Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. THE higher spirits, living as they are not in an individual man, but each living and acting in many, are spiritual bonds between those persons, uniting them all in the same belief, the same truth, the same moral or political tendency. All the persons who have any spiritual fellowship between them, belong to the body of one spirit, and as co-ordinate members of it, work out the ideas which they have received from that spirit. Sometimes an idea lives at one time in a whole nation, a great number of people are moved to one great common enterprise. There is a mighty spirit coming over them all, penetrating them all. Such universal influences, however, are not only brought about by the spirits of the dead; also numberless new-born ideas of the living influence those living around them;but all the ideas which a living person sends forth into the world are also elements and members of his future spiritual organism. Now, wherever two kindred spirits meet on earth, growing into one through their common qualities, and influencing and enriching one another through their different qualities, the communities, nations, or generations, to which they formerly belonged individually, enter into spiritual communion as well, increasing thereby the mental stores and powers of each other. Thus the development of spiritual life in the third stage is closely connected with the development and progress of mankind. The gradual formation and growth of states, the progress of science and art, of commerce and trade, the development of all these spheres into larger and larger bodies harmoniously organized, is the consequence of numberless spirits living and moving among men and growing together into greater spiritual organisms. How could it be possible for all those important spheres of li...