Theosophical University Press Online Edition
We live in a wonderful web of worlds in Nature -- worlds that are becoming, at least in their physical parts, more understandable to Occidental minds through the very remarkable discoveries that are in making in our times by the great men of science: discoveries in many respects remarkably corroborative of the Ancient Wisdom, the Esoteric Tradition, and thereby showing us in ever larger degree how amazingly the Sages and Seers of olden times interpreted Nature well and aright when such interpretations are examined in the light of modern scientific research and discovery. These discoveries, especially the very latest 'inventions' of our ultra-modern scientists, go far in elucidating the real facts, the causes behind the phenomena of the material Nature that surrounds us. Indeed, modern research and discovery, and the interpretation of the discoveries thus made, are elucidating, that is to say bringing into the light, and in many astonishing ways, the real meanings of some of the great teachings of the Sages and Seers of past time, who, up to our own epoch, have been all too often mocked at by the wiseacres of recent generations as being visionaries living in the dreams of the childhood of the human race. Were this true, most wonderful children were they! Marvelous children indeed, possessors of genius surpassing all that we have in our own era!
It is an interesting fact of human history, whose import is all too often forgotten even by the cleverest of European scholars, that the profoundest of philosophies which human genius has given birth to and elaborated are all of very hoary age, born in long past millennia; and it is asking too much of human credulity to suppose that the 'untutored mind' and the supposititious 'simple confiding and child-like trust' of primitive man, or of barbarian man, or of their relatively recent descendants, could have thought out such consistent and indeed highly scientific systems. Precisely the same observation may be made of the great and wide-spread religious systems of the archaic ages. The more these ancient philosophical and religious systems are examined, are studied, are analysed, the more is the modern imagination captured by them, because of their subtil psychology, because of their often immense intellectual intricacy, and because of the depth of spiritual penetration which they manifest; and, last but not least, the reflexion grows upon one that such highly elaborate and symmetrical systems of human thought, swaying the minds of so many millions for so many ages, are obviously not the product of the minds of men inferior to the best that the twentieth century itself has produced.
Or, in the case of human languages: philologers and linguists have often expressed their astonishment that some of the languages even yet spoken, albeit imperfectly, by what are now many of the barbarian and savage peoples of the earth, should be so elaborate both in vocabulary and in syntax. Of what possible use can such languages be to barbarian or savage peoples of the present day, whose simple lives and physical wants show no causal reasons for such extended vocabularies and such intricacies of grammar! If languages are the product of human genius and experience, as unquestionably they are, how is it that barbarian and savage man, who had no need of so many words nor for such intricate grammatical and syntactical relations, produced them? If a man had never seen nor heard of an automobile, nor of an aeroplane, nor of an electric light, it would be astounding to find these words in the vocabulary of the language he uses imperfectly, and one would naturally question: Whence came these terms into his speech? (177)
Thus it is that not only language, but the surviving in existence of these highly elaborated and metaphysically accurate religious and philosophical systems, prove what to the reasoning mind is the only explanation possible of the facts -- that so-called modern barbarian or savage peoples, instead of being 'primitive,' as commonly thought, are the degenerate descendants, the modern human relics, of civilizations of far past times, whose very existence has been lost track of in the night of prehistory, and who retain today but surviving remnants of what was once a highly developed culture.
The only exception to this, perhaps, at least the most noteworthy exception, is the Negro, who, instead of being a degenerate of once mighty sires, is 'primitive' as meaning a human stock still in its infancy or childhood, and destined at some time in the future to play a truly civilized part in world-history. But then the Negro will no longer be a Negro, for he will have mixed with many and different racial strains -- a process of miscegenation which even now is taking place, despite the laws which the White Man in many countries has passed in the hopeful endeavor to stop it.
These civilizations of pre-history were indeed a fact, although virtually an easily attainable proof of their existence has long, long since vanished, save for relics or forgotten or half-forgotten and degenerate representations, such as has been briefly hinted at above. Every one of these great civilizations or races of archaic pre-history was at different times and in different manners guided and led by Great Men, whom it is convenient to class under the inclusive phrase Great Seers and Sages. No race of men and no part of the globe has existed without such high spiritual and intellectual guidance and over-seeing; although the continents on which some of these highly progressed, noble, and cultured civilizations were born and lived out their destiny, have ages since sunken under the waters of what are now the seas which roll their waves where once archaic man lived and builded.
These great Sages and Seers were as much the product of evolution, i. e., of unfolding and unwrapping of innate and latent genius, as are the outstanding spiritual and intellectual figures of today and of the annals of known history. Human beings of surpassing ability, spiritually and intellectually speaking, in part through initiation and in part by means of natural evolutionary unfolding, can pass behind or into or through the enshrouding veils of matter which so closely hem us in, and thus reach directly into the causal worlds and study these at first hand, returning from this most wonderful of human Adventures, enriched with garnered experience.
Yes, those Great Sages and Seers cast their percipient consciousness behind the veils of the outward seeming, doing so self-consciously, and saw things as they are at the Heart of Nature, following the threads, the marvelous reticulum, the intricate web-work, of invisible Nature into the inmost recesses reachable by them, and wherever that web-work exists, which is equivalent to saying everywhere; and on their return to ordinary human life they cast their knowledge thus gained into the systematic philosophical, religious, and scientific formulation, which, in all the ages of the past, was the Mother-System of the great World-Religions and World-Philosophies, and which today in its modern presentation is call Theosophy -- God-Wisdom, the Wisdom of the Gods, in other words the Esoteric Philosophy, or the Esoteric Tradition.
It is to be remembered that those ancients looked out upon the Nature surrounding them more or less just as we ourselves do. They had among them the Great Men, hereinbefore mentioned, 'Superior Men,' to use the old Chinese term; likewise all the human host of the past, and during all the hundreds of millennia of the past, also obviously included as the majority what we may called 'middling men,' that is to say, average men, just as most men and women today are average; and they likewise numbered among themselves 'inferior men,' just as we have them today. But it was these Great Men, these highly intuitive men, these men of expanded consciousness and titanic intellect and flashing spiritual vision, who saw, and seeing, who understood, and who, understanding, were able to formulate the System, the Mother-System just spoken of.
They believed, therefore, in a Universe builded on invisible causes -- brought forth from invisible causes, and in consequence functioning and operating through the qualities and attributes and powers flowing forth into exterior physical manifestation from those invisible causes. The material universe which they saw, they said, is but the garment or veil which shadows forth, manifests, transmits, which lets us see, the working characteristics of those forces thus flowing forth from and out of the originant causes contained in the hierarchies of invisible worlds and their inhabitants. They said that these invisible causes are very frequently highly self-conscious invisible Beings, therefore living spiritual and intellectual entities, very much as we ourselves are self-conscious beings and living intellectual entities and therefore are originators of causative operations which flow forth from our own thoughts and energic impulses into concrete manifestation around us. Man thinks and feels; he intuits and is conscious; because the Universe itself is a manifestation of consciousness and feeling, therefore of conscious forces and self-conscious powers. The Universe is, in fact, they said, but imbodied consciousnesses; and the human host is but one of the hierarchies of conscious beings thus infilling the Universe; and in very truth, making that Universe and spiritually and intellectually informing it.
