Evolution—rather nature, in the light of evolution—has only been studied for sometwenty-five years or so. That is, of course, a mere fractional space in the history of human thought.And just because of this we do not lose all hope that Materialistic Science will amend its ways, and will gradually accept the Esoteric Teachings—if even at first divorced from their (to Science) too metaphysical elements.Has the last word on the subject of human evolution yet been said? As Processor Huxley says:Each such answer to the great question [man's real place in nature], invariably asserted by the followers of its propounder, if not by himself, to becomplete and final, remains in high authority and esteem, it may be for one century, it may be for twenty: but, as invariably, Time proves each reply to have been amere approximation to the truth—tolerable chiefly on account of the ignorance of those by whom it was accepted, and wholly intolerable when tested by the larger knowledge of their successors.353Will this eminent Darwinian admit the possibility of his“Pithecoid Ancestry”being assignable to the list of“wholly intolerable beliefs,”in the“larger knowledge”of Occultists? But whence the savage? Mere“rising to the civilized state”does not account for the evolution of form.In the same letter,“The Evolution of Man,”Dr. Wilson makes other strange confessions. Thus, he observes, in answer to the queries put toKnowledge, by“G. M.”:“Has evolution effected any change in man? If so, what change? If not, why not?”... If we refuse to admit [as science does] that man was created a perfect being, and then became degraded, there exists only another supposition—that of evolution. If man has arisen from a savage to a civilized state, that surely is evolution.We do not yet know because such knowledge is difficult to acquire, if the human frame is subject to the same influences as those of lower animals.But there is little doubt that elevation from savagery to civilized life means and implies“evolution,”and that of considerable extent. Mentally, man's evolution cannot be doubted; the ever-widening sphere of thought has sprung from small and rude beginnings, like language itself. But man's ways of life, his power of adaptation to his surroundings, and countless other circumstances, have made the facts and course of his“evolution”very difficult to trace.This very difficulty ought to make the Evolutionists more cautious in their affirmations. But why is evolution impossible, if“man was created a perfect being, and then became degraded”? At best it can only apply to theoutward, physical man. As remarked inIsis Unveiled,[pg 162]Darwin's evolution begins at the middle point, instead of commencing for man, as for everything else, from universals. The Aristotle-Baconian method may have its advantages, but it has, undeniably, already demonstrated its defects. Pythagoras and Plato, who proceeded from universals downwards, are now shown more learned, in the light of Modern Science, than was Aristotle. For the latter opposed and denounced the idea of the revolution of the Earth and even of its rotundity, when writing:Almost all those who affirm that they have studied heaven in its uniformity, claim that the earth is in the centre, but the philosophers of the Italian School, otherwise called the Pythagoreans, teach entirely the contrary.This, because the Pythagoreans were Initiates, and followed the deductive method. Whereas Aristotle, the father of the inductive system, complained of those who taught that:The centre of our system was occupied by the sun, and the earth was only a star, which by a rotatory motion around the same centre, produces night and day.354The same with regard to man. The theory taught in the Secret Doctrine, and now expounded, is the only one, which—without falling into the absurdity of a“miraculous”man created out of the dust of the earth, or the still greater fallacy of man evolving from a pinch of lime-salt, the ex-protoplasmic Moneron—can account for his appearance on Earth.Analogyis the guiding law in Nature, the only true Ariadne's thread that can lead us, through the inextricable paths of her domain, toward her primal and final mysteries. Nature, as a creative potency, is infinite, and no generation of Physical Scientists can ever boast of having exhausted the list of her ways and methods, however uniform the laws upon which she proceeds. If we can conceive of a ball of“fire-mist”—as it rolls through æons of time in the interstellar spaces—becoming gradually a Planet, a self-luminous Globe, to settle into aman-bearingWorld or Earth, thus having passed from a soft plastic body into a rock-bound Globe; and if we see on it everything evolving from the non-nucleated jelly-speck that becomes the Sarcode355of the Moneron, then passes from its protistic state356into the form of an[pg 163]animal, to grow into a gigantic reptilian monster of the Mesozoic times; then dwindling again into the (comparatively) dwarfish crocodile, now confined solely to tropical regions, and the universally common lizard357—if we can conceive all this, then how can man alone escape the general law?“There were giants on earth in those days”saysGenesis, repeating the statement of all the other Eastern Scriptures; and the Titans are founded on an anthropological and physiological fact.And, as the hard-shelled crustacean was once upon a time a jelly-speck, a“thoroughly homogeneous particle of albumen in a firmly adhesive condition,”so was the outward covering of primitive man, his early“coat of skin,”plusan immortal spiritual Monad, and a psychic temporary form and body within that shell. The modern, hard, muscular man, almost impervious to any climate, was, perhaps, some 25,000,000 years ago, just what the Hæckelian Moneron is, strictly an“organism without organs,”an entirely homogeneous substance with a structureless albumen body within, and a human form only outwardly.No man of Science has the right, in this century, to find the figures of the Brâhmans in the question of chronology preposterous; for their own calculations often exceed by far the claims made by Esoteric Science. This may easily be shown.Helmholtz calculated that the cooling of our Earth from a temperature of 2,000° to 200° Cent. must have occupied a period of no less than 350,000,000 years. Western Science (including Geology) seems generally to allow our Globe an age of about 500,000,000 years altogether. Sir William Thomson, however, limits the appearance of the earliest vegetable life to 100,000,000 years ago—a statement respectfully contradicted by the Archaic Records. Speculations, furthermore, vary daily in the domains of Science. Meanwhile, some Geologists are very much opposed to such limitation. Volger calculates:That the time requisite for the deposit of the strata known to us must at least have amounted to 648 millions of years.Both time and space are infinite and eternal.The earth, as a material existence, is indeed infinite; the changes only which it has undergone can be determined by finite periods of time....We must therefore assume that the starry heaven is not merely in space, which no[pg 164]astronomer doubts, but also in time, without beginning or end; that it never was created, and is imperishable.358Czolbe repeats exactly what the Occultists say. But the Âryan Occultists, we may be told, knew nothing of these later speculations. As Coleman says:They were even ignorant of the globular form of our earth.To this theVishnu Purânacontains a reply, which has forced certain Orientalists to open their eyes very wide.The sun is stationed, for all time, in the middle of the day, and over against mid-night, in all the Dvîpas [Continents], Maitreya. But the rising and the settingof the sunbeing perpetually oppositeto each other,—and, in the same way, all the cardinal points, and so the cross-points, Maitreya, people speak of the rising of the sun where they see it; and where the sun disappears, there,to them, is his setting. Of the sun, which is alwaysin one and the same place, there is neither setting nor rising; for what is called rising and setting areonlythe seeing and the not seeing the sun.359To this Fitzedward Hall remarks:The heliocentricism taught in this passage is remarkable. It is contradicted, however, a little further on.360Contradictedpurposely, because it was a secret temple-teaching. Martin Haug remarked the same teaching in another passage. It is useless to calumniate the Âryans any longer.To return to the chronology of the Geologists and Anthropologists. We are afraid Science has no reasonable grounds on which she could oppose the views of the Occultists in this direction. Except that“of man, the highest organic being of creation, not a trace was found in the primary strata; only in the uppermost, the so-called alluvial layer,”is all that can be urged, so far. That man wasnot the last member in the mammalian family, but thefirstinthisRound, is something that Science will be forced to acknowledge one day. A similar view also has already been mooted in France on very high authority.That man can be shown to have lived in the Mid-Tertiary Period, and in a geological agewhen there did not yet exist one single specimen of the now known species of mammals, is a statement that Sciencecannotdeny and which has now been proven by de Quatrefages.361But even supposing his existence in the Eocene Period is not yet demonstrated, what period of time has elapsed since the Cretaceous Period? We[pg 165]are aware of the fact that only the boldest Geologists dare place man further back than the Miocene Age. But how long, we ask, is the duration of those ages and periods since the Mesozoic time? On this, after a good deal of speculation and wrangling, Science is silent, the greatest authorities upon the subject being compelled to answer to the question:“We do not know.”This ought to show that the men of Science are no greater authorities in this matter than are the profane. If, according to Professor Huxley,“the time represented by the Coal formation alone would be six millions of years,”362how many more millions would be required to cover the time from the Jurassic Period, or the middle of the so-called Reptilian Age—when the Third Race appeared—up to the Miocene, when the bulk of the Fourth Race was submerged?363The writer is aware that those specialists, whose computations of the ages of the Globe and Man are the most liberal, have always had the shyer majority against them. But this proves very little, since the majority rarely, if ever, turns out to be right in the long run. Harvey stood alone for many years. The advocates for crossing the Atlantic with steamers were in danger of ending their days in a lunatic asylum. Mesmer is classed to this day—in the Encyclopædias—along with Cagliostro and St. Germain, as a charlatan and impostor. And now that Messrs. Charcot and Richet have vindicated Mesmer's claims, and that Mesmerism under its new name of“Hypnotism”—a false nose on a very old face—is accepted by Science, it does not strengthen our respect for that majority, when we see the ease and unconcern with which its members treat of“Hypnotism,”of“telepathic impacts,”and its other phenomena. They speak of it, in short, as if they had believed therein since the days of Solomon, and had not, only a few years ago, called its votaries lunatics and impostors!364The same revulsion of thought is in store for the long period of years which Esoteric Philosophy claims as the age of sexual and physiological mankind. Therefore even the Stanza which says:[pg 166]“The Mind-born, the boneless, gave being to the Will-born with bones;”—adding that this took place in the middle of the Third Race 18,000,000 years ago—has yet a chance of being accepted by future Scientists.As far as nineteenth century thought is concerned, we shall be told, even by some personal friends who are imbued with an abnormal respect for the shifting conclusions of Science, that such a statement is absurd. How much more improbable will appear our further assertion, viz., that the antiquity of the First Race dates back millions of years beyond this again. For, although the exact figures are withheld—and it is out of the question to refer the incipient evolution of the primeval Divine Races withcertaintyto either the early Secondary, or the Primary Ages of Geology—one thing is clear, that the figures 18,000,000 of years, which embrace the duration ofsexual, physical, man, have to be enormously increased if the whole process of spiritual, astral and physical development is taken into account. Many Geologists, indeed, consider that the duration of the Quaternary and Tertiary Ages demands the concession of such an estimate; and it is quite certain that no terrestrial conditions whatever negative the hypothesis of an Eocene man, if evidence for his reality is forthcoming. Occultists, who maintain that the above date carries us far back into the Secondary or“Reptilian”Age, may refer to M. de Quatrefages in support of the possible existence of man in that remote antiquity. But with regard to the earliest Root-Races the case is very different. If the thick agglomeration of vapours, charged with carbonic acid, that escaped from the soil, or was held in suspension in the atmosphere since the commencement of sedimentation, offered a fatal obstacle to the life of human organisms as now known, how, it will be asked, could the primeval men have existed? This consideration is, in reality, out of court. Such terrestrial conditions as were then operative had no touch with the plane on which the evolution of theethereal astralRaces proceeded. Only in relatively recent geological periods, has the spiral course of cyclic law swept mankind into the lowest grade of physical evolution—the plane of gross material causation. In those early ages,astralevolution was alone in progress, and the two planes, the astral and the physical,365though developing on parallel lines, had[pg 167]no direct point of contact with one another. It is obvious that a shadow-likeetherealman is related by virtue of his organization—if such it can be called—only to that plane from which the substance of his Upâdhi is derived.There are things, perhaps, that may have escaped the far-seeing—but notall-seeing—eyes of our modern Naturalists; yet it is Nature herself who undertakes to furnish the missing links. Agnostic speculative thinkers have to choose between the version given by the Secret Doctrine of the East, and the hopelessly materialistic Darwinian and Biblical accounts of the origin of man; between no soul and no spiritual evolution, and the Occult doctrine which repudiates“special creation”and the“Evolutionist”anthropogenesis equally.Again, to take up the question of“spontaneous generation”; life—as Science shows—has not always reigned on this terrestrial plane. There was a time when even the Hæckelian Moneron—that simple globule of Protoplasm—had not yet appeared at the bottom of the seas. Whence came theImpulsewhich caused the molecules of Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, etc., to group themselves into the Urschleim of Oken, that organic“Slime,”now christened Protoplasm? What were the prototypes of the Monera? They, at least, could not have fallen in meteorites from other Globes already formed, Sir William Thomson's wild theory to this effect notwithstanding. And even if they had so fallen; if our Earth got its supply of life-germs from other Planets; who, orwhat, had carried them on to these Planets? Here, again, unless the Occult Teaching is accepted, we are compelled once more to face amiracle—to accept the theory of a personal, anthropomorphic Creator, the attributes and definitions of whom, as formulated by the Monotheists, clash as much with philosophy and logic, as they degrade the ideal of an infinite Universal Deity, before whose incomprehensible awful grandeur the highest human intellect feels dwarfed. Let not the modern Philosopher, while arbitrarily placing himself on the highest pinnacle of human intellectuality hitherto evolved, show himself spiritually and intuitionally so far below the conceptions of even the ancient Greeks, themselves on a far lower level, in these respects, than the Philosophers of Eastern Âryan antiquity. Hylozoism, when philosophically understood, is the highest aspect of Pantheism. It is the only possible escape from idiotic Atheism based on lethal materiality, and the still more idiotic anthropomorphic conceptions of the Monotheists; between which it stands on its own entirely neutral ground.[pg 168]Hylozoismdemandsabsolute Divine Thought, which wouldpervadethe numberless active, creating Forces, or“Creators,”whichEntitiesare moved by, and have their being in, from, and through, that Divine Thought; the latter, nevertheless, having no more personal concern in them ortheircreations, than the Sun has in the sun-flower and its seeds, or in vegetation in general. Such active“Creators”are known to exist and are believed in, because perceived and sensed by theInnerMan in the Occultist. Thus the latter says that an Absolute Deity, having to be unconditioned and unrelated, cannot be thought of at the same time as an active, creating, one living God, without immediate degradation of the ideal.366A Deity that manifests in Space and Time—these two being simply the forms ofThatwhich is the AbsoluteAll—can be but a fractional part of the whole. And since that“All”cannot be divided in its absoluteness, therefore thatsensedCreator (we say Creators) can be at best but the mereaspectthereof. To use the same metaphor—inadequate to express the full idea, yet well adapted to the case in hand—these Creators are like the numerous rays of the solar orb, which remains unconscious of, and unconcerned in, the work; while its mediating agents, the rays, become the instrumental media every spring—the Manvantaric dawn of the Earth—in fructifying and awakening the dormant vitality inherent in Nature and its differentiated matter. This was so well understood in antiquity, that even the moderately religious Aristotle remarked that such work of direct creation would be quite unbecoming to God—ἀπρεπὲς τῷ Θεῷ. Plato and other philosophers taught the same: deity cannot set its own hand to creation—αὐτουργεῖν ἅπαντα. This Cudworth calls“Hylozoism.”As old Zeno is credited by Laërtius with having said:Nature is a habit moved from itself, according to seminal principles; perfecting and containing those several things which in determinate times are produced from it, and acting agreeably to that from which it was secreted.367Let us return to our subject, pausing to think over it. Indeed, if there was vegetable life during those periods that could feed on the then deleterious elements; and if there was even animal life whose aquatic organization could be developed, notwithstanding the supposed scarcity of Oxygen, why could there not be human life also, in its[pg 169]incipient physical form,i.e., in a race of beings adapted for that geological period and its surroundings? Besides, Science confesses that it knows nothing of the real length of geological periods.But the chief question before us is, whether it is quite certain that, from the time of that which is called the Azoic Age, there ever was such an atmosphere as that hypothesized by the Naturalists. Not all the Physicists agree with this idea. Were the writer anxious to corroborate the teachings of the Secret Doctrine by exact Science, it would be easy to show, on the admission of more than one Physicist, that the atmosphere has changed little, if at all, since the first condensation of the oceans—i.e., since the Laurentian Period, the Pyrolithic Age. Such, at any rate, is the opinion of Blanchard, S. Meunier, and even of Bischof—as the experiments of the last Scientist with basalts have shown. For were we to take the word of the majority of Scientists as to the quantity of deadly gases, and of elements entirely saturated with Carbon and Nitrogen, in which the vegetable and animal kingdoms are shown to have lived, thriven, and developed, then one would have to come to the curious conclusion that there were, in those days, oceans ofliquid carbonic acid, instead of water. With such an element, it becomes doubtful whether the Ganoids, or even the Primitive Trilobites themselves could live in the oceans of the Primary Age—let alone in those of the Silurian, as shown by Blanchard.The conditions that were necessary for the earliest Race of mankind, however, require no elements, whether simple or compound. That which was stated at the beginning is maintained. The spiritual ethereal Entity which lived in Spaces unknown to Earth, before the first sidereal“jelly-speck”evolved in the Ocean of crude Cosmic Matter—billions and trillions of years before our globular speck in infinity, called Earth, came into being and generated the Monera in its drops, called oceans—needed no“elements.”The“Manu with soft bones,”could well dispense with Calcium Phosphate, as he had no bones, save in a figurative sense. And while even the Monera, however homogeneous their organism, still required physical conditions of life that would help them toward further evolution, the Being which became Primitive Man and the“Father of Man,”after evolving on planes of existence undreamed of by Science, could well remain impervious to any state of atmospheric conditions around him. The primitive ancestor, in Brasseur de Bourbourg'sPopol Vuh, who—in the Mexican legends—could act and live with equal ease under ground and[pg 170]water as upon the earth, answers only to the Second and early Third Races in our texts. And if the three kingdoms of Nature were so different in pre-diluvian ages, why should not man have been composed of materials and combinations of atoms now entirely unknown to Physical Science? The plants and animals now known, in almost numberless varieties and species, have all developed, according to scientific hypotheses, from primitive and far fewer organic forms. Why should not the same have occurred in the case of man, the elements, and the rest? As the Commentary says:Universal Genesis starts from the One, breaks into Three, then Five, and finally culminates in Seven, to return into Four, Three, and One.
