Pass from that department of life, and turn to a very important question—Penology, the treatment of criminals. What is the criminal? Criminals fall into two great classes: one class of young souls, and they need to be educated; another class of souls whose development has been lopsided, so that the intellect has grown, but the conscience has not developed side by side with it—by far the more dangerous criminals those, and far more difficult to deal with. Now, the young soul is very largely a savage, the man at so low a stage of humanevolution that earlier in the evolution of our race he would have been guided into some savage tribe in some island or desert, where the rough discipline of that savage life would have begun the hewing of him into shape—rough, hard, cruel, but gradually building up that young soul into a sense of duty to his tribe. Now, as things have changed, and human evolution has gone forward rapidly, there are not places enough in the world where those conditions are available for the gradual training of these younger souls. The civilised nations, as we call them, have been spreading everywhere over the world’s surface, have been driving these miserable people out of their possessions, have taken their lands, largely murdered them, have appropriated the land and dispossessed the earlier possessors into the next world. What has become of all those? They have got to come back, and they tend by natural law to come to the nations who have been most active in sending them out of their possessions. It is quite natural, if you think that we live under law, not by chance; and it is not, perhaps, if I may say it with all respect, very wonderful that the people of Great Britain have a rather extra share of those unfortunate savages to look after. They come into the slum, and there they are born really savages. If you look at them you call them congenital criminals. But they are really young souls, without morality, without much brains, with a certain craft and cunning and cleverness, but fundamentally young. Then you find others who have come out of that lowest condition of savagery, but who are not yet at the point where the restraints of the society that suits the oldersouls are tolerable to them. And so you get a great crop of occasional criminals, with the tendency to turn them into habitual criminals. Then you have that other class I spoke of, the lopsided people, whom I said were the most difficult to deal with; men who are really clever, but turn their cleverness to plundering their fellows instead of using it within the limitations of the law. That is a large class. Sometimes they just go over the edge of the law, sometimes they just keep within it, but from the social standpoint, remember, there are many social criminals who always keep on what is sometimes called the street-side of the law—that is, they do not go within the jail—such a man as one I spoke of the other day, who had wrecked the railway system of a whole district in order that out of that wreckage he might build himself up an enormous fortune. He is not a burglar from the technical standpoint, he is not a thief that a policeman might catch hold of, but in the sight of karma, and in the sight of the eternal justice, that man who by legal means has robbed thousands of others of their means of livelihood is a worse thief than the one who has picked a pocket and is thrown into jail. There are a good many things in a civilised country which lie very nearly along the line of legal or illegal theft, a good deal of which goes by the name of company-promoting, where it is just a toss-up whether there is really fraud that can be proved; but with the remarkable fact that while the companies always perish, and the people who took shares are beggared, the company-promoter comes out at the top, and becomes quite a successful person. Now all that,from the social standpoint, is utterly immoral, but we cannot call them criminals in the technical sense, although now and then they go a little too far, and then the criminal law catches them.
How should those be dealt with who are really the young souls? how shall we avoid turning them into habitual criminals as we do now?—for is there anything more miserable and more shameful than that a man should go back time after time till fifty, sixty convictions are registered against him in the police court, and the sentence grows longer and longer because he is a habitual criminal? He has been manufactured into that. You ought not to treat a man who has committed a crime against your legal system by consigning him to prison for seven days, or a month, or a year, growing longer and longer and longer after every return to temporary freedom. You don’t use people who are ill like that; you never find a doctor committing a small-pox patient to a hospital for seven days, nor a fever-stricken one for a month; they are committed until they are cured, and that is the way in which you should deal with anyone of marked criminal propensities. You should not punish, you should only help; and you should take that child-soul and train him into decency of living. For one thing, you should never have in your prisons any form of useless labour as a punishment. The criminal who is really a savage always dislikes labour; he is always idle—that is part of his youth; and if you give him a form of labour that is punitive and not useful, you only increase his natural disgust for every kind of labour, and make him hate it more thoroughly when hecomes out of jail than he did when he went in. Taking up shot and carrying it to one side of the prison yard, and then carrying it back again, or the useless torture of the treadmill, these make criminals, they do not cure them.[1]You want, when the criminal comes into your power, to take him in hand as you would take a younger brother who does not know how to guide himself, and it is your duty as the elder to guide him; you need to train him in some honest trade whereby he might gain a livelihood; you need to discipline him, not cruelly, but firmly and steadily; you need to lay down the very wholesome law that if a man will not work neither shall he eat, and teach him in the prison to earn his dinner before he enjoys it. You need to set him to work at trades whereby he may earn his own living within the walls of the jail; and if, after you have taught him a trade so that he can earn his living, and outside the jail have found him an opportunity of decent livelihood—if then he refuses to work, and comes back again into your hands, then you should keep that discipline upon him until he really is cured, even though it be for many and many a year, for you are training him into better character. You might make the prison life less of a disgrace than it is now; give him rational amusement, amusement that will cultivate, instead of having him deadened by the continual feeling of disgrace within the prison walls. You may restrain him—that may be necessary for the welfare of society; but you should treat him as a younger one in the national household, tobe gradually trained up into decent living; let the willingness to live the decent life be the only key to the door of the jail.
But you may do much before there is any need to send them to prison at all. There is a system which is just beginning here, called the Probation System, one that has been worked in America with very great success, and one that a late member of our Society, Miss Lucy Bartlett, has had the immense privilege of introducing into Italy, so that it has been made the law of the land. Now what is that system? When a young boy or girl commits a first offence, he is not sent to jail if someone, a good citizen, of decent standing and good life, will come forward in the court and say: “I will take charge of that boy or girl, or young man or young woman. I will be his friend and look after him.” Then the sentence is not one of imprisonment; it is a sentence which is over the lad’s head for a time; and if he will not be helped, then it is allowed to take effect. But, as a matter of fact, that is very seldom the case. This man or woman coming forward out of the more leisured classes of society, and becoming a friend to that younger brother or sister, is, in the great majority of cases, a means of redeeming that younger one from evil into good; the older makes a friend of him, takes him out sometimes, talks with him, trusts him really as a brother or a sister, and great is the redeeming power of human love in restoring self-respect, and great the desire for approval. Those are the motives that are brought to bear on one who has only just set his feet on the path of criminality, and that in most cases brings him back to virtue; and the friendshipthat began in the probation goes on through the rest of life, strengthening, helping, teaching both the helper and the helped. The system has been in operation for some time now in America, long enough to test it; in Italy only for some two or three years, too short a time; man after man and woman after woman of the leisured classes has come forward to act as friend and helper of the one who has come within the grip of the law. Surely no better application of Brotherhood to criminal treatment could be found than that; it is the realisation of the duty of those who are beyond the temptation to vice to their youngers who have fallen under its power.
