Spirit and Matter

There can be no conception of anything as being at a distance from us. When the elements of time and space are eliminated, all our ideas of things must necessarily be understood as existing in a universal "here" and an everlasting "now." This is, no doubt, a highly abstract conception, but I would ask the student to endeavor to grasp it thoroughly, since it is of vital importance in the practical application of Mental Science, as will appear further on.

The opposite conception is that of things expressing themselves through conditions of time and space, and thus establishing a variety of relations to other things—such as size, distance, and direction, or the sequence of events in time. These two conceptions are respectively the conception of the abstract and the concrete, of the unconditioned and the conditioned, of the absolute and the relative.

They are not opposed to each other in the sense of being incompatible; rather, each is the complement of the other, and the only reality is found in the combination of the two. The error of the extreme idealist One who believes that reality is purely mental or spiritual. is in endeavoring to realize the absolute without the relative, and the error of the extreme materialist One who believes that nothing exists except matter and its movements. is in endeavoring to realize the relative without the absolute. On the one side, the mistake is in trying to realize an "inside" without an "outside," and on the other, in trying to realize an "outside" without an "inside." Both are necessary to the formation of a substantial entity.