Evolution—rather nature, in the light of evolution—has only been studied for sometwenty-five years or so. That is, of course, a mere fractional space in the history of human thought.And just because of this we do not lose all hope that Materialistic Science will amend its ways, and will gradually accept the Esoteric Teachings—if even at first divorced from their (to Science) too metaphysical elements.Has the last word on the subject of human evolution yet been said? As Processor Huxley says:Each such answer to the great question [man's real place in nature], invariably asserted by the followers of its propounder, if not by himself, to becomplete and final, remains in high authority and esteem, it may be for one century, it may be for twenty: but, as invariably, Time proves each reply to have been amere approximation to the truth—tolerable chiefly on account of the ignorance of those by whom it was accepted, and wholly intolerable when tested by the larger knowledge of their successors.353Will this eminent Darwinian admit the possibility of his“Pithecoid Ancestry”being assignable to the list of“wholly intolerable beliefs,”in the“larger knowledge”of Occultists? But whence the savage? Mere“rising to the civilized state”does not account for the evolution of form.In the same letter,“The Evolution of Man,”Dr. Wilson makes other strange confessions. Thus, he observes, in answer to the queries put toKnowledge, by“G. M.”:“Has evolution effected any change in man? If so, what change? If not, why not?”... If we refuse to admit [as science does] that man was created a perfect being, and then became degraded, there exists only another supposition—that of evolution. If man has arisen from a savage to a civilized state, that surely is evolution.We do not yet know because such knowledge is difficult to acquire, if the human frame is subject to the same influences as those of lower animals.But there is little doubt that elevation from savagery to civilized life means and implies“evolution,”and that of considerable extent. Mentally, man's evolution cannot be doubted; the ever-widening sphere of thought has sprung from small and rude beginnings, like language itself. But man's ways of life, his power of adaptation to his surroundings, and countless other circumstances, have made the facts and course of his“evolution”very difficult to trace.This very difficulty ought to make the Evolutionists more cautious in their affirmations. But why is evolution impossible, if“man was created a perfect being, and then became degraded”? At best it can only apply to theoutward, physical man. As remarked inIsis Unveiled,[pg 162]Darwin's evolution begins at the middle point, instead of commencing for man, as for everything else, from universals. The Aristotle-Baconian method may have its advantages, but it has, undeniably, already demonstrated its defects. Pythagoras and Plato, who proceeded from universals downwards, are now shown more learned, in the light of Modern Science, than was Aristotle. For the latter opposed and denounced the idea of the revolution of the Earth and even of its rotundity, when writing:Almost all those who affirm that they have studied heaven in its uniformity, claim that the earth is in the centre, but the philosophers of the Italian School, otherwise called the Pythagoreans, teach entirely the contrary.This, because the Pythagoreans were Initiates, and followed the deductive method. Whereas Aristotle, the father of the inductive system, complained of those who taught that:The centre of our system was occupied by the sun, and the earth was only a star, which by a rotatory motion around the same centre, produces night and day.354The same with regard to man. The theory taught in the Secret Doctrine, and now expounded, is the only one, which—without falling into the absurdity of a“miraculous”man created out of the dust of the earth, or the still greater fallacy of man evolving from a pinch of lime-salt, the ex-protoplasmic Moneron—can account for his appearance on Earth.Analogyis the guiding law in Nature, the only true Ariadne's thread that can lead us, through the inextricable paths of her domain, toward her primal and final mysteries. Nature, as a creative potency, is infinite, and no generation of Physical Scientists can ever boast of having exhausted the list of her ways and methods, however uniform the laws upon which she proceeds. If we can conceive of a ball of“fire-mist”—as it rolls through æons of time in the interstellar spaces—becoming gradually a Planet, a self-luminous Globe, to settle into aman-bearingWorld or Earth, thus having passed from a soft plastic body into a rock-bound Globe; and if we see on it everything evolving from the non-nucleated jelly-speck that becomes the Sarcode355of the Moneron, then passes from its protistic state356into the form of an[pg 163]animal, to grow into a gigantic reptilian monster of the Mesozoic times; then dwindling again into the (comparatively) dwarfish crocodile, now confined solely to tropical regions, and the universally common lizard357—if we can conceive all this, then how can man alone escape the general law?“There were giants on earth in those days”saysGenesis, repeating the statement of all the other Eastern Scriptures; and the Titans are founded on an anthropological and physiological fact.And, as the hard-shelled crustacean was once upon a time a jelly-speck, a“thoroughly homogeneous particle of albumen in a firmly adhesive condition,”so was the outward covering of primitive man, his early“coat of skin,”plusan immortal spiritual Monad, and a psychic temporary form and body within that shell. The modern, hard, muscular man, almost impervious to any climate, was, perhaps, some 25,000,000 years ago, just what the Hæckelian Moneron is, strictly an“organism without organs,”an entirely homogeneous substance with a structureless albumen body within, and a human form only outwardly.No man of Science has the right, in this century, to find the figures of the Brâhmans in the question of chronology preposterous; for their own calculations often exceed by far the claims made by Esoteric Science. This may easily be shown.Helmholtz calculated that the cooling of our Earth from a temperature of 2,000° to 200° Cent. must have occupied a period of no less than 350,000,000 years. Western Science (including Geology) seems generally to allow our Globe an age of about 500,000,000 years altogether. Sir William Thomson, however, limits the appearance of the earliest vegetable life to 100,000,000 years ago—a statement respectfully contradicted by the Archaic Records. Speculations, furthermore, vary daily in the domains of Science. Meanwhile, some Geologists are very much opposed to such limitation. Volger calculates:That the time requisite for the deposit of the strata known to us must at least have amounted to 648 millions of years.Both time and space are infinite and eternal.The earth, as a material existence, is indeed infinite; the changes only which it has undergone can be determined by finite periods of time....We must therefore assume that the starry heaven is not merely in space, which no[pg 164]astronomer doubts, but also in time, without beginning or end; that it never was created, and is imperishable.358Czolbe repeats exactly what the Occultists say. But the Âryan Occultists, we may be told, knew nothing of these later speculations. As Coleman says:They were even ignorant of the globular form of our earth.To this theVishnu Purânacontains a reply, which has forced certain Orientalists to open their eyes very wide.The sun is stationed, for all time, in the middle of the day, and over against mid-night, in all the Dvîpas [Continents], Maitreya. But the rising and the settingof the sunbeing perpetually oppositeto each other,—and, in the same way, all the cardinal points, and so the cross-points, Maitreya, people speak of the rising of the sun where they see it; and where the sun disappears, there,to them, is his setting. Of the sun, which is alwaysin one and the same place, there is neither setting nor rising; for what is called rising and setting areonlythe seeing and the not seeing the sun.359To this Fitzedward Hall remarks:The heliocentricism taught in this passage is remarkable. It is contradicted, however, a little further on.360Contradictedpurposely, because it was a secret temple-teaching. Martin Haug remarked the same teaching in another passage. It is useless to calumniate the Âryans any longer.To return to the chronology of the Geologists and Anthropologists. We are afraid Science has no reasonable grounds on which she could oppose the views of the Occultists in this direction. Except that“of man, the highest organic being of creation, not a trace was found in the primary strata; only in the uppermost, the so-called alluvial layer,”is all that can be urged, so far. That man wasnot the last member in the mammalian family, but thefirstinthisRound, is something that Science will be forced to acknowledge one day. A similar view also has already been mooted in France on very high authority.That man can be shown to have lived in the Mid-Tertiary Period, and in a geological agewhen there did not yet exist one single specimen of the now known species of mammals, is a statement that Sciencecannotdeny and which has now been proven by de Quatrefages.361But even supposing his existence in the Eocene Period is not yet demonstrated, what period of time has elapsed since the Cretaceous Period? We[pg 165]are aware of the fact that only the boldest Geologists dare place man further back than the Miocene Age. But how long, we ask, is the duration of those ages and periods since the Mesozoic time? On this, after a good deal of speculation and wrangling, Science is silent, the greatest authorities upon the subject being compelled to answer to the question:“We do not know.”This ought to show that the men of Science are no greater authorities in this matter than are the profane. If, according to Professor Huxley,“the time represented by the Coal formation alone would be six millions of years,”362how many more millions would be required to cover the time from the Jurassic Period, or the middle of the so-called Reptilian Age—when the Third Race appeared—up to the Miocene, when the bulk of the Fourth Race was submerged?363The writer is aware that those specialists, whose computations of the ages of the Globe and Man are the most liberal, have always had the shyer majority against them. But this proves very little, since the majority rarely, if ever, turns out to be right in the long run. Harvey stood alone for many years. The advocates for crossing the Atlantic with steamers were in danger of ending their days in a lunatic asylum. Mesmer is classed to this day—in the Encyclopædias—along with Cagliostro and St. Germain, as a charlatan and impostor. And now that Messrs. Charcot and Richet have vindicated Mesmer's claims, and that Mesmerism under its new name of“Hypnotism”—a false nose on a very old face—is accepted by Science, it does not strengthen our respect for that majority, when we see the ease and unconcern with which its members treat of“Hypnotism,”of“telepathic impacts,”and its other phenomena. They speak of it, in short, as if they had believed therein since the days of Solomon, and had not, only a few years ago, called its votaries lunatics and impostors!364The same revulsion of thought is in store for the long period of years which Esoteric Philosophy claims as the age of sexual and physiological mankind. Therefore even the Stanza which says:[pg 166]“The Mind-born, the boneless, gave being to the Will-born with bones;”—adding that this took place in the middle of the Third Race 18,000,000 years ago—has yet a chance of being accepted by future Scientists.As far as nineteenth century thought is concerned, we shall be told, even by some personal friends who are imbued with an abnormal respect for the shifting conclusions of Science, that such a statement is absurd. How much more improbable will appear our further assertion, viz., that the antiquity of the First Race dates back millions of years beyond this again. For, although the exact figures are withheld—and it is out of the question to refer the incipient evolution of the primeval Divine Races withcertaintyto either the early Secondary, or the Primary Ages of Geology—one thing is clear, that the figures 18,000,000 of years, which embrace the duration ofsexual, physical, man, have to be enormously increased if the whole process of spiritual, astral and physical development is taken into account. Many Geologists, indeed, consider that the duration of the Quaternary and Tertiary Ages demands the concession of such an estimate; and it is quite certain that no terrestrial conditions whatever negative the hypothesis of an Eocene man, if evidence for his reality is forthcoming. Occultists, who maintain that the above date carries us far back into the Secondary or“Reptilian”Age, may refer to M. de Quatrefages in support of the possible existence of man in that remote antiquity. But with regard to the earliest Root-Races the case is very different. If the thick agglomeration of vapours, charged with carbonic acid, that escaped from the soil, or was held in suspension in the atmosphere since the commencement of sedimentation, offered a fatal obstacle to the life of human organisms as now known, how, it will be asked, could the primeval men have existed? This consideration is, in reality, out of court. Such terrestrial conditions as were then operative had no touch with the plane on which the evolution of theethereal astralRaces proceeded. Only in relatively recent geological periods, has the spiral course of cyclic law swept mankind into the lowest grade of physical evolution—the plane of gross material causation. In those early ages,astralevolution was alone in progress, and the two planes, the astral and the physical,365though developing on parallel lines, had[pg 167]no direct point of contact with one another. It is obvious that a shadow-likeetherealman is related by virtue of his organization—if such it can be called—only to that plane from which the substance of his Upâdhi is derived.There are things, perhaps, that may have escaped the far-seeing—but notall-seeing—eyes of our modern Naturalists; yet it is Nature herself who undertakes to furnish the missing links. Agnostic speculative thinkers have to choose between the version given by the Secret Doctrine of the East, and the hopelessly materialistic Darwinian and Biblical accounts of the origin of man; between no soul and no spiritual evolution, and the Occult doctrine which repudiates“special creation”and the“Evolutionist”anthropogenesis equally.Again, to take up the question of“spontaneous generation”; life—as Science shows—has not always reigned on this terrestrial plane. There was a time when even the Hæckelian Moneron—that simple globule of Protoplasm—had not yet appeared at the bottom of the seas. Whence came theImpulsewhich caused the molecules of Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, etc., to group themselves into the Urschleim of Oken, that organic“Slime,”now christened Protoplasm? What were the prototypes of the Monera? They, at least, could not have fallen in meteorites from other Globes already formed, Sir William Thomson's wild theory to this effect notwithstanding. And even if they had so fallen; if our Earth got its supply of life-germs from other Planets; who, orwhat, had carried them on to these Planets? Here, again, unless the Occult Teaching is accepted, we are compelled once more to face amiracle—to accept the theory of a personal, anthropomorphic Creator, the attributes and definitions of whom, as formulated by the Monotheists, clash as much with philosophy and logic, as they degrade the ideal of an infinite Universal Deity, before whose incomprehensible awful grandeur the highest human intellect feels dwarfed. Let not the modern Philosopher, while arbitrarily placing himself on the highest pinnacle of human intellectuality hitherto evolved, show himself spiritually and intuitionally so far below the conceptions of even the ancient Greeks, themselves on a far lower level, in these respects, than the Philosophers of Eastern Âryan antiquity. Hylozoism, when philosophically understood, is the highest aspect of Pantheism. It is the only possible escape from idiotic Atheism based on lethal materiality, and the still more idiotic anthropomorphic conceptions of the Monotheists; between which it stands on its own entirely neutral ground.[pg 168]Hylozoismdemandsabsolute Divine Thought, which wouldpervadethe numberless active, creating Forces, or“Creators,”whichEntitiesare moved by, and have their being in, from, and through, that Divine Thought; the latter, nevertheless, having no more personal concern in them ortheircreations, than the Sun has in the sun-flower and its seeds, or in vegetation in general. Such active“Creators”are known to exist and are believed in, because perceived and sensed by theInnerMan in the Occultist. Thus the latter says that an Absolute Deity, having to be unconditioned and unrelated, cannot be thought of at the same time as an active, creating, one living God, without immediate degradation of the ideal.366A Deity that manifests in Space and Time—these two being simply the forms ofThatwhich is the AbsoluteAll—can be but a fractional part of the whole. And since that“All”cannot be divided in its absoluteness, therefore thatsensedCreator (we say Creators) can be at best but the mereaspectthereof. To use the same metaphor—inadequate to express the full idea, yet well adapted to the case in hand—these Creators are like the numerous rays of the solar orb, which remains unconscious of, and unconcerned in, the work; while its mediating agents, the rays, become the instrumental media every spring—the Manvantaric dawn of the Earth—in fructifying and awakening the dormant vitality inherent in Nature and its differentiated matter. This was so well understood in antiquity, that even the moderately religious Aristotle remarked that such work of direct creation would be quite unbecoming to God—ἀπρεπὲς τῷ Θεῷ. Plato and other philosophers taught the same: deity cannot set its own hand to creation—αὐτουργεῖν ἅπαντα. This Cudworth calls“Hylozoism.”As old Zeno is credited by Laërtius with having said:Nature is a habit moved from itself, according to seminal principles; perfecting and containing those several things which in determinate times are produced from it, and acting agreeably to that from which it was secreted.367Let us return to our subject, pausing to think over it. Indeed, if there was vegetable life during those periods that could feed on the then deleterious elements; and if there was even animal life whose aquatic organization could be developed, notwithstanding the supposed scarcity of Oxygen, why could there not be human life also, in its[pg 169]incipient physical form,i.e., in a race of beings adapted for that geological period and its surroundings? Besides, Science confesses that it knows nothing of the real length of geological periods.But the chief question before us is, whether it is quite certain that, from the time of that which is called the Azoic Age, there ever was such an atmosphere as that hypothesized by the Naturalists. Not all the Physicists agree with this idea. Were the writer anxious to corroborate the teachings of the Secret Doctrine by exact Science, it would be easy to show, on the admission of more than one Physicist, that the atmosphere has changed little, if at all, since the first condensation of the oceans—i.e., since the Laurentian Period, the Pyrolithic Age. Such, at any rate, is the opinion of Blanchard, S. Meunier, and even of Bischof—as the experiments of the last Scientist with basalts have shown. For were we to take the word of the majority of Scientists as to the quantity of deadly gases, and of elements entirely saturated with Carbon and Nitrogen, in which the vegetable and animal kingdoms are shown to have lived, thriven, and developed, then one would have to come to the curious conclusion that there were, in those days, oceans ofliquid carbonic acid, instead of water. With such an element, it becomes doubtful whether the Ganoids, or even the Primitive Trilobites themselves could live in the oceans of the Primary Age—let alone in those of the Silurian, as shown by Blanchard.The conditions that were necessary for the earliest Race of mankind, however, require no elements, whether simple or compound. That which was stated at the beginning is maintained. The spiritual ethereal Entity which lived in Spaces unknown to Earth, before the first sidereal“jelly-speck”evolved in the Ocean of crude Cosmic Matter—billions and trillions of years before our globular speck in infinity, called Earth, came into being and generated the Monera in its drops, called oceans—needed no“elements.”The“Manu with soft bones,”could well dispense with Calcium Phosphate, as he had no bones, save in a figurative sense. And while even the Monera, however homogeneous their organism, still required physical conditions of life that would help them toward further evolution, the Being which became Primitive Man and the“Father of Man,”after evolving on planes of existence undreamed of by Science, could well remain impervious to any state of atmospheric conditions around him. The primitive ancestor, in Brasseur de Bourbourg'sPopol Vuh, who—in the Mexican legends—could act and live with equal ease under ground and[pg 170]water as upon the earth, answers only to the Second and early Third Races in our texts. And if the three kingdoms of Nature were so different in pre-diluvian ages, why should not man have been composed of materials and combinations of atoms now entirely unknown to Physical Science? The plants and animals now known, in almost numberless varieties and species, have all developed, according to scientific hypotheses, from primitive and far fewer organic forms. Why should not the same have occurred in the case of man, the elements, and the rest? As the Commentary says:Universal Genesis starts from the One, breaks into Three, then Five, and finally culminates in Seven, to return into Four, Three, and One.
