Fire exists the first in light, and then consolidates—only the chemist can disclose into what carbonates. Clearly, certain sites are endowed more richly than others. The natural beauty wandered through the landscape like morning glory through the picket of a fence. The depth and subtlety of this landscape with gardening features, terraces, fountains and statues produces an affect on the mind between eternity and time. The heart asks for pleasure first. The purer the beauty, the more it will be out of the World. The lake was lovely and always changing hue and texture, and it was also a novelty capable of amplifying the drawing power of exposition. Many visitors from the heart of the country will, until they arrive here, never have seen a broad body of water extending to the horizon; will never have seen a vessel under sail, nor a steamboat of half the tonnage of those to be seen hourly passing in and out of the harbor; and will never have seen such effects of reflected light or clouds piling up from the horizon, as are to be enjoyed almost every Summer’s day on the lake margin of the city. And the sweetest in the gale is heard, as it sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all perching hope in the soul. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7

Indeed, space is an obscure representation of the essence or essential presence of the divine being. When walking through a charming and lush forest setting, one’s thoughts can easily take flights of fancy and shed the layers of city life. The essential feature of the soul is that it initiates movement. To do this, however, it must be where the body is. This is possible because unlike material objects spirits can penetrate both other spirits and material object, contracting or expanding like Newton’s aether, as the occasion makes necessary. Thus, God, an individual mind, and a material object can be all present in the one place without losing their independence as substances. Spirit can be regarded as a sort of fourth dimension; a body which contains a spirit has a certain spissitude, or density of substances. The behavior of living organisms cannot be derived from a collection of particles; spirits are the true cause of all activity. This does not mean that all activity is the work of conscious rational beings. Spirits exists at various levels; seminal forms, which are neither sensitive nor rational but are still capable of initiating motion, are responsible for actions at the level lower than animal feeling. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7

Pursuing what seems to be in accordance with right reason, our capacity to discover what actions accord with reason and our inclination toward those actions that flow from a special boniform faculty.  Reason itself cannot incite action; virtuous action can be instigated only by the passional side of our nature. The ultimate ground of all virtue is intellectual love. You may seem alone, but you are not. There are always eyes watching you. Do not wish you were a priority in someone’s life because you are God’s number one priority.  If I had to select one quality, one personal characteristic that I regard as being most highly correlated with success, whatever the field, I would pick the trait of persistence. Determination. The will to endure to the end. Most people give up just when they are about to achieve success. Do not feel badly because you are not where you want to be right this moment. Do not focus on the disappointment, failure, or mistakes. They are all part of God’s plan to prepare you for victory. Keep moving forward, doing your best and being your best, and honor God. Be determined and persistent, and God will provide for your future. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7

The knowledge of the soul admittedly contributes greatly to the advance of truth in general, and, above all, to our understanding of Nature, for the soul is in some sense the principle of life. Fortunes, as well as reputations, are at stake. Look, life is not fun and games. We could be running multimillion-dollars businesses, and we are not laughing all the way to the bank. Our economy is based on planned obsolescence. God knows what he is doing in your life and put a dream in your heart. There is a promise inside of your soul, and deep down you know that you will succeed. Our aim is to grasp and understand the soul’s essential nature and its properties; of these some are taught to be affections proper to the soul itself, while others are considered to attach to the being owning to the presence within it of soul. To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things to do in the World. The Lord will indeed give what is good, and our land will yield its harvest. Meaning we will be successful. Righteousness goes before us and prepares the way for our footsteps. Adversity causes some to break; others to break records. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7

Some philosophers have argued that mental events after death are logically impossible. They contend that a mind or mental events presuppose a person who has them, and what is meant by a person entails a body. A typical line of reasoning would be the following: the concept of a person presupposes criteria for identifying the person, and in the end the criteria will have to be physical if we are to identify people. It does, however, seem perfectly possible and quite graphically describable, too, that I should survive my own death and witness my own funeral. That is why we do not speak ill of the dead. There must be a reason for that superstition. So, the disembodied existence of a person seems to be logically possible. Yet, one the other hand, there does appear to be a difficulty in conceiving of disembodied existence as the general rule, since it is hard to see how we would even have a concept of persons in such a situation. It is only through their bodies that we come to know of the existence, identity, and nature of other persons. Perhaps the concept of a person logically requires that there be at least some cases of people with bodies, but it does not require that all persons have bodies. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7

In favor of the hypothesis of survival, there is a large number of reports, investigated with varying degrees of neutrality, of messages from and apparitions of people who have died. In many of these cases it is reported that information was transmitted that only the dead person could have had. It is argued that such occurrences are best explained by postulating that the persons involved survived their physical deaths and are able to communicate with us. Even if such cases did stand up under scrutiny, we would be faced with the difficult problem of distinguishing them from retrospective clairvoyance and telepathy, which in turn, cannot easily be distinguished from usual forms of physical causation. Evidence against the hypothesis of disembodied existence is the fact that certain neural mechanisms are necessary for consciousness. When these mechanisms are interfered with, there is temporary loss of consciousness. Since all neural mechanisms cease functioning entirely in death, it is reasonable to think that consciousness ceases entirely. It is true that there is still the possibility that only as a person has a body that his or her consciousness dependent on it and when the body dies the person is free from this dependency. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7

However, this simply points out an inductive argument from known cases to as yet unknown cases, and such induction runs some risk of going wrong. General inductive procedures justify not giving much weight to this possibility. Yet, many people believe that we can gain insight into the mind-body problem by considering the analogous issues involved in machines. The achievements in machine technology are truly remarkable. Machines are able to store enormous amounts of information and perform calculations at incredible speeds. Machines have developed theorems (sometimes more ingeniously than their designers), play games (sometimes more skillfully than their inventors), translate spoken words into different languages, compose music, and write poems. Machines have been constructed that learn from past experiences, adapt their programs to new circumstances, and develop new ways of solving problems. The suggestion might be made that if we can explain machine output solely in physical terms, and if there is no difference in principle between machine output and human behavior, then it follows that we can explain human behavior in physical terms. Might it not be that when we have machines that complex, we would have just as much reason for believing in the intervention of mental events in the case of machines as we have in the case of humans?  This remains to be seen. Some thinkers, accepting both premises that the soul is both originative of movement and cognitive, have compounded it of both and declared the soul to be a self-moving number. The same power that raised Christ from the dead lives on inside of us. God is greater than anything that is against us, and controller of our destinies. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7