I can hardly leave this subject without saying a word on Capital Punishment. That, of course, cannot find defence from anyone who realises the principle of Brotherhood. Some of you may remember the saying of a witty Frenchman: “Que messieurs les assassins commencent”; but it is not from the lower that reforms begin, but from the higher. You cannot expect your murderer to respect human life if you have taught him by your criminal legislation that the right penalty for murder is to murder again. True, one comes from passion and the other from the law; but if the law does not teach respect for human life, how should the passions of the criminal honour that sacredness? It is not only from that general principle that you make human life cheap by destroying it, but from another even more important. You cannot get rid of that murderer of yours; you can only get rid of his body, and his body is the most convenient prison in which you can keep him.You can lock up his body and prevent him from committing any further murders, but you cannot lock him up when you have driven him out of his body by the hangman’s noose; you have not killed him, you cannot kill him, you have only killed his body; and you have driven him out into that next world which interpenetrates this world, and whose inhabitants are with us all the time; you have sent him out into that other world hating, cursing, full of anger and revenge against those who have cut short his life. He acts as the instigator of other murders; he stimulates other criminals into the last possibility of crime. Have you ever noticed that a brutal murder is sometimes repeated over and over again in the same community until you get a cycle of murders of one particular kind? I know, of course, that the Press, in reporting every detail of those horrors, adds the forces of imagination to the power of temptation which comes from the man you have sent to the other side. In a civilised country no such details of brutal crime should ever be given; people should understand that that stimulates the faculty of imitation, and so makes repetition of the crime more likely. Another reason why you should never send a man out like that is, that when the criminal is in your hands, remembering the lives that lie in front of him, you should try to give him something to take with him into the other world which he can turn into capacity and moral sense; you should remember he will come back again to a physical body, and it is your duty to make that next birth of his as much an improvement on the present as it is possible for human thought and human love to make it. We have a duty to these young souls around us in order that theymay profit by our civilisation, and not suffer from it as they too often do to-day.
When you turn to economics, what will be the result of Brotherhood there? The detailed working out of that problem will certainly need the keenest intellects in order to devise some scheme of production and distribution which shall make human life less burdened on the one side, less full of useless luxury on the other. But not along the rough-and-ready lines of the Socialism of the streets are these great and difficult problems rightly to be solved. You need to solve them by the most careful consideration of all the problems which are interlinked the one with the other. Some system of general co-operation, of general profit-sharing, or something along those lines, will be the principle on which the changed conditions will go; but while you will make the lot of the toilers far lighter and happier, you will never give to the ignorant the control over that on which their food supply depends; for that means ruin. Let me give you one illustration to show you what I mean. There have been a large number of strikes in this country for years and years past, and there is no doubt that many of those were brought about by the greed of the employing class, and by the unfair treatment of the workers; but none the less they have in more than one case—in fact, in many cases—reduced the workers to a lower condition than they were in before. I was up at Tyneside the other day. Newcastle with its adjoining ports, Sunderland, and the whole coast along there, was once one of the great shipbuilding centres in England. Strike after strike made shipbuilding impossible to carry on, becausethe men could not pay their way. The result is that it has ceased to be a great shipbuilding district; that the trade has largely gone away from the Tyneside, and that those parts are falling into decay. You cannot blame the men who struck; they tried to get better conditions for themselves; they did not understand the difficulties of all these large commercial firms, and that they might readily make shipbuilding impossible for the shipbuilder by pressing for a particular rate of wage which was not too much for them, but more than at the time the exigencies of the trade enabled the shipbuilder to pay. And so on and on in endless cases. Careful thought and deliberate judgment are wanted. Many proposals have been made by the trades unions themselves—a sliding scale of wages, arbitration boards, and so on—all steps in the right direction. But your difficulty with arbitration boards is that their decision is not always accepted. When people go to arbitration they hope to get a decision on their own side; when it does not come out, they are not always willing to submit. When I was in New Zealand last year there had been a great struggle between employers and men; at last both applied to the arbitration court, but when the decision was given against the men, the men refused to go back to work. You cannot play that way with these great economic questions; no one trade should ever decide entirely for itself what should be the rate of wage that it is possible for the employers to pay, for the question is complicated by many considerations; it is not one trade, but it is the balance of all trades on which the ultimate decision has to turn. Hence the need of ability, of power to understand,of wide study of economic questions which no handiworker is able to give. There is where the difficulty comes in, and where there is need on both sides of a spirit which shall seek the common good; otherwise at the end there is only more trouble than before, and the trade vanishes where the conditions for carrying it on are made impossible. Exactly the same thing is going on now in Australia. The men who know conditions of mining and things of that sort are laying down the wages which shipping companies must pay to their sailors. When a P. and O. boat, for instance, goes within the waters of Australia, they will soon be compelled to pay their men at the particular rate of pay which has been fixed on economic conditions in Australia. What will be the result? The P. and O. boats will not go; they cannot ruin themselves to please the Australian working-men; hence the means of communication will be very largely cut off; and when the harm is done, it is too late then to cry out for the remedy. Those are the kind of things that are going on in every direction with the coming of manual workers into power, because the attempt to rule has come before the conditions of rule have been understood.
It is very much the same when you come to deal with all questions of Woman’s Labour. Woman claims the right to labour, but very often she has forgotten that employers can play upon certain characteristics of the woman that nothing can alter, because they are fundamental and natural. When a woman has taken up the trade of the wife and the mother, and then goes out to work in the mill, leaving the children behind and thebaby uncared for save by hired care, then wages are driven down because she is willing to work for lower wages, knowing the misery of the children she has left at home; then comes the playing-off of the wife against the husband, of the woman against the man; the children are the sufferers from the taking away of the mother to work in the mill, and the man is turned out to walk the streets because cheaper female labour has taken his place. These are some of the complicated difficulties that arise out of what seems the simple thing of allowing a woman to sell her labour. Women and men can never be equal in the labour market, because the woman is the childbearer, and there comes in the difference, and the question of the nation’s health and vigour. She can never command the same wage as the man, because, as I once heard brutally said when I was complaining about the starvation wage of some match-girls: “There is always another way the woman has to increase her income.” That is true, pitifully true; but it puts her at a disadvantage in the struggle of the labour market. That which seemed so promising at first has only increased the stress of economic conditions, has turned the man out into the streets while the woman is trying to do the double work of the mill and the home. That is an impossible condition of things, for which a remedy will have to be found.
And so to deal with these economic questions we want the best brains and the best hearts, the widest knowledge and the deepest sympathy. Those, and those only, can solve these terrible economic problems of the time. You cannot solve them by any rough-and-ready means, nor byany quick and sudden means. You must solve them by wisdom and by love, and by realising the nation’s interest is a common interest, not of class against class, but of union of all for the common good of the community.