Now what is Science -- the supposed intellectual hope of modern humanity? It is the result of four things combined: human experience, human experiment or research, human reflexion or thinking, and correlation of the knowledge thus gained into systematic form.
This is precisely what the System which we call Theosophy is, and as it is presented to the world today. It is the result of innumerable ages of human experience, of human research and experiment by the Great Sages, the Masters of Life and of Wisdom, and of their deep thinking and reflexion, casting this Wisdom-Knowledge into systematic formulation. It is the result of their correlation of the knowledge that they have wrested from the womb of Nature and have formulated into systematic exposition. Such Great Men still live as a Brotherhood. They are humans of relatively immense spiritual and intellectual grandeur, whose flashing vision has penetrated into the deepest arcana of matter or substance, and of force or energy; and they have been able to do this, because the faculties and powers within them which allow them to do it are directly derivative from the same faculties and qualities and powers which operate in the Universe itself; and in this sense they are but discovering what they themselves essentially are, which is equivalent to saying, finding what the Cosmos essentially itself is. Human ability to do this arises in the fact that man's constitution is wholly derivative, both in general and in particular, from the Universe in which he moves and lives and has his being. Man but repeats in himself and in the small, as the microcosm, whatever Great Nature herself is and contains as the Macrocosm.
As the mystic Jakob Bohme wrote:
For the Book in which all mysteries lie, is man himself: he himself is the book of Being of all beings, seeing he is the likeness of Divinity. The Great Arcanum lies in him; the revealing of it belongs only to the Divine Spirit. (178)
Man as a ray of this Divine Spirit can ascend along that ray until he is enabled to read all the pages that his thus developing consciousness allows him to read in this Book of Life and Being of the surrounding Universe and of himself.
These Great Men know truth instantly when they see it, for their consciousness is becoming universal in proportion and relative to their inner development or evolution. Having raised themselves into self-conscious union, in greater or less degree, with the All-Self, they thereby become proportionately conversant with and operate upon the fields where the All-Self is and operates, and this is everywhere. Nor do they laboriously have to work among millions of details and carefully to sift therefrom the facts which constitute recorded scientific experience and knowledge.
This Wisdom which they have discovered and gathered is as certain and sure in fundamentals as are the principles of mathematics -- a branch of this Wisdom. Like mathematics it is wholly self-consistent and its proofs are found in itself, which is equivalent to saying found in Nature. It is ordered Knowledge therefore; in other words, Science per se.
Let us see then, by brief study in this and in the following chapter, how near Modern Science has approached and is approaching to this Sacred and Secret Science of the archaic ages. Certainly we are living in a marvelous age. Our modern scientists are becoming more than scientists -- they are becoming scientific mystics. Our chemistry is becoming alchemy, a super-chemistry. Our astronomy is becoming more and more like ancient astrology, for our astronomers no longer try solely to find out the exact modes of the movements of the celestial bodies and where they ought to be at certain specified times, and more or less what the physical composition of these celestial bodies is, but they are casting their minds, as did the ancient Sages and Seers, forwards and backwards in an endeavor to try to pierce the veils of the phenomenal seeming; and this very effort in itself is one of the noblest exercises of the human intellect; for it is in fact a yearning to pass beyond mere brain-mind thinking into the realm of invisible causes, into what is in sheer truth the realm of metaphysics, (179) and scientists in certain other branches of human research are, perhaps only half-consciously, attempting to do the same thing.
Professor A. S. Eddington, when writing recently of Space, Time, and Gravitation, openly says that theories of materialistic physics reach no ultimate realities whatsoever -- which of course is a statement of obvious fact. Nevertheless it is significant to have this acknowledgement by one of the most eminent men in ultra-modern scientific research, for it shows that scientific thinkers today are rapidly advancing out of the realms of an imagination captured and held shackled in the bonds of a now outworn materialistic conception of Nature into fields of actualities, and to a great extent are freeing themselves from the formerly universally prevalent attitude of scientific egoistic self-sufficiency that one's own conceptions of Nature are cosmic realities.
Unfortunately, the candid observer of the trend of scientific thought, especially along the new mathematical lines presently so favored, must acknowledge that even yet there remains no small bias to look upon the conclusions of mathematical investigation, often based upon very shaky premisses, as actualities in themselves. We must never forget that the mathematical mill produces finally only what is put into it: in other words, and to change the figure of speech, mathematical deductions or conclusions are logically based upon certain premisses upon which are wrought certain mathematical operations; and if these premisses be supposititious or speculative, or not actually founded throughout on natural fact, the conclusions derivative therefrom are bound of necessity to carry the imprint or taint -- if the word be pardoned -- of the defects that the premisses themselves contain. In other words, again, mathematics per se are no absolutely certain instrument for uncovering or discovering or unveiling verities in Nature, but are a fairly perfect instrument for tooling whatever premisses may be subjected to them. Mathematics are a means or rather a method of abstract thinking concerning relations among things but cannot be used apart from the original premisses upon which mathematical work is done. (180)
Professor Eddington poetically and very truthfully says that we form theories about life and the Universe which are shaped in our own image and patterned after the forms of our own minds. These are true and wise words, and everybody who thinks about the matter knows it perfectly well. It stands to reason that the human mind can think only thoughts that the human mind contains. This indeed is very true. We begin to realize that we see the shadows of the thinking of our own minds, the images of our own thoughts, instead of cosmic realities in themselves that science all too frequently has hitherto fondly imagined those shadows to be.
Professor Eddington is in many respects an intuitive man; he is one of those rare minds who can, by the force of pure native genius, at times by intuition -- if one like the term better-cast his understanding, when the mood to do so is upon him, through and beyond appearances into noumena, i. e., into the causal reality behind the phenomena; although naturally, because he is no initiate, his intuitions are often halting, and his vision by the same token is often, despite his best will, imperfect. All human steps of progress in thinking and in discovery are slow and faltering at first, as must be the case with human researchers.
Some little time ago, in speaking before a meeting of the English Royal Society, he probably amazed that gathering of eminent men by his declaration in regard to the need of a radical modification of our ideas concerning the nature and dynamical characteristics of the electron, which, as all know, is now supposed to be the ultimate -- or nearly the ultimate -- element of physical substance; and he went on to say, as we understand, that such a modification was a necessity and was timely: in other words, that it was high time that such a change in conceptual outlook should occur with regard to our views of the range of consciousness in Nature.
This new attitude is a distinctly encouraging one; and the Theosophist can do no otherwise than voice his sincere commendation of the new visioning of Nature that is coming to scientific men.
A. Wolf, Professor of Scientific Theory, London University, in an English paper, quotes Eddington as follows:
It is Professor Eddington's theory that they [physical occurrences] all partake -- everything partakes -- of the nature of mental activity, of consciousness, or sub-consciousness, sometimes of a low and sometimes of a higher order, and these mental activities can be described by other and higher minds, but all things have a consciousness of self, which is different from their appearance in the consciousness of other minds and from the description.
