Theosophical University Press Online Edition
It was to a strangely self-complacent world that H. P. Blavatsky came when about to launch the public part of her mission in the last quarter of the nineteenth century -- strangely self-complacent and thoroughly self-satisfied, and yet, as is always the case in such eras, a world psychology which was shot through and through with intellectual discontent and spiritual hunger. Ease and grace both of mind and soul were conspicuous because of their absence, to employ what sounds like an Hibernian mode of speaking; and because of this intellectual malaise and the feeling of insecurity in so many lines of human consciousness, it was the time of the beginning or inauguration of those many and various new movements of human thinking and feeling which since then have reached such widespread proportions.
Officially, however, the Western world was divided into two camps, each armed to the teeth and each regarding the other with both suspicion and deep distrust because of the "conflict" between religion and science which had been waged for the previous two hundred and fifty years, more or less. The religious camp, with its many factions, each distrustful of all others yet united against the common foe, was haughtily nursing the deep wounds received in the long struggle, yet refusing to recognize the case as it stood; and on the other hand were ranged the scientific forces, equally haughty and arrogant and swollen with steadily mounting pride over their supposed victory. Although neither camp officially made advances towards the other, at least a species of neutrality or truce had been tacitly made between them; yet here again both these camps, antagonistic to each other, instinctively united to frown down with haughty and contemptuous pride aught that seemed to either to attack what had come to be considered either's special prerogatives or field of activity.
The tale has been well told by many quick and ready pens, and there is no need to elaborate or even to sketch the story here, for it is one which is known to everyone having more than an elementary instruction in history. The way had been, to a certain extent, prepared for the coming of the great theosophist, aided by her collaborators, because of the then relatively recent introduction into the thought-life of the West of somewhat at least of the great philosophical and religious and mystical thought of the archaic Orient. Such men as the Frenchman Anquetil-Duperron and the English Orientalist Sir William Jones and their many later followers, especially in Germany, had, through the introduction of several varieties of Oriental studies in the universities and the publication and diffusion of at least some driblets of this ancient Oriental learning, brought into the consciousness of the Western world a realization, albeit feeble as yet, of the fact that the great religious systems and philosophical schools of other parts of the world, outside of Greece and Rome, contained a message of genuine and deep spiritual and intellectual worth and import which could no longer be ignored or set aside on the formerly frivolous grounds that it was "polytheistic nonsense" or "irreligious heathenism."
Everywhere even then, rapidly growing groups of thoughtful men and women who had become deeply interested in religious and philosophical matters zealously labored in these new fields, uncovering what was to the West novel proofs and examples of the fertility of human philosophical and religious genius wherever found on the globe. Moreover, other far less socially respectable movements were taking birth, such as what later came to be called New Thought, or the peculiarities of the then different sects of the "Deniers," and last, but certainly even then the most numerous, the thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of men and women who had become, at any rate temporarily, fascinated and intrigued by the claims of the Spiritists and the phenomenal occurrences which took place in their circles.
Yet all these latter movements lacked the worthiest and noblest of foundations on which to build a proper temple wherein the always soaring genius of the human spirit might take up its abode, and these foundations are philosophy and religion, derivative or flowing forth from nature's own self -- from her structure and her operations and laws. Nature here does not mean solely nature's physical shell, as its parts or particles are studied in the laboratories of the schools or in the secluded privacy of one's library, but means what the esoteric tradition states it to mean: the Heart of things, and therefore and in especial, the shoreless and invisible inner realms of the universe.
It was indeed to a frigidly unsympathetic world that H. P. Blavatsky brought her message and into which she launched her work: a world contemptuous of all that to it was "new" or unknown because so perfectly self-assured in its convictions, both in science and in the established religions, that the last word had been uttered in either camp. It is a curious picture when one considers it and reflects for a moment upon it. Here comes a woman of middle age, knowing little or nothing of the jargon of the Schools, and though a gentlewoman to her fingertips by birth and breeding and education, yet markedly unconventional to Western eyes, joining, at least to a certain degree, the Spiritists, partly in order to show them the real facts behind the phenomena that these latter were so zealously studying; and when rejected by them because of her lack of spiritistic orthodoxy and because of her stated truths which were too unwelcome to be received and too profound to be easily understood, then inaugurating or founding a society of her own through which she immediately proceeded to pour into the Western mind with all the native genius that she so abundantly possessed and with the wealth of talent that she lavished thereupon, a stream of what seemed to the average Occidental an almost incomprehensible medley or farrago of 'heathenish' ideas combined with the then last word in modern science; offending the social susceptibilities of people with her incessant smoking of cigarettes after the manner of Russian ladies; but most unwelcome of all, perhaps, in her insistent and reiterated affirmations, delivered with real, genial power which was so peculiarly her own, that there exists in the world a majestic Brotherhood of great men, true sages and seers, whose life and entire work are devoted to watching over the spiritual and intellectual destiny of men: -- it is small wonder, when one reflects over this truly amazing picture, that the great theosophist was not only misunderstood but even in some cases heartlessly and perseveringly pursued with invective and libel.
A curious picture, indeed; but what is wonderful about it is not the novelty of the picture so much as the fact that she succeeded in accomplishing her mission, single-handed, at first; and sole and alone and unaided, (165) by any other in the beginning, wrought what really was a marvel: she not only broke through the hardest substance known to man -- the human mind -- but the breach once made and the Theosophical Society once founded, she really achieved what history will some day recognize to be the fact, the diversion of the heavy and powerfully-flowing stream of Western thought then running downwards into a new orientation or direction.
It was not to a world such as the world of the twentieth century slowly became, wherein the cry of everyone seems to be like that of the ancient Athenians, "for something new," for novelties, that H. P. Blavatsky came. One may well ask oneself just what it was she did in order to give her message initial currency in the world then divided between religious dogmatism on the one hand and scientific materialism on the other. As a matter of fact, she did everything that a greatly intuitive mind and the impulses of a heart equally great could do. She drove her wedges of thought into any logical opening that offered itself and that promised to widen into paths fit for her message to be launched upon. She neglected no opportunities, she missed no chances. As above alluded to, it was thus that she worked for a while with the Spiritists because they were at that time far more open-minded in the reception of new ideas than were either the self-satisfied church people on the one hand, or the equally dogmatic and self-satisfied scientific thinkers on the other hand.
By every means possible to her she made her Message to become more or less known: the newspapers began to print columns of chit-chat and gossipy talk about her personality -- she and her message were written about and talked about and gossiped about everywhere; although there is no doubt at all, as is proved by the written records of those who then knew her best, that her sensitive mind and heart suffered greatly at times from the grotesque and often parodied misunderstanding of herself and of the message that she brought to the Western world, on the part of the newspapers and the general public.
But the main thing was adoing, which was that her message was going out to all and sundry, and was entering into receptive minds everywhere, and was being welcomed by them, and was thus beginning to be recognized at least in some small degree for what it was. She laid all her talents, all her intellectual and psychological powers, indeed all her life, on the altar of her work; she gave up everything that a woman cherishes as most dear -- name, personal happiness, fortune, social status, even reputation -- for as regards this last, as said above, she was scandalously slandered at times by those who misunderstood or who feared the message of which she was the aggressive and incessantly active voice.
This message was a religious one; this message was a philosophical one; this message was a scientific one: it was her message indeed, yet not hers. She was the messenger, but she neither invented it nor composed it nor syncretized it haphazard and piecemeal from the reading of articles in encyclopaedias and reference books dealing with the world's great religions and philosophies.