But then it is said: What about politics? On the detail of that, frankly, I have naught to say, for I am concerned only with principles. But one thing I would like to put to you, coming back to that point of liberty with which I started. People have supposed that liberty means a vote. You could not have a bigger blunder. Liberty and the vote have practically nothing in common. The vote gives you the power to make laws, to coerce other people; it by no means gives you necessarily liberty for yourself. We have never yet had, as I said, liberty upon earth. We have had class legislation of every kind in England, but liberty never. Go back in history and you find the Kings ruling, and that built up the one nation of England. Then the Barons ruled, and they did not on the whole do so badly, for England was called Merrie England then, and certainly no one would dream of applying that name to it now. Then there came the England of Parliaments, getting duller and duller, deader and deader; then the England of Commercialism. And who is our ruler now? Neither King nor Lords nor Parliament altogether, but on the one side King Purse, and King Mob on the other. Neither of those is a ruler who is likely to make this nation great. Liberty is a great celestial Goddess, strong, beneficent, and austere, and she can never descend upon a nation by the shouting of crowds, nor by the arguments of unbridled passion, nor by hatred of class against class.Liberty will never descend upon earth in outer matters until she has first descended into the hearts of men, and until the higher Spirit which is free has dominated the lower nature, the nature of passions and strong desires, and the will to hold for oneself and to trample upon others. You can only have a free nation when you have free men to build it out of—free men and women both; but no man is free and no woman is free who is under the dominance of appetite, or vice, or drunkenness, or any form of evil which he is unable to control. Self-control is the foundation on which alone freedom can be built. Without that you have anarchy, not freedom; and every increase of the present anarchy is paid for by the price of happiness, which is given in exchange. But when Freedom comes, she will come down to a nation in which every man and every woman will have learned self-control and self-mastery; and then, and then only, out of such men who are free, out of such women who are free, strong, righteous, ruling their own nature and training it to the noblest ends—of such only can you build up political freedom, which is the result of the freedom of the individual, and not the outcome of the warring passions of men.
Friends: Some of you who have been attending this course of lectures may remember that in speaking of the new doors opening in religion, science, and art, I made a somewhat hasty and imperfect reference to changes that would be taking place in the human organism and an unfolding of the human consciousness, and I promised, in that brief statement, to return to the subject when I was to deal with “The Coming Race.” The nature, the character of that unfolding of consciousness, the changes in the bodily organism of man that will accompany those unfolding powers in consciousness, and make it possible for them to be manifested in our physical world—those changes naturally fall under the heading which I have taken for to-night’s discourse, “The Coming Race.” For it is of one of these great changes in the type of humanity that I have specially to speak to you to-night. In order to lead your thoughts to that rationally, and without gaps or chasms, I shall ask you to consider with me for a few moments certain great principles of study which we find continually used by the Mystics of the past, and in our own day adopted to a very considerable extent by modern science. The reason why science hasadopted them is the same reason that made Mystics originally work them out, and that is, that science in our own time has been dealing with such enormous periods of growth, with such vast extent of these periods, that the scientific man cannot observe; that he is obliged to try to find a principle by which, observing what is near, he may be able, by a process of induction, to discover what is far off.
Now, this principle is called the principle of correspondences. You find it, as I said, used by Mystics of all types in the past: the great scientist-mystic, Swedenborg, of Sweden, based a very large part of his thought on the system of correspondences, of trying to discover what was far off and extensive by a study of that which was near and comparatively small. So in our own day with regard to science; and I remind you first of that in order to show you that in using this principle we are on ground which is recognised as being firm and stable, and is adopted in all the greater researches which have to deal with the distant and the extensive. Science has made specially good use of this system of correspondences in two lines of its thought: one, that of evolutionary growth, illuminated by the study of embryology; the other, that of the evolution of consciousness in humanity at large, illuminated by an observation of consciousness in the child, the youth, and the man. If, for a moment, we stop on the great evolutionary series or cycles of the past, we shall at once recognise that direct observation is only possible to a very small extent. It is true that by the aid of geology many buried skeletons of the past may be brought to the surface and examined, and thus light may be thrown on the various classes to whichthe skeletons in the time of the living animal belonged. Fossil remains certainly help us to a very great extent in trying to study the evolutionary past of our globe; but, as everyone knows who has studied the geological record, that record has large gaps occurring in it from time to time. It is exceedingly imperfect, exceedingly unsatisfactory, and only along some limited lines of evolutionary study is it possible to find from the fossils of the past the principle of life as it has gradually grown and branched upon our earth. Hence, in the difficulty of thus unveiling the past, evolutionists have turned to the study of the near, the growth of the individual, the stages through which his body passes, especially during ante-natal life, and it was very largely the study of embryology that threw light on the evolutionary truth. For it is observed, in tracing the growth of the human body of the individual, that it passes through certain clear, definite, marked stages. There is a stage at which the characteristics are those of the fish, bringing about some very curious results as regards especially the distribution of some of the nerves; then a stage which is that of the reptile; then a stage which is that of the mammal; and so on up to the highest in the mammalian kingdom, man himself. From the standpoint of mere observation from outside, without use of reason, this sequence invariably followed would say little, would signify little; but when man looks at that with the eye of reason, and not only observes the succession of certain stages, but applies his reason to solve the problem as to why those stages constantly appear, then it is he realises that in the body of the individual the whole evolutionary course of nature is traced and repeated;that in that highest, the human, form all the past history of the evolution of forms is broadly indicated; and that while, of course, details cannot be observed, the great succession is seen there, the invariable sequence ever repeated in the highest, the noblest form. And, working back with the light of that, science was then able to recognise very clearly the evolutionary stages of which geology yielded up its imperfect fossil record; for there it found the great age of the fishes, with no higher form of vertebrate life existing; then it found the age of the reptiles, then that of the mammals, finally the human kingdom; and looking over the past in that way, illuminated by the observations of the present, science recognised the truth of that ancient principle of correspondences which serves as a clue in distant regions where observations well-nigh fail us, and enables us, by the use of analogy, to trace our way among the labyrinths of the past.
It is not only along this line of æonian evolution and embryological growth that science has found help from this application of the principle of correspondences. It has found that not only in the state of bodies but also in the state of minds the same principle serves as its best clue once again in the labyrinth of the past. It has found out that the stages of human consciousness may be traced from the earliest stage of the will to live, then upwards through the unfolding consciousness of the child, in the stage of passions of the youth, in the stage of mentality dominating the maturity of man; and it goes along these lines into very much of detail, showing us how at a certain stage the child is reproducing the savagecondition of consciousness; how a little later it grows out of that into the passional and barbarous; then through that into the emotional, where art and beauty begin to show themselves as outgrowths from human nature; and then on, at later stages, to that splendid mentality which it regards as the crown of human consciousness. Along these lines, which will be familiar to all the thoughtful and the cultured amongst you, science has been led to new discoveries, has been able in this fashion to find out many of the hidden things of nature.