Professor Eddington here is quoted as saying -- and saying truly, thus echoing the ancient Esoteric Wisdom of Immemorial Time -- that the Universe is infilled with consciousness expressing itself through innumerable consciousnesses, and that to a certain extent we can interpret them; first of all, however, understanding that we interpret them strictly according to the framework of our own specific and peculiar consciousness. Hence any such descriptive interpretation, as we humans must necessarily figurate it, is de facto imperfect because of our own imperfectly developed consciousness; nevertheless, every entity everywhere, whose consciousness we might attempt to interpret and to describe, has its own understanding of its own consciousness, which it understands better than any other one can understand it or interpret it or describe it to be. This seems to be his meaning, and it is obviously true.
In a review several years ago of Professor Eddington's book, The Nature of the Physical World, appeared the following:
Perhaps the most important aspect of these new ideas is to be found in the insight they give us into the limitations of exact science. Instead of knowledge of substance, science gives us knowledge purely of structure, and instead of revealing a strict determinism in Nature, science has to be content with probabilities. But is the whole of our knowledge confined to what can be reached by scientific methods? Professor Eddington suggests that our own consciousness gives us a clue to the actual nature of the material of which science tells us nothing but its structure. We have peculiarly intimate knowledge of certain collections of atoms -- namely, our brains. It is our own succession of feelings that constitutes the stuff of what is described by an outside observer as 'brain-matter.' Accordingly, Professor Eddington suggests that the stuff of the world may be what he calls 'mind-stuff.'
People of olden times, and even of recent times, frequently used to call essential matter by the name of Mind, but now, following Eddington, for a time at least, they will call it 'mind-stuff.' The name is thus changed a bit, but the idea or thing is the same -- although the ancients, in speaking of mind-stuff, it must be carefully noted meant something purely spiritual, indeed at times super-spiritual, the Cosmic Soul, in fact; whereas ultra-modern scientists have risen apparently no higher in conceptual allusion than to ethereal substance -- one remove or at best two removes beyond and within the physical sphere.
More than forty years ago, H. P. Blavatsky wrote in her magazine, Lucifer, upon the subject of consciousness as existing in the atom. Her article was called forth by another article written by the well-known journalist and contributor to various magazines, George Parsons Lathrop, and dealt with the religious views of Mr. Edison. Edison was at one time a member of the Theosophical Society. She said:
Edison's conception of matter was quoted in our March editorial article. The great American electrician is reported by Mr. G. Parsons Lathrop in Harper's Magazine as giving out his personal belief about the atoms being "possessed by a certain amount of intelligence," and shown indulging in other reveries of this kind. For this flight of fancy the February Review of Reviews takes the inventor of the phonograph to task and critically remarks that "Edison is much given to dreaming," his "scientific imagination" being constantly at work.
Would to goodness the men of science exercised their "scientific imagination" a little more and their dogmatic and cold negations a little less. Dreams differ. In that strange state of being which, as Byron has it, puts us in a position "With seal'd eyes to see," one often perceives more real facts than when awake. Imagination is, again, one of the strongest elements in human nature, or in the words of Dugald Stewart it "is the great spring of human activity, and the principal source of human improvement. . . . Destroy the faculty, and the condition of men will become as stationary as that of brutes." It is the best guide of our blind senses, without which the latter could never lead us beyond matter and its illusions. The greatest discoveries of modern science are due to the imaginative faculty of the discoverers. (181)
How true that is! Probably there has not been one single great scientific discovery, arising out of the process of brain-mind reasoning from a to b to c, and eventuating in success: but always there was the yearning for truth, the intuitive visioning; then suddenly came the light, and the thing was seen -- however dimly, however imperfectly sketched. To continue:
But when has anything new been postulated, when a theory clashing with and contradicting a comfortably settled predecessor put forth, without orthodox science first sitting on it, and trying to crush it out of existence? . . . (182)
Scientists today are becoming the best friends of Theosophists, i. e., students of the Esoteric Tradition; but in those days there was a deal of scientific dogmatism: a wretched, miserable, haughty dogmatism, just as much of it as there was in the churches -- of a different type to be sure, yet equally dogmatic in its way. If a man in those days even spoke of the 'soul,' though he spoke of it sotto voce, he was considered to be just a trifle soft-headed, or mayhap soft-hearted; in any case it was thought that something was wrong with him somewhere.
Man in those days was considered by the scientists to be an 'animate machine.' The Universe was also a mechanism that ran itself. There was no spirit, no soul, no life anywhere; mechanisms everywhere, machines which ran themselves -- and nobody knew how!
To continue the citation:
Is it then, because consciousness in every universal atom and the possibility of a complete control over the cells and atoms of his body by man, have not been honored so far with the imprimatur of the Popes of exact science, that the idea is to be dismissed as a dream? Occultism gives the same teaching. Occultism tells us that every atom, like the monad of Leibnitz, is a little universe in itself; and that every organ and cell in the human body is endowed with a brain of its own, with memory, therefore, experience and discriminative powers. The idea of Universal Life composed of individual atomic lives is one of the oldest teachings of esoteric philosophy, and the very modern hypothesis of modern science, that of crystalline life, is the first ray from the ancient luminary of knowledge that has reached our scholars. If plants can be shown to have nerves and sensations and instinct (but another word for consciousness), why not allow the same in the cells of the human body? Science divides matter into organic and inorganic bodies, only because it rejects the idea of absolute [i. e., Universal] life and a life-principle as an entity: otherwise it would be the first to see that absolute [i. e., Universal] life cannot produce even a geometrical point, or an atom inorganic in its essence . . . .
Now to lay at rest once for all in the minds of Theosophists this vexed question, we intend to prove that modern science . . . is itself on the eve of discovering that consciousness is universal [Eddington's mind-stuff] -- thus justifying Edison's "dreams." But before we do this, we mean also to show that though many a man of science is soaked through and through with such belief, very few are brave enough to openly admit it . . . . (183)
The sporadic utterances of some of our modern scientists show how true were the above words of H. P. Blavatsky. Sir James Jeans, in an interview published in The Observer (London), when asked the question: "Do you believe that life on this planet is the result of some sort of accident, or do you believe that it is a part of some great scheme?" replied thus:
I incline to the idealistic theory that consciousness is fundamental, and that the material universe is derived from consciousness, not consciousness from the material universe. If this is so, then it would appear to follow that there is a general scheme . . . . In general the universe seems to me to be nearer to a great thought than to a great machine. It may well be, it seems to me, that each individual consciousness ought to be compared to a brain cell in a universal mind . . . .
And he significantly concluded the interview with the statement: "I do not think I have the right to give a definite opinion on any of the questions that we have discussed this afternoon."
Why not? Once that a scientific man states that what he says is his own opinion, definite or otherwise, he certainly has as much right to give it as have other scientists who seem to manifest no such reluctance or hesitation in making statements of a far more aggressively assertive character. One certainly is driven to commend such modesty, with the regret, however, that scientific modesty is not always as strongly vocal as it might be.
The great German scientist, Max Planck, in a similar interview, published in The Observer, when asked, "Do you think that consciousness can be explained in terms of matter?" replied:
No, I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.