Such an idea is ludicrous to the competent scholar who knows her history and the work she did, and indeed would be absurd to any one of competent judgment who has honestly studied the already accumulated evidence. One has but to look at the articles in such encyclopedias as then existed to recognise that she would have found very little indeed in those works in any wise akin to the majestic system of universal and incomparably profound truths that she so widely disseminated. It is only in fairly recent years that Western scholarship has come to know somewhat of the deeper reaches of the profound religions and philosophies of the archaic world and of the Orient, and to do something more than a simple chronicling of data found in the more or less misapprehended Oriental literatures. (166)
Moreover, she herself never had studied philosophy as such; she never had studied religion as a science; she was an excellent modern linguist in her native Russian and in French, and to a certain small extent in German. English she then spoke but haltingly. To say that this great soul, wonderful woman as she truly was, but with a mind untutored and untrained in technical philosophical, religious, scientific, and linguistic studies, could have invented the majestic system based on the recondite truths of nature as found evidenced in the world's religions and philosophies in the short space of time which we know she could have had to compose such a system, is, in all its reaches as an idea, a perfectly incredible supposition.
She herself in substance once said, in answer to the remark of some fanatic religionist who understood neither her nor the philosophy which she brought: "You say, my friend, that you think I myself composed all this. Nay, I cannot accept that. Had I done so, I were indeed a miracle myself! It would be a more marvelous thing, were that the case, than is this system itself which I give to you from my teachers. I am but their mouthpiece in that respect."
Her teachers and the inspirers of her great work, according to her own self-effacing statement, were two of the members of the great brotherhood of sages mentioned before, two great men, men of buddha-like souls, who took the karmic responsibilities upon their shoulders of making themselves thus karmically answerable (167) for the sending out of a new spiritual and intellectual message to mankind, which message, by virtue of its innate vigor and the persuasive power of the teachings which it contains, would induce men to think, and to think towards sublime and lofty ends, and to do so despite themselves. Yet it should not be forgotten that H. P. Blavatsky herself, while messenger and mouthpiece in one sense, had of necessity a most unusual spiritual, intellectual, and psychomental constitution superior to and evolutionally ahead of the average of men, to have been capable of transmitting to us so successfully the wonderful message that in fact she did transmit, and that has so widely, and yet with such invisible and subtle power, molded the thought of Europe and of America and indeed of Asiatic countries since 1875. It can probably be said with perfect truth and without exaggeration that no other religio-philosophical movement has ever in past times done anything at all equal to what the Theosophical Movement has accomplished in the world in the short space of its sixty years of work.
Who then can seriously doubt, having in view the true psychological marvel that she wrought, that H. P. Blavatsky appeared as a true spiritual and intellectual teacher, and as one in the regular succession or series composed of other teachers, both those who have preceded her through the ages, and, as the theosophist teaches likewise, those who will follow her in times to come. The ages pass, and each age brings in a new generation of men, and each generation of men receives light, it is true, from the generation which preceded it, from its fathers. But generations rise and they fall, physically in civilization as well as spiritually in light, and also in the intellectual, the ethical, and the mental courses which men follow in producing the civilizing influences of human life. Yet in these generations which thus follow each other in time, there is always a crying need for guiding minds, for a light given anew from age to age; for a new lighting, phoenix-like, of the old spiritual and intellectual fires. There is always need for another passer-on of the same light which lighteth all men.
Yet, although in the foregoing paragraphs we have endeavored to render due meed of homage to the great theosophist because of her own grandeur and spiritual worth, doing so with hearts filled with gratitude for what she brought to us, nevertheless it is of the utmost importance for the reader to remember that the matter of highest value and of greatest worth is not, after all, H. P. Blavatsky's own noble self, but the message which she brought, and of which she was the ever self-abnegating mouthpiece and interpreter.
Our gratitude runs to the woman, indeed, yet it is not upon her personality that we must fix our vision and our reflections, but upon her message and upon her work, determining to carry it into the future whole and complete, unadulterate and unchanged, elaborated and enlarged by new additions drawn from the same sublime source, as time goes on. It is thus principle and principles rather than personalities which should receive the greater part of our devotion: neither the messenger apart from the message, nor the message as divorced from the messenger, but each receiving its due meed and portion of our reverence and devotion. As the great theosophist herself would have said in substance: "I am as nothing; pass on to others what I have brought unto you. This is nearly everything."
H. P. Blavatsky came at a critical period in world history. Religion in the Occident, as has been already stated, was mostly dogmatism in opinion and forms of service, because the Christ-spirit worked not as a living inspiration and ideal to follow in the different ecclesiastical organizations. Science had already introduced a scientific materialism -- or quasi-philosophical negationism -- into men's minds and consequently into their inner outlook on life, so that they had lost all abiding faith in their own spiritual intuitions, and indeed the vast majority had forgotten that they had such, and had lost the instinctive recognition that there is an interior and invisible universe, the roots and foundation of the outer material spheres, which latter are but the lowest and least expressive garment of the indwelling divinity.
Men, furthermore, had lost all their sense of a lively faith that there is an inherent moral law in the world, administered on a colossal scale and with inflexible and infinitely impartial justice, to which men, as inseparable parts or portions of the universe itself, were by the fact subordinate, and from which moral and spiritual administration of affairs, taking place both on the cosmic scale and in the small, there was no possible hope of escape, either through favoritism or through any sort or manner of propitiation.
The loss of the indwelling sense of this utterly and impartially just course of events, with its consequent loss of human dignity as partakers of and co-laborers with such moral sanction, had therefore deprived men of all faith, both instinctive and intellectual, that both collectively and individually they would reap in the course of cycling time what they themselves at any time sowed.
The result of all this was that in those days the human race as a whole, especially in the Occident, having lost the directing light of the spiritual star which guides mankind through the ages, and thinking themselves to be but beasts of a somewhat better kind than the apes, and that they were destined to annihilation when the body died, were rushing with accelerating speed for the maelstrom of gross material sensualisms -- the sensualities of an utterly material existence. This, as every occultist knows full well, had it proceeded farther than it did, would have involved the loss of hundreds of thousands and indeed, in time, of millions of human souls, in addition to heaven knows what untold spiritual and intellectual misery and moral injury to hosts of men and women, whose intuitions were still alive indeed, but blighted and blinded, and who in their intellectual suffering knew not whither to look for light. The churches gave it not for they had it not; albeit a great many noble men and women illuminated the ecclesiastical organizations by their presence within them. The scientists never had it: they were searching only and researching, hunting desperately, but they had not yet found.
Then came H. P. Blavatsky with her theosophical message. Laughed at and derided at first, scorned and persecuted for years, she worked alone until she found a few true helpers; and by means of her indomitable, her inflexible will, and her magnificent intellect, and her amazing spiritual intuition, she taught and she wrote and she built up a society devoted to stemming the tide towards the abyss, and to diverting its stream into nobler ways -- and it succeeded. A new impulse was forced at high pressure into the thought-atmosphere of the world. Attention was attracted by the work of the Theosophical Society to other sources of wonderfully inspiring thought: to amazing and lofty philosophies, to profound and inspiring religions. New words imbodying grand ideas entered into the language of the West. The truth of the teaching of reincarnation, which was then only partially known by scholars and called by them transmigration or metempsychosis, and which was scorned because considered to be merely a literary relic of ancient heathenish superstition -- people of the Occident forgetting that even in their day, as today, three-fourths or more of the human race still hold that belief -- the truth of the teaching of reincarnation began to insinuate itself into human understanding and to percolate into all departments of human society, so that today it has become common knowledge -- as far as it is understood -- and is frequently met with in literature and in the drama, in picture and in sermon, and, however much misunderstood, has now become more or less tacitly accepted by untold millions.
With the coming and work of the Theosophical Movement many new thoughts besides that of reimbodiment began to sink into and to permeate the consciousness of men. The protagonists of the old theology became less dogmatic in their pronouncements, apparently more charitable in statement, more kindly. Scientific researchers in all lands coincidently began to have what were to the time strange stirrings of new ideas in their minds, due to their marvelously efficient and far-reaching work in discovery. The existence and action of new forces burst upon their astounded vision which had been almost trained to look for nothing radically new but only for novel permutations of what already had been uncovered by research. Scientific men as a body became less cocksure in assertion, more careful and more sincere in statement, and therefore more truly scientific, as every true devotee of science should be.