Evolution—rather nature, in the light of evolution—has only been studied for sometwenty-five years or so. That is, of course, a mere fractional space in the history of human thought.And just because of this we do not lose all hope that Materialistic Science will amend its ways, and will gradually accept the Esoteric Teachings—if even at first divorced from their (to Science) too metaphysical elements.Has the last word on the subject of human evolution yet been said? As Processor Huxley says:Each such answer to the great question [man's real place in nature], invariably asserted by the followers of its propounder, if not by himself, to becomplete and final, remains in high authority and esteem, it may be for one century, it may be for twenty: but, as invariably, Time proves each reply to have been amere approximation to the truth—tolerable chiefly on account of the ignorance of those by whom it was accepted, and wholly intolerable when tested by the larger knowledge of their successors.353Will this eminent Darwinian admit the possibility of his“Pithecoid Ancestry”being assignable to the list of“wholly intolerable beliefs,”in the“larger knowledge”of Occultists? But whence the savage? Mere“rising to the civilized state”does not account for the evolution of form.In the same letter,“The Evolution of Man,”Dr. Wilson makes other strange confessions. Thus, he observes, in answer to the queries put toKnowledge, by“G. M.”:“Has evolution effected any change in man? If so, what change? If not, why not?”... If we refuse to admit [as science does] that man was created a perfect being, and then became degraded, there exists only another supposition—that of evolution. If man has arisen from a savage to a civilized state, that surely is evolution.We do not yet know because such knowledge is difficult to acquire, if the human frame is subject to the same influences as those of lower animals.But there is little doubt that elevation from savagery to civilized life means and implies“evolution,”and that of considerable extent. Mentally, man's evolution cannot be doubted; the ever-widening sphere of thought has sprung from small and rude beginnings, like language itself. But man's ways of life, his power of adaptation to his surroundings, and countless other circumstances, have made the facts and course of his“evolution”very difficult to trace.This very difficulty ought to make the Evolutionists more cautious in their affirmations. But why is evolution impossible, if“man was created a perfect being, and then became degraded”? At best it can only apply to theoutward, physical man. As remarked inIsis Unveiled,[pg 162]Darwin's evolution begins at the middle point, instead of commencing for man, as for everything else, from universals. The Aristotle-Baconian method may have its advantages, but it has, undeniably, already demonstrated its defects. Pythagoras and Plato, who proceeded from universals downwards, are now shown more learned, in the light of Modern Science, than was Aristotle. For the latter opposed and denounced the idea of the revolution of the Earth and even of its rotundity, when writing:Almost all those who affirm that they have studied heaven in its uniformity, claim that the earth is in the centre, but the philosophers of the Italian School, otherwise called the Pythagoreans, teach entirely the contrary.This, because the Pythagoreans were Initiates, and followed the deductive method. Whereas Aristotle, the father of the inductive system, complained of those who taught that:The centre of our system was occupied by the sun, and the earth was only a star, which by a rotatory motion around the same centre, produces night and day.354The same with regard to man. The theory taught in the Secret Doctrine, and now expounded, is the only one, which—without falling into the absurdity of a“miraculous”man created out of the dust of the earth, or the still greater fallacy of man evolving from a pinch of lime-salt, the ex-protoplasmic Moneron—can account for his appearance on Earth.Analogyis the guiding law in Nature, the only true Ariadne's thread that can lead us, through the inextricable paths of her domain, toward her primal and final mysteries. Nature, as a creative potency, is infinite, and no generation of Physical Scientists can ever boast of having exhausted the list of her ways and methods, however uniform the laws upon which she proceeds. If we can conceive of a ball of“fire-mist”—as it rolls through æons of time in the interstellar spaces—becoming gradually a Planet, a self-luminous Globe, to settle into aman-bearingWorld or Earth, thus having passed from a soft plastic body into a rock-bound Globe; and if we see on it everything evolving from the non-nucleated jelly-speck that becomes the Sarcode355of the Moneron, then passes from its protistic state356into the form of an[pg 163]animal, to grow into a gigantic reptilian monster of the Mesozoic times; then dwindling again into the (comparatively) dwarfish crocodile, now confined solely to tropical regions, and the universally common lizard357—if we can conceive all this, then how can man alone escape the general law?“There were giants on earth in those days”saysGenesis, repeating the statement of all the other Eastern Scriptures; and the Titans are founded on an anthropological and physiological fact.And, as the hard-shelled crustacean was once upon a time a jelly-speck, a“thoroughly homogeneous particle of albumen in a firmly adhesive condition,”so was the outward covering of primitive man, his early“coat of skin,”plusan immortal spiritual Monad, and a psychic temporary form and body within that shell. The modern, hard, muscular man, almost impervious to any climate, was, perhaps, some 25,000,000 years ago, just what the Hæckelian Moneron is, strictly an“organism without organs,”an entirely homogeneous substance with a structureless albumen body within, and a human form only outwardly.No man of Science has the right, in this century, to find the figures of the Brâhmans in the question of chronology preposterous; for their own calculations often exceed by far the claims made by Esoteric Science. This may easily be shown.Helmholtz calculated that the cooling of our Earth from a temperature of 2,000° to 200° Cent. must have occupied a period of no less than 350,000,000 years. Western Science (including Geology) seems generally to allow our Globe an age of about 500,000,000 years altogether. Sir William Thomson, however, limits the appearance of the earliest vegetable life to 100,000,000 years ago—a statement respectfully contradicted by the Archaic Records. Speculations, furthermore, vary daily in the domains of Science. Meanwhile, some Geologists are very much opposed to such limitation. Volger calculates:That the time requisite for the deposit of the strata known to us must at least have amounted to 648 millions of years.Both time and space are infinite and eternal.The earth, as a material existence, is indeed infinite; the changes only which it has undergone can be determined by finite periods of time....We must therefore assume that the starry heaven is not merely in space, which no[pg 164]astronomer doubts, but also in time, without beginning or end; that it never was created, and is imperishable.358Czolbe repeats exactly what the Occultists say. But the Âryan Occultists, we may be told, knew nothing of these later speculations. As Coleman says:They were even ignorant of the globular form of our earth.To this theVishnu Purânacontains a reply, which has forced certain Orientalists to open their eyes very wide.The sun is stationed, for all time, in the middle of the day, and over against mid-night, in all the Dvîpas [Continents], Maitreya. But the rising and the settingof the sunbeing perpetually oppositeto each other,—and, in the same way, all the cardinal points, and so the cross-points, Maitreya, people speak of the rising of the sun where they see it; and where the sun disappears, there,to them, is his setting. Of the sun, which is alwaysin one and the same place, there is neither setting nor rising; for what is called rising and setting areonlythe seeing and the not seeing the sun.359To this Fitzedward Hall remarks:The heliocentricism taught in this passage is remarkable. It is contradicted, however, a little further on.360Contradictedpurposely, because it was a secret temple-teaching. Martin Haug remarked the same teaching in another passage. It is useless to calumniate the Âryans any longer.To return to the chronology of the Geologists and Anthropologists. We are afraid Science has no reasonable grounds on which she could oppose the views of the Occultists in this direction. Except that“of man, the highest organic being of creation, not a trace was found in the primary strata; only in the uppermost, the so-called alluvial layer,”is all that can be urged, so far. That man wasnot the last member in the mammalian family, but thefirstinthisRound, is something that Science will be forced to acknowledge one day. A similar view also has already been mooted in France on very high authority.That man can be shown to have lived in the Mid-Tertiary Period, and in a geological agewhen there did not yet exist one single specimen of the now known species of mammals, is a statement that Sciencecannotdeny and which has now been proven by de Quatrefages.361But even supposing his existence in the Eocene Period is not yet demonstrated, what period of time has elapsed since the Cretaceous Period? We[pg 165]are aware of the fact that only the boldest Geologists dare place man further back than the Miocene Age. But how long, we ask, is the duration of those ages and periods since the Mesozoic time? On this, after a good deal of speculation and wrangling, Science is silent, the greatest authorities upon the subject being compelled to answer to the question:“We do not know.”This ought to show that the men of Science are no greater authorities in this matter than are the profane. If, according to Professor Huxley,“the time represented by the Coal formation alone would be six millions of years,”362how many more millions would be required to cover the time from the Jurassic Period, or the middle of the so-called Reptilian Age—when the Third Race appeared—up to the Miocene, when the bulk of the Fourth Race was submerged?363The writer is aware that those specialists, whose computations of the ages of the Globe and Man are the most liberal, have always had the shyer majority against them. But this proves very little, since the majority rarely, if ever, turns out to be right in the long run. Harvey stood alone for many years. The advocates for crossing the Atlantic with steamers were in danger of ending their days in a lunatic asylum. Mesmer is classed to this day—in the Encyclopædias—along with Cagliostro and St. Germain, as a charlatan and impostor. And now that Messrs. Charcot and Richet have vindicated Mesmer's claims, and that Mesmerism under its new name of“Hypnotism”—a false nose on a very old face—is accepted by Science, it does not strengthen our respect for that majority, when we see the ease and unconcern with which its members treat of“Hypnotism,”of“telepathic impacts,”and its other phenomena. They speak of it, in short, as if they had believed therein since the days of Solomon, and had not, only a few years ago, called its votaries lunatics and impostors!364The same revulsion of thought is in store for the long period of years which Esoteric Philosophy claims as the age of sexual and physiological mankind. Therefore even the Stanza which says:[pg 166]“The Mind-born, the boneless, gave being to the Will-born with bones;”—adding that this took place in the middle of the Third Race 18,000,000 years ago—has yet a chance of being accepted by future Scientists.As far as nineteenth century thought is concerned, we shall be told, even by some personal friends who are imbued with an abnormal respect for the shifting conclusions of Science, that such a statement is absurd. How much more improbable will appear our further assertion, viz., that the antiquity of the First Race dates back millions of years beyond this again. For, although the exact figures are withheld—and it is out of the question to refer the incipient evolution of the primeval Divine Races withcertaintyto either the early Secondary, or the Primary Ages of Geology—one thing is clear, that the figures 18,000,000 of years, which embrace the duration ofsexual, physical, man, have to be enormously increased if the whole process of spiritual, astral and physical development is taken into account. Many Geologists, indeed, consider that the duration of the Quaternary and Tertiary Ages demands the concession of such an estimate; and it is quite certain that no terrestrial conditions whatever negative the hypothesis of an Eocene man, if evidence for his reality is forthcoming. Occultists, who maintain that the above date carries us far back into the Secondary or“Reptilian”Age, may refer to M. de Quatrefages in support of the possible existence of man in that remote antiquity. But with regard to the earliest Root-Races the case is very different. If the thick agglomeration of vapours, charged with carbonic acid, that escaped from the soil, or was held in suspension in the atmosphere since the commencement of sedimentation, offered a fatal obstacle to the life of human organisms as now known, how, it will be asked, could the primeval men have existed? This consideration is, in reality, out of court. Such terrestrial conditions as were then operative had no touch with the plane on which the evolution of theethereal astralRaces proceeded. Only in relatively recent geological periods, has the spiral course of cyclic law swept mankind into the lowest grade of physical evolution—the plane of gross material causation. In those early ages,astralevolution was alone in progress, and the two planes, the astral and the physical,365though developing on parallel lines, had[pg 167]no direct point of contact with one another. It is obvious that a shadow-likeetherealman is related by virtue of his organization—if such it can be called—only to that plane from which the substance of his Upâdhi is derived.There are things, perhaps, that may have escaped the far-seeing—but notall-seeing—eyes of our modern Naturalists; yet it is Nature herself who undertakes to furnish the missing links. Agnostic speculative thinkers have to choose between the version given by the Secret Doctrine of the East, and the hopelessly materialistic Darwinian and Biblical accounts of the origin of man; between no soul and no spiritual evolution, and the Occult doctrine which repudiates“special creation”and the“Evolutionist”anthropogenesis equally.Again, to take up the question of“spontaneous generation”; life—as Science shows—has not always reigned on this terrestrial plane. There was a time when even the Hæckelian Moneron—that simple globule of Protoplasm—had not yet appeared at the bottom of the seas. Whence came theImpulsewhich caused the molecules of Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, etc., to group themselves into the Urschleim of Oken, that organic“Slime,”now christened Protoplasm? What were the prototypes of the Monera? They, at least, could not have fallen in meteorites from other Globes already formed, Sir William Thomson's wild theory to this effect notwithstanding. And even if they had so fallen; if our Earth got its supply of life-germs from other Planets; who, orwhat, had carried them on to these Planets? Here, again, unless the Occult Teaching is accepted, we are compelled once more to face amiracle—to accept the theory of a personal, anthropomorphic Creator, the attributes and definitions of whom, as formulated by the Monotheists, clash as much with philosophy and logic, as they degrade the ideal of an infinite Universal Deity, before whose incomprehensible awful grandeur the highest human intellect feels dwarfed. Let not the modern Philosopher, while arbitrarily placing himself on the highest pinnacle of human intellectuality hitherto evolved, show himself spiritually and intuitionally so far below the conceptions of even the ancient Greeks, themselves on a far lower level, in these respects, than the Philosophers of Eastern Âryan antiquity. Hylozoism, when philosophically understood, is the highest aspect of Pantheism. It is the only possible escape from idiotic Atheism based on lethal materiality, and the still more idiotic anthropomorphic conceptions of the Monotheists; between which it stands on its own entirely neutral ground.