Citations might be made from a number of other equally great scientific luminaries all running to the same definite conclusion, but it is unnecessary to do so here. The main point is that some of the greatest, perhaps the greatest, men of science today are beginning to re-echo one of the fundamental philosophical postulates of the Esoteric Tradition, that 'Mind' or 'Consciousness' is of the essence of the Universe, and that such 'Mind' or 'Consciousness' is perforce operative and self-manifesting in every part or point of the incomprehensibly vast cosmic whole. (184)
So that beyond, behind, within everything, the atom for instance, and within the electronic infinitesimals composing the atom, is a consciousness-center -- or what the Esoteric Philosophy calls a Jiva, and which, adopting the Pythagorean word, made familiar to European philosophers through Leibniz, we may call a Monad, or unit of Individuality. Indeed, according to the Ancient Wisdom, every atom is an organism, an organic living entity, an atom thus being the vehicle or manifestation of a transcendent but imperfectly expressed 'soul' and ultimately of a god enshrined therein. In other words, the soul-life of the atom is an intermediate portion of the invisible and ethereal atomic structure which flows forth from the monadic center or root at the 'back of beyond,' so to say, of each physical atomic unit.
The modern scientist is already preparing the way for this larger conception when through his researches he can declare that the atom is no longer considered to be a blindly driven, senseless, lifeless, inert particle of dead matter: driven by blind fate, urged by fortuity, attracted hither and yon by haphazard chance, but is a composite entity made up of electrical points or charges.
The Danish physicist, Bohr, in 1913, evolved a conception of the physical atom which was exceedingly interesting, approximating in certain degree to the Theosophical view, and which -- despite the modifications of the Bohr theory which have been made since 1913 -- explains electro-magnetic and other phenomena of Nature with almost uncanny precision: to wit, that the physical atom is a sort of solar system in miniature, or, conversely, that our solar system or any other solar system is a cosmic atom. Each such atom has its atomic 'sun,' which the scientists today call a proton, or aggregate of protons combined with electrons, and also has its planet or planets which are called electrons, whirling with incredible speed about their central atomic sun. In the case of the hydrogen atom, which is modernly supposed to be the primordial building-brick of physical matter, there is but one planet or electron, with its one proton or atomic sun.
The great value of Bohr's conception was that it is analogical; that is to say, it follows the pattern laid down by other and larger structures and processes of Nature. What Nature does in one place, very logically and indeed of necessity she repeats in other places, because she follows one ultimate fundamental law or course of action operative throughout her entire extent. Bohr's entire conception is an unconscious tribute to the very ancient and esoteric doctrine of Analogy. For analogy is a method of reasoning based on Nature herself and on her alone; and, despite many disclaimers to the contrary, some of them rather irritable, it is becoming more and more in modern times apparent as a mode of reasoning, perhaps only half-consciously followed by our ultra-modern scientific theorists or theories. It must be noted, however, that there are such things as false analogies only too easy to fall into, which are in consequence misrepresentations of Nature's functionings and events, and against these false analogies the student has to be constantly on guard. (185)
Bohr's theory that the atom is a kind of miniature solar system, whatever defects this theory may in future be proved to have, at least is correspondential to all Nature as we know it. It is based on analogical reasoning; it is not a mere hypothesis arbitrarily evolved to meet a supposed need, or a supposed want, of a passing phase of ultra-modern physics which confessedly is still but an ambitious infant. It is precisely this combination of analogical reasoning, however half-consciously done by Bohr, with the other scientific idea of the substance of matter being essentially force, which renders the Bohr atom so attractive, at least in its general outline, to the Theosophical student. Time will show how much of truth Bohr's picture of the atom contained, (186) and how much of truth is involved in later theories of atomic structure -- time and experiment as conducted by our really remarkable leaders in physical chemistry. Whether future research will show that Bohr or any later worker was the more exact in evolving a conception of atomic structure, matters not in the least for our present purpose; the essential conceptions seem to be more or less the same in pretty nearly all modern theories of atomic structure, to the effect that the atom is built mostly of etheric spaces, and that the particles of the substance that it contains consist of electricity variously compounded of its 'positive' and 'negative' qualities or parts.
Thus therefore the physical world so seemingly solid to our senses, reduced to its ultimates, is mostly 'emptinesses' or etheric spaces, with almost innumerable particles of negative or positive electricity, electrons, protons, positrons, etc., mutually acting and interacting, and by their common labor producing all the physical world and likewise all its component parts.
Incredible is the rapidity of movement which is assigned by modern scientific theory to these electric particles. Dr. E. E. Fournier d'Albe wrote in The Observer of London several years ago about the orbits of these electrons and their rate in speed and time as they pursue their supposed orbital course around their atomic protonic sun:
In this miniature solar system [of the atom] the year would be represented by the time of one revolution [of an electron] round the central 'sun,' and as these revolutions take place at the rate of about a thousand million millions [or one quadrillion in American numeration] per second, it is clear that while we watch, even for a moment, untold ages and geological eras of atomic time are passing by.
Professor W. F. G. Swann gives a still more modern view of atomic time as founded in an electronic revolution or electronic year when compared with human time. (187)
There are beings in this Universe whose time-movement is so slow that were our solar system, which today has been called a 'cosmic atom' by certain intuitive scientists -- one of the teachings of the Esoteric Tradition -- to be conceived by them as an atomic system, then the revolution of our planet Terra around our central luminary, which revolution we call a year, would be an incalculably small period of time to them -- in fact smaller to them than is the revolution of an electron around its atomic sun, which constitutes an atomic year, small in time to us. On the other hand, to infinitesimal beings whom we may imagine, if you please, with perfect justice, as living and having their life-period on an atomic electron -- one of the atomic planets -- one of our years would be a quasi-eternity.
The life of our Universe, while contrasted with infinity is but the wink of an eye, so to speak, yet to us it seems as quasi-eternity, for it lasts for many trillions of human years; and after the same manner of thinking, man's life is but a fleeting instant in endless duration, although it is of immense time-length as contrasted with the bewilderingly rapid appearances and disappearances of infinitesimals in the atomic world.
We are told also by scientific thinkers that the atomic distances separating electron from electron and these from their protonic center or sun are relatively as great in the atom as are the distances in our cosmic solar system separating planet from planet and these from our sun, and there is no reason in the world why this most suggestive teaching or declaration or statement of ultra-modern science is not perfectly true. One must remember that to ourselves all things in this Universe are relative, as stated before, and in consequence that such supposedly fundamental things as space and time are as relative as all other things contained by them. Indeed, in one sense of the word, both space and time, as is taught by the Esoteric Philosophy, are mayavi or illusory in the sense that neither the latter nor the former, when we give to the term 'space' the meaning of extension, is external in the European sense; and because in European usage the terms 'space' and 'time' are both directly related to physical things or 'events' and therefore distinctly temporary, neither can be called 'absolute,' and this, according to Einstein, is perfectly correct in this aspect or portion of his Relativity Theory. (188)
The atoms which compose our bodies are builded thus, according to modern scientific ideas, and therefore are infinitesimal copies or repetitive reflexions of that larger Cosmic Atom which human knowledge calls the solar system. Just as the interplanetary spaces are empty, or nearly so, of visible physical things, and are therefore called emptinesses, so are our bodies mostly such 'spacial vacancies.' But it must not be imagined for a moment that these 'vacancies' are actually, 'nothingness'; that idea is enormously absurd. These spacial vacancies, so called, are filled full with ethereal substances even as the cosmic spaces of our solar system and the greater kosmic Spaces of our Galactic Universe are filled full with kosmic ether.