The veil was lifting; truly magical things were about to happen in all lines of research where the inquisitive intellect of men commenced to discern and to intuit what up to that time had not been considered to be possible -- new and unguessed fields and realms of the physical sphere. The world was suddenly startled by hearing of the work of Crookes, Becquerel, Roentgen, and others in radiant matter, leading on to the discovery of the so-called x-rays -- a marvelous and most unsettling revelation to the cocksure materialism of the time, proving the existence of an interior world or realm which was utterly invisible and intangible by the sense apparatus which we have, and to which all were then more or less enslaved.
Following this came the work of the Curies, of Rutherford, of Soddy, and of others. Radium was discovered. Men's thoughts took a new turn. They began to think along new lines, or rather along the old lines which the Church had forgotten and modern science had not yet rediscovered.
Great things grow in the silence. In the silence lies the seed, and in the silence it brings forth what is in its heart. Thus all growth takes place. The great theosophist cast into the world the seeds of thought of the message that she was sent to bring; and thereafter quietly, in the inner silences of men's minds and hearts, those seeds took root and grew, and like the plant that will burst the rock into which it sends deep its roots, so did these seeds of thought sown by her strike deep roots into human souls, breaking the adamantine hardness of custom and prejudice and predilection -- and anyone who knows anything whatsoever of human nature and of the lessons of history will realize how hard and unyielding are the prejudiced minds of men.
H. P. Blavatsky herself had described a part of her mission as that of being a breaker of the molds of mind. It is no exaggeration to say that since her time all departments of human thought have moved with startling rapidity along the lines of thought that she laid down, and in the direction towards which she pointed with emphatic gesture. The scientific speculations and teachings and theories and hypotheses which exist today were in large part if not entirely unknown when in 1891 she passed on to what she called Home. Yet she taught the essentials of all these things, now recently discovered, in her great work The Secret Doctrine. In it all the latest discoveries of modern science are outlined at least, and in some cases even sketched in detailed outline. In fact, in this profound and most suggestive book the groundwork may be seen for the superstructure of scientific theory that then was to come and now is with us.
It is difficult for us men of today, who live in and under the psychology of our own time, adequately to realize the woful restrictions of religious and philosophical thought that existed when H. P. Blavatsky came to America in 1873. The word "soul" was then actually tabu in circles valuing social polish and good form. A man was considered superstitious who thought that there was anything in him of a permanent nature besides the vibrating atoms and molecules of his brain, which were supposed to give to him the "sensation" of consciousness; and among countless millions the accepted idea was that when a man died everything of him died, and that this was the end of all of him. Non omnis moriar. "I shall not all of me die," was an intuition of very real fact which had died an inglorious death, choked and smothered by the evil and relentless embrace of the abominable psychology of a shallow but egoistic materialism.
On the other hand, other millions of people thought, or thought that they thought, that the soul might be an intangible something -- indeed, nobody knew quite what: perhaps the same as the spirit, perhaps not -- which, if a man were good, when he died went to heaven; and if he were bad while he lived on earth, when he died -- well, nobody knew just what did happen! The old idea was that the bad soul fell into an eternal hell of material fire, in which throughout eternity it would suffer the pains of the damned in an asbestos-like body. But this idea for generations had already been renounced as pure superstition by virtually everyone except a vocal few in positions of authority, or by unvocal multitudes whose chief characteristic was that they were a mere sequacious herd, believing unthinkingly whatever they were told.
In either case the idea, if accepted at all, was an eternity of unearned bliss or an eternity of unearned horrible physical suffering, as the destiny of that nebulous ghostlike wraith of uncertain lineament, and still more uncertain characteristics, which those who still accepted the idea spoke of as the human soul.
Let us briefly consider some of the scientific ideas then popular. The materialists, a wholly dominant school, said that the world was made of dead, insensate, unensouled matter, and that this matter is composed of various chemical elements -- which last fact of course nobody ever denied. These various chemical elements in turn were shown to be composed of atoms. Those atoms were considered to be indivisible, hard little bodies, which therefore were practically eternal. It was said: if the atoms are not everlasting or eternal we do not know it, and we fancy that they are. No one ever heard of a beginning of them, and no one has ever heard of an ending for them. Eternity stretches backwards into the infinite past as well as forwards into the infinite future. Whence then came they unless out of the eternity of the past, for here they are? They must indefinitely exist or be eternal, otherwise how came they here?
Sir Isaac Newton, in following but misunderstanding his Greek teachers, nearly all of them of the famous Atomistic School, spoke thus of the atoms, for he understood them to be merely ultimate particles of physical matter and nothing more. They are, he said:
Solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable Particles . . . so very hard, as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary Power being able to divide what God himself made one in the first Creation. (168)
Newton was a scholar: he was a religious man after his own manner and after the religion of his time, yet he was an industrious student of Greek philosophy. He particularly favored, as is evident from his writings, the teachings of the Greek Atomists such as Democritus and Epicurus, who taught -- and their teaching has been grossly misunderstood by modern times, even by Newton -- that the ultimate particles of life and of cosmic being are "indivisibles." Therefore they gave to these indivisibles the appellation of atomoi, a Greek word meaning things that cannot be divided or cut into two or more pieces -- in other words, indivisibles. The real meaning of the term as thus used by Democritus and Epicurus and by their followers, when their rather vague expressions are correctly understood, is that these atoms are spiritual atoms, the consciousness-centers of things, cosmic spiritual sparks. (169)
Neither Newton nor the often really great scientists who followed him in later generations knew the real meaning of the ancient Atomistic School in its adoption and usage of this term, and in consequence they took over the word itself from the old Greek literature and used it as the name by which they designated the "solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles" of Newton.
Although the prevailing scientific opinion or view of nature in the middle and later years of the nineteenth century was predominantly, if not wholly, abjectly materialistic, nevertheless a number of great men at different times voiced their objections to it, and occasionally did so in no uncertain language.
Thomas Henry Huxley, the eminent English biologist, chemist, writer, and what not else, was so disgusted, although he was a fervent Darwinist himself, with the materialistic chemical theories of his day, that he imbodied his essay, Science and Morals, the following significant and telling paragraph:
I must make a confession, even if it be humiliating. I have never been able to form the slightest conception of those 'forces' which the Materialists talk about, as if they had samples of them many years in bottle. . . . by the hypothesis, the forces are not matter; and thus all that is of any particular consequence in the world turns out to be not matter on the Materialists's own showing. Let it not be supposed that I am casting a doubt upon the propriety of the employment of the terms 'atom' and 'force,' as they stand among the working hypotheses of physical science. As formulae which can be applied, with perfect precision and great convenience, in the interpretation of nature, their value is incalculable; but, as real entities, having an objective existence, an indivisible particle which nevertheless occupies space is surely inconceivable; and with respect to the operation of that atom, where it is not, by the aid of a 'force' resident in nothingness, I am as little able to imagine it as I fancy anyone else is. (170)
In those days, everything that was, was supposed to be dead matter and nothing else; but yet in some very mysterious way, which nobody could understand, which nobody really knew anything about, there were certain forces in the universe which were continuously operative likewise, and which worked upon and moved this matter. To the question: Whence came these forces? the answer was, "We do not know; but as matter is the only substantial thing in the universe, they must arise out of matter in some way unknown to us. Let us then call them 'modes of motion.'" Are the forces then matter? Answer: No, because they move matter. Are the forces then different from matter? Answer: No, because they arise out of matter. (171)
No wonder that men of penetrating intellect revolted from this paradox -- nay, were repelled by the obvious contradictions. Yet the materialists doubtless did their best to give some adequate explanation of the nature of force and of matter. They had nothing better to offer than a lame hypothesis, and this lame hypothesis they actually rode to its own death. But so great was their influence, so all-pervasive at the time was the materialistic conception of things, that only a few brave and intuitive souls ventured to question these scientific dogmas, for that in truth is just what they were.
