Magick Without Tears

MENTAL PROCESSES 195 always be reduced to a series of one or other of these. If not, it is a sham statement; nonsense masquerading as sense in the cloak of verbiage and verbosity. Analysis, and Synthesis; or, Subtraction, and Addition. 1. You can examine A, and find that it is composed of B and C. A = B + C. 2. You can find out what happens to B when you add C to it. B + C = A. As you notice, the two are identical, after all; but the process is different. Example: Raise Copper Oxide to a very high temperature; you obtain metallic copper and oxygen gas. Heat copper in a stream of oxygen; you obtain copper oxide. You can complicate such experiments indefinitely, as when one analyzes coal-tar, or synthesizes complex products like quinine from its elements; but one can always describe what happens as a series of simple operations, either of the analytical or the synthetic type. (I wonder if you remember a delightful passage in Anatole France where he interprets an "exalted" mystical statement, first by giving the words their meaning as concrete images, when he gets a magnificent hymn, like a passage from the Rig-Veda; secondly, by digging down to the original meaning, with an effect comical and even a little ribald. I fear I have no idea where to find it; in one of the "odds and ends" compilations most likely. So please, look somebody; you won't have wasted your time!) This has been put in a sort of text, because the first stumbling-block to study is that one never has any certainty as to what the author means, or thinks he means, or is trying to persuade one that he means. Try something simple: "The soul is a part of God." Now then, when he writes "soul" does he mean Atma, or Buddhi, or the Higher Manas, or Purusha, or Yechidah, or Neschamah, or Nephesch, or Nous, or Psyche, or Phren, or Ba, or Khu, or Ka, or Animus or Anima, or Seele, or what? But even this very plain word "part." Does he mean to