The most interesting deduction that we could and indeed should draw from the foregoing reflexions is -- just as the Esoteric Philosophy has taught from immemorial time -- that what we humans call physical appearances of things are but transitory 'events' or illusory and fugitive episodes, on and in that particular Cosmic Space of the solar system which we call our physical world; and that in point of fact, this physical world itself is mostly composed or woven of 'holes' or so-called and mis-called 'empty spaces.' We say 'empty' only because our gross physical senses, such as the organs of sight and touch which have been evolved to cognise and to report only things of physical matter, tell us nothing of the inner and invisible, because highly ethereal, worlds and spheres and realms, which we thus collect under the single term 'etheric spaces' or 'empty spaces.'
Probably the actual so-called solid physical units -- let us call them electrons, etc. -- which compose the substantial part of my physical body, when closely assembled, thus leaving to one side the 'empty spaces,' could be compressed into a volume little larger than a pin-head. So that we see immediately that so far as mere volume or spatial extension is concerned, our physical bodies are indeed true illusions as regards bulk, yet very real to us because our sense-organs live in this world of 'bulky' illusion.
As an example: I enter a railway train. I take a seat. My body touches the seat, presses it, apparently, and physically deforms it; the seat is screwed to the framework of the car, into the woodwork, which in turn rests upon the metal carriage, which in turn rests upon the wheels, which roll over the steel rails, and the rails rest upon the earth, and the earth is builded of various particles of soil -- stone and what not. Yet at each one of these steps in our picture there is no absolute physical contact whatsoever between any two of then -- no physical contact between any two of the series.
I am but apparently touching the chair on which I sit. Not a particle of my body actually touches it: the electrons of which my body is composed are repelled by the electronic vibrations of which the chair-seat is composed. The chair is screwed into the wood of the car of the railway coach; but those screws do not actually touch the wood, although they have broken it. This wood is again clamped to the metal body of the car. To us these clamped links seem tight and solid and absolutely in contact; yet not a article of that wood actually touches the steel. The steel-carriage rests on the axles of the wheels, yet not a particle of that resting steel actually touches, is in absolute physical contact with, the metallic substance of the wheels. The wheels as they roll along the tracks actually do not touch the railroad-tracks at all; they roll along on ether. Every particle of the wheel which seems to touch the track, and vice versa, consists of electronic and other particles of negative and positive charges, and they repel each other. The rails supposedly rest solidly on the earth, yet the same statement of fact is true there likewise; the rails are not in absolute contact with the earth. The earth itself is composed of these various electronic and other materials, and yet not a single mathematical point of any one of these materials has absolute physical contact with any other; they are held apart by electric repulsive forces, residing in the electrons, protons, etc., of which the atoms are builded. What an illusory world it is we live in!
Hence we see something of what 'matter' is: it is, first, the atomic forces or vibrations as well as the balancing among themselves of these forces; working, second, in open spaces relatively as vast as those which form the solar system and the Universe around our physical earth. 'Matter' therefore, as we humans find it, is really an illusion; for first we do not see it as it is, and, second, not seeing it as it is, we imagine it to be something that it is not.
Take as an instance the constitution of an atom of hydrogen, the simplest atom as yet known to science. The hydrogen atom is composed of two electric particles, one positive, called the proton, which according to theory is the central sun of the atom, and one negative particle, called the electron, which is the atomic 'planet' whirling around its central nucleus or proton with vertiginous speed. A quadrillion times mayhap -- some scientists say more than one quadrillion times -- does it circle in its orbit around its atomic sun in the short space of one human second. What is the result of this vertiginous movement, as we humans sense that result? Tiny, infinitesimal, as this whirling electron is, its speed is so great that, if we had the power to put our finger upon it, or even tried to touch it, we should feel resistance arising from the incredible speed of the whirling of this electron around its central sun, forming as it were a streak of something solid, or a belt or shell which to our gross physical flesh would then be sensed as highly tangible. We would sense it as what we call 'matter,' and yet this 'matter' is but a charge of negative electricity, in other words of force.
We may indeed ask ourselves: What is matter? What is the material side of being? We now know that 'matter is mostly holes'; matter is mostly spaces; matter is mostly 'emptinesses.' It is obvious that if we consider our solar system, we see that the larger part of it is what is called vacuity or space, the sun and the planets forming but a small part of the space within the confines of it; and so is it exactly the case, according to theory, with the atom. The protonic sun and the electronic planets are but a very small part of the space which the atom contains; and yet out of these 'empty' atoms is built up all the physical matter which we know of, of any kind whatsoever, from the most ethereal gas to the most dense of metals. Truly is our physical world essentially an unreal world, an illusory world.
Eddington gives us in his book, The Nature of the Physical World, an admirably phrased view of the modern scientific conception of physical matter, pointing out that 'matter' has been dissolved by ultra-modern scientific specialists into points of energy existing in a void. Professor Eddington in thus speaking of a 'void' filled with atoms scattered sporadically, recalls to mind very curiously what was taught by the old Greek theorists of the Atomistic School of philosophers, a School supposed to have been founded by Leucippus and Democritus, who taught that the 'ultimates' of all things are atoms and a void. But their teachings have never been properly understood by moderns. They did not mean by to kenon -- which are the Greek words usually translated by 'vacuum' -- 'void,' what this word is understood to signify in modern times, utter or absolute emptiness. They meant an absence of the matter which is subject to perception by the senses of man; but the very basis of their thought was the existence of an ethereal field or ocean in Space -- when properly understood, SPACE itself -- which by comparison with the grossness of illusory physical matter was called the 'Void.'
In modern times this ethereal cosmic substance has commonly been called ether; and, indeed, the Greeks themselves often spoke of aether from which our moderns have taken their word 'ether.' (189)
The Esoteric Philosophy does not postulate the existence of any such thing as an utterly absolute void, which would be, apparently, identic with the old theologic idea of nothingness. The conception when carefully analysed is seen to be but phantasy, as Plato would have phrased it, an illusion of the mind reacting on its own thought when dealing with etherealities. Obviously, something, whatever its nature or being may be, and however ultra-ethereal this something may be, must exist to provide the space within and upon which the various electric particles composing the atoms have position and function. Were modern science once to grant the existence of invisible, because extremely ethereal, worlds or realms of space, many of the phantoms which now trouble its dreams and harass the imagination of the mighty men who are the devotees thereof would instantly disappear, for these ethereal worlds existing within the physical universe would be seen to be the background and container of the latter, and of which our physical universe is but the outer shell or garment or veil. The very lowest part of this range of invisible substance may as well be called 'ether' as by any other name, provided that the idea be once grasped.