[pg 168]Hylozoismdemandsabsolute Divine Thought, which wouldpervadethe numberless active, creating Forces, or“Creators,”whichEntitiesare moved by, and have their being in, from, and through, that Divine Thought; the latter, nevertheless, having no more personal concern in them ortheircreations, than the Sun has in the sun-flower and its seeds, or in vegetation in general. Such active“Creators”are known to exist and are believed in, because perceived and sensed by theInnerMan in the Occultist. Thus the latter says that an Absolute Deity, having to be unconditioned and unrelated, cannot be thought of at the same time as an active, creating, one living God, without immediate degradation of the ideal.366A Deity that manifests in Space and Time—these two being simply the forms ofThatwhich is the AbsoluteAll—can be but a fractional part of the whole. And since that“All”cannot be divided in its absoluteness, therefore thatsensedCreator (we say Creators) can be at best but the mereaspectthereof. To use the same metaphor—inadequate to express the full idea, yet well adapted to the case in hand—these Creators are like the numerous rays of the solar orb, which remains unconscious of, and unconcerned in, the work; while its mediating agents, the rays, become the instrumental media every spring—the Manvantaric dawn of the Earth—in fructifying and awakening the dormant vitality inherent in Nature and its differentiated matter. This was so well understood in antiquity, that even the moderately religious Aristotle remarked that such work of direct creation would be quite unbecoming to God—ἀπρεπὲς τῷ Θεῷ. Plato and other philosophers taught the same: deity cannot set its own hand to creation—αὐτουργεῖν ἅπαντα. This Cudworth calls“Hylozoism.”As old Zeno is credited by Laërtius with having said:Nature is a habit moved from itself, according to seminal principles; perfecting and containing those several things which in determinate times are produced from it, and acting agreeably to that from which it was secreted.367Let us return to our subject, pausing to think over it. Indeed, if there was vegetable life during those periods that could feed on the then deleterious elements; and if there was even animal life whose aquatic organization could be developed, notwithstanding the supposed scarcity of Oxygen, why could there not be human life also, in its[pg 169]incipient physical form,i.e., in a race of beings adapted for that geological period and its surroundings? Besides, Science confesses that it knows nothing of the real length of geological periods.But the chief question before us is, whether it is quite certain that, from the time of that which is called the Azoic Age, there ever was such an atmosphere as that hypothesized by the Naturalists. Not all the Physicists agree with this idea. Were the writer anxious to corroborate the teachings of the Secret Doctrine by exact Science, it would be easy to show, on the admission of more than one Physicist, that the atmosphere has changed little, if at all, since the first condensation of the oceans—i.e., since the Laurentian Period, the Pyrolithic Age. Such, at any rate, is the opinion of Blanchard, S. Meunier, and even of Bischof—as the experiments of the last Scientist with basalts have shown. For were we to take the word of the majority of Scientists as to the quantity of deadly gases, and of elements entirely saturated with Carbon and Nitrogen, in which the vegetable and animal kingdoms are shown to have lived, thriven, and developed, then one would have to come to the curious conclusion that there were, in those days, oceans ofliquid carbonic acid, instead of water. With such an element, it becomes doubtful whether the Ganoids, or even the Primitive Trilobites themselves could live in the oceans of the Primary Age—let alone in those of the Silurian, as shown by Blanchard.The conditions that were necessary for the earliest Race of mankind, however, require no elements, whether simple or compound. That which was stated at the beginning is maintained. The spiritual ethereal Entity which lived in Spaces unknown to Earth, before the first sidereal“jelly-speck”evolved in the Ocean of crude Cosmic Matter—billions and trillions of years before our globular speck in infinity, called Earth, came into being and generated the Monera in its drops, called oceans—needed no“elements.”The“Manu with soft bones,”could well dispense with Calcium Phosphate, as he had no bones, save in a figurative sense. And while even the Monera, however homogeneous their organism, still required physical conditions of life that would help them toward further evolution, the Being which became Primitive Man and the“Father of Man,”after evolving on planes of existence undreamed of by Science, could well remain impervious to any state of atmospheric conditions around him. The primitive ancestor, in Brasseur de Bourbourg'sPopol Vuh, who—in the Mexican legends—could act and live with equal ease under ground and[pg 170]water as upon the earth, answers only to the Second and early Third Races in our texts. And if the three kingdoms of Nature were so different in pre-diluvian ages, why should not man have been composed of materials and combinations of atoms now entirely unknown to Physical Science? The plants and animals now known, in almost numberless varieties and species, have all developed, according to scientific hypotheses, from primitive and far fewer organic forms. Why should not the same have occurred in the case of man, the elements, and the rest? As the Commentary says:Universal Genesis starts from the One, breaks into Three, then Five, and finally culminates in Seven, to return into Four, Three, and One.
Evolution—rather nature, in the light of evolution—has only been studied for sometwenty-five years or so. That is, of course, a mere fractional space in the history of human thought.And just because of this we do not lose all hope that Materialistic Science will amend its ways, and will gradually accept the Esoteric Teachings—if even at first divorced from their (to Science) too metaphysical elements.Has the last word on the subject of human evolution yet been said? As Processor Huxley says:Each such answer to the great question [man's real place in nature], invariably asserted by the followers of its propounder, if not by himself, to becomplete and final, remains in high authority and esteem, it may be for one century, it may be for twenty: but, as invariably, Time proves each reply to have been amere approximation to the truth—tolerable chiefly on account of the ignorance of those by whom it was accepted, and wholly intolerable when tested by the larger knowledge of their successors.353Will this eminent Darwinian admit the possibility of his“Pithecoid Ancestry”being assignable to the list of“wholly intolerable beliefs,”in the“larger knowledge”of Occultists? But whence the savage? Mere“rising to the civilized state”does not account for the evolution of form.In the same letter,“The Evolution of Man,”Dr. Wilson makes other strange confessions. Thus, he observes, in answer to the queries put toKnowledge, by“G. M.”:“Has evolution effected any change in man? If so, what change? If not, why not?”... If we refuse to admit [as science does] that man was created a perfect being, and then became degraded, there exists only another supposition—that of evolution. If man has arisen from a savage to a civilized state, that surely is evolution.We do not yet know because such knowledge is difficult to acquire, if the human frame is subject to the same influences as those of lower animals.But there is little doubt that elevation from savagery to civilized life means and implies“evolution,”and that of considerable extent. Mentally, man's evolution cannot be doubted; the ever-widening sphere of thought has sprung from small and rude beginnings, like language itself. But man's ways of life, his power of adaptation to his surroundings, and countless other circumstances, have made the facts and course of his“evolution”very difficult to trace.This very difficulty ought to make the Evolutionists more cautious in their affirmations. But why is evolution impossible, if“man was created a perfect being, and then became degraded”? At best it can only apply to theoutward, physical man. As remarked inIsis Unveiled,[pg 162]Darwin's evolution begins at the middle point, instead of commencing for man, as for everything else, from universals. The Aristotle-Baconian method may have its advantages, but it has, undeniably, already demonstrated its defects. Pythagoras and Plato, who proceeded from universals downwards, are now shown more learned, in the light of Modern Science, than was Aristotle. For the latter opposed and denounced the idea of the revolution of the Earth and even of its rotundity, when writing:Almost all those who affirm that they have studied heaven in its uniformity, claim that the earth is in the centre, but the philosophers of the Italian School, otherwise called the Pythagoreans, teach entirely the contrary.This, because the Pythagoreans were Initiates, and followed the deductive method. Whereas Aristotle, the father of the inductive system, complained of those who taught that:The centre of our system was occupied by the sun, and the earth was only a star, which by a rotatory motion around the same centre, produces night and day.354The same with regard to man. The theory taught in the Secret Doctrine, and now expounded, is the only one, which—without falling into the absurdity of a“miraculous”man created out of the dust of the earth, or the still greater fallacy of man evolving from a pinch of lime-salt, the ex-protoplasmic Moneron—can account for his appearance on Earth.Analogyis the guiding law in Nature, the only true Ariadne's thread that can lead us, through the inextricable paths of her domain, toward her primal and final mysteries. Nature, as a creative potency, is infinite, and no generation of Physical Scientists can ever boast of having exhausted the list of her ways and methods, however uniform the laws upon which she proceeds. If we can conceive of a ball of“fire-mist”—as it rolls through æons of time in the interstellar spaces—becoming gradually a Planet, a self-luminous Globe, to settle into aman-bearingWorld or Earth, thus having passed from a soft plastic body into a rock-bound Globe; and if we see on it everything evolving from the non-nucleated jelly-speck that becomes the Sarcode355of the Moneron, then passes from its protistic state356into the form of an[pg 163]animal, to grow into a gigantic reptilian monster of the Mesozoic times; then dwindling again into the (comparatively) dwarfish crocodile, now confined solely to tropical regions, and the universally common lizard357—if we can conceive all this, then how can man alone escape the general law?“There were giants on earth in those days”saysGenesis, repeating the statement of all the other Eastern Scriptures; and the Titans are founded on an anthropological and physiological fact.And, as the hard-shelled crustacean was once upon a time a jelly-speck, a“thoroughly homogeneous particle of albumen in a firmly adhesive condition,”so was the outward covering of primitive man, his early“coat of skin,”plusan immortal spiritual Monad, and a psychic temporary form and body within that shell. The modern, hard, muscular man, almost impervious to any climate, was, perhaps, some 25,000,000 years ago, just what the Hæckelian Moneron is, strictly an“organism without organs,”an entirely homogeneous substance with a structureless albumen body within, and a human form only outwardly.No man of Science has the right, in this century, to find the figures of the Brâhmans in the question of chronology preposterous; for their own calculations often exceed by far the claims made by Esoteric Science. This may easily be shown.Helmholtz calculated that the cooling of our Earth from a temperature of 2,000° to 200° Cent. must have occupied a period of no less than 350,000,000 years. Western Science (including Geology) seems generally to allow our Globe an age of about 500,000,000 years altogether. Sir William Thomson, however, limits the appearance of the earliest vegetable life to 100,000,000 years ago—a statement respectfully contradicted by the Archaic Records. Speculations, furthermore, vary daily in the domains of Science. Meanwhile, some Geologists are very much opposed to such limitation. Volger calculates:That the time requisite for the deposit of the strata known to us must at least have amounted to 648 millions of years.Both time and space are infinite and eternal.The earth, as a material existence, is indeed infinite; the changes only which it has undergone can be determined by finite periods of time....We must therefore assume that the starry heaven is not merely in space, which no[pg 164]astronomer doubts, but also in time, without beginning or end; that it never was created, and is imperishable.358Czolbe repeats exactly what the Occultists say. But the Âryan Occultists, we may be told, knew nothing of these later speculations. As Coleman says:They were even ignorant of the globular form of our earth.To this theVishnu Purânacontains a reply, which has forced certain Orientalists to open their eyes very wide.The sun is stationed, for all time, in the middle of the day, and over against mid-night, in all the Dvîpas [Continents], Maitreya. But the rising and the settingof the sunbeing perpetually oppositeto each other,—and, in the same way, all the cardinal points, and so the cross-points, Maitreya, people speak of the rising of the sun where they see it; and where the sun disappears, there,to them, is his setting. Of the sun, which is alwaysin one and the same place, there is neither setting nor rising; for what is called rising and setting areonlythe seeing and the not seeing the sun.359To this Fitzedward Hall remarks:The heliocentricism taught in this passage is remarkable. It is contradicted, however, a little further on.360Contradictedpurposely, because it was a secret temple-teaching. Martin Haug remarked the same teaching in another passage. It is useless to calumniate the Âryans any longer.To return to the chronology of the Geologists and Anthropologists. We are afraid Science has no reasonable grounds on which she could oppose the views of the Occultists in this direction. Except that“of man, the highest organic being of creation, not a trace was found in the primary strata; only in the uppermost, the so-called alluvial layer,”is all that can be urged, so far. That man wasnot the last member in the mammalian family, but thefirstinthisRound, is something that Science will be forced to acknowledge one day. A similar view also has already been mooted in France on very high authority.That man can be shown to have lived in the Mid-Tertiary Period, and in a geological agewhen there did not yet exist one single specimen of the now known species of mammals, is a statement that Sciencecannotdeny and which has now been proven by de Quatrefages.361But even supposing his existence in the Eocene Period is not yet demonstrated, what period of time has elapsed since the Cretaceous Period? We[pg 165]are aware of the fact that only the boldest Geologists dare place man further back than the Miocene Age. But how long, we ask, is the duration of those ages and periods since the Mesozoic time? On this, after a good deal of speculation and wrangling, Science is silent, the greatest authorities upon the subject being compelled to answer to the question:“We do not know.”This ought to show that the men of Science are no greater authorities in this matter than are the profane. If, according to Professor Huxley,“the time represented by the Coal formation alone would be six millions of years,”362how many more millions would be required to cover the time from the Jurassic Period, or the middle of the so-called Reptilian Age—when the Third Race appeared—up to the Miocene, when the bulk of the Fourth Race was submerged?363The writer is aware that those specialists, whose computations of the ages of the Globe and Man are the most liberal, have always had the shyer majority against them. But this proves very little, since the majority rarely, if ever, turns out to be right in the long run. Harvey stood alone for many years. The advocates for crossing the Atlantic with steamers were in danger of ending their days in a lunatic asylum. Mesmer is classed to this day—in the Encyclopædias—along with Cagliostro and St. Germain, as a charlatan and impostor. And now that Messrs. Charcot and Richet have vindicated Mesmer's claims, and that Mesmerism under its new name of“Hypnotism”—a false nose on a very old face—is accepted by Science, it does not strengthen our respect for that majority, when we see the ease and unconcern with which its members treat of“Hypnotism,”of“telepathic impacts,”and its other phenomena. They speak of it, in short, as if they had believed therein since the days of Solomon, and had not, only a few years ago, called its votaries lunatics and impostors!364The same revulsion of thought is in store for the long period of years which Esoteric Philosophy claims as the age of sexual and physiological mankind. Therefore even the Stanza which says:[pg 166]“The Mind-born, the boneless, gave being to the Will-born with bones;”—adding that this took place in the middle of the Third Race 18,000,000 years ago—has yet a chance of being accepted by future Scientists.As far as nineteenth century thought is concerned, we shall be told, even by some personal friends who are imbued with an abnormal respect for the shifting conclusions of Science, that such a statement is absurd. How much more improbable will appear our further assertion, viz., that the antiquity of the First Race dates back millions of years beyond this again. For, although the exact figures are withheld—and it is out of the question to refer the incipient evolution of the primeval Divine Races withcertaintyto either the early Secondary, or the Primary Ages of Geology—one thing is clear, that the figures 18,000,000 of years, which embrace the duration ofsexual, physical, man, have to be enormously increased if the whole process of spiritual, astral and physical development is taken into account. Many Geologists, indeed, consider that the duration of the Quaternary and Tertiary Ages demands the concession of such an estimate; and it is quite certain that no terrestrial conditions whatever negative the hypothesis of an Eocene man, if evidence for his reality is forthcoming. Occultists, who maintain that the above date carries us far back into the Secondary or“Reptilian”Age, may refer to M. de Quatrefages in support of the possible existence of man in that remote antiquity. But with regard to the earliest Root-Races the case is very different. If the thick agglomeration of vapours, charged with carbonic acid, that escaped from the soil, or was held in suspension in the atmosphere since the commencement of sedimentation, offered a fatal obstacle to the life of human organisms as now known, how, it will be asked, could the primeval men have existed? This consideration is, in reality, out of court. Such terrestrial conditions as were then operative had no touch with the plane on which the evolution of theethereal astralRaces proceeded. Only in relatively recent geological periods, has the spiral course of cyclic law swept mankind into the lowest grade of physical evolution—the plane of gross material causation. In those early ages,astralevolution was alone in progress, and the two planes, the astral and the physical,365though developing on parallel lines, had[pg 167]no direct point of contact with one another. It is obvious that a shadow-likeetherealman is related by virtue of his organization—if such it can be called—only to that plane from which the substance of his Upâdhi is derived.There are things, perhaps, that may have escaped the far-seeing—but notall-seeing—eyes of our modern Naturalists; yet it is Nature herself who undertakes to furnish the missing links. Agnostic speculative thinkers have to choose between the version given by the Secret Doctrine of the East, and the hopelessly materialistic Darwinian and Biblical accounts of the origin of man; between no soul and no spiritual evolution, and the Occult doctrine which repudiates“special creation”and the“Evolutionist”anthropogenesis equally.Again, to take up the question of“spontaneous generation”; life—as Science shows—has not always reigned on this terrestrial plane. There was a time when even the Hæckelian Moneron—that simple globule of Protoplasm—had not yet appeared at the bottom of the seas. Whence came theImpulsewhich caused the molecules of Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, etc., to group themselves into the Urschleim of Oken, that organic“Slime,”now christened Protoplasm? What were the prototypes of the Monera? They, at least, could not have fallen in meteorites from other Globes already formed, Sir William Thomson's wild theory to this effect notwithstanding. And even if they had so fallen; if our Earth got its supply of life-germs from other Planets; who, orwhat, had carried them on to these Planets? Here, again, unless the Occult Teaching is accepted, we are compelled once more to face amiracle—to accept the theory of a personal, anthropomorphic Creator, the attributes and definitions of whom, as formulated by the Monotheists, clash as much with philosophy and logic, as they degrade the ideal of an infinite Universal Deity, before whose incomprehensible awful grandeur the highest human intellect feels dwarfed. Let not the modern Philosopher, while arbitrarily placing himself on the highest pinnacle of human intellectuality hitherto evolved, show himself spiritually and intuitionally so far below the conceptions of even the ancient Greeks, themselves on a far lower level, in these respects, than the Philosophers of Eastern Âryan antiquity. Hylozoism, when philosophically understood, is the highest aspect of Pantheism. It is the only possible escape from idiotic Atheism based on lethal materiality, and the still more idiotic anthropomorphic conceptions of the Monotheists; between which it stands on its own entirely neutral ground.