But while this is true, there is a point at which science always stops. It uses correspondences to explain the past; it never struck science to use them to try to forecast the future; and naturally, for along the scientific line such forecast of the future is practically impossible; science works by induction, not by deduction, gathers together innumerable facts, arranges them, classifies them, compares them, and out of all that gathering, arrangement, and comparison it tries to find by a process of logical induction some great principle in which all the classified facts find their explanation, and thus a law is discovered. But further than that induction cannot take us. It cannot take us beyond the facts that are observed. Nothing in the facts observed presages that which is to come; and it is only when you use the other logical method—not that of induction, which is the scientific plan, but that of deduction, which we find in the philosophies of the past, which we find in the one perfect science, the science of mathematics, the Platonic method as against that of Aristotle—it is only then that we findit possible by a process of deduction not only to explain the past, but also to draw out a chart of the future. And it is by using that noble form of logical thought that Occult Science has ever been able to presage the future from the principles that it finds existing in the universe, unfolding stage by stage. I want, if I can, now to show you how that method may be applied; how, knowing the nature of man, we may be able from that to indicate not only the past through which he has come from far beyond the range of what is recognised as history, but also to throw a light along the road that mankind will travel in the future, seeing the heights up which he will climb, realising the powers yet hidden within the partially unfolded and evolved man.
There is one other thing that will help us a little as well as the principle of correspondences, but, so far as I know, this other clue of ours has not been adopted or used in modern science. I say, so far as I know, for science is going on so rapidly at the present time that it is not possible to keep abreast with all the details of the later investigations. This second principle is called the principle of reflexion. As you may have a mountain reflected in a lake, and all the peculiarities, the outlines, the foliage on the mountainside, will be reproduced in the calm water of the lake that washes the foot of the mountain; as in that reflexion the highest in the object will be reflected as the lowest in the image, and as at every intermediate point where the mountain is reproduced in the image, the reflexion of the mountain, there will be a reversal, the higher being the lower, and so on, until you come to the point of junction between waterand mountain, and there the nearest to you on the mountain will be reflected in the nearest to you on the water—just so may we in studying man understand something of him by regarding him as a reflexion of divinity, the great threefold aspect of divine life showing itself out in man. But you may ask me: What do you exactly mean when you say reflexion? I mean the reproduction of similar characteristics in a grosser and denser form of matter. That is what we mean by reflexion thus applied. Just as the mountain which you see by the air is reflected in the denser water, so are spiritual attributes reflected in grosser matter; or, otherwise expressed, the same, or rather a similar characteristic, works in grosser matter; therefore with powers more limited, therefore with faculties less potent. That is the use we make of this term “reflexion” in theosophical literature. The characteristics are the same, but because of the denser matter their manifestation is limited and confined. So the great Will which brings the universe into existence is reflected in the Will to Live in man; and as that is the highest manifestation of Deity, so, reflected in man, does it appear at the lowest stage of evolution as the one prominent characteristic of the dawning human consciousness. In the babe, that will to live is practically the only sign of consciousness, showing itself out in groping movements, whereby the will to live is striving to come into contact with the outer world and discover something of its environment. And so the second great manifestation of Deity, the Wisdom-Love which in the Christian nomenclature shows itself out in the person of the Son, that reflected in human nature comes out asthe emotions, the refined, gentle, unselfish emotions that form the second great stage of human consciousness, beginning with the lowest stage of passion, and gradually rising unbroken to the loftiest manifestation of emotion; and then the third, the creative activity, which, again, in the Christian nomenclature would be the creative Spirit, shows itself out in man’s one creative power, the power of the mind, of which one of the expressions is imagination, that which creates with the intellectual force of man. The correspondence, you see, is complete, but how limited the manifestation compared with the manifestation on the planes of divinity. Hence this limited reflexion, this limited reproduction, we term the law of reflexion; and we very often find it hand in hand with the law of correspondences, giving us a clue once more to guide us through difficulties and obscurities where direct vision might fail.
Let us begin at that point I spoke of with regard to the human being. Now, by this process of deduction, and seeing in man the image of the Supreme, we are not compelled to stop our study when we have taken these three stages—the stage of the will to live showing itself in activity, the stage of passion and emotion, the stage of mentality; for we see that above those there shine out the three same attributes of Deity in subtler, finer form that we call the human Spirit, and that this human Spirit, reproducing in itself the three great aspects, tells us of the future, as the lower reflexions tell us of the past. So that we cannot only trace, as science does, the unfolding of consciousness through the vast ages of the past, but we can follow it onwards intothe future, where that higher repetition of divinity is gradually unfolding, and trace out for ourselves man’s higher qualities, the later stages of human evolution.
Now, it is true that in this the theory is not complete and perfect unless you recognise the fundamental truth of Reincarnation. No otherwise can you trace the unfolding of the divine Spirit in man, save by giving him time and environment by which these successive stages may be accomplished. For, looking at humanity, we see that very many men disappeared in the savage state, where only the preliminary stage of human consciousness had been unfolded; others we find coming into the world above the savage state, but showing out only passions, strong, selfish emotions; others, again, further on, showing out mental powers, and in them the mind becoming predominant. But unless you admit here a sequential unfolding of the individual consciousness, you will find yourself surrounded by complicated difficulties when you try to understand human evolution; for if you follow those consciousnesses onwards, thinking they are never to return to the school of life to learn the lessons that they have not learned in the infant school of savage life, then you will have to posit a heaven or heavens, one of which is full of these souls that have only accomplished savagery on earth; another that is full of those that have reached the emotional stage without having started and laid the foundation of the savage; a third that show forth mind, but not the will to live of the savage, nor the emotion of the half-cultivated man. And so you get a world on the other side more fantastic than rational, and you realise that somehow or other in yourscheme of things you must make room forpost-mortemevolution; and the very moment you adopt that, that moment you have accepted the principle of reincarnation, even though you may choose to carry it on in other worlds rather than in the present.[2]With that, of course, other difficulties arise, but on those I need not for the moment dwell, as I do not want to deal fully with reincarnation now. But suppose you accept it, then the whole thing is rational before you—a spiritual intelligence unfolding in one stage after another, and building each stage on the one that preceded. If you apply that to the evolution of the reincarnating individual, you see the stage of the child, the stage of the youth, the stage of the man, and you await the unfolding of the spiritual man. Or if you choose to look at it in the vast cycles of the past, then you will realise that you have before you animal man, passional man, intellectual man, and you can hardly stop without thinking next of spiritual man—the four stages that you can trace by this principle that I spoke of, the deduction from the divine life leading you onwards to the stage not yet unfolded, save in some lofty specimens of humanity. And when you have just seen these stages so thoroughly reproducing at each point of enlarging sight the other in yourself—the four stages visible—the three and the dawning of the next; then in the whole reincarnating life of the individual the same three and the dawning of the next; then in evolution the same three and the possibility of thenext—it does not seem strange then to come on to the races, as the Theosophist does, and to see in the early human race—that which is really the first that can truly be called human, although there