This word 'ether' is a convenient term, although it does not mean very much to modern scientific speculation because nobody understands precisely what is meant by its use; but it is employed in a vague and generalizing way to signify the field of action of electro-magnetic forces; and this to a Theosophist is a limitation so unreasonable that while he accepts it as a provisional scientific theory, he does not accept it as a natural fact.
The Ancient Wisdom teaches that the ether is not merely matter of one grade or of uniform density or existing only on one plane, but that it is septiform or seven fold counting from its most ethereal parts to its densest -- just beyond the range of the physical. Its most ethereal parts we call, in our own technical Theosophical terms, Akasa, (190) or the highly spiritual-ethereal substance-energy infilling and in a true sense composing what is popularly called Space -- or less accurately, spacial extension. There are therefore many grades of ether.
For instance, consider the ether, so called, which surrounds the Earth, which ether is kosmic in extent, and in which every molecule and indeed every atom of our bodies, every molecule of everything that exists, and every atom and every electron and proton of every atom, are bathed as in a boundless ocean. This 'ether' seems to us tenuous, thin, ethereal, and yet, according to ultra-modern scientific theories, it is incomparably more dense than is the densest known 'physical' substance. Obviously, for does it not permeate and interpenetrate all? It permeates and interpenetrates our grossest physical matter, as water will a sponge; and, as shown above, our physical matter is mostly spaces, 'holes,' 'emptinesses.'
A British scientist, Sir J. J. Thomson, recently has stated his conclusion that the density of the ether is 'two thousand million times that of lead' -- or, as Americans would say, two billion times denser than lead. Such is the character of this intangible, super-gaseous-like thing or entity called ether, which is everywhere and pervades everything. Lead is one of the most dense of our physical metals; and yet the ether, which permeates everything, according to this hypothesis, is two billion times more dense!
Yes, says the Ancient Wisdom, the lowest parts of the ether actually are far more dense than are our densest metals. (191) So that our physical world is not the most 'material' thing in the universe. There are planes or grades of substance-matter far more dense than are our own, even as there are planes and grades of substance-matter incomparably more ethereal and tenuous than is the physical. That incomparably more ethereal and tenuous part is what we human beings call 'spirit'; and the other far denser and grosser part is what we call absolute 'matter'; but this entire range of substance from spirit to grossest matter is, in the Theosophical teaching, the septiform range of the Akasic background of the Universe -- of our Universe. The entire Kosmos or Kosmical Universe is composite of vast ranges of ethereal substances and beings and entities and things and of other vast ranges of material grades of substances and beings and entities and things; and in that portion of it which we call our solar system, man and all other beings and entities and things therein move and live and have their being, each of such units withal imbodying with its own essence a spark of something infinitely more sublime, which 'something' we may call, if we wish, the Divine Central Fire of Consciousness-Life-Substance. It not merely imbodies this spark within itself, and the core of its being, but that spark is in very truth the unit's own ultimate essence. Therefore and because of this the unit man in his essence is universal, because that essence is in inseparable identic unity with the universal Divine Fire just mentioned.
The words employed in any such explanation are more or less of necessity metaphors, it is true, but while being metaphors or verbal symbols, they nevertheless represent positive actualities or realities, and it is in the growing understanding of these realities or actualities that we come to comprehend ever more greatly the real meaning of the Esoteric Wisdom lying in the background of all the great ancient religions and philosophies, because all these last were based in their reaches of thought on the fundamental teaching of the identity in essence of the Infinite Universe with all its offsprings.
The well-known and widely read English physicist, Sir Oliver Lodge, who also in many respects is entitled to the name of philosopher, has recently given his opinion on what he considers to be the nature and origin of 'matter,' so called; (192) and what he says in this passage is so closely akin in divers ways to the teaching of the Esoteric Tradition on the sane point, that it is well worth quoting here. Sir Oliver writes:
. . . matter should, as it were, crystallise out of an unmodified spatial ether, the original seat of all the energy in the universe. According to this idea matter becomes the palpable part of the ether -- the only portion of it which affects our organs of sense, and therefore the only portion which is incontrovertibly known to us . . . . We can trace the physical operations back and back as far as we can, but not without limit. Sooner or later we arrive at something which is not physical, which has more analogy with our minds than with our bodies, and which we sometimes call idealistic and sometimes spiritual. (193)
Unfortunately, one cannot always follow the eminent English physicist in all his scientific deductions and philosophico-scientific ideas. The citation that follows is one which contains, to the Theosophist, a great deal of truth, yet it cannot be accepted by the esotericist in the manner in which it is stated.
Sir Oliver Lodge writes:
I venture to make the, possibly absurd, prediction that life will be found to be something that interacts with matter through the agency of the ether of space, that it is displayed and not originated by matter, and that it can exist in unsensed fashion quite apart from its material manifestation. (194)
One must make the following comment on Sir Oliver Lodge's idea that "life will be found to be something that interacts with matter through the agency of the ether of space." This is not only unscientific in view of the latest declarations of a number of men as great, if not greater, than Sir Oliver, but it cannot be strictly accurate because of the apparent distinction made between life and 'matter' as supposedly entities of radically different type or character; and also for the simple reason that, as said before, force and matter, or spirit and substance, are fundamentally one -- not fundamentally two. It is this unfortunate divorce of life from matter, or of force from matter, in past years, that has worked such intellectual havoc not only in the scientific circles but, in past centuries as well as today, in religious circles as well. There would seem to be no possible or genuinely solid reason for this radical distinction or divorce except the unfortunate presupposition that life must be something different in essence from matter or from force, whereas they are but different manifestations of the one universal underlying reality.
Probably one cannot weigh too heavily upon the vast and far-reaching importance of clearing our minds once and forever of the old Western religious, and since Descartes' time (195) scientific, idea or notion that life and consciousness, and supposedly force likewise, are all distinct and of essentially different character from what we call 'matter,' or, more accurately, substance. This radical dualism in European thought has been the fecund and extremely fertile mother of more spiritual and scientific perplexities, phantoms, and consequent wanderings from the truth, than any other single cause operative in the same direction for ages past. It has been, apparently, a fundamental postulate of Western theology since the time of the fall of the Roman Empire; but it is particularly on the writings and ideas of the French philosopher, Descartes, that we place full responsibility for the influence of this totally erroneous conception over the minds of all scientific men since Descartes lived.
The radical distinction that he drew between these two sides of Nature, and which is the basic idea of Cartesianism, has swayed scientific thought almost without objection since his time until the beginning of the twentieth century. It was about the year 1900, more or less, that there set in the new and far truer idea of the fundamental or substantial or essential identity of 'matter' and all forms of 'energy,' or, as the Theosophist would say, substance and force -- the physical reflexions on our plane of cosmic Pradhana and Brahman, i. e., Cosmic Root-Nature and its inspiriting and perpetually co-existent Cosmic Mind.
The Esoteric Philosophy has always rejected this divorce of the inseparable twain as wholly unnatural and therefore utterly untrue. They are in essence ONE: but appear in our illusory universe as twain because their unceasing interactions and intermodal activities as the two aspects or veils of the one fundamental Reality.