[pg 168]Hylozoismdemandsabsolute Divine Thought, which wouldpervadethe numberless active, creating Forces, or“Creators,”whichEntitiesare moved by, and have their being in, from, and through, that Divine Thought; the latter, nevertheless, having no more personal concern in them ortheircreations, than the Sun has in the sun-flower and its seeds, or in vegetation in general. Such active“Creators”are known to exist and are believed in, because perceived and sensed by theInnerMan in the Occultist. Thus the latter says that an Absolute Deity, having to be unconditioned and unrelated, cannot be thought of at the same time as an active, creating, one living God, without immediate degradation of the ideal.366A Deity that manifests in Space and Time—these two being simply the forms ofThatwhich is the AbsoluteAll—can be but a fractional part of the whole. And since that“All”cannot be divided in its absoluteness, therefore thatsensedCreator (we say Creators) can be at best but the mereaspectthereof. To use the same metaphor—inadequate to express the full idea, yet well adapted to the case in hand—these Creators are like the numerous rays of the solar orb, which remains unconscious of, and unconcerned in, the work; while its mediating agents, the rays, become the instrumental media every spring—the Manvantaric dawn of the Earth—in fructifying and awakening the dormant vitality inherent in Nature and its differentiated matter. This was so well understood in antiquity, that even the moderately religious Aristotle remarked that such work of direct creation would be quite unbecoming to God—ἀπρεπὲς τῷ Θεῷ. Plato and other philosophers taught the same: deity cannot set its own hand to creation—αὐτουργεῖν ἅπαντα. This Cudworth calls“Hylozoism.”As old Zeno is credited by Laërtius with having said:Nature is a habit moved from itself, according to seminal principles; perfecting and containing those several things which in determinate times are produced from it, and acting agreeably to that from which it was secreted.367Let us return to our subject, pausing to think over it. Indeed, if there was vegetable life during those periods that could feed on the then deleterious elements; and if there was even animal life whose aquatic organization could be developed, notwithstanding the supposed scarcity of Oxygen, why could there not be human life also, in its[pg 169]incipient physical form,i.e., in a race of beings adapted for that geological period and its surroundings? Besides, Science confesses that it knows nothing of the real length of geological periods.But the chief question before us is, whether it is quite certain that, from the time of that which is called the Azoic Age, there ever was such an atmosphere as that hypothesized by the Naturalists. Not all the Physicists agree with this idea. Were the writer anxious to corroborate the teachings of the Secret Doctrine by exact Science, it would be easy to show, on the admission of more than one Physicist, that the atmosphere has changed little, if at all, since the first condensation of the oceans—i.e., since the Laurentian Period, the Pyrolithic Age. Such, at any rate, is the opinion of Blanchard, S. Meunier, and even of Bischof—as the experiments of the last Scientist with basalts have shown. For were we to take the word of the majority of Scientists as to the quantity of deadly gases, and of elements entirely saturated with Carbon and Nitrogen, in which the vegetable and animal kingdoms are shown to have lived, thriven, and developed, then one would have to come to the curious conclusion that there were, in those days, oceans ofliquid carbonic acid, instead of water. With such an element, it becomes doubtful whether the Ganoids, or even the Primitive Trilobites themselves could live in the oceans of the Primary Age—let alone in those of the Silurian, as shown by Blanchard.The conditions that were necessary for the earliest Race of mankind, however, require no elements, whether simple or compound. That which was stated at the beginning is maintained. The spiritual ethereal Entity which lived in Spaces unknown to Earth, before the first sidereal“jelly-speck”evolved in the Ocean of crude Cosmic Matter—billions and trillions of years before our globular speck in infinity, called Earth, came into being and generated the Monera in its drops, called oceans—needed no“elements.”The“Manu with soft bones,”could well dispense with Calcium Phosphate, as he had no bones, save in a figurative sense. And while even the Monera, however homogeneous their organism, still required physical conditions of life that would help them toward further evolution, the Being which became Primitive Man and the“Father of Man,”after evolving on planes of existence undreamed of by Science, could well remain impervious to any state of atmospheric conditions around him. The primitive ancestor, in Brasseur de Bourbourg'sPopol Vuh, who—in the Mexican legends—could act and live with equal ease under ground and[pg 170]water as upon the earth, answers only to the Second and early Third Races in our texts. And if the three kingdoms of Nature were so different in pre-diluvian ages, why should not man have been composed of materials and combinations of atoms now entirely unknown to Physical Science? The plants and animals now known, in almost numberless varieties and species, have all developed, according to scientific hypotheses, from primitive and far fewer organic forms. Why should not the same have occurred in the case of man, the elements, and the rest? As the Commentary says:Universal Genesis starts from the One, breaks into Three, then Five, and finally culminates in Seven, to return into Four, Three, and One.
Evolution—rather nature, in the light of evolution—has only been studied for sometwenty-five years or so. That is, of course, a mere fractional space in the history of human thought.And just because of this we do not lose all hope that Materialistic Science will amend its ways, and will gradually accept the Esoteric Teachings—if even at first divorced from their (to Science) too metaphysical elements.Has the last word on the subject of human evolution yet been said? As Processor Huxley says:Each such answer to the great question [man's real place in nature], invariably asserted by the followers of its propounder, if not by himself, to becomplete and final, remains in high authority and esteem, it may be for one century, it may be for twenty: but, as invariably, Time proves each reply to have been amere approximation to the truth—tolerable chiefly on account of the ignorance of those by whom it was accepted, and wholly intolerable when tested by the larger knowledge of their successors.353Will this eminent Darwinian admit the possibility of his“Pithecoid Ancestry”being assignable to the list of“wholly intolerable beliefs,”in the“larger knowledge”of Occultists? But whence the savage? Mere“rising to the civilized state”does not account for the evolution of form.In the same letter,“The Evolution of Man,”Dr. Wilson makes other strange confessions. Thus, he observes, in answer to the queries put toKnowledge, by“G. M.”:“Has evolution effected any change in man? If so, what change? If not, why not?”... If we refuse to admit [as science does] that man was created a perfect being, and then became degraded, there exists only another supposition—that of evolution. If man has arisen from a savage to a civilized state, that surely is evolution.We do not yet know because such knowledge is difficult to acquire, if the human frame is subject to the same influences as those of lower animals.But there is little doubt that elevation from savagery to civilized life means and implies“evolution,”and that of considerable extent. Mentally, man's evolution cannot be doubted; the ever-widening sphere of thought has sprung from small and rude beginnings, like language itself. But man's ways of life, his power of adaptation to his surroundings, and countless other circumstances, have made the facts and course of his“evolution”very difficult to trace.This very difficulty ought to make the Evolutionists more cautious in their affirmations. But why is evolution impossible, if“man was created a perfect being, and then became degraded”? At best it can only apply to theoutward, physical man. As remarked inIsis Unveiled,[pg 162]Darwin's evolution begins at the middle point, instead of commencing for man, as for everything else, from universals. The Aristotle-Baconian method may have its advantages, but it has, undeniably, already demonstrated its defects. Pythagoras and Plato, who proceeded from universals downwards, are now shown more learned, in the light of Modern Science, than was Aristotle. For the latter opposed and denounced the idea of the revolution of the Earth and even of its rotundity, when writing:Almost all those who affirm that they have studied heaven in its uniformity, claim that the earth is in the centre, but the philosophers of the Italian School, otherwise called the Pythagoreans, teach entirely the contrary.This, because the Pythagoreans were Initiates, and followed the deductive method. Whereas Aristotle, the father of the inductive system, complained of those who taught that:The centre of our system was occupied by the sun, and the earth was only a star, which by a rotatory motion around the same centre, produces night and day.354The same with regard to man. The theory taught in the Secret Doctrine, and now expounded, is the only one, which—without falling into the absurdity of a“miraculous”man created out of the dust of the earth, or the still greater fallacy of man evolving from a pinch of lime-salt, the ex-protoplasmic Moneron—can account for his appearance on Earth.Analogyis the guiding law in Nature, the only true Ariadne's thread that can lead us, through the inextricable paths of her domain, toward her primal and final mysteries. Nature, as a creative potency, is infinite, and no generation of Physical Scientists can ever boast of having exhausted the list of her ways and methods, however uniform the laws upon which she proceeds. If we can conceive of a ball of“fire-mist”—as it rolls through æons of time in the interstellar spaces—becoming gradually a Planet, a self-luminous Globe, to settle into aman-bearingWorld or Earth, thus having passed from a soft plastic body into a rock-bound Globe; and if we see on it everything evolving from the non-nucleated jelly-speck that becomes the Sarcode355of the Moneron, then passes from its protistic state356into the form of an[pg 163]animal, to grow into a gigantic reptilian monster of the Mesozoic times; then dwindling again into the (comparatively) dwarfish crocodile, now confined solely to tropical regions, and the universally common lizard357—if we can conceive all this, then how can man alone escape the general law?“There were giants on earth in those days”saysGenesis, repeating the statement of all the other Eastern Scriptures; and the Titans are founded on an anthropological and physiological fact.And, as the hard-shelled crustacean was once upon a time a jelly-speck, a“thoroughly homogeneous particle of albumen in a firmly adhesive condition,”so was the outward covering of primitive man, his early“coat of skin,”plusan immortal spiritual Monad, and a psychic temporary form and body within that shell. The modern, hard, muscular man, almost impervious to any climate, was, perhaps, some 25,000,000 years ago, just what the Hæckelian Moneron is, strictly an“organism without organs,”an entirely homogeneous substance with a structureless albumen body within, and a human form only outwardly.No man of Science has the right, in this century, to find the figures of the Brâhmans in the question of chronology preposterous; for their own calculations often exceed by far the claims made by Esoteric Science. This may easily be shown.Helmholtz calculated that the cooling of our Earth from a temperature of 2,000° to 200° Cent. must have occupied a period of no less than 350,000,000 years. Western Science (including Geology) seems generally to allow our Globe an age of about 500,000,000 years altogether. Sir William Thomson, however, limits the appearance of the earliest vegetable life to 100,000,000 years ago—a statement respectfully contradicted by the Archaic Records. Speculations, furthermore, vary daily in the domains of Science. Meanwhile, some Geologists are very much opposed to such limitation. Volger calculates:That the time requisite for the deposit of the strata known to us must at least have amounted to 648 millions of years.Both time and space are infinite and eternal.The earth, as a material existence, is indeed infinite; the changes only which it has undergone can be determined by finite periods of time....We must therefore assume that the starry heaven is not merely in space, which no[pg 164]astronomer doubts, but also in time, without beginning or end; that it never was created, and is imperishable.358Czolbe repeats exactly what the Occultists say. But the Âryan Occultists, we may be told, knew nothing of these later speculations. As Coleman says:They were even ignorant of the globular form of our earth.To this theVishnu Purânacontains a reply, which has forced certain Orientalists to open their eyes very wide.The sun is stationed, for all time, in the middle of the day, and over against mid-night, in all the Dvîpas [Continents], Maitreya. But the rising and the settingof the sunbeing perpetually oppositeto each other,—and, in the same way, all the cardinal points, and so the cross-points, Maitreya, people speak of the rising of the sun where they see it; and where the sun disappears, there,to them, is his setting. Of the sun, which is alwaysin one and the same place, there is neither setting nor rising; for what is called rising and setting areonlythe seeing and the not seeing the sun.359To this Fitzedward Hall remarks:The heliocentricism taught in this passage is remarkable. It is contradicted, however, a little further on.360Contradictedpurposely, because it was a secret temple-teaching. Martin Haug remarked the same teaching in another passage. It is useless to calumniate the Âryans any longer.To return to the chronology of the Geologists and Anthropologists. We are afraid Science has no reasonable grounds on which she could oppose the views of the Occultists in this direction. Except that“of man, the highest organic being of creation, not a trace was found in the primary strata; only in the uppermost, the so-called alluvial layer,”is all that can be urged, so far. That man wasnot the last member in the mammalian family, but thefirstinthisRound, is something that Science will be forced to acknowledge one day. A similar view also has already been mooted in France on very high authority.That man can be shown to have lived in the Mid-Tertiary Period, and in a geological agewhen there did not yet exist one single specimen of the now known species of mammals, is a statement that Sciencecannotdeny and which has now been proven by de Quatrefages.361But even supposing his existence in the Eocene Period is not yet demonstrated, what period of time has elapsed since the Cretaceous Period? We[pg 165]are aware of the fact that only the boldest Geologists dare place man further back than the Miocene Age. But how long, we ask, is the duration of those ages and periods since the Mesozoic time? On this, after a good deal of speculation and wrangling, Science is silent, the greatest authorities upon the subject being compelled to answer to the question:“We do not know.”This ought to show that the men of Science are no greater authorities in this matter than are the profane. If, according to Professor Huxley,“the time represented by the Coal formation alone would be six millions of years,”362how many more millions would be required to cover the time from the Jurassic Period, or the middle of the so-called Reptilian Age—when the Third Race appeared—up to the Miocene, when the bulk of the Fourth Race was submerged?363The writer is aware that those specialists, whose computations of the ages of the Globe and Man are the most liberal, have always had the shyer majority against them. But this proves very little, since the majority rarely, if ever, turns out to be right in the long run. Harvey stood alone for many years. The advocates for crossing the Atlantic with steamers were in danger of ending their days in a lunatic asylum. Mesmer is classed to this day—in the Encyclopædias—along with Cagliostro and St. Germain, as a charlatan and impostor. And now that Messrs. Charcot and Richet have vindicated Mesmer's claims, and that Mesmerism under its new name of“Hypnotism”—a false nose on a very old face—is accepted by Science, it does not strengthen our respect for that majority, when we see the ease and unconcern with which its members treat of“Hypnotism,”of“telepathic impacts,”and its other phenomena. They speak of it, in short, as if they had believed therein since the days of Solomon, and had not, only a few years ago, called its votaries lunatics and impostors!364The same revulsion of thought is in store for the long period of years which Esoteric Philosophy claims as the age of sexual and physiological mankind. Therefore even the Stanza which says:[pg 166]“The Mind-born, the boneless, gave being to the Will-born with bones;”—adding that this took place in the middle of the Third Race 18,000,000 years ago—has yet a chance of being accepted by future Scientists.As far as nineteenth century thought is concerned, we shall be told, even by some personal friends who are imbued with an abnormal respect for the shifting conclusions of Science, that such a statement is absurd. How much more improbable will appear our further assertion, viz., that the antiquity of the First Race dates back millions of years beyond this again. For, although the exact figures are withheld—and it is out of the question to refer the incipient evolution of the primeval Divine Races withcertaintyto either the early Secondary, or the Primary Ages of Geology—one thing is clear, that the figures 18,000,000 of years, which embrace the duration ofsexual, physical, man, have to be enormously increased if the whole process of