preceded it a semi-animal man—the birth of our present humanity. We call it the Lemurian Race; and it is interesting that Haeckel points to the lost continent of Lemuria as that which was the cradle of the human race; so does modern science every now and again touch on these teachings of the elder world. In that Lemurian Race was shown the strong will to live; then came the Atlantean, that which lived on the vast continent of Atlantis, the existence of which is being recognised more and more by science by logical necessity, as it cannot get geological evidence or antiquarian evidence, the greater part of the continent being whelmed beneath the Atlantic Ocean. Still, antiquarian research gives us something by pointing out to us identities of racial characteristics in places now separated by that same vast Atlantic Ocean. And archæology shows us in ancient Egypt, in the style of its painting, in the symbols that it used, nay, even in some of the human types that it limned, exactly the same symbols, the same types, the same outlines of philosophical and religious thought as in Southern Mexico, in a civilisation long since disappeared, that was swept away by the Aztec civilisation, which had become ancient and corrupt when the Spaniards invaded Mexico. In those two far removed portions of the earth’s surface, separated by the Atlantic, we find the repetition of one in the other. And there are many other reasons on which I need not now dwell, similarities of fauna and flora, certain architectural likenesses,and so on, which are all leading scientific men onwards to the recognition of the great continent of Atlantis. Just as the men of the Lemurian continent showed out only that will to live in clumsiest form, so did the men of the Atlantean continent show out passion, appetite, desire, the whole of their civilisation showing the marks of this predominant passional nature; that which might be expected in theory showed itself out in fact. With that went—as always goes with the passional and non-intellectual type—a great development of what in these days we call the lower form of psychism. We apply that term, as our knowledge of these powers grows more precise, to the way of seeing the invisible, hearing the inaudible, and so on, that we find in some members of the animal kingdom; that we find largely developed in savage nations; that we find showing themselves out sometimes among the dwellers in mountains and in vast spaces where the air is pure, where nature is still in a fairly primitive condition. It is not precise, exact science under the control of the will; it seems to be responsive to impressions of passions, emotions; very rarely, if ever, to impressions from the mind. And so, looking back on the great Atlantean peoples, we see them showing out these forms of psychism that we connect with the higher animal and with the lower human evolution before mentality has been very largely developed, before the nervous system characteristic of the modern man has dominated the sympathetic system more characteristic of the animal. And then we come to a time when we can glance backward and see the method of the evolution of a new race, giving many an indicationto help us in our study of the Coming Race of our own time. For, looking back into that far-off history, we see a selection going on among the Atlantean people, and we notice that the selection was made not amongst those who had carried the Atlantean type to its highest and most triumphant point, but, on the contrary, from a subdivision of that race—a sub-race, as we call it—in which those qualities did not show which had made Atlantis great and mighty, but in which there were more germs than in the triumphant Atlantean of the coming development—that of the mind. Some of you will be familiar with the name of the Toltec, the race, or rather sub-race, in which the Atlantean civilisation touched its highest point. Not from those were the germs of the Aryan race chosen; rather from the succeeding sub-race, in which, as I said, mental qualities were beginning to assert themselves, with the inevitable result that as those qualities became manifest, the others, the psychic, fell into the background. Look round to-day and you will see how true that still is with the ordinary uncultivated, untrained psychic; how very low is the stage of the intelligence, very little mental power going hand-in-hand with that lower kind of psychism; and so the people who were chosen to be the germs of our own great Race were not amongst the most admired of the Atlantean civilisation, but were rather looked down upon as not showing out these faculties which then were regarded as the most valuable, as falling below the triumphant type of the Toltec, as people of little account, and yet people who had in them the promise of the future. Then the gathering of those together, the isolating of themfrom the rest of the then civilised world; the deliberate breeding of them into a type which was aimed at. For all the great types of human kind exist in the mind of the Logos before they are made manifest in the matter of our earth—first the idea, then the manifestation; and the seven great types which were to make up the humanity of our globe in the present cycle of its existence, those existed as Ideas in the Platonic sense of the word, those were the types towards which the great Powers guided the evolution of humanity; and when the highest point was being touched at the fourth, then came the preparation for the birth of the fifth. The same great laws which, on a far lower scale, are used by the ordinary scientific gardener or scientific breeder of cattle, when he is trying to develop a new type that exists in his mind, remember, before he tries to work it out in petals of flower or flesh and blood of animal, that ideal type to which the scientific breeder directs his efforts, those laws help him to-day which, on a far loftier level and for mightier purposes, were used by the great Ruler of the Coming Race in order to shape the ideal type that now we know as the Aryan. If you compare one of the men of Kashmir, in Northern India, with your best Caucasian type, you will find they closely resemble the one the other, evidently replicas of the same type. I choose the man of Kashmir especially, because he is fair of skin, owing to his living in a temperate clime, and because from the shutting in of his land from communication with other countries, due to the difficulty of reaching his fellows—owing to that the type has been kept purer there than probably anywhere else upon earth.Fair of skin, blue- or violet-eyed, with hair brown in varying shades, with features sharply cut, delicate lips, thin and well-formed nose, there you have one of the finest types of human beauty existing upon earth. You find that type reproduced over and over again, with varying modifications as the sub-races develop, but the one type is everywhere visible; and in the shape of the head, with the forehead largely developed, with the place in the brain where all intellectual faculties can be made manifest, in that type of head you have the type of mentality, the Race that is to carry to the highest point the possibilities of the human intellect. As you come down, looking at the sub-races, the same strange point strikes you as we saw with regard to the psychic Atlantean, and the comparatively psychic sub-race from which our own was gradually built up. Compare together the refined Roman, luxurious, well-built, cultured, and the Goth, who was the origin of the Teutonic sub-race; there again you see the same thing, the contrast with the regnant type of the apparently lower type, the one that has in it the promise of rising higher than its predecessor. Judging by analogy, following along similar lines of thought, we can very readily understand to-day that the type of the Coming Race will not be that which is the triumph of the present, but rather those in whom the characteristics of the present are less developed, but which have in them the germ of something more, which can unfold in the far-off future into a greater splendour, a diviner manifestation. So that when we are looking for those who are the beginnings of the Coming Race, we should not look for them to-dayamong those in whom our Aryan peoples show out the highest types of mentality, of intellect, of power, of thought. Their work is to carry on the present civilisation to the zenith. Who but they can lead it to the highest point? They have developed the mind which is the great characteristic of this fifth Teutonic sub-race; theirs the mission, theirs the privilege, to guide that sub-race to its highest point of achievement. They only, whose intellect is so loftily developed, are fit to guide the present civilisation to the point of glory which it has yet to reach, and it is they who are the leaders of the triumphant type of to-day, they to whom our present race looks up as the ideal of all that is most splendid in intellectual power. Not amongst them, then, should we seek the beginnings of the Coming Race, of the Race that shall be; for, using our principle of correspondences, we can see that now we must look for the germinating of the spiritual man, not of the intellectual; that which is beyond intellect, that which is higher than the scientific mind, the qualities that have shone out in the great religious teachers of the past, the qualities that characterised the Buddha, the Christ, are the spiritual qualities as apart from the intellectual; and it is the germinating of those qualities now which will make the origin of the Race that is to be.