So far as life interacting with matter 'through the agency of the ether of space' (196) is concerned, there seems to be no possible objection to this, only a Theosophist would prefer to say that life works through that part of the ethers -- note the plural -- of space which are intra-atomic and hyper-intra-atomic, that is to say, the ethers within, and within the within, the substance and the structure of the atom. These ethers, thus aggregated, are the same as the 'ethers of space'; the term here showing, of course, that there are in actuality many ethers, and not merely one. There are as many ethers, as a matter of fact, as we can say that there are 'matters.' One may also add that while it is just said in a general way that the ethers of space are the same as the aggregated intra-atomic ethers, one does so only in order to be more clearly understood; because the hyper-intra-atomic ether that is here in the mind's eye, is actually much more tenuous and ethereal than is the lower part of the inter-stellar ether, or, perhaps more accurately, than is the lowest inter-planetary ether of our own solar system.
There are indeed and in very truth ethers within ethers as our percipient mind plunges more and more into and within the abysmal recesses of atomic structure: as we go farther and farther into and within the ranges of atomic substance and energy. The physical matter that we know is soaked through by these ethers, especially by the lowest of them, very much as water permeates and soaks through a sponge. Hence we may, perhaps, use this figure of speech and say that our matter is sponge-like, 'full of holes' relatively, and compared with which the ether -- even the lowest of the ethers -- is exceedingly tenuous. Thus to declare, as Sir Oliver apparently does, that life is distinct essentially from matter and 'works through ether' and thus links up with matter, is to say something that one feels bound rather strongly to object to, not merely on the ground of philosophic logic but in view of the latest discoveries and deductions of other eminent men of science.
The truth therefore is that life is inseparable from both force or energy and matter, because it is the causal substance of both these, both these being fundamentally one, as before said -- life in fact being the actual and universal source of both force or energy and matter, and in its incomprehensibly manifold activities may, for the purpose of easy illustration, perhaps be called the Causal Energy of the Cosmos, which is thus infinitely more 'energetic' than 'energy' itself.
That life is "displayed and not originated by matter" is of course an admirably true statement; matter merely displays it, manifests it, and thus proves it, but most emphatically does not 'create' it. No one today, presumably, will deny this. It is a very archaic Theosophical teaching; and the words "not originated by matter" show how greatly Sir Oliver Lodge has freed himself from the older scientific ideas that there is no such thing as a perennially vital fluid per se or vital essence per se, and that the phenomena of life are merely manifestations rising in some mysterious and inexplicable way out of the bosom of matter.
Further, when Sir Oliver says that "it can exist in unsensed fashion quite apart from its material manifestation," one must applaud this statement as being unquestionably true. It is a brave thing to say, because even today few scientists have had the courage to put it in that way. Yet by this approval, there is emphatically no intention to imply any consent to the view that life is essentially different from matter and has itself no material manifestation, for this is not the fact. Between pure force or energy as such, and the gross physical world as such, there must be connecting grades or steps of force-substance; because it is obvious that pure force or energy can no more act upon pure matter than can heat or electricity produce effective work without intermediary links which are the machinery or engines combining the factors. Steam cannot be applied to work unless you have the proper mechanism for placing the energy of superheated water at the point of operation. An internal combustion-engine can do no work unless connected up with the proper mechanism at the points where results are desired. All this is known to everybody. Yet we do see physical things move, and to move the matter of which they are composed they must be energized. These things act, they do things, and when they are humans or beasts we say that they have 'life,' that they are 'animated' entities. But what fills the gulf between the gross physical matter and the intangible force or energy which moves it? There is in fact a vast scale of substances-forces decreasing in materiality between gross matter and pure energy; and each rung of this scale, each stage or step thereof, is called in our terminology a 'plane.' These planes provide the ladder of communication between pure force or energy on the one side and gross physical substance or matter on the other.
Matters exist, therefore, in all-various degrees of tenuity or ethereality, or concretion or density; but there is life per se in individuals manifesting as a vital fluid belonging to each one such grade or stage or plane of material manifestation -- and these vital fluids in their aggregate form what we may call the Universal Life, manifesting in appropriate form on any one plane and functioning therefore through the various matters of that plane.
This is but another way of saying, therefore, that the Universe is full of gods; and not merely of gods or highly spiritual beings alone -- call them by what name you will -- but of multi-myriad beings beneath them in all-various stages of evolutionary growth; and, furthermore, also of beings superior to gods in evolutionary growth. It is impossible in the Boundless to set limits or frontiers in either direction, for this would be a violation of the fundamental postulate of the Esoteric Philosophy.
When we raise our eyes at night, when they are no longer dimmed by the splendor of our own day-star, and see the sparkling worlds bestrewn over the violet dome, we also see what is popularly called 'empty space' in which these sparkling worlds are; but the Theosophist prefers to speak of this interstellar 'ether' as 'open space,' because in point of fact there is no real emptiness anywhere. What we call 'open space,' or, if you like, 'the cosmic ether,' is simply that aggregate, that vast and incomprehensibly great composite, of invisible worlds and substances and forces and energies which our imperfect physical, optical sense can take no cognisance of.
If we turn in the other direction to the infinitesimal spaces of the atom and the intra-atomic ether, we see the same natural principles of elements and figure operative there also. In these infinitesimal spaces the physical atom is builded more or less precisely on the model of our own physical universe -- for each atom is mostly open spaces, and only occasionally could we see scintillating electronic stars flashing upon our vision -- points of electric energy which our modern scientists call electrons, and by other names.
But what do we mean when we speak of our Universe -- our own Home-Universe, which is only one of many such Universes; for in point of strict fact, there is a quasi-infinite number of such Universes? We mean the Galaxy, the Milky Way: all that is contained within the encircling zone of that wide-flung belt of thousands of millions of stars, among which our own sun is a relatively insignificant member. Astronomers tell us that the Milky Way is more or less like a lentil in shape or a thin watch; (197) and they say that this Galactic aggregate of stellar bodies is so enormous in physical extent that light, which travels 186,000 miles or more in a human second, would take 300,000 years to pass from one extremity of the diameter of the Galaxy to its other extremity -- in other words, through a plane traversing the middle portion of it; they also say that it is about 10,000 light-years in thickness. (198)
Now these Galactic spaces, themselves small when compared with still vaster kosmical relations, are nevertheless almost unimaginable expanses for easy human understanding; and they strongly suggest that the entire Galactic System is but one of many similar kosmical units scattered over the illimitable fields of Space, thus making of even our Galaxy but a body of minor molecular extent by comparison. Yet the same system of vast open spaces, relatively speaking, bestrewn with atoms: and in the atoms themselves and with the same relative significance, vast spaces in which live electric points called electrons and so forth: prevails in the infinitesimal world, as above pointed out.
It would therefore most certainly seem that in this really sublime and most suggestive conception we find the principles of the teaching of the Esoteric Tradition that Nature -- using the word here in the grandest sense -- repeats herself everywhere throughout her own structure, and is builded and operates strictly throughout on analogical principles. "As above, so below; as below, so above."