We have learned much about nature since that time. We now know that the atom itself is mostly holes, so-called and miscalled empty space; and for all that we know, the protons and electrons and neutrons and positrons, etc., which compose the atom are themselves composed of particles -- shall we say wavicles? -- still more minute. And, if so, are these still minuter particles or wavicles in their turn again simply divisibles? Who in the ranks of modern science can tell us? Where shall one stop, where can one stop, in following with the mind such a conception of the nature of substance?
Our modern scientists are wiser by far than were their predecessors; and they certainly know more than the latter did. Our moderns have learned many new things, and they are today enthusiastically discussing philosophical and scientific problems that fifty years ago would have been considered cause for ostracism of their proponents had they been offered in any scientific gathering. One of the last of these remarkable adumbrations of truth is the scientific dictum -- which also is a theosophical teaching -- to the effect that force and matter are essentially one; that what we call matter is equilibrated or crystallized or concreted force, or forces; and, vice versa, that what we call force may with equal propriety be called liberated or free or etherealized matter -- one or other of the many forms of what it is now customary to call radiation.
Thus two of the old absolutes of science have been discarded as such. Gone is the old idea, which European thinkers have held for heaven knows how many hundreds of years, that there are certain absolutes, as popular language terms them, existing cheek by jowl with each other in the universe, and yet in some perfectly unaccountable way blending together and making the universe as we see it. These logical contradictions in conception have been some of the greatest stumbling blocks that scientific thinkers for three hundred years or more have had to meet and have had to explain away as best they could.
Two more such absolutes (172) were considered to be time and space. For ages it was thought in the West that there actually is an entity, so to say, called time, quite distinct if not utterly apart from matter and from force. Sir Isaac Newton himself wrote:
Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself flows in virtue of its own nature uniformly and without reference to any external object. (173)
He thus makes of time an absolute something or entity, independent in its own essential existence of everything else, per se independent of space, per se independent of force, per se independent of substance. Now what does he say about space?
Absolute space, by virtue of its own nature and without reference to any external object, always remains the same and is immovable. (174)
Today, however, such an ascription of independent existence, or entification to space on the one hand, and to time on the other hand, has come to be considered extremely doubtful, and is, indeed, rejected by a rapidly growing body of scientific and philosophical thinkers. The new idea about space and time as forming not absolute entities per se, independent of and in consequence different from each other, but as being rather two aspects of a continuum containing both, is largely due to the labors of Dr. Albert Einstein, although the idea is not a radically new one and was known to and accepted by one or more of the philosophers of ancient Greece. It is quite possible that the intuition of such a space-time continuum, as it is now called, has formed the subject of the private cogitations of many thousands of thinking men, at least those of a somewhat metaphysical bias; and, indeed, everybody knows that it is actually impossible to divorce space and its substances from time and its movement, because it is impossible to conceive of duration apart from things which endure, or on the other hand, it is impossible to conceive of space without duration in which it exists; so that the two ideas are radically interwoven in human consciousness.
Thus the idea may be said to have been lying latent in the consciousness of everybody, but nobody seemed to have taken the pains to understand it or had ever dared to propose it as a logical philosophical and metaphysical as well as natural reality, to wit: that all things, whatsoever and wherever they are, are fundamentally relative or related to each other, or together both in time and in space, and that consequently the old conception of absolutes in these matters is untenable. (175)
This idea has revolutionized modern scientific thinking; it has overturned the commonest and what was at one time apparently the most solidly founded conceptions of quondam orthodox science -- for that in very truth is what it was, orthodox -- and the world, which is never particularly noted for its independence in thinking, is in consequence vastly amazed. Yet every thinking man and woman knows perfectly well that any force in operation proceeds inseparably both in and from time, and in and from space, and does this concurrently; and time-space or space-time is just this conception, is just this thought: that time, and space or matter, and force, are all three one thing, or one event manifesting itself in triform or triadic manner: one phase or facet or aspect of it being duration or time, another phase or aspect or facet of it being the force of it or the energy of it, and the other phase or facet or aspect of it being the matter of it or the space of it, but all three are one fundamentally -- much like the various triads or triune entities or trinities, of ancient religious thought.
The physical body exists. It is matter; it is force; it lives in time -- and yet you cannot separate from the physical body, either in thought or in actuality, the matter of it or the force of it or the time element of it, because the combination of these three as a single unit -- time-force-space -- in any particular phase of manifestation of it, is that body.
The universe is in exactly the same case; it is time-space-force or space-force-time. Therefore anything whatsoever is an event of time-space-force: a passing phase, in which time is involved as an aspect, in which matter or space is involved as an aspect and in which force is involved as an aspect of the triune whole. But behind time, behind force, behind space -- behind or within or above and around these three aspects there is THAT, the reality of which everything that exists in time-space-force is an event.
Precisely because of these transitory or ever-flowing series of events, which are in constant flux and change from predecessor to successor, did the archaic wisdom speak of the entire manifested universe and therefore of all individuals or entities or component parts of it as well, as being maya or mahamaya or "illusion." The profound import of this teaching of maya, or of the illusory and transitory nature of all manifested beings and things, has not yet dawned on the Western mind, but is beginning to do so, as is seen by the wide and rather sudden vogue which the modern doctrine of Relativity -- at least in its principles, and apart from mere mathematical expositions of it -- shows clearly enough.
The universe is a coherent and consistent whole, one vast organism, or more accurately still, one mighty organic entity, every part of it related to every other part, everything in it in relation to everything else in it, and any one part of it subordinate to the whole. Some scientists state that some at least of the factors governing atomic physics do not appear to follow in all respects the same laws that govern macrocosmic phenomena, and give to these singularities in atomic structure and operation the name of indeterminism, though why it should be supposed on any grounds of logic that the minute, which in its infinite particles compose the whole, should not follow even in a single detail the macrocosmic operations of the whole, in no wise appears.
The truth probably is that modern physicists and chemists see only what we may call the very large or general workings of the atomic physical operations, and have not yet penetrated more deeply into the smaller minutiae thereof, and are not as yet more than very partially acquainted with any of these operations. Inversely, astronomers see only the minutiae of macrocosmic physics, and are but just now beginning to have some intuition that there are very general and super-macrocosmic laws or operations of universal nature of which the cosmic minutiae are but details. The still wider view of things which the future is infallibly destined to bring unquestionably will reconcile under one common generalization what now seems to be the differently explicable singularities or partialities which puzzle modern research. It stands to reason that atomic physics sees but one phase or aspect, and that macrocosmic physics sees inversely another aspect, of universal nature.
It is the modern Relativity Theory that has brought about so large a part of the revolution in modern scientific thought, and has done so more largely than any other factor. It cannot be said that the Theosophist approves of all the mathematical proofs that Dr. Albert Einstein, the formulator, or at any rate the main popularizer, (176) of modern Relativity has elaborated and published in demonstration of his hypothesis. Not at all; nor necessarily, again, the rather restricted mathematical manner or mode under which he presents his proofs; nor again, his understanding of the operations of nature as he cites them in substantiation of his demonstrations -- not necessarily at all. But certain fundamental ideas are the same in Theosophy and in this wonderful new hypothesis, which has revolutionized all modern scientific conceptions, and has brought about a virtual overthrow of the fundamentals of scientific thought of a generation agone.
The beautiful thing about this hypothesis is that it introduces Metaphysics into Physics, although this perfectly true observation will arouse the ire, probably, of the larger body of still 'orthodox' scientists, who seem to be as afraid of Metaphysics as they are of Mysticism. Metaphysics literally means 'beyond physics,' and physics means anything that pertains to the ordinary physical world of perception that falls under the notice of our senses; and in consequence what can be more 'metaphysical' than the truly invisible, intangible, infinitesimals of the world of atoms and electrons which are as completely out of the scope or range of observation of any one of our senses as thought itself is!