But we can see in the race of the present signs of the changing evolution which shall gradually show out the coming type of consciousness, which shall gradually adapt the bodies to the fuller manifestation of the qualities that shall gradually unfold. For what is the great mark of such spiritual types of humanity, what thequality that shines out above all others wherever they appear upon earth? It is that quality that to-day we name Brotherhood, the recognition of that unity of life which makes for all-embracing compassion and boundless self-sacrifice. Those are the types that we see in these great Ones of our race, they who have unfolded the spiritual nature, who show out the glory of the Spirit. It is very marked that in every one of those mighty Teachers of the past this is the quality which above all others shines out as their distinguishing mark among the men of the generation in which they are born. The love of the helpless and the weak, the effort ever to raise those who are downtrodden and oppressed, the effort to share, to uplift, to make happy—in a word, to save; that is the great spiritual characteristic of all the Saviours of the world, and therefore at the present time those are making ready for the beginning of the Coming Race who show out in conception and in practice their belief in the universal Brotherhood of man. They may be less developed in intellect, that is not what is for the moment wanted from them; they may be less glorious in the triumphs of the mind, that is not the material that is needed specially for the Coming Race; it is these higher qualities of the Spirit that must be looked for by the Leader of that Race as the material which gradually He can mould into the type He has in His mind, and so out of those germinal possibilities evolve the Man that shall be.
Now let us pause for a moment and ask what are the special marks of that Race in consciousness and in body. In consciousness, clearly the recognition of unity. Thatis essential; for what the intellect divides the Spirit unites. The recognition of life in each rather than of the separated form, the recognition of the one Self in all rather than the separated selves that are marked out by the separated bodies, that will be the great mark in consciousness, the new unfolding; wherever that recognition of unity is made, there is one of the signs of the Coming Race. And then, side by side with that, growing inevitably out of it, a breadth and liberality of tolerance will mark those in whom the sense of unity is beginning to unfold. All that is narrow and exclusive, all that tends to separate one from another, all that emphasises differences instead of emphasising likenesses, all those are against the unfolding of the consciousness that knows the One in the many, and recognises Divinity in all. With that unfolding consciousness will come a type of body of which there are beginning to be many amongst us to-day. When there is going to be a variation which will start a new evolutionary type, it is always noted that those out of whom the variation grows are what is called unstable. Instability is the mark of progress, or of degeneration. There is the instability of health, but also of disease; and with the changing type of the nervous system you find this instability present in both its forms. If you look around you at the present time, what is one of the marks of the bodies in the most advanced races of the earth? Nervous troubles of every kind, and most marked amongst the most highly developed. It is needless to draw your attention to that; everyone knows it. The greater tension of the nervous system shows itself out amongst us in all kinds of different ways; saddestof all, in the extraordinary increase of madness in the most highly civilised nations of the world. Lunatic asylums are always multiplying, for as soon as a new one is built it gets filled, and another is demanded. That is the sad sight when we are looking around, looking for the Coming Race; the present race suffers by the very conditions that that race has made for itself; all the separative conditions of competition, struggle, class and individual and trade antagonism, all these are destructive to the evolving nervous system of man. The environment is impossible, the conditions ruinous for the evolution of a finer, more delicate nervous organisation; and yet the resistless force of nature presses onwards against the human race, forces it onwards whether it will go or not, and the evolutionary forces cannot be opposed save at the risk of destruction.
Now that is one of the lessons that needs to come out of these studies for the immediate guiding of our own lives to-day. We are living in an environment that is destructive of the higher evolution, and at our peril we leave it as it is when the Coming Race must inevitably be born. If we would go on we must adapt ourselves, and that adaptation is the crying need of the time. For amongst us to-day are being born children in whom this finer nervous organisation is showing itself already, children of delicate nervous type, but not necessarily at all unhealthy; often perfectly healthy, but with the nervous system so delicately poised that it is always in danger of jar and injury. There must be many amongst you who know that out of your own personal experience as fathers and mothers; there may be born into yourfamily a little child whose nervous system is so delicate, so exquisitely poised, that the child is very readily thrown out of balance, and suffers quite abnormally. One thing that it is very necessary for the fathers and mothers of the time to understand is, that as these children come to them for protection, for training, for help, they must remember that they have there organisms which suffer and enjoy more keenly than organisms that are less delicately, less exquisitely balanced. Such a child feels pain where a child of rougher type would pass through unnoticing. The intense joy which, on the other hand, marks such an organism is always balanced with periods of intense depression. Such children should be guarded as far as possible from all that can jar and trouble. It is useless to try to make them live in the surroundings that suit those whose nervous systems are not so fine. On the contrary, it is the duty of the parent to try to provide for such children gentler and more harmonious surroundings, realising that without those the delicate instrument would be jarred and thrown out of tune, so that that from which the most lovely melodies might have been drawn will be only an instrument fit to be thrown away, destroyed. Think for a moment of the conditions under which you are living now in London. During the last ten years London has become almost intolerable to live in, if only for the noise, the continual rattle, the shrieking and hooting that fill the streets; the shaking of the very earth itself under the heavy vehicles of all sorts that we place upon it. London is becoming a city where to live in peace you would want to go about with cotton-wool stuffed into your earsand spectacles over your eyes so that you might not see too clearly, and with your nose closed so that you might not smell the horrible smells with which the streets are continually filled. Literally, what will have to be done is this: all the more refined and cultured people will have to go out of these huge towns and leave them to the people who like them. For remember, there are many people who like them; there are plenty of people who enjoy the rattle and the noise and the tumult of a London street. There are plenty of country peasants who, if you bring them up to London, like it enormously; but if you take the London lad or lass and put them down the country they say how frightfully quiet and dull it is. Why not let the great cities go to the people who like them, who will be helped to evolve by them? For, mind, that which is destructive to a delicate nervous system is the necessary stimulus for the evolution of a nervous system of a lower and coarser type. I do not want to abolish all these great cities at all; but I would say to any who feel the suffering which grows out of the noise and the rush and the hurry. Your place is no longer here, and, above all, it is no place for the children. For the finer the organisation of the father and the mother from the nervous standpoint, the finer will be the nervous organisation of the child; and if they suffer from it, their best policy is to leave London for the country, and surround themselves and the children of the Coming Race with sweeter and better environments. It is not only that these vast towns that are deforming and defacing England are an impossible environment for the Coming Race; we must also adapt ourselves to the new conditionsby changes of food, by changes of method in ordinary living. The food that the great majority of people now use, flesh, is utterly unsuited to the finer type of nervous organisation. You may notice how people of a finer type shrink from it instinctively. Children of a finer type, when they realise that meat was a living thing, will turn aside from it with disgust, and leave it untouched. That instinctive dislike is one of the things that will be growing very much amongst the little ones; more and more will they revolt against the use of flesh. But it would be wise not only to notice how that revolt is growing, but deliberately to avoid the use of such articles of diet yourself, if you desire to train your bodies into a preparation for the Coming Race. For the body which is nourished on flesh and on the many forms of alcohol is a body which will be thrown out of health by the opening up of the higher consciousness; and nervous diseases are partly due to the fact that the higher consciousness is trying to express itself through bodies clogged with flesh-products and poisoned with alcohol. For, let me take a point of very great importance which has direct bearing upon this. As the new bodies develop, and the higher, more nervous organisation of the physical body grows, the next of