Important themes include: Steiner emphasized that there is an objective natural and spiritual world that can be known, and that perceptions of the spiritual world and incorporeal beings are, under conditions of training comparable to that required for the natural sciences, including self-discipline, replicable by multiple observers.

His books "On the Good" ("Peri Tagathou - Περὶ Τἀγαθοῦ") seem to have been of a better kind; in them he had minutely explained, mainly in opposition to the Stoics, that existence could neither be found in the elements because they were in a perpetual state of change and transition, nor in matter because it is vague, inconstant, lifeless, and in itself not an object of our knowledge; and that, on the contrary, existence, in order to resist the annihilation and decay of matter, must itself rather be incorporeal and removed from all mutability, in eternal presence, without being subject to the variation of time, simple and imperturbable in its nature by its own will as well as by influence from without.

Dr Meade and Mary have the same agenda, as Meade's "Shady House" patients turn out to be "Wanderers," incorporeal former inhabitants of the erased Millgate who can communicate with Mary and certain others.

The First Cause, by thinking of itself, "overflows" and the incorporeal entity of the second intellect "emanates" from it.

It is implied that this particular Borden dies a few days later, and the incorporeal Angier travels to meet the corporeal Angier, now living as Lord Colderdale.