The propensity to seek defects in natural beauty is not proof of taste, but evidence of its absence. Who can possible know his Self, while living in the mephitic atmosphere of the material world? Sinnett weaves seamlessly lucid metaphysical insights in a prosaic story of everyday life. The real and the illusive aspects of our being are always next to each other, like twin parallel lines, but they never meet unless the animal tendencies created by selfishness are conquered, and the devil of the duad annihilated. Two spirits were finally united in the limited nirvanic state of devachan, from whence no traveller returns.

Only a thorough apprehension of the seven principles of the living man, each of which is subdivided into seven more, can bring order into the chaos and confusion of terms and notions.

The after-death experiences of the souls of the dead and their subsequent return to earth-life will depend upon which of Seven Virgins they have to face in the Hall of Judgment. Thrice blessed is he who, clad in the Vesture of Glory, can pass by the Guardians of every threshold.

Man is the most unhappy of all creatures. His body has many diseases, and they are readily perceived. But the soul does not readily perceive its own maladies; it even mistakes them for indications of soundness. The man diseased in body willingly yields to the care of the physician. But the unruly passions of the soul resist a cure, and are therefore more fatal.

Plato held the eternity of matter. The material of which the world was formed was originally a shapeless mass existing from eternity. It was arranged in perfect and beautiful forms by God. Plato comments on the nature of the soul, the soul of the world, the origin of evil, and the four original elements of all created, corporeal things. But the soul is both created and uncreated. The subject is illustrated by geometry and the doctrine of ratios, and by the musical scale. The divisible and the indivisible are the Other and the Same. The opinion of those philosophers who make the soul a compound of both refuted. Two discordant principles rule the world: Fate or Necessity, and Intelligence or Wisdom. The soul is not altogether the workmanship of the Deity: Illustrations from geometry, the planetary system, and the science of music. The soul derives its beginning neither from time nor is the product of generation, but it is endowed with several faculties and virtues.