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The Law and the Word

The Law and the Word

Thomas Troward19179 Chapters3h 44m read

In brief

The Law and the Word, published in 1917, is a work of mental science and metaphysical instruction by Judge Thomas Troward. It contends that a single Universal Substance animated by a Primary Living Energy responds to directing thought, so that the creative Word governs the impersonal Law through which all things come into form.

Key ideas

  • All material existence proceeds from one undifferentiated Universal Substance animated by a Primary Living Energy
  • The Law of Unity underlies and connects every level of created being
  • Thought-Power acts upon the impersonal, cosmic element present in all things
  • The Word holds primacy over the Law, with conscious intention directing the creative principle
  • The conquest of death follows as the highest consequence of these creative principles

You already suspect your thought does something to the world. Troward hands you the mechanism and the proof, then asks what you will speak into it. He stops short of the one thing you most want said aloud.

This Book Is: Spirituality · Thought Power · Creativity

Chapters

The Law cannot be changed, and the Word can.
The Law and the Word, Chapter VI

About This Book

There is a Law that cannot be changed, and there is a Word that can. Between these two principles, Troward locates the entire mechanism of creation. The Law is impersonal, mathematical, utterly indifferent to human preference. It responds but never initiates. The Word is something else entirely. It is thought shaped by intention, given force through recognition, spoken into the receptive substance of the universe by a consciousness that knows what it is doing and why. This book is Troward's final sustained inquiry into the relationship between these two forces, and into the question of what happens when a human being learns to operate them together.

Written in the last years of his life, Troward begins where modern science left off in 1917, tracing the implications of etheric vibration and primordial substance not as metaphors but as observable facts pointing toward a single origin. From that origin he builds outward, showing how the law of wholeness binds the visible to the invisible, the part to the whole, the individual mind to the mind that architects galaxies. The progression is deliberate. Each chapter lays a foundation the next chapter requires.

What distinguishes this work is where it arrives. Troward does not stop at the creative power of thought. He follows his own logic to its furthest conclusion: that death itself is not a fixed condition but an unsolved equation, one the principles explored here are designed to address. Not through miracle. Through understanding. The reader who begins with vibrations and substance will end contemplating immortality, and will find, perhaps unexpectedly, that the path between them is continuous.

About this edition

First published 1917.

The book carries a copyright notice dated 1917. Works published in the United States before 1931 are out of copyright there, so this text is in the public domain in the US.

Presented as a reading edition by Better Thought. Typography, chapter titles and glossary links are ours. The words are the author's.

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