This hypothesis also strongly tends to do away with purely speculative ideas, of what Plato would call 'phantasy,' that certain things are 'absolute' in a Universe wholly relative throughout, and thus brings us back to an examination of nature as nature is, and not as mathematical theorists have tacitly taken it to be -- and as all too many of them still do, even of the ultra-modern school.
When first enunciated, this theory was not widely accepted, and this was to be expected. Every new discovery has a hard time at first in finding acceptance; then it becomes popular, and everybody takes it for granted; then comes a later time when it becomes crystallized as a more or less dogmatic teaching, and is then inevitably subject to misinterpretation and misconstruction; it becomes scientifically sectarian or orthodox, or becomes a scientific tenet with almost the inertia of a religious dogma; finally there springs forth some new idea, the child of some new man, some new luminary, in the scientific world, who gives to us a novel view or version of natural truth, and the old tenet, the old idea, the old dogma which is now crystallized and more or less misinterpreted, finds its way into the limbo of rejected ideas -- where it is given the quietest burial possible with the least amount of publicity!
Relativity is not what it is often popularly misunderstood to be the doctrine that nothing whatsoever in the Universe is other than relative, which would mean that there is nothing continuously fundamental or universally basic or enduringly real anywhere, whence or from which all other things within its encompassing sphere flow forth; or, in other words, that there is no positively and eternally real or infinitely fundamental background of unchanging Reality. The point is that Relativity, when properly understood, refers to all manifestations whatsoever, because manifestations are beings and entities and things evolving forth or rolling forth from an inner and superior enduring and unchanging Reality.
Of course, all manifested things are related also to this primordial and universal Source; but the beings and entities and things in their interlocking and interwoven relations with each other are obviously all relatives. In other words, just as the Esoteric Tradition and all its religious and philosophical offsprings through the ages teach: there is a relativity in manifestation or manifested outpourings from the heart of Eternal Reality, because these outflowings or manifestations are essentially and inherently all related together, yet all, for the term of their cosmic appearance, are transitory and therefore 'unreal' in the sense of being mayavi productions of the ONE. It is evident that there can be no relativity in One, for relativity implies differentiation into multitudes or units which then have interactions and relations.
Mathematical and physical Relativity is, or rather should be, the search for the Ineffable Reality which is suspected even now in many scientific quarters to lie within and beyond and behind relative things -- in other words, behind the phenomena of the Universe. Its fundamental postulate is that this Universe in which we live is composed of relatives, as already stated, everything being relative to every other thing, yet all working together; that there is no thing 'absolute,' that is to say, purely and wholly independent of other things, among these relative things, as was formerly taught -- neither what is commonly called space, nor time, nor matter, nor forces. All these are the macrocosmic 'events,' to use the Relativists' own technical word: the forms which a relative universe takes or assumes at certain times and places as it passes through, or perhaps more accurately as it itself forms, the 'space-time continuum' -- again to use the jargon of the Relativists.
However, the Relativists, unfortunately, are still bound by the conception that physical matter, the physical world in short, is the only world there is, or at least the only world whose existence they will admit, and some even go so far as to say that there are no other spheres of being and no possible states of matter or time or space or consciousness than those which they think they know -- i. e., no inner and spiritual worlds on the one hand, and no worlds more material than ours on the other hand. One does not presume to question this attitude of mind in so far as strictly physical science is concerned in its necessary limitations; but it would seem needful to point out that this mental attitude of self-satisfied vision in restrictions -- which is just what it is -- literally slams the door of discovery in the face of any easy entrance into larger spheres of thought. No man can advance far if he does not believe that a farther advance is possible. The theory of Relativity is founded on unquestionable essentials or points of truth, but the deductions drawn in many cases by many Relativist speculators appear to be mere 'brain-mind' constructions or phantasies.
There are some seven points of thought on which we may say that this ultra-modern scientific relativist theory of the nature of the Universe and of its operations is practically the same as the teachings of Ancient Theosophy, the Esoteric Tradition: nor does this statement imply that every point hereinunder listed has been set forth in formal fashion by scientific writers, but simply that these seven points seem to be necessary deductions, or actually teachings, of the modern scientific relativist theory. The seven points are suggested as follows:
1. That all things and beings are relative to all other things and beings, and that nothing is absolute, i. e., apart from -- and existing as an absolute entification separate from -- all other things and beings in the entirety of the Universe.
2. That force and matter are fundamentally one thing; while Theosophy says that force and matter are two macrocosmic forms of phenomena of the underlying and eternally causal and vivifying REALITY: Kosmic LIFE.
3. That force and matter are both granular or corpuscular or atomic, so to say, and necessarily so, both being manifested and differentiated forms of the same underlying essential Reality.
4. That nature in its forms of manifestation is illusory to us; that is to say, that things and beings are really not in themselves as our senses interpret them to us humans. In other words, we do not see the Universe as it is, because our senses are imperfect receiving instruments and therefore inadequate reporters. There is a great lesson to be drawn from this idea -- if nothing else, at least the lesson of modesty!
5. That our Universe is not infinite; that is to say, boundless; but only one of innumerable other Universes; and that it is rounded, more or less, in conformation, which, therefore, because of its self-contained nature and the global activities of its forces, is the so-called 'curved-space' of Dr. Einstein; this signifying that all movement in it, reduced to the last analysis, must necessarily pursue lines or pathways within that rounded Universe which follow the general conformation of the Universe.
6. That Time, Space, Matter, and Force, are not singular and individual absolutes in themselves, any one separate from the others and different from them, as formerly so confidently supposed; but that all are relatives, and interdependent and interlocked, any one in the other three in existence and in function; and all of them manifestations or phenomena of the underlying fathomless Reality before spoken of -- the limitless Kosmic Life.
7. Because our Universe is rounded in conformation; and because it is filled full of countless forms of forces all at work; and because force is substantial, force and matter being fundamentally one; and because force and matter are inseparable by nature: therefore all the many forms of force or energy follow pathways or lines of least resistance; in other words, force cannot leave matter nor matter divorce itself from force, both being essentially one. Hence, all pathways of force or energy, or lines of least resistance, follow curved paths, because the Universe itself is of rounded or global type -- force thus returning into itself after following its courses. Nevertheless, force of higher forms, of kinds not imbodied or englobed, or encrusted, so to say, in physical matter, could and must have intercosmic circulations, which are the bonds of the Universe with the Boundless Space surrounding our own Home-Universe, and are the links between our own Home-Universe and other Universes. It should be added here that although the forces in the Universe of necessity follow in operations the conformation of such Universe, nevertheless it is the Universe itself which is the product of or builded of and from these Forces, and not vice versa.
In connexion with our consideration of the foregoing seven points, it must here be pointed out, however, that modern Science is a very changing and very changeable thing, exactly as it ought to be because it is advancing steadily in knowledge, and that a thing which by its very nature changes from year to year cannot be taken as an ultimate or final teacher of truth. Thank Heaven that it is so, because if it were an ultimate or final statement of truth, it would then have reached its utmost limits, and in a short time it would be as dead as a door-mat, and its representatives would have become a true corporation of amiable 'moss-backs' mutually patting themselves on the shoulder, in a common and foolishly exultant pride over their conquest of the universe. Science is always approximating, ever coming nearer and nearer, to the truth, which it will, nevertheless, never attain in fulness; for that would be equivalent to saying that the human mind is capable of encompassing infinity, which is absurd. The progressive and therefore changeable views of science in every way provide the right atmosphere and frame-work of scientific study, and all this is just what it ought to be.
Therefore let us be on our guard lest we take any one scientific theory or hypothesis or deduction and say: "This is Science's latest declaration; being the last, it must be the most perfect, and therefore probably it is the Truth." No, it is not necessarily true; but it is the latest honest endeavor to approximate to truth: it is the latest theory about scientific discoveries, but it certainly will be displaced in time by the next-forthcoming theory, which will be a still closer approximation to truth -- perhaps! Scientific thinkers not infrequently go back to theories which were once held as true and then abandoned when new light was received from wider and deeper research: the annals of Science contain many cases where a truth has been learned by temporarily abandoning a theory which in still later days has been proved to be truer than the newer one which superseded it.