your bodies, the astral, will become more and more highly organised year by year. The organisation of that next body of yours, of finer matter than the physical, is going on very rapidly at the present time under the pressure of thought, which all educated and cultured people use at least to some extent. As that body becomes more highly organised, its special sense-organs come into activity, andthen we have what is called a higher psychism, which is not the result of an astral body unorganised and vibrating to every passing wind of emotion, but of a body highly organised, with its own senses developed, and those senses seeking to express themselves through the grosser body of the physical plane. Now there is one organ in your brain which is the sixth sense, the sense through which all these astral cognitions, astral emotions, will show themselves down in your own waking consciousness, and that is the body which very much puzzles many of our doctors and scientific men—the pituitary body. That is not, as many of them think, a mere vestigial organ left from the past; it is that, but it is also the organ of which the finer internal differentiation is making the sense for the higher psychic powers of the Coming Race. Now that is matter of fact known to the occult student, because he sees that development going on in his own case and in the case of others around him; and in proportion as that finer and well-organised astral body hands down into the brain the various things which it cognises, so does he find the pituitary body functioning, so does he experience changes that go on in that. Now, that body, according to one of the latest discoveries of modern science, is at once affected by the vapours of alcohol; it is one of the glands of the body which are most readily poisoned, and even a very small amount of alcohol poisons the pituitary body, and chokes its highest evolution. Obviously, then, if you want to ease that, if you want at this stage of evolution to put a little evolutionary pressure even on the bodies of the fifth Race, and thus ease that, one of the first things that should besaid to you is: Never touch alcohol at all in any form, for if you do the vibrations of the alcohol poison the very means of communication between the astral and the physical bodies, and the developing of them to higher purposes is one of the marks of the Coming Race, the means whereby it will sense the astral world in waking consciousness; hence the instruction that you will have from everyone who is speaking of this and understands the conditions: Do not only give up all forms of flesh, but also take care that your diet is free from every trace of alcohol. Now, these are laws of nature that you cannot get over; and if you make up your mind to cling to the fifth Race way of diet, then you must be content to remain fifth Race, and go no further. No one wants you to go further than you wish to go, but the conditions are unchangeable, and the more that is recognised the better will it be. Above all, with those children that I have been mentioning, take care not to try to force them in any way, nor to induce them to take those articles of diet which will injure their growing delicacy of nervous organisation, and destroy that developing organ in the brain by which they will bring their knowledge through into ordinary life.
Then let me remind you of the way in which this may be done. Let us suppose that you desire to hasten the coming of the Coming Race; let us suppose that you are not willing to wait for the slow processes of nature, lasting hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of years, but want to co-operate with nature, as we ought to do to-day, having reached the stage of evolution that we have reached, where human intelligence can quicken theworkings of nature. The first thing that you must do is to make meditation a part of your daily life. Now, meditation has three stages: first, the reining in of the wandering mind, the checking of its thinking from one point to another continually in activity; then the fixing of that controlled mind on a single object of thought; then the contemplation of that object in order that it may be reproduced in yourself. That process of meditation is the way in which the unfolding consciousness may be definitely stimulated, and there is no other healthy and sane way. By a daily practice of that sort, the fixing of your mind either on the ideal Self or on some ideal of virtue that you desire to reproduce within yourself—as you follow that practice of meditation, the higher consciousness develops, and you change your contact with the world. Let me take a case. You come across a man who is very untruthful. Normally he may deceive you for a time until you get evidence that appeals to the mind, until you can argue logically and prove that the man is not truthful; a slow process, but one that needs to be used in the present stage. What will be the process of recognising untruth where the spiritual nature has begun to develop by the process of meditation? You would meditate on truth; that is the first step. By that regular daily meditation on truth you make your subtle body vibrate, so that the nature of your subtle body becomes that which answers to truth; then when a man who is untruthful comes along you do not have to reason; by the direct process of intuition you recognise that man as false; he jars you just as a false note jars on a musical instrument. There is no processof reasoning, no need to go into evidence, no need to seek for proofs; you feel him, see him to be false, by intuition instead of reasoning. Now, I know a case of that kind in India, although I don’t suppose you will quite copy my Indian friend, for he was a man who, from his boyhood upwards, had meditated every day upon truth, and he had done it for forty years. That is a long time from the western standpoint. The effect of that was that he had so tuned himself to the note of truth—he happened to be a judge—that no evidence could deceive him, however plausible; he knew when a man was lying by the jar that he felt within himself. I only mention that as a special case to show you the method by which this meditation unfolds the inner powers, so that, instead of the slow processes you are accustomed to, a direct intuition tells you the character of the person with whom you come into touch. I might go through the whole string of the virtues; the principle is the same everywhere. In addition to meditation, you must practise. You must practise in your daily life the keenest sympathy that you are able to develop; by deliberate effort, force yourself into sympathy with everyone whom you may happen to meet; make yourself feel as that person feels; and above all, practise it with those who are lower in evolution than yourself, for there sympathy becomes most useful, and the practise of feeling as the less-evolved feel enables you to lift them up nearer to your own level. You must not only practise sympathy, too, in your daily life; you must practise the absence of the sense of separateness, the most difficult thing in the world to do for all of us who belong to this Teutonic sub-race.Our sense of individuality is so strong that in everything we feel “my,” “mine,” “my property,” “my books,” “my house,” “my friends”—a continual repetition of the “my.” You must get rid of that; you must get rid of the feeling which instinctively claims something that you call your own as against other people. Now, it is not an easy thing to do; and the first stages are very disagreeable, jarring the fifth sub-race type of mind. Try to get rid of your sense of individual ownership in the things that are yours. How often you hear a generous-tempered man say: “Oh, I would have given it to him at once if he had asked for it, but I did not like his taking it!” Why not? Because you feel separate; because of “I” and “he,” “mine,” “his.” The next Race is not going to have that sense so strongly developed; and if you want to take part in the building of it, the sooner you get rid of it the better for yourselves. Practise not minding having your things taken away and used by anybody who wants to use them. It sounds strange to you, but it is a commonplace in India. My Indian friends, when I first knew them, used to be astonished when I said to them: “May I use such-and-such a thing?” “Why, of course, if you want it,” was the invariable answer; and at last I got to realise that that was a very much higher position towards objects of property than the self-assertive owning. Similarly, in India, when you have a garden, anybody who likes comes in, sits under your trees, lights a little fire, and cooks his dinner there if he likes. When one day, again, in my very early days, before I understood this, I said to somebody: “Oh, but do you like people coming into your garden like that without asking permission?”“What else is a garden for?” was the reply. That is the natural feeling there because of the communal life which has been universal for thousands of years. You think of the use of the thing and the man who wants to use it; that he wants it is the reason why he should have the use of it. That is a very long way from our fifth sub-race way of looking at property. Practise that, then, in order to get rid of this utterly exaggerated sense of separation which we find in our social life at the present time. This habit of self-sacrifice—sacrificing your own whims, wishes, wants, every day of your life, for the sake of making life easier for those around you—that will be one of the characteristics of the Coming Race. And as you do it, you will gradually find that you won’t mind; that the pleasure of making another person satisfied is far greater than the pleasure of having a thing for yourself; that the words of the Christ are literally true: “It is more blessed to give than to receive”; not a duty but more blessed, more happy, so that the joy that comes out of the sharing utterly swamps any feeling of self-sacrifice. That, again, will be the great social type of the Coming Race.