spiritual, astral and physical development is taken into account. Many Geologists, indeed, consider that the duration of the Quaternary and Tertiary Ages demands the concession of such an estimate; and it is quite certain that no terrestrial conditions whatever negative the hypothesis of an Eocene man, if evidence for his reality is forthcoming. Occultists, who maintain that the above date carries us far back into the Secondary or“Reptilian”Age, may refer to M. de Quatrefages in support of the possible existence of man in that remote antiquity. But with regard to the earliest Root-Races the case is very different. If the thick agglomeration of vapours, charged with carbonic acid, that escaped from the soil, or was held in suspension in the atmosphere since the commencement of sedimentation, offered a fatal obstacle to the life of human organisms as now known, how, it will be asked, could the primeval men have existed? This consideration is, in reality, out of court. Such terrestrial conditions as were then operative had no touch with the plane on which the evolution of theethereal astralRaces proceeded. Only in relatively recent geological periods, has the spiral course of cyclic law swept mankind into the lowest grade of physical evolution—the plane of gross material causation. In those early ages,astralevolution was alone in progress, and the two planes, the astral and the physical,365though developing on parallel lines, had[pg 167]no direct point of contact with one another. It is obvious that a shadow-likeetherealman is related by virtue of his organization—if such it can be called—only to that plane from which the substance of his Upâdhi is derived.There are things, perhaps, that may have escaped the far-seeing—but notall-seeing—eyes of our modern Naturalists; yet it is Nature herself who undertakes to furnish the missing links. Agnostic speculative thinkers have to choose between the version given by the Secret Doctrine of the East, and the hopelessly materialistic Darwinian and Biblical accounts of the origin of man; between no soul and no spiritual evolution, and the Occult doctrine which repudiates“special creation”and the“Evolutionist”anthropogenesis equally.Again, to take up the question of“spontaneous generation”; life—as Science shows—has not always reigned on this terrestrial plane. There was a time when even the Hæckelian Moneron—that simple globule of Protoplasm—had not yet appeared at the bottom of the seas. Whence came theImpulsewhich caused the molecules of Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, etc., to group themselves into the Urschleim of Oken, that organic“Slime,”now christened Protoplasm? What were the prototypes of the Monera? They, at least, could not have fallen in meteorites from other Globes already formed, Sir William Thomson's wild theory to this effect notwithstanding. And even if they had so fallen; if our Earth got its supply of life-germs from other Planets; who, orwhat, had carried them on to these Planets? Here, again, unless the Occult Teaching is accepted, we are compelled once more to face amiracle—to accept the theory of a personal, anthropomorphic Creator, the attributes and definitions of whom, as formulated by the Monotheists, clash as much with philosophy and logic, as they degrade the ideal of an infinite Universal Deity, before whose incomprehensible awful grandeur the highest human intellect feels dwarfed. Let not the modern Philosopher, while arbitrarily placing himself on the highest pinnacle of human intellectuality hitherto evolved, show himself spiritually and intuitionally so far below the conceptions of even the ancient Greeks, themselves on a far lower level, in these respects, than the Philosophers of Eastern Âryan antiquity. Hylozoism, when philosophically understood, is the highest aspect of Pantheism. It is the only possible escape from idiotic Atheism based on lethal materiality, and the still more idiotic anthropomorphic conceptions of the Monotheists; between which it stands on its own entirely neutral ground.[pg 168]Hylozoismdemandsabsolute Divine Thought, which wouldpervadethe numberless active, creating Forces, or“Creators,”whichEntitiesare moved by, and have their being in, from, and through, that Divine Thought; the latter, nevertheless, having no more personal concern in them ortheircreations, than the Sun has in the sun-flower and its seeds, or in vegetation in general. Such active“Creators”are known to exist and are believed in, because perceived and sensed by theInnerMan in the Occultist. Thus the latter says that an Absolute Deity, having to be unconditioned and unrelated, cannot be thought of at the same time as an active, creating, one living God, without immediate degradation of the ideal.366A Deity that manifests in Space and Time—these two being simply the forms ofThatwhich is the AbsoluteAll—can be but a fractional part of the whole. And since that“All”cannot be divided in its absoluteness, therefore thatsensedCreator (we say Creators) can be at best but the mereaspectthereof. To use the same metaphor—inadequate to express the full idea, yet well adapted to the case in hand—these Creators are like the numerous rays of the solar orb, which remains unconscious of, and unconcerned in, the work; while its mediating agents, the rays, become the instrumental media every spring—the Manvantaric dawn of the Earth—in fructifying and awakening the dormant vitality inherent in Nature and its differentiated matter. This was so well understood in antiquity, that even the moderately religious Aristotle remarked that such work of direct creation would be quite unbecoming to God—ἀπρεπὲς τῷ Θεῷ. Plato and other philosophers taught the same: deity cannot set its own hand to creation—αὐτουργεῖν ἅπαντα. This Cudworth calls“Hylozoism.”As old Zeno is credited by Laërtius with having said:Nature is a habit moved from itself, according to seminal principles; perfecting and containing those several things which in determinate times are produced from it, and acting agreeably to that from which it was secreted.367Let us return to our subject, pausing to think over it. Indeed, if there was vegetable life during those periods that could feed on the then deleterious elements; and if there was even animal life whose aquatic organization could be developed, notwithstanding the supposed scarcity of Oxygen, why could there not be human life also, in its[pg 169]incipient physical form,i.e., in a race of beings adapted for that geological period and its surroundings? Besides, Science confesses that it knows nothing of the real length of geological periods.But the chief question before us is, whether it is quite certain that, from the time of that which is called the Azoic Age, there ever was such an atmosphere as that hypothesized by the Naturalists. Not all the Physicists agree with this idea. Were the writer anxious to corroborate the teachings of the Secret Doctrine by exact Science, it would be easy to show, on the admission of more than one Physicist, that the atmosphere has changed little, if at all, since the first condensation of the oceans—i.e., since the Laurentian Period, the Pyrolithic Age. Such, at any rate, is the opinion of Blanchard, S. Meunier, and even of Bischof—as the experiments of the last Scientist with basalts have shown. For were we to take the word of the majority of Scientists as to the quantity of deadly gases, and of elements entirely saturated with Carbon and Nitrogen, in which the vegetable and animal kingdoms are shown to have lived, thriven, and developed, then one would have to come to the curious conclusion that there were, in those days, oceans ofliquid carbonic acid, instead of water. With such an element, it becomes doubtful whether the Ganoids, or even the Primitive Trilobites themselves could live in the oceans of the Primary Age—let alone in those of the Silurian, as shown by Blanchard.The conditions that were necessary for the earliest Race of mankind, however, require no elements, whether simple or compound. That which was stated at the beginning is maintained. The spiritual ethereal Entity which lived in Spaces unknown to Earth, before the first sidereal“jelly-speck”evolved in the Ocean of crude Cosmic Matter—billions and trillions of years before our globular speck in infinity, called Earth, came into being and generated the Monera in its drops, called oceans—needed no“elements.”The“Manu with soft bones,”could well dispense with Calcium Phosphate, as he had no bones, save in a figurative sense. And while even the Monera, however homogeneous their organism, still required physical conditions of life that would help them toward further evolution, the Being which became Primitive Man and the“Father of Man,”after evolving on planes of existence undreamed of by Science, could well remain impervious to any state of atmospheric conditions around him. The primitive ancestor, in Brasseur de Bourbourg'sPopol Vuh, who—in the Mexican legends—could act and live with equal ease under ground and[pg 170]water as upon the earth, answers only to the Second and early Third Races in our texts. And if the three kingdoms of Nature were so different in pre-diluvian ages, why should not man have been composed of materials and combinations of atoms now entirely unknown to Physical Science? The plants and animals now known, in almost numberless varieties and species, have all developed, according to scientific hypotheses, from primitive and far fewer organic forms. Why should not the same have occurred in the case of man, the elements, and the rest? As the Commentary says:Universal Genesis starts from the One, breaks into Three, then Five, and finally culminates in Seven, to return into Four, Three, and One.
Evolution—rather nature, in the light of evolution—has only been studied for sometwenty-five years or so. That is, of course, a mere fractional space in the history of human thought.And just because of this we do not lose all hope that Materialistic Science will amend its ways, and will gradually accept the Esoteric Teachings—if even at first divorced from their (to Science) too metaphysical elements.Has the last word on the subject of human evolution yet been said? As Processor Huxley says:Each such answer to the great question [man's real place in nature], invariably asserted by the followers of its propounder, if not by himself, to becomplete and final, remains in high authority and esteem, it may be for one century, it may be for twenty: but, as invariably, Time proves each reply to have been amere approximation to the truth—tolerable chiefly on account of the ignorance of those by whom it was accepted, and wholly intolerable when tested by the larger knowledge of their successors.353Will this eminent Darwinian admit the possibility of his“Pithecoid Ancestry”being assignable to the list of“wholly intolerable beliefs,”in the“larger knowledge”of Occultists? But whence the savage? Mere“rising to the civilized state”does not account for the evolution of form.In the same letter,“The Evolution of Man,”Dr. Wilson makes other strange confessions. Thus, he observes, in answer to the queries put toKnowledge, by“G. M.”:“Has evolution effected any change in man? If so, what change? If not, why not?”... If we refuse to admit [as science does] that man was created a perfect being, and then became degraded, there exists only another supposition—that of evolution. If man has arisen from a savage to a civilized state, that surely is evolution.We do not yet know because such knowledge is difficult to acquire, if the human frame is subject to the same influences as those of lower animals.But there is little doubt that elevation from savagery to civilized life means and implies“evolution,”and that of considerable extent. Mentally, man's evolution cannot be doubted; the ever-widening sphere of thought has sprung from small and rude beginnings, like language itself. But man's ways of life, his power of adaptation to his surroundings, and countless other circumstances, have made the facts and course of his“evolution”very difficult to trace.This very difficulty ought to make the Evolutionists more cautious in their affirmations. But why is evolution impossible, if“man was created a perfect being, and then became degraded”? At best it can only apply to theoutward, physical man. As remarked inIsis Unveiled,[pg 162]Darwin's evolution begins at the middle point, instead of commencing for man, as for everything else, from universals. The Aristotle-Baconian method may have its advantages, but it has, undeniably, already demonstrated its defects. Pythagoras and Plato, who proceeded from universals downwards, are now shown more learned, in the light of Modern Science, than was Aristotle. For the latter opposed and denounced the idea of the revolution of the Earth and even of its rotundity, when writing:Almost all those who affirm that they have studied heaven in its uniformity, claim that the earth is in the centre, but the philosophers of the Italian School, otherwise called the Pythagoreans, teach entirely the contrary.This, because the Pythagoreans were Initiates, and followed the deductive method. Whereas Aristotle, the father of the inductive system, complained of those who taught that:The centre of our system was occupied by the sun, and the earth was only a star, which by a rotatory motion around the same centre, produces night and day.354The same with regard to man. The theory taught in the Secret Doctrine, and now expounded, is the only one, which—without falling into the absurdity of a“miraculous”man created out of the dust of the earth, or the still greater fallacy of man evolving from a pinch of lime-salt, the ex-protoplasmic Moneron—can account for his appearance on Earth.Analogyis the guiding law in Nature, the only true Ariadne's thread that can lead us, through the inextricable paths of her domain, toward her primal and final mysteries. Nature, as a creative potency, is infinite, and no generation of Physical Scientists can ever boast of having exhausted the list of her ways and methods, however uniform the laws upon which she proceeds. If we can conceive of a ball of“fire-mist”—as it rolls through æons of time in the interstellar spaces—becoming gradually a Planet, a self-luminous Globe, to settle into aman-bearingWorld or Earth, thus having passed from a soft plastic body into a rock-bound Globe; and if we see on it everything evolving from the non-nucleated jelly-speck that becomes the Sarcode355of the Moneron, then passes from its protistic state356into the form of an[pg 163]animal, to grow into a gigantic reptilian monster of the Mesozoic times; then dwindling again into the (comparatively) dwarfish crocodile, now confined solely to tropical regions, and the universally common lizard357—if we can conceive all this, then how can man alone escape the general law?“There were giants on earth in those days”saysGenesis, repeating the statement of all the other Eastern Scriptures; and the Titans are founded on an anthropological and physiological fact.And, as the hard-shelled crustacean was once upon a time a jelly-speck, a“thoroughly homogeneous particle of albumen in a firmly adhesive condition,”so was the outward covering of primitive man, his early“coat of skin,”plusan immortal spiritual Monad, and a psychic temporary form and body within that shell. The modern, hard, muscular man, almost impervious to any climate, was, perhaps, some 25,000,000 years ago, just what the Hæckelian Moneron is, strictly an“organism without organs,”an entirely homogeneous substance with a structureless albumen body within, and a human form only outwardly.No man of Science has the right, in this century, to find the figures of the Brâhmans in the question of chronology preposterous; for their own calculations often exceed by far the claims made by Esoteric Science. This may easily be shown.Helmholtz calculated that the cooling of our Earth from a temperature of 2,000° to 200° Cent. must have occupied a period of no less than 350,000,000 years. Western Science (including Geology) seems generally to allow our Globe an age of about 500,000,000 years altogether. Sir William Thomson, however, limits the appearance of the earliest vegetable life to 100,000,000 years ago—a statement respectfully contradicted by the Archaic Records. Speculations, furthermore, vary daily in the domains of Science. Meanwhile, some Geologists are very much opposed to such limitation. Volger calculates:That the time requisite for the deposit of the strata known to us must at least have amounted to 648 millions of years.Both time and space are infinite and eternal.The earth, as a material existence, is indeed infinite; the changes only which it has undergone can be determined by finite periods of time....We must therefore assume that the starry heaven is not merely in space, which no[pg 164]astronomer doubts, but also in time, without beginning or end; that it never was created, and is imperishable.358Czolbe repeats exactly what the Occultists say. But the Âryan Occultists, we may be told, knew nothing of these later speculations. As Coleman says:They were even ignorant of the globular form of our earth.To this theVishnu Purânacontains a reply, which has forced certain Orientalists to open their eyes very wide.The sun is stationed, for all time, in the middle of the day, and over against mid-night, in all the Dvîpas [Continents], Maitreya. But the rising and the settingof the sunbeing perpetually oppositeto each other,—and, in the same way, all the cardinal points, and so the cross-points, Maitreya, people speak of the rising of the sun where they see it; and where the sun disappears, there,to them, is his setting. Of the sun, which is alwaysin one and the same place, there is neither setting nor rising; for what is called rising and setting areonlythe seeing and the not seeing the sun.359To this Fitzedward Hall remarks:The heliocentricism taught in this passage is remarkable. It is contradicted, however, a little further on.360Contradictedpurposely, because it was a secret temple-teaching. Martin Haug remarked the same teaching in another passage. It is useless to calumniate the Âryans any longer.To return to the chronology of the Geologists and Anthropologists. We are afraid Science has no reasonable grounds on which she could oppose the views of the Occultists in this direction. Except that“of man, the highest organic being of creation, not a trace was found in the primary strata; only in the uppermost, the so-called alluvial layer,”is all that can be urged, so far. That man wasnot the last member in the mammalian family, but thefirstinthisRound, is something that Science will be forced to acknowledge one day. A similar view also has already been mooted in France on very high authority.That man can be shown to have lived in the Mid-Tertiary Period, and in a geological agewhen there did not yet exist one single specimen of the now known species of mammals, is a statement that