All honor, therefore, to the great men of scientific research who are great enough and broad enough mentally to change when change is necessary -- great enough to change even their bases of thinking, when new lights come into the purview of their vision. But for all that, and abating not a tittle of our reverence for honest study and discovery, where are there any unchanging disclosures of natural truth in modern science -- disclosures of new facts in nature which later research and newer discoveries will not overthrow or prove to have been misunderstood facts? Complete reliance upon an ever-changing thing which in some scientific quarters all too often becomes a dogmatic scientific religion, is blinding oneself to what is Science's greatest glory -- its continuously enlarging field of vision brought about by changing ideas. Hence, to accept any step in scientific progress as the ultimate, as was so often done even by thoughtful scientific writers at the end of the nineteenth century, is simply attempting to build a temple upon ever-changing quicksand.
There are today in the scientific ranks men as scientifically dogmatic as ever the religionist in Occidental countries has been dogmatic in his religious beliefs. Any new discovery, any new fact, any new theory, particularly, is welcomed by these men with a very cold reception indeed, if it do not conform, at least on most points of contact, with orthodoxy in scientific thought!
As an illustration: some time ago, at Harrisburg in Illinois, there was found in a lump of coal of the Carboniferous Period a stem of an angiospermous plant. An angiosperm, as those who have studied botany know, is a plant which contains its seed in a capsule or pod or encasement of some kind; and this type of plant has always been supposed, according to the popular Darwinian evolutionist theory, to have been the very latest development of structure in time, and to have been preceded by the gymnosperms, or plants with more or less naked seed. The angiosperms are the prevailing form in the world today, while the gymnosperms were the prevailing form in the earlier and earliest geological periods. Examples of gymnosperms are pines, firs, larches, etc. The point of this discovery is that an angiosperm-relic was found among the fossils in an Era in which the gymnosperms alone have been popularly supposed by Darwinians to have had existence. In other words, a plant of a fully developed type supposedly belonging to a far later geologic Era was found, according to reports, in coal-deposits belonging to periods far preceding the alleged earliest evolution of this type. This discovery has received a mere and scanty mention and no more than that in a scientific paper which fell under the present writer's notice, and seems otherwise to have been ignored.
Is this a case where scientific theories were more true than the facts of nature herself, i. e., if the discovery is an authentic one as seems to be unquestioned? Was this remarkable discovery set aside and ignored, although a fact of nature, because it did not conform to scientific hypotheses? If so, is this Science, or the consequences of scientific dogmatism?
Another illustration: some time ago, at Scofield, Utah, in a deposit of the Cretaceous Period, which period belongs to the Mesozoic Age, there was found, according to report, what has been described as the entire fossilized foot of a one-toed horse. The one-toed horse is the very latest type in development of the Equidae, according to the Darwinian theory and other modern evolutionist theories; and this type is that of the horse today, the five-toed type having hitherto been found solely, it would seem, in geologic deposits of the Eocene Period of the Tertiary Age -- an Age which, as everybody knows, came millions of years later in time than the Cretaceous Period.
The Cretaceous Period, as remarked above, belongs to the Mesozoic or Secondary Age -- an entire geologic epoch or stage before the appearance of the Tertiary deposits. Thus, according to the evolutionary theories based on all discoveries of horse-fossils hitherto made, the foot of a modern-type one-toed horse is found in a geological Era when even the primitive five-toed horse of the Eocene had never yet been heard of -- or in other words, before nature produced it!
It is of course within the bounds of possibility that these two illustrations, which have been intentionally taken from unacceptable discoveries, are no genuine discoveries at all but downright frauds, and one can imagine in his mind's eye wicked and perversely minded deceptionists deliberately planting or 'salting' the spots where these discoveries were made; but as no one, as far as the present writer knows, breathed a word contesting these discoveries, nor has offered any proof, however intangible, that these 'finds' are fraudulent, and as they have been passed over in utter silence by the entire scientific world, as far as the present writer is aware, the suggestion that they are frauds seems to be as arbitrary and unfounded in fact as one could well wish for. Time will show. One is reminded of the fate of the Calaveras skull and of other similar instances of discovery which have been rejected as unfounded but which a later day has proved to be as well authenticated as many things that are commonly accepted because falling within the frontiers of scientific hypothesis and unconscious prejudice.
Darwinians and other evolutionists are usually so certain of the history, as they have traced it, of the development of the horse through the periods of geologic time, that they even describe the five-toed beast of the Eocene Period as a small five-toed mammal not much larger than a modern fox; yet, if the second of the two discoveries above mentioned is authentic, there has been found the fully carbonized foot of a one-toed horse in deposits of the Cretaceous Period. This discovery, which if it can be proved to be authentic -- and, as above stated, no one apparently has as yet disproved it -- is ludicrously subversive of the evolutionary scheme of the accepted geologic history of the Equidae, and has been entirely ignored by responsible biologists and geologists, as far as one has been able to ascertain. If the discovery is an authentic one, it is a case of another scientific 'conspiracy of silence.'
The great men of science, however -- the really great men -- are always open-minded and indefatigable researchers for new light. It is rather the scientific popularizers -- and they are very numerous -- who are oft as dogmatic and as set in their ways of thinking as ever any dogmatic religionist has been, and sometimes they are fully as unreasonable. Some of these men have in very truth wrought more mischief in the world from a misunderstanding, and therefore because of a misteaching, of the truths of nature, than the great-hearted men of science have ever been able to neutralize. The voice of these latter, the truly great, is always modest and their declarations are invariably restricted to ascertained fact. The consequence is that when they give to the world the results of researches and studies in the form of scientific deductions their voices are listened to with high respect and with an understanding recognition that their speculations are always as least well founded in theory even if a later day prove them to be erroneous.
Ultra-modern science is far more open-minded, as a whole, than was the science of a generation agone, when too many men actually insisted upon reading into nature what they wanted to find there. Preconceptions, prejudices, prejudgments, too frequently represented the state of mind with which a large number of the scientists of thirty or forty years ago greeted any new fact of nature or any new discovery that was brought to their attention; and the supporters of every such new fact or discovery had to fight a desperate battle for recognition before it was acknowledged as even a possibility. This was human nature then, as it is human nature now. If the facts did not conform to accepted theories, heaven help the facts!
Today Science is everything to men, a goddess by whom they swear, and whose oracles are becoming the code of conduct by which men live. In former years Western thought turned to modern science in a pathetic reaction from the intellectual revulsion and rebellion brought about by dogmatisms of unreasonable, outworn religious creeds. Today men do not refer everything back to accepted religious statements as our more pious forebears did. Yet a new and in some respects a more truly religious spirit is nevertheless finding its silent way into men's minds and hearts. Having overthrown the old standards both of thought and conduct, humanity is desperately searching for new ones. Men, both individually and collectively, are becoming more inwardly critical and not so outwardly dogmatic. They are searching as they never have searched before, for some foundation in religious thinking which will give to them peace and hope; and in modern science they think they find it -- at any rate, until very recently, they thought that they had found it. It was a sound instinct which expressed itself in the thought: "We men are collectively a part of nature. Nature is governed by inescapable law. It is throughout coherent and consistent with itself. Therefore, if we can really only understand it, and get the truth of Being in this manner, we shall know Reality -- or as much of Reality as our minds can encompass. That Reality is within us as fully as it is in nature." This instinct is thoroughly sound, for indeed it is no mere instinct at all, but a spiritual intuition; and truly, there can be no greater or nobler religion than this: the instinctive recognition of one's spiritual as well as material utter oneness with the Universe and the new and lively sense of moral responsibility that is thus born within us.
