unsatisfactory. I believe that the children went home disappointed, for I could see that we had not got at anything that the children had not understood. Since then Virginia’s mother told me that Virginia did not enjoy it as much as the other meetings; that it was too deep for her. Florence’s “big brother Arthur” told me that she, too, did not enjoy it as much, and that when he questioned her she seemed to understand clearly only the fact that there was no sharp distinction between mind and matter. Otherwise, as he put it, she “talked woolly.” During the meeting she yawned once.

Well, then, this meeting was a failure. As such, I want to use it. What was the cause? Of course, one of the chief causes was the difficulty of the subject, and yet the unavoidability of it. How could I go on to speak of immortality to children with such absurd notions? I don’t think it could be “skipped.” Of course, I would at first suppose that my method of tackling the subject was at fault. It may be so, but at present I can think of no other method. I think that the real and remediable cause of the difficulty was this: That the children did not have a good enough conception of the philosophy of science, actual knowledge of cosmic facts, to understand my point of view. I should have had the talk on evolution first. To remedy this as much as possible, I am going to have the talk on evolution next. To speak of immortality now would cause still more confusion. I await next Sunday with some uncertainty and doubt. For the next meeting must be good, or the club will be a failure. We must learn by experience, they as well as I. I will go forward with courage, if my little army does not fail me.

If I were giving again the talk on matter and spirit, I would do it differently. I would not say “matter is the expression of spirit,” but “matter is the medium through which spirit expresses itself.” For matter is something, though we know not what, and never know it except as form, which seems to us always an expression of will. But we know that, whatever it be, it passes from one controlling will to another. (Of course, it is too difficult to be discussed in this fashion by boys and girls.)