See how practically, then, this thought of the Coming Race bears upon our living of to-day. Those who would prepare themselves for the part of that changed type of man must begin building it up in their character, their emotions, their minds to-day, by meditation, the opening of the consciousness by practise, the training of the life into expressions along higher lines. That race will be the builder of a universal religion, in which sharing what each has of truth will be the only formof missionary effort. That Race will be the builder of a brotherly civilisation, in which the need of every man will be the measure of what he has given to him; in which the power of every man will be the limit of his responsibility. Those will be the great changes that will come, and you, if you will, may take part in that changing; you, even in the present civilisation, may hold to the higher ideal, and try to make it acceptable to the minds of your fellow-men. But our hope is mostly in the young, in those who have not yet been hardened in the brutal competition which marks the commercial and class life of to-day. The young lads and the young girls, still plastic, still easily fired by great ideals, with nervous systems finer in many cases than ours, and hearts warmer than those that have been chilled in the experience of life—in them lies the hope of the future. For they shall make ideals, they shall create them in the world of thought, and out of the world of thought those ideals shall be sent into the world of matter, and make the Coming Race, which shall build a civilisation happy, glorious, beautiful, and free, but in which it shall be realised that the greatest freedom expresses itself in the greatest service.
Friends: Looking back over the long story of the past we can see certain mighty, grandiose figures emerging from the great crowd of human beings, men who tower far above their generation, who are giants, as it were, with pigmies around them; however far we look back such figures are ever to be seen, until at last the mists appear to roll across this great vista of the past, and even through those mists we can discover the outlines of great Ones who teach and bless mankind. To the great mass of students these figures, standing out in the past, appear very closely to resemble each other. We cannot, as it were, distinguish Them with regard to Their knowledge or Their power; all are so far above the men of the time, so far above the most advanced humanity of our own day, that it seems impossible to throw Them into any kind of order, or to understand how far They are part of one great group of mighty Beings; what relation They bear to each other we cannot see; what Their rank in the hierarchy of the superhuman we are practically unable to say. But as the occult student tries to study the past, there are certain indications that he can grasp which serve as a kind of guide as to thesemighty Beings. He sees great world-cycles of different extent, embracing longer or shorter periods of time, and he is able to trace some relation between these mighty Beings and the cycles of the world, the point of time at which They appear, at which They manifest. And by this study of the past, assisted by occult methods, these periods in the world’s story and these Teachers of the world’s humanity fall into quite definite relations.
We can notice, looking back, that there are four great ages through which the world passes in its long evolutionary history, ages that are often referred to in what are called the mythologies of the past, ages which are characterised very differently the one from the other, and in which the whole cycle of the world’s story is divided. It may be noticed that at the beginning of each of those huge cycles a very great figure appears, as though, when the world was entering on a new phase of life, it were necessary that a special benediction should descend upon it, a special light should shine out. When we ask who are the great Ones who mark these longest periods in human history, we are told that They are Beings belonging to past worlds, belonging to other planets than our own, planets and worlds older in the scale of manifestation; that They have passed through all the struggles of an evolving life, that They have formed part of a humanity that long since has passed away and been numbered in the records of the universe, too far off to touch a world like ours; that, reaching through human to superhuman growth, They have finally joined their consciousness with the consciousness of the Logos Himself, expanding to His consciousness,uniting with His nature, and yet never losing that centre which is the result of Their long evolution up the human and the superhuman ladder. Holding that centre in all the life of God, it is possible for Them to draw around Themselves again a circumference which shall enable Them to become manifest in any world, in any race. Where a centre is, a circumference can ever be drawn; and around such a centre in Deity itself, of the Son made one with the Father, from such a centre a new circumference of a human life may be drawn, and such a Being, mighty in His Deity and yet veiled in humanity, may appear to enlighten and to bless the world. Among the Hindū people, whose teachers have carried them far along occult lines, whose sacred scriptures are full of occult indications, a special name is given to these pre-eminent manifestations. They call them by a Sanskrit word which means those who descend. The name avatāra may be familiar to you, perhaps. But it is the significance of the name on which for a moment I pause. They have climbed up to unity with the God head: They descend to humanity in order to preserve and help. Such are the mightiest figures that appear in any world, on any globe, through the long course of its evolution. Egypt signified that mystery under a special name: they called it the birth of Horus. Christianity has symbolised it under another name—Divine Incarnation; and the Christian will tell you—accurate in the spiritual fact, although at times confused in the definition of the life—that the Second Person of the Trinity descends upon earth, and he regards the Christ of Judea as being such a manifestation of the Most High. The main fact thatsuch a revelation may come to man is a fundamental spiritual truth. It ought never to be lost from sight; and in every great religion it has ever been said that it is from that aspect of the Logos that these manifestations descend upon earth. Christianity recognises but a single manifestation; Hindūism recognises nine that have passed and one that is to come. In Zoroastrianism you find the same conception. Religions, living and dead, have ever groped after that highest of truths; only it must never be lost sight of that He who is an Avatāra, the highest of divine manifestations, has been in some other cycle of life a man among men, and that it is because of that long-past experience that a return to those conditions is possible at any time.
Leave that aside for a moment, and take another great type that shines out. There is no name for the next type I am just thinking of except in Eastern lands, where they call him “The Enlightened,” the Buddha. In the West that name is constantly connected with the last of those manifestations, with the great Being born into the world nearly six hundred years before the Christian era. He is called the Buddha. But among the people of the faith that He gave to the world the belief is that there were many before Him, that there shall be many after Him; that He is only one among the great host of revealers of the divine, and that one of those is born in every world, in every Root Race. So that in every world there are seven of such Beings, one manifesting in every Race; but when He has appeared, then He passes away from earth, having finished even the superhuman evolution, and passes on, as those that I mentioned passed inother worlds, in other times, in order to unite Himself as the Son with the Eternal Father, so that in a world later than our own such a one may return as an Avatāra, one who descends. But note that the Buddha, mighty as He was, climbed to His greatness through the humanity of our own globe. Climbing step by step up the long ladder of human life, of superhuman unfolding, He touched the last rung of that ladder when He was born as Gautama into India some twenty-five centuries ago, and then, having finished His work, passed onward into what is there called Nirvāna, the highest condition available for the superhuman, that of union with the divine, though without loss of the centre of which I spoke.