Science is becoming philosophical; indeed, 'philosophical' is an inadequate word, in a sense, because to Western ears it implies merely dry reasonings and dusty volumes of almost empty verbiage; science actually is becoming metaphysical and mystical as observed elsewhere in this work. The cogitations and literary studies of the great modern scientific mathematicians, say what they may to the contrary, are as truly metaphysical -- i. e., pertaining to ideas and substances 'beyond physics,' or beyond physical and tangible worlds -- as are a vast number of the philosophical and religious ideas and fundamentals of thought which are found in the great Systems which have survived through many ages the most exacting intellectual probing and the loftiest spiritual investigation.
How can it be otherwise than that science, like every other human activity, should slowly or rapidly change as the case may be, with the incoming of new light and with the steadily enlarging treasure-house of garnered facts. We must never forget that the affairs and pursuits of men are, in the last analysis, the manifestations of the thoughts and ideals of men; and the thoughts of men always follow three distinct and separately characteristic types, as history abundantly demonstrates. They are: a religious era, always followed by a scientific era, invariably followed by a philosophical era, which ushers in again a new religious era, which gives way in its turn to a new scientific era, followed anew by a philosophical era; and thus the Wheel of Life turns continuously around. H. P. Blavatsky came to do her great work in a scientific era, and therefore her books were largely composed towards and shaped to breaking the scientific molds in the thought of men, although obviously her magnificent genius dealt beautifully, splendidly, as every reader of her works knows well enough, with equally great philosophical and religious questions likewise. The Philosophical Era that was due to come is now with us, or beginning to come to us. Science is becoming decidedly philosophical; day by day, year by year, the scientists are drawing more and more deftly and cleverly aside another and still another corner of the Veil of Isis, the spiritual Guardian and Inspirer of nature, the fostering Spirit behind things; and with such partial withdrawal of the Veil hiding the immaculate sublimity of Truth, do we see that the greatest men of science -- not all of them but indeed many of them -- are approaching closer and closer in their ideas to the some of the fundamental Theosophical doctrines. These great men no longer dogmatize, even scientifically, but pass their lifetime into research into and discovery of the facts of nature; and now, as yet very dimly indeed, darkly as yet, they are receiving intimations of how nature's worlds are builded and of how the forces of invigorating and inspiriting these worlds work and urge upwards the countless hierarchies of entities and beings inhabiting them. There is thus a growing understanding of nature, not of the physical sphere alone, but intimations of the existence of vast reaches of worlds existing in the Universal Cosmos, and indeed, likewise true intuitions of inner and spiritual realms which are the true causal and productive factors of the marvelous spread of things in the bosom of the Boundless All.
Science, if it proceeds steadily forwards and is not halted in its stride by the outbreak of some karmically cataclysmic disaster, is on the brink of wonderful discoveries. The bandages which man's egoism has placed over the eyes of the Goddess of Research, Science, have, to a certain extent, fallen away. The Goddess looks into the future and therein glimpses the faint outlines of what the generations of men in the future will be busy with. The attitude of her devotees today is no longer one of a wholly absorbing self-satisfaction with what has been achieved; they no longer consider past conquests in science as a completed and closed book of natural revelation, for in them appears today a divine hunger for a larger and more inclusive truth -- a yearning which will not be stayed or put aside -- for a greater light, for more light for ever.
FOOTNOTES:
165. Assuredly no one will suppose for a moment that this mentioning of H. P. Blavatsky in the text as having almost alone and single-handed begun her great work is in any wise an ignoring or slurring over of the really great pioneer work that was done at HPB's side by her first two most important, because most prominent, collaborators: Colonel Henry Steel Olcott and William Quan Judge; the former the first president of the Theosophical Society and the latter probably HPB's most understanding and faithful student and defender.
It is not the intention of the present work in any wise to embark upon the very painful and disastrous events which, shortly after the great theosophist's passing, brought about the breaking of the Theosophical Society in twain.
The work of Mr. Judge is so well known and was of such wide-reaching nature that it needs little more than to mention it to show bow faithfully the Great Theosophist was supported during her life by him both in written and spoken work and by his unceasing theosophical activities.
Colonel Olcott, likewise, undoubtedly an honest man at heart, did most admirable work for the Theosophical cause, especially as long as HPB herself was alive and was enabled by her profound genius and knowledge of him to guide his activities by her example. There were others, after the founding of the Theosophical Society, whose work it is not easy adequately to commend.
The observations in the text are intended solely to point out that it was almost alone and single-handed, indeed quite alone and single-handed in the beginning, that H. P. Blavatsky, after a number of years passed in travel and preparing herself for her great task, turned to the Occident and began her work, reaching New York in 1873, where later with Colonel H. S. Olcott, Mr. W. Q. Judge, and several others, she founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. (return to text)
166. The reader should not suppose from the foregoing observations that the esoteric philosophy, or the esoteric tradition, is solely of East Indian or Hindu origin, as a hasty perusal of the text might perhaps induce the inattentive reader to presume. The majestic wisdom-religion of antiquity was at one time the universally diffused and accepted belief or religion-philosophy-science of the human race, and its vestiges or remnants may still be found by careful research imbodied in every great religion and philosophy which the literatures of the world contain.
It is no more Oriental than it is Occidental, no more Northern than it is Southern, no more Chinese than Druidic, no more Greek or Roman than it is Hindu; and it was as devotedly studied among the Mayas and the Aztecs and Peruvians of ancient times as it had been in China or the forests of Northern Europe. Even the so-called savage and barbarian tribes as they are found today, degenerate descendants of once mighty and civilized sires, have their carefully treasured traditions of a far-distant past, although the inner significance or meaning of these branches of folklore is now utterly forgotten by their fallen and degenerate custodians.
Special emphasis is laid in the text above on the fact of H. P. Blavatsky's constant reference to and illustration of the branches of the esoteric philosophy as she found it in the Oriental religious and philosophical literatures, only because it is in these literatures of still highly civilized peoples that the existence of the ancient wisdom of the gods is most easily demonstrated and proof of its once universal diffusion found.
In Isis Unveiled, H. P. Blavatsky's first work of monumental size, she took pains to show the once universal diffusion of the ancient wisdom in every land and in every clime and among every people, using material that was then at hand for her work in illustration and elaboration; whereas in her still greater work, The Secret Doctrine, her literary labors in illustration and proof and the elaboration thereof were largely based upon the majestic religions and philosophies of Hindustan, for the reason just set forth.
It is important that both reader and student understand this matter, because in recent years there is a tendency among a few to suppose that India alone, or perhaps India and China together, with minor allusions to the literatures of Greece and Rome, were overemphasized by the great theosophist in her literary labor. This opinion is entirely erroneous and without any foundation in actual fact, as the competent scholar may discover for himself by adequate study. Let it therefore be said once again that the wisdom-religion of antiquity was and is the property of no particular race or time in world history, but once was universal over the globe and was the common property, the common spiritual and intellectual heritage, of every nation, and that it has existed in every clime. (return to text)
167. To a mind still tainted with the thorough-going materialism of thirty or forty years ago -- as, alas, the larger part of the European and American psychology still is because of the sheer mental inertia and weight of former intellectual standards -- the immense import of the idea contained in the text above will seem either nebulous or, possibly, even a downright exaggeration. The Occident has well-nigh lost all sense of the great natural law of retribution active throughout every sphere of the universe; and because of the loss of this sense of rigidly retributive action in nature, there has grown up in Western psychology a feeling that a man can do pretty much what he desires to do, can act pretty much as he will, without of necessity thereby falling under the sway of an ineluctable and all-seeing justice.
In the West chance or fortuity seems to be looked upon as being everywhere: that if a man act so as to escape the consequences of the sanctions of human law he has little else to fear from the movements or operations of universal nature herself. This is a deplorable mistake, and it is high time that the truth about the matter be emphasized at every turn of thought.
No Occultist worthy of the name could ever hold such an idea, for he realizes that the very foundation of the universe is rigid and inflexible operations brought into action by consciousnesses of whatever grade, each individual consciousness according to its standing on the ladder of life; and that, consequently, no man can act, nor even think nor feel, without placing himself instantly under the sway of compensatory or retributive action, which will pursue him or follow him until the movement thus set in motion by him has run its course to the very end.