Sciencecannotdeny and which has now been proven by de Quatrefages.361But even supposing his existence in the Eocene Period is not yet demonstrated, what period of time has elapsed since the Cretaceous Period? We[pg 165]are aware of the fact that only the boldest Geologists dare place man further back than the Miocene Age. But how long, we ask, is the duration of those ages and periods since the Mesozoic time? On this, after a good deal of speculation and wrangling, Science is silent, the greatest authorities upon the subject being compelled to answer to the question:“We do not know.”This ought to show that the men of Science are no greater authorities in this matter than are the profane. If, according to Professor Huxley,“the time represented by the Coal formation alone would be six millions of years,”362how many more millions would be required to cover the time from the Jurassic Period, or the middle of the so-called Reptilian Age—when the Third Race appeared—up to the Miocene, when the bulk of the Fourth Race was submerged?363The writer is aware that those specialists, whose computations of the ages of the Globe and Man are the most liberal, have always had the shyer majority against them. But this proves very little, since the majority rarely, if ever, turns out to be right in the long run. Harvey stood alone for many years. The advocates for crossing the Atlantic with steamers were in danger of ending their days in a lunatic asylum. Mesmer is classed to this day—in the Encyclopædias—along with Cagliostro and St. Germain, as a charlatan and impostor. And now that Messrs. Charcot and Richet have vindicated Mesmer's claims, and that Mesmerism under its new name of“Hypnotism”—a false nose on a very old face—is accepted by Science, it does not strengthen our respect for that majority, when we see the ease and unconcern with which its members treat of“Hypnotism,”of“telepathic impacts,”and its other phenomena. They speak of it, in short, as if they had believed therein since the days of Solomon, and had not, only a few years ago, called its votaries lunatics and impostors!364The same revulsion of thought is in store for the long period of years which Esoteric Philosophy claims as the age of sexual and physiological mankind. Therefore even the Stanza which says:[pg 166]“The Mind-born, the boneless, gave being to the Will-born with bones;”—adding that this took place in the middle of the Third Race 18,000,000 years ago—has yet a chance of being accepted by future Scientists.As far as nineteenth century thought is concerned, we shall be told, even by some personal friends who are imbued with an abnormal respect for the shifting conclusions of Science, that such a statement is absurd. How much more improbable will appear our further assertion, viz., that the antiquity of the First Race dates back millions of years beyond this again. For, although the exact figures are withheld—and it is out of the question to refer the incipient evolution of the primeval Divine Races withcertaintyto either the early Secondary, or the Primary Ages of Geology—one thing is clear, that the figures 18,000,000 of years, which embrace the duration ofsexual, physical, man, have to be enormously increased if the whole process of spiritual, astral and physical development is taken into account. Many Geologists, indeed, consider that the duration of the Quaternary and Tertiary Ages demands the concession of such an estimate; and it is quite certain that no terrestrial conditions whatever negative the hypothesis of an Eocene man, if evidence for his reality is forthcoming. Occultists, who maintain that the above date carries us far back into the Secondary or“Reptilian”Age, may refer to M. de Quatrefages in support of the possible existence of man in that remote antiquity. But with regard to the earliest Root-Races the case is very different. If the thick agglomeration of vapours, charged with carbonic acid, that escaped from the soil, or was held in suspension in the atmosphere since the commencement of sedimentation, offered a fatal obstacle to the life of human organisms as now known, how, it will be asked, could the primeval men have existed? This consideration is, in reality, out of court. Such terrestrial conditions as were then operative had no touch with the plane on which the evolution of theethereal astralRaces proceeded. Only in relatively recent geological periods, has the spiral course of cyclic law swept mankind into the lowest grade of physical evolution—the plane of gross material causation. In those early ages,astralevolution was alone in progress, and the two planes, the astral and the physical,365though developing on parallel lines, had[pg 167]no direct point of contact with one another. It is obvious that a shadow-likeetherealman is related by virtue of his organization—if such it can be called—only to that plane from which the substance of his Upâdhi is derived.There are things, perhaps, that may have escaped the far-seeing—but notall-seeing—eyes of our modern Naturalists; yet it is Nature herself who undertakes to furnish the missing links. Agnostic speculative thinkers have to choose between the version given by the Secret Doctrine of the East, and the hopelessly materialistic Darwinian and Biblical accounts of the origin of man; between no soul and no spiritual evolution, and the Occult doctrine which repudiates“special creation”and the“Evolutionist”anthropogenesis equally.Again, to take up the question of“spontaneous generation”; life—as Science shows—has not always reigned on this terrestrial plane. There was a time when even the Hæckelian Moneron—that simple globule of Protoplasm—had not yet appeared at the bottom of the seas. Whence came theImpulsewhich caused the molecules of Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, etc., to group themselves into the Urschleim of Oken, that organic“Slime,”now christened Protoplasm? What were the prototypes of the Monera? They, at least, could not have fallen in meteorites from other Globes already formed, Sir William Thomson's wild theory to this effect notwithstanding. And even if they had so fallen; if our Earth got its supply of life-germs from other Planets; who, orwhat, had carried them on to these Planets? Here, again, unless the Occult Teaching is accepted, we are compelled once more to face amiracle—to accept the theory of a personal, anthropomorphic Creator, the attributes and definitions of whom, as formulated by the Monotheists, clash as much with philosophy and logic, as they degrade the ideal of an infinite Universal Deity, before whose incomprehensible awful grandeur the highest human intellect feels dwarfed. Let not the modern Philosopher, while arbitrarily placing himself on the highest pinnacle of human intellectuality hitherto evolved, show himself spiritually and intuitionally so far below the conceptions of even the ancient Greeks, themselves on a far lower level, in these respects, than the Philosophers of Eastern Âryan antiquity. Hylozoism, when philosophically understood, is the highest aspect of Pantheism. It is the only possible escape from idiotic Atheism based on lethal materiality, and the still more idiotic anthropomorphic conceptions of the Monotheists; between which it stands on its own entirely neutral ground.[pg 168]Hylozoismdemandsabsolute Divine Thought, which wouldpervadethe numberless active, creating Forces, or“Creators,”whichEntitiesare moved by, and have their being in, from, and through, that Divine Thought; the latter, nevertheless, having no more personal concern in them ortheircreations, than the Sun has in the sun-flower and its seeds, or in vegetation in general. Such active“Creators”are known to exist and are believed in, because perceived and sensed by theInnerMan in the Occultist. Thus the latter says that an Absolute Deity, having to be unconditioned and unrelated, cannot be thought of at the same time as an active, creating, one living God, without immediate degradation of the ideal.366A Deity that manifests in Space and Time—these two being simply the forms ofThatwhich is the AbsoluteAll—can be but a fractional part of the whole. And since that“All”cannot be divided in its absoluteness, therefore thatsensedCreator (we say Creators) can be at best but the mereaspectthereof. To use the same metaphor—inadequate to express the full idea, yet well adapted to the case in hand—these Creators are like the numerous rays of the solar orb, which remains unconscious of, and unconcerned in, the work; while its mediating agents, the rays, become the instrumental media every spring—the Manvantaric dawn of the Earth—in fructifying and awakening the dormant vitality inherent in Nature and its differentiated matter. This was so well understood in antiquity, that even the moderately religious Aristotle remarked that such work of direct creation would be quite unbecoming to God—ἀπρεπὲς τῷ Θεῷ. Plato and other philosophers taught the same: deity cannot set its own hand to creation—αὐτουργεῖν ἅπαντα. This Cudworth calls“Hylozoism.”As old Zeno is credited by Laërtius with having said:Nature is a habit moved from itself, according to seminal principles; perfecting and containing those several things which in determinate times are produced from it, and acting agreeably to that from which it was secreted.367Let us return to our subject, pausing to think over it. Indeed, if there was vegetable life during those periods that could feed on the then deleterious elements; and if there was even animal life whose aquatic organization could be developed, notwithstanding the supposed scarcity of Oxygen, why could there not be human life also, in its[pg 169]incipient physical form,i.e., in a race of beings adapted for that geological period and its surroundings? Besides, Science confesses that it knows nothing of the real length of geological periods.But the chief question before us is, whether it is quite certain that, from the time of that which is called the Azoic Age, there ever was such an atmosphere as that hypothesized by the Naturalists. Not all the Physicists agree with this idea. Were the writer anxious to corroborate the teachings of the Secret Doctrine by exact Science, it would be easy to show, on the admission of more than one Physicist, that the atmosphere has changed little, if at all, since the first condensation of the oceans—i.e., since the Laurentian Period, the Pyrolithic Age. Such, at any rate, is the opinion of Blanchard, S. Meunier, and even of Bischof—as the experiments of the last Scientist with basalts have shown. For were we to take the word of the majority of Scientists as to the quantity of deadly gases, and of elements entirely saturated with Carbon and Nitrogen, in which the vegetable and animal kingdoms are shown to have lived, thriven, and developed, then one would have to come to the curious conclusion that there were, in those days, oceans ofliquid carbonic acid, instead of water. With such an element, it becomes doubtful whether the Ganoids, or even the Primitive Trilobites themselves could live in the oceans of the Primary Age—let alone in those of the Silurian, as shown by Blanchard.The conditions that were necessary for the earliest Race of mankind, however, require no elements, whether simple or compound. That which was stated at the beginning is maintained. The spiritual ethereal Entity which lived in Spaces unknown to Earth, before the first sidereal“jelly-speck”evolved in the Ocean of crude Cosmic Matter—billions and trillions of years before our globular speck in infinity, called Earth, came into being and generated the Monera in its drops, called oceans—needed no“elements.”The“Manu with soft bones,”could well dispense with Calcium Phosphate, as he had no bones, save in a figurative sense. And while even the Monera, however homogeneous their organism, still required physical conditions of life that would help them toward further evolution, the Being which became Primitive Man and the“Father of Man,”after evolving on planes of existence undreamed of by Science, could well remain impervious to any state of atmospheric conditions around him. The primitive ancestor, in Brasseur de Bourbourg'sPopol Vuh, who—in the Mexican legends—could act and live with equal ease under ground and[pg 170]water as upon the earth, answers only to the Second and early Third Races in our texts. And if the three kingdoms of Nature were so different in pre-diluvian ages, why should not man have been composed of materials and combinations of atoms now entirely unknown to Physical Science? The plants and animals now known, in almost numberless varieties and species, have all developed, according to scientific hypotheses, from primitive and far fewer organic forms. Why should not the same have occurred in the case of man, the elements, and the rest? As the Commentary says:Universal Genesis starts from the One, breaks into Three, then Five, and finally culminates in Seven, to return into Four, Three, and One.
Evolution—rather nature, in the light of evolution—has only been studied for sometwenty-five years or so. That is, of course, a mere fractional space in the history of human thought.
Evolution—rather nature, in the light of evolution—has only been studied for sometwenty-five years or so. That is, of course, a mere fractional space in the history of human thought.
And just because of this we do not lose all hope that Materialistic Science will amend its ways, and will gradually accept the Esoteric Teachings—if even at first divorced from their (to Science) too metaphysical elements.
Has the last word on the subject of human evolution yet been said? As Processor Huxley says:
Each such answer to the great question [man's real place in nature], invariably asserted by the followers of its propounder, if not by himself, to becomplete and final, remains in high authority and esteem, it may be for one century, it may be for twenty: but, as invariably, Time proves each reply to have been amere approximation to the truth—tolerable chiefly on account of the ignorance of those by whom it was accepted, and wholly intolerable when tested by the larger knowledge of their successors.353
Each such answer to the great question [man's real place in nature], invariably asserted by the followers of its propounder, if not by himself, to becomplete and final, remains in high authority and esteem, it may be for one century, it may be for twenty: but, as invariably, Time proves each reply to have been amere approximation to the truth—tolerable chiefly on account of the ignorance of those by whom it was accepted, and wholly intolerable when tested by the larger knowledge of their successors.353
Will this eminent Darwinian admit the possibility of his“Pithecoid Ancestry”being assignable to the list of“wholly intolerable beliefs,”in the“larger knowledge”of Occultists? But whence the savage? Mere“rising to the civilized state”does not account for the evolution of form.
In the same letter,“The Evolution of Man,”Dr. Wilson makes other strange confessions. Thus, he observes, in answer to the queries put toKnowledge, by“G. M.”:
“Has evolution effected any change in man? If so, what change? If not, why not?”... If we refuse to admit [as science does] that man was created a perfect being, and then became degraded, there exists only another supposition—that of evolution. If man has arisen from a savage to a civilized state, that surely is evolution.We do not yet know because such knowledge is difficult to acquire, if the human frame is subject to the same influences as those of lower animals.But there is little doubt that elevation from savagery to civilized life means and implies“evolution,”and that of considerable extent. Mentally, man's evolution cannot be doubted; the ever-widening sphere of thought has sprung from small and rude beginnings, like language itself. But man's ways of life, his power of adaptation to his surroundings, and countless other circumstances, have made the facts and course of his“evolution”very difficult to trace.
“Has evolution effected any change in man? If so, what change? If not, why not?”... If we refuse to admit [as science does] that man was created a perfect being, and then became degraded, there exists only another supposition—that of evolution. If man has arisen from a savage to a civilized state, that surely is evolution.We do not yet know because such knowledge is difficult to acquire, if the human frame is subject to the same influences as those of lower animals.But there is little doubt that elevation from savagery to civilized life means and implies“evolution,”and that of considerable extent. Mentally, man's evolution cannot be doubted; the ever-widening sphere of thought has sprung from small and rude beginnings, like language itself. But man's ways of life, his power of adaptation to his surroundings, and countless other circumstances, have made the facts and course of his“evolution”very difficult to trace.
This very difficulty ought to make the Evolutionists more cautious in their affirmations. But why is evolution impossible, if“man was created a perfect being, and then became degraded”? At best it can only apply to theoutward, physical man. As remarked inIsis Unveiled,[pg 162]Darwin's evolution begins at the middle point, instead of commencing for man, as for everything else, from universals. The Aristotle-Baconian method may have its advantages, but it has, undeniably, already demonstrated its defects. Pythagoras and Plato, who proceeded from universals downwards, are now shown more learned, in the light of Modern Science, than was Aristotle. For the latter opposed and denounced the idea of the revolution of the Earth and even of its rotundity, when writing:
Almost all those who affirm that they have studied heaven in its uniformity, claim that the earth is in the centre, but the philosophers of the Italian School, otherwise called the Pythagoreans, teach entirely the contrary.
Almost all those who affirm that they have studied heaven in its uniformity, claim that the earth is in the centre, but the philosophers of the Italian School, otherwise called the Pythagoreans, teach entirely the contrary.
This, because the Pythagoreans were Initiates, and followed the deductive method. Whereas Aristotle, the father of the inductive system, complained of those who taught that:
The centre of our system was occupied by the sun, and the earth was only a star, which by a rotatory motion around the same centre, produces night and day.354
The centre of our system was occupied by the sun, and the earth was only a star, which by a rotatory motion around the same centre, produces night and day.354
The same with regard to man. The theory taught in the Secret Doctrine, and now expounded, is the only one, which—without falling into the absurdity of a“miraculous”man created out of the dust of the earth, or the still greater fallacy of man evolving from a pinch of lime-salt, the ex-protoplasmic Moneron—can account for his appearance on Earth.
