Since the days of Jacob Behmen there have been no such remarkable series of mystic writings as are contained in the two volumes called "The Perfect Way" and "Clothed with the Sun," by Doctor Anna Kingsford. Her belief and her illuminations were crystallized in the affirmation, "Life is the elaboration of soul through the varied transformations of matter." She saw the entire purpose of creation to be the evolution and elaboration of the soul. Very little is generally known of Doctor Kingsford. She was descended from an old Italian family, one of whom had been the architect of the Vatican, and, on her mother's side, from mingled German and Irish ancestry. She was the daughter of John Bonus, born in England in 1846, and she married, in 1867, Algernon Godfrey Kingsford, who subsequently took orders in the English Church. Three years later Mrs. Kingsford entered the Catholic communion, and some years afterward she studied medicine in Paris and received her degree. She is said to have been very beautiful, with great talent in painting and in music, a poet of lyric gifts, and from her childhood she saw visions and dreamed dreams. She died in 1888, and is buried in Atcham, near Shrewsbury, where her husband had his parish.
In 1881 Doctor Kingsford delivered in London, before drawing-room audiences, comprising representatives of literature, art, fashion, and the peerage,--audiences inclusive of the most notable people in London, the nine lectures that are published under the title of "The Perfect Way," and at the time these lectures inspired a profound interest. Their central theme is the Pre-existence and Perfectibility of the soul. "The intuition," she says, "is that portion of the mind whereby we are enabled to gain access to the interior and permanent region of our nature, and there to possess ourselves of the knowledge which in the long ages of her past existence the soul has made her own. For that in us which perceives and permanently remembers is the soul. And all that she has once learned is at the service of those who duly cultivate relations with her." And those relations, she taught, are cultivated by living so purely in thought and deed as to prevent the interposition of any barrier between the phenomenal (or the outer) and the substantial (or the inner) self; and by steadfastly cultivating harmonious relations between those two, by subordinating the whole system to the Divine will,--thus does one gain full access to the stores of knowledge in the soul. Doctor Kingsford further explains:--