It is a matter of the gravest character, and of far-reaching import, in any wise to touch or to affect the thoughts and feelings and thereby the lives of others, for in so doing we set in motion causes, verae causae, which, thus awakened, are sleepless and Argus-eyed, and dog the footsteps for weal or for woe of him who has thus acted.
Here is the root of the Theosophical teaching of karmic retribution, and in it is involved the principle of that mysterious and in some senses dread Law of universal nature, which the Occultist-student of the esoteric philosophy briefly describes in the Sanskrit term Karma.
Any man who involves himself in any wise in affecting the life and therefore the destiny of others by that fact becomes bound to those others, and cannot free himself from these bonds until he himself has undergone all the effects, the consequences, flowing forth from the original cause or causes. It is indeed a most serious thing, a heavy responsibility, to touch the lives of other men; and this responsibility is the greater, the greater is the original actor who thus brings about the weaving of the karmic web of destiny in which he involves himself when thus upon him has fallen the influences of his thought and consequent actions. nature will exact retribution to the uttermost farthing, or, contrariwise, will bring about compensatory reward in exactly similar manner.
It is of course inevitable, and indeed our duty, to aid, to help, to support, to succor each other to our utmost; but this is all in accordance with nature's primordial law of cosmic harmony, and the consequences flowing from such action are always beneficial to all concerned; but it is another matter entirely when the thought or action is inaugurated for purposes of the self-interest of the actor, or for ignoble or egoistic reasons of any kind. In this latter case, the actor is working against that primal cosmic harmony just spoken of, because he sets himself up as a unit and for selfish reasons as against the common good. Retribution will follow him to the bitter end.
Thus it is that the sublime work of the great brotherhood is a constant laboring in the cause of all that lives, helping, aiding, stimulating spiritual and intellectual attributes and qualities wherever they are found in human individuals, and consequently striving to increase the sum of human wisdom, happiness, and peace.
The extremely subtle and difficult doctrine of Karman imbodying as a teaching the descriptive working of the Law of retributive justice in the universe, should not be confused on the one hand with the soulless insensate and mechanistic determinism of the now moribund materialistic ideas of a generation or two agone, nor, on the other hand, with the nebulous and vague but nevertheless interesting modern scientific ideas clustering about what is at present called Indeterminism -- a very natural revolt and reaction of the scientific intellect against obviously incomplete and inadequate physical determinism, formerly so popular.
This is not, however, saying that either of these two ideas is entirely devoid of some modicum of natural truth. Karma or the operation of infallible and inexorable retributive and compensatory justice in the universe, is derivative, in the last analysis, from the actions of colossal minds in the cosmos, interworking and interlocking and interblended, and existing in various evolutionary grades or degrees, and yet all working or operating through equivalently interlocked and interblending and interoperating hierarchies extending from the divine to the grossest matter.
Thus karma is not fatalism, nor again is it arbitrary moral irresponsibility, which free will is so often misunderstood to be. Every being or entity in boundless space has its own modicum of free will which it uses or abuses or misuses in accordance with its evolutionary degree of interior unfoldment; and each such being or entity has free will in progressively greater degree, in rising proportion, as such being or entity penetrates to higher and deeper states of consciousness, or rather mind, within its own essence or constitution. In other words, the more a being or entity becomes the imbodiment of higher states of mind or intelligence or consciousness within its own constitution, the more does it exemplify and imbody and express a larger measure of free will.
Finally, therefore, karma is actually seen to be in no wise fatalistic, but both radically and operatively an expression of free will interacting and interblending in function with other free wills with which it is inextricably interlinked and involved. For a further elaboration of this subject see infra. (return to text)
168. Newton's Opticks. (return to text)
169. These Greek atomoi are really what in the esoteric philosophy, and in its terminology adopted for the West, are called by the Pythagorean term monads -- signifying spiritual unitary individuals or individualities, which de facto are indivisible, everlasting, at least for the time period of a solar manvantara, a length of time so vast that it is expressible only by fifteen figures. (return to text)
170. Science and Morals. (return to text)
171. As Plato expressed it, some twenty-five centuries ago, in words which were as descriptive of materialistic fortuity in his time as they are true today:
"They mean to say that fire and water, and earth and air, all exist by nature and chance, and not by art [plan], and that as to the bodies which come next in order -- earth and sun, and moon, and stars -- they are created [formed] by the help of these inanimate existences, and that they are severally moved by chance and some inherent influence according to certain affinities of hot with cold, or of dry with moist, or of soft with hard, and other chance admixtures of opposites which have united of necessity, and that on this manner the whole heaven has been created [formed], and all that is in the heaven, including animals and all plants, and that all the seasons come from these elements, not by the action of mind, as they say, or of any god, or from art [plan], but as I was saying, by nature and chance only. . . . And that the principles of justice have no existence at all in nature. . . ." -- Laws, 10, 889; translation by Jowett
Plotinus also rejects this materialistic naturalism, and very properly and cogently, on the same grounds that are familiar to modern thinkers:
"The most irrational theory of all is that an aggregation of molecules should produce life, that elements without intelligence should produce intelligence." -- Enneads, 4, bk. 7, 2; Guthrie's translation, p. 58 (return to text)
172. The literary theosophist, who is careful in the choice and use of his words, employs the word absolute in current speech and in technical theosophical writing, because it is a convenient term with which to express the radical or original or perfected state or condition of whatever entity or thing one may be discussing at the time. But in so using the word absolute, it is done in a strictly relative sense, for there are a virtually infinite number of absolutes in this relative sense.
Accuracy in the use of such words of highly technical philosophical or scientific character is something which should be strived for, because with good literary tools accurately employed the descriptive and expository work of a philosophical writer is thereby rendered easier, albeit he has to face the very natural, and in one sense proper, objections of those who care less for verbal accuracy and who care more for the principle of using common words in their ordinary acceptations. The argument is of course a good one; but equally good and indeed better is the argument that one should use words employed in a technical manner in as strictly clear and descriptive a sense as possible.
Not a few writers on philosophical and similar matters who are careful in their choice of words, use this term absolute in its proper sense as meaning "freed," "perfected," "completed." Sir William Hamilton in his Discussions, (3rd ed., page 13, footnote) remarks upon this word: "The Absolute is diametrically opposed to, is contradictory of, the Infinite." This is absolutely correct, because absolute is the English word derived from the Latin, absolutum, meaning "freed," "unloosed," and hence is an exact English equivalent word of the Sanskrit philosophical term moksha or mukti, signifying spiritual freedom or release for the period of a cosmic manvantara from the cycle of imbodiments or peregrinations in the material worlds, and is therefore closely similar to, if not exactly identic in meaning with, the other Sanskrit word of such wide usage, Nirvana. (return to text)
173. Principia, Definitions, Scholium 1. (return to text)
174. Op. cit., Definitions, Scholium 2. (return to text)
175. The point here is that it is both logically impossible and therefore unnatural to divorce time from space or space from time -- which is the same thing; because, as just said in the text, the one is unthinkable, except as a phantasy, apart from the other. Strictly speaking, CONSCIOUS SPACE, or space-duration, is the only reality. This should be carefully borne in mind. (return to text)
176. As a matter of fact, Einstein was not the originator of this speculative but in some respects truthful theory of things. The credit for the first, if rather vague, formulation of that theory in modern times seems to lie with a Hollander, H. A. Lorentz. At any rate, Lorentz's Transformations -- which are mathematical formulae expressing certain endeavors to reach the relations of things as based upon their coordinated interplay with each other -- formed the mathematical basis of Einstein's first calculations. Einstein used these mathematical Transformations as they were, and with their help and by means of his own studies, illuminated by real flashes of intuition, he was enabled to combine various fundamental, mathematical, and therefore natural, principles into a systematic form, which finally took the shape of the 'Doctrine of Relativity' which bears his name. (return to text)