Analogyis the guiding law in Nature, the only true Ariadne's thread that can lead us, through the inextricable paths of her domain, toward her primal and final mysteries. Nature, as a creative potency, is infinite, and no generation of Physical Scientists can ever boast of having exhausted the list of her ways and methods, however uniform the laws upon which she proceeds. If we can conceive of a ball of“fire-mist”—as it rolls through æons of time in the interstellar spaces—becoming gradually a Planet, a self-luminous Globe, to settle into aman-bearingWorld or Earth, thus having passed from a soft plastic body into a rock-bound Globe; and if we see on it everything evolving from the non-nucleated jelly-speck that becomes the Sarcode355of the Moneron, then passes from its protistic state356into the form of an[pg 163]animal, to grow into a gigantic reptilian monster of the Mesozoic times; then dwindling again into the (comparatively) dwarfish crocodile, now confined solely to tropical regions, and the universally common lizard357—if we can conceive all this, then how can man alone escape the general law?“There were giants on earth in those days”saysGenesis, repeating the statement of all the other Eastern Scriptures; and the Titans are founded on an anthropological and physiological fact.
And, as the hard-shelled crustacean was once upon a time a jelly-speck, a“thoroughly homogeneous particle of albumen in a firmly adhesive condition,”so was the outward covering of primitive man, his early“coat of skin,”plusan immortal spiritual Monad, and a psychic temporary form and body within that shell. The modern, hard, muscular man, almost impervious to any climate, was, perhaps, some 25,000,000 years ago, just what the Hæckelian Moneron is, strictly an“organism without organs,”an entirely homogeneous substance with a structureless albumen body within, and a human form only outwardly.
No man of Science has the right, in this century, to find the figures of the Brâhmans in the question of chronology preposterous; for their own calculations often exceed by far the claims made by Esoteric Science. This may easily be shown.
Helmholtz calculated that the cooling of our Earth from a temperature of 2,000° to 200° Cent. must have occupied a period of no less than 350,000,000 years. Western Science (including Geology) seems generally to allow our Globe an age of about 500,000,000 years altogether. Sir William Thomson, however, limits the appearance of the earliest vegetable life to 100,000,000 years ago—a statement respectfully contradicted by the Archaic Records. Speculations, furthermore, vary daily in the domains of Science. Meanwhile, some Geologists are very much opposed to such limitation. Volger calculates:
That the time requisite for the deposit of the strata known to us must at least have amounted to 648 millions of years.
That the time requisite for the deposit of the strata known to us must at least have amounted to 648 millions of years.
Both time and space are infinite and eternal.
The earth, as a material existence, is indeed infinite; the changes only which it has undergone can be determined by finite periods of time....We must therefore assume that the starry heaven is not merely in space, which no[pg 164]astronomer doubts, but also in time, without beginning or end; that it never was created, and is imperishable.358
The earth, as a material existence, is indeed infinite; the changes only which it has undergone can be determined by finite periods of time....
We must therefore assume that the starry heaven is not merely in space, which no[pg 164]astronomer doubts, but also in time, without beginning or end; that it never was created, and is imperishable.358
Czolbe repeats exactly what the Occultists say. But the Âryan Occultists, we may be told, knew nothing of these later speculations. As Coleman says:
They were even ignorant of the globular form of our earth.
They were even ignorant of the globular form of our earth.
To this theVishnu Purânacontains a reply, which has forced certain Orientalists to open their eyes very wide.
The sun is stationed, for all time, in the middle of the day, and over against mid-night, in all the Dvîpas [Continents], Maitreya. But the rising and the settingof the sunbeing perpetually oppositeto each other,—and, in the same way, all the cardinal points, and so the cross-points, Maitreya, people speak of the rising of the sun where they see it; and where the sun disappears, there,to them, is his setting. Of the sun, which is alwaysin one and the same place, there is neither setting nor rising; for what is called rising and setting areonlythe seeing and the not seeing the sun.359
The sun is stationed, for all time, in the middle of the day, and over against mid-night, in all the Dvîpas [Continents], Maitreya. But the rising and the settingof the sunbeing perpetually oppositeto each other,—and, in the same way, all the cardinal points, and so the cross-points, Maitreya, people speak of the rising of the sun where they see it; and where the sun disappears, there,to them, is his setting. Of the sun, which is alwaysin one and the same place, there is neither setting nor rising; for what is called rising and setting areonlythe seeing and the not seeing the sun.359
To this Fitzedward Hall remarks:
The heliocentricism taught in this passage is remarkable. It is contradicted, however, a little further on.360
The heliocentricism taught in this passage is remarkable. It is contradicted, however, a little further on.360
Contradictedpurposely, because it was a secret temple-teaching. Martin Haug remarked the same teaching in another passage. It is useless to calumniate the Âryans any longer.
To return to the chronology of the Geologists and Anthropologists. We are afraid Science has no reasonable grounds on which she could oppose the views of the Occultists in this direction. Except that“of man, the highest organic being of creation, not a trace was found in the primary strata; only in the uppermost, the so-called alluvial layer,”is all that can be urged, so far. That man wasnot the last member in the mammalian family, but thefirstinthisRound, is something that Science will be forced to acknowledge one day. A similar view also has already been mooted in France on very high authority.
That man can be shown to have lived in the Mid-Tertiary Period, and in a geological agewhen there did not yet exist one single specimen of the now known species of mammals, is a statement that Sciencecannotdeny and which has now been proven by de Quatrefages.361But even supposing his existence in the Eocene Period is not yet demonstrated, what period of time has elapsed since the Cretaceous Period? We[pg 165]are aware of the fact that only the boldest Geologists dare place man further back than the Miocene Age. But how long, we ask, is the duration of those ages and periods since the Mesozoic time? On this, after a good deal of speculation and wrangling, Science is silent, the greatest authorities upon the subject being compelled to answer to the question:“We do not know.”This ought to show that the men of Science are no greater authorities in this matter than are the profane. If, according to Professor Huxley,“the time represented by the Coal formation alone would be six millions of years,”362how many more millions would be required to cover the time from the Jurassic Period, or the middle of the so-called Reptilian Age—when the Third Race appeared—up to the Miocene, when the bulk of the Fourth Race was submerged?363
The writer is aware that those specialists, whose computations of the ages of the Globe and Man are the most liberal, have always had the shyer majority against them. But this proves very little, since the majority rarely, if ever, turns out to be right in the long run. Harvey stood alone for many years. The advocates for crossing the Atlantic with steamers were in danger of ending their days in a lunatic asylum. Mesmer is classed to this day—in the Encyclopædias—along with Cagliostro and St. Germain, as a charlatan and impostor. And now that Messrs. Charcot and Richet have vindicated Mesmer's claims, and that Mesmerism under its new name of“Hypnotism”—a false nose on a very old face—is accepted by Science, it does not strengthen our respect for that majority, when we see the ease and unconcern with which its members treat of“Hypnotism,”of“telepathic impacts,”and its other phenomena. They speak of it, in short, as if they had believed therein since the days of Solomon, and had not, only a few years ago, called its votaries lunatics and impostors!364
The same revulsion of thought is in store for the long period of years which Esoteric Philosophy claims as the age of sexual and physiological mankind. Therefore even the Stanza which says:[pg 166]“The Mind-born, the boneless, gave being to the Will-born with bones;”—adding that this took place in the middle of the Third Race 18,000,000 years ago—has yet a chance of being accepted by future Scientists.
As far as nineteenth century thought is concerned, we shall be told, even by some personal friends who are imbued with an abnormal respect for the shifting conclusions of Science, that such a statement is absurd. How much more improbable will appear our further assertion, viz., that the antiquity of the First Race dates back millions of years beyond this again. For, although the exact figures are withheld—and it is out of the question to refer the incipient evolution of the primeval Divine Races withcertaintyto either the early Secondary, or the Primary Ages of Geology—one thing is clear, that the figures 18,000,000 of years, which embrace the duration ofsexual, physical, man, have to be enormously increased if the whole process of spiritual, astral and physical development is taken into account. Many Geologists, indeed, consider that the duration of the Quaternary and Tertiary Ages demands the concession of such an estimate; and it is quite certain that no terrestrial conditions whatever negative the hypothesis of an Eocene man, if evidence for his reality is forthcoming. Occultists, who maintain that the above date carries us far back into the Secondary or“Reptilian”Age, may refer to M. de Quatrefages in support of the possible existence of man in that remote antiquity. But with regard to the earliest Root-Races the case is very different. If the thick agglomeration of vapours, charged with carbonic acid, that escaped from the soil, or was held in suspension in the atmosphere since the commencement of sedimentation, offered a fatal obstacle to the life of human organisms as now known, how, it will be asked, could the primeval men have existed? This consideration is, in reality, out of court. Such terrestrial conditions as were then operative had no touch with the plane on which the evolution of theethereal astralRaces proceeded. Only in relatively recent geological periods, has the spiral course of cyclic law swept mankind into the lowest grade of physical evolution—the plane of gross material causation. In those early ages,astralevolution was alone in progress, and the two planes, the astral and the physical,365though developing on parallel lines, had[pg 167]no direct point of contact with one another. It is obvious that a shadow-likeetherealman is related by virtue of his organization—if such it can be called—only to that plane from which the substance of his Upâdhi is derived.
There are things, perhaps, that may have escaped the far-seeing—but notall-seeing—eyes of our modern Naturalists; yet it is Nature herself who undertakes to furnish the missing links. Agnostic speculative thinkers have to choose between the version given by the Secret Doctrine of the East, and the hopelessly materialistic Darwinian and Biblical accounts of the origin of man; between no soul and no spiritual evolution, and the Occult doctrine which repudiates“special creation”and the“Evolutionist”anthropogenesis equally.
Again, to take up the question of“spontaneous generation”; life—as Science shows—has not always reigned on this terrestrial plane. There was a time when even the Hæckelian Moneron—that simple globule of Protoplasm—had not yet appeared at the bottom of the seas. Whence came theImpulsewhich caused the molecules of Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, etc., to group themselves into the Urschleim of Oken, that organic“Slime,”now christened Protoplasm? What were the prototypes of the Monera? They, at least, could not have fallen in meteorites from other Globes already formed, Sir William Thomson's wild theory to this effect notwithstanding. And even if they had so fallen; if our Earth got its supply of life-germs from other Planets; who, orwhat, had carried them on to these Planets? Here, again, unless the Occult Teaching is accepted, we are compelled once more to face amiracle—to accept the theory of a personal, anthropomorphic Creator, the attributes and definitions of whom, as formulated by the Monotheists, clash as much with philosophy and logic, as they degrade the ideal of an infinite Universal Deity, before whose incomprehensible awful grandeur the highest human intellect feels dwarfed. Let not the modern Philosopher, while arbitrarily placing himself on the highest pinnacle of human intellectuality hitherto evolved, show himself spiritually and intuitionally so far below the conceptions of even the ancient Greeks, themselves on a far lower level, in these respects, than the Philosophers of Eastern Âryan antiquity. Hylozoism, when philosophically understood, is the highest aspect of Pantheism. It is the only possible escape from idiotic Atheism based on lethal materiality, and the still more idiotic anthropomorphic conceptions of the Monotheists; between which it stands on its own entirely neutral ground.[pg 168]Hylozoismdemandsabsolute Divine Thought, which wouldpervadethe numberless active, creating Forces, or“Creators,”whichEntitiesare moved by, and have their being in, from, and through, that Divine Thought; the latter, nevertheless, having no more personal concern in them ortheircreations, than the Sun has in the sun-flower and its seeds, or in vegetation in general. Such active“Creators”are known to exist and are believed in, because perceived and sensed by theInnerMan in the Occultist. Thus the latter says that an Absolute Deity, having to be unconditioned and unrelated, cannot be thought of at the same time as an active, creating, one living God, without immediate degradation of the ideal.366A Deity that manifests in Space and Time—these two being simply the forms ofThatwhich is the AbsoluteAll—can be but a fractional part of the whole. And since that“All”cannot be divided in its absoluteness, therefore thatsensedCreator (we say Creators) can be at best but the mereaspectthereof. To use the same metaphor—inadequate to express the full idea, yet well adapted to the case in hand—these Creators are like the numerous rays of the solar orb, which remains unconscious of, and unconcerned in, the work; while its mediating agents, the rays, become the instrumental media every spring—the Manvantaric dawn of the Earth—in fructifying and awakening the dormant vitality inherent in Nature and its differentiated matter. This was so well understood in antiquity, that even the moderately religious Aristotle remarked that such work of direct creation would be quite unbecoming to God—ἀπρεπὲς τῷ Θεῷ. Plato and other philosophers taught the same: deity cannot set its own hand to creation—αὐτουργεῖν ἅπαντα. This Cudworth calls“Hylozoism.”As old Zeno is credited by Laërtius with having said:
Nature is a habit moved from itself, according to seminal principles; perfecting and containing those several things which in determinate times are produced from it, and acting agreeably to that from which it was secreted.367
Nature is a habit moved from itself, according to seminal principles; perfecting and containing those several things which in determinate times are produced from it, and acting agreeably to that from which it was secreted.367
Let us return to our subject, pausing to think over it. Indeed, if there was vegetable life during those periods that could feed on the then deleterious elements; and if there was even animal life whose aquatic organization could be developed, notwithstanding the supposed scarcity of Oxygen, why could there not be human life also, in its[pg 169]incipient physical form,i.e., in a race of beings adapted for that geological period and its surroundings? Besides, Science confesses that it knows nothing of the real length of geological periods.
But the chief question before us is, whether it is quite certain that, from the time of that which is called the Azoic Age, there ever was such an atmosphere as that hypothesized by the Naturalists. Not all the Physicists agree with this idea. Were the writer anxious to corroborate the teachings of the Secret Doctrine by exact Science, it would be easy to show, on the admission of more than one Physicist, that the atmosphere has changed little, if at all, since the first condensation of the oceans—i.e., since the Laurentian Period, the Pyrolithic Age. Such, at any rate, is the opinion of Blanchard, S. Meunier, and even of Bischof—as the experiments of the last Scientist with basalts have shown. For were we to take the word of the majority of Scientists as to the quantity of deadly gases, and of elements entirely saturated with Carbon and Nitrogen, in which the vegetable and animal kingdoms are shown to have lived, thriven, and developed, then one would have to come to the curious conclusion that there were, in those days, oceans ofliquid carbonic acid, instead of water. With such an element, it becomes doubtful whether the Ganoids, or even the Primitive Trilobites themselves could live in the oceans of the Primary Age—let alone in those of the Silurian, as shown by Blanchard.
The conditions that were necessary for the earliest Race of mankind, however, require no elements, whether simple or compound. That which was stated at the beginning is maintained. The spiritual ethereal Entity which lived in Spaces unknown to Earth, before the first sidereal“jelly-speck”evolved in the Ocean of crude Cosmic Matter—billions and trillions of years before our globular speck in infinity, called Earth, came into being and generated the Monera in its drops, called oceans—needed no“elements.”The“Manu with soft bones,”could well dispense with Calcium Phosphate, as he had no bones, save in a figurative sense. And while even the Monera, however homogeneous their organism, still required physical conditions of life that would help them toward further evolution, the Being which became Primitive Man and the“Father of Man,”after evolving on planes of existence undreamed of by Science, could well remain impervious to any state of atmospheric conditions around him. The primitive ancestor, in Brasseur de Bourbourg'sPopol Vuh, who—in the Mexican legends—could act and live with equal ease under ground and[pg 170]water as upon the earth, answers only to the Second and early Third Races in our texts. And if the three kingdoms of Nature were so different in pre-diluvian ages, why should not man have been composed of materials and combinations of atoms now entirely unknown to Physical Science? The plants and animals now known, in almost numberless varieties and species, have all developed, according to scientific hypotheses, from primitive and far fewer organic forms. Why should not the same have occurred in the case of man, the elements, and the rest? As the Commentary says:
Universal Genesis starts from the One, breaks into Three, then Five, and finally culminates in Seven, to return into Four, Three, and One.