As Emerson so beautifully says:
Atom from atom yawns as far
As moon from earth, or star from star. (199)
How did Emerson get this idea when ultra-modern scientific teachings and conceptions regarding the constitution of matter and its atomic structure, were in his time perfectly unknown, if not from the whisperings or inspiration of his own inner god?
Consider some of the suns whose tiny scintillating points our eyes may descry on any clear night -- cosmic atoms indeed, whose glorious splendors our imperfect sense of sight reports to us as merely scintillating points of light. Yet what in fact are these suns? Some of them are 'dwarfs' but some of them are 'giants,' or indeed 'titans,' in volume; yet these titan suns, to beings constructed on a vastly larger pattern than we are, would be very small, possibly microscopic; and again, vastly larger than those enormous suns appear to us, would they appear to beings whom we humans would consider and properly consider to be of infinitesimal dimensions.
Our own Sun in its physical dimensions and by comparison with others greater than it, may be called a dwarf-sun. Its diameter is stated to be but 866,500 miles. It, too, is a kosmic atom of its kind, and just as every atom of infinitesimal size, our sun is ensouled by its own spiritual-psychic-'life-atom' or Monad of stellar character. Now let us turn to view an example of a giant sun, to the star Arcturus. This sun is indeed a giant, 21,000,000 miles in diameter: a giant when compared with the diameter of our own Sun of 866,500 miles. Yet this stellar giant, Arcturus, is an infant in comparison with Betelgeuze, the diameter of which is more than ten times larger, reckoned at 215,000,000 human miles; and Betelgeuze would practically fill the orbit of Mars of our own Solar System if we could place it there. Our own Sun, in comparison with it, if we could place them drawn to scale on a sheet of paper, would appear as little more than a pin-prick or pinpoint, and Betelgeuze would have to be represented by a circle 250 times as large. But what is Betelgeuze in size, in comparison with the titan-star, Antares of 400,000,000 human miles in diameter -- and by much more than would be required to fill the entire orbit of Mars. Antares, in fact, has a diameter which is reckoned at 450 times that of our Sun.
What then are these suns? Each one is a cosmic atom, a part of a vast cosmic body corporate in which it moves and lives and has its being, more or less exactly as the atoms of the physical body live within that body and help to build the matter of which it is made. Yet each, whether sun or atom, is a living being itself, the maker and giver of all life to the minor lives dependent on its existence.
This is one aspect or phase of the Theosophical conception of Relativity, as taught in the Esoteric Philosophy, which Theosophical relativity-teaching covers vast ranges of philosophical thought, involving indeed the whole range of Universal or Cosmic Nature. The modern scientific relativity-theory, as elaborated by Einstein and his admirers, is but a mathematical and quasi-philosophical adumbration, a reaching out for, an attempt after, a more or less blind groping for, the Archaic Doctrine, ages upon ages agone pushed to its ultimate logical limits in religious, philosophical, and scientific research by the great Sages of the past, and which aspect of the Archaic Doctrine we call, adopting an old Sanskrit philosophical term, a phase of the 'Doctrine of Maya.' This word Maya, popularly translated 'illusion,' when briefly and simply explained, means that we humans do not see the Universe as it actually is, but that we cognise it only as our senses report it back to us; and that there is a fundamental and eternal Reality behind things -- or Realities, if the word be preferred -- of which all the phenomenal Universe or Universes are but transitory expressions, however long-enduring in time, and therefore are properly to be studied under the guise of relations, or as being relatives -- relative to each other, yet each and all expressing differentiated aspects or 'productions' of the Reality behind and within.
In the Orient, as for instance in the Vedanta-philosophy of Hindusthan, this conception of cosmic as well as individual illusion is likewise called Maya, the meaning there also being that the Universe as we see it is an illusory presentation or, in other words, that we do not see it as it actually IS. This idea is fundamental in all archaic Oriental thinking. It was equally known in the Hither East and to all philosophers of the Mediterranean nations, at least as a reasonable theory, and is a fundamental postulate in the Theosophical Philosophy. Our ultra-modern scientists today are beginning to tell us more or less precisely the same thing -- at least inferentially, indirectly, and by skilfully elaborated scientific deduction.
The main stumbling-block in the way of the acceptance of this grand idea by European philosophers and thinkers in the past, has been the psychological conviction under which they labored that the physical universe contains certain absolutes such as time and space, and therefore that space and time and substance are 'real things' in themselves, all working together according to some unknown 'absolute Cause,' as they expressed it, behind all, and thus producing forth the Universe as our imperfect senses cognise it to be. (200)
In closing the reflexions, philosophical, scientific, and otherwise, which comprise the bulk of the matter in the present chapter, one may add to them the concluding thought by way of a summary, that the tendency of ultra-modern scientific thinking seems to be a steady and continuous approach or approximation to certain fundamental or essential postulates or axioms of the Esoteric Philosophy or Esoteric Tradition. The idea now seeming to gain headway in scientific circles that the entire physical universe, is, when all is said, distinctly illusory in character, so far as merely human conceptions go, is typically of the substance of the Esoteric Doctrine; and only the gods know how far this idea will lead intuitive scientists of our day behind the Veil if they pursue it faithfully into its farther reaches, undismayed by what must be to them the startling novelty of the new regions of thought into which they are thus led.
When we consider also the very just and inspiring idea that many modern scientific thinkers now have of the nature of ultimate or primordial causation, and of the essence of things, both of which these men ascribe to the substance and functions and operations of Cosmic Mind, one has real cause for pausing in contemplative thought and wondering just how far this latter conviction will lead the scientific world. With the Universe appearing as illusory, and the substance of the Universe arising in Cosmic Mind and therefore governed by the attributes and qualities thereof, the esotericist sees in these two scientific conceptual postulates alone a relatively complete breaking down of the barriers brought about by the labors and deductions of the men of science themselves, which have hitherto separated Esotericism from Science and made the latter so reluctant even to consider the former's existence as other than the imaginative phantasy of peculiar people.
FOOTNOTES:
177. The point in illustration here is not that the savage or barbarian having these terms in his language understands them, but that he does not understand them, since they are words or names retained from pre-history in his language, and which in his sight are either entirely inexplicable or are words used in tribal mystical ceremonies, or in tribal initiations, or in their mythology as signifying their divinities, or the powers or tools or instruments of the gods. The words remain, but their real significance has been utterly forgotten.
It is, however, to be remembered that such linguistic fossils are of extremely uncommon occurrence when dealing with things or events of a purely physical or material character; but such fossils are very numerous when dealing with more abstract things, such as pertain to philosophy, religion, mysticism, and the like. The reason is that words dealing with physical things are more likely to die and pass out of currency almost with the passing of the things themselves when no longer in use; whereas words of religion or mysticism remain. (return to text)
178. Epistle IX, par. 3. (return to text)
179. "It is plain that the physicist is becoming deeply involved in metaphysics . . . . The physicist night have gone for advice to the philosophers, but in that case he should have become more confused than ever, since philosophy has followed no definite method and is for the most part in the grip of the old physics which has now broken down. We may hope that out of the new physics may evolve a more intelligent metaphysics." -- Three Interpretations of the Universe, pp. 168-9 (Macmillan, 1934). Quoted by the kind permission of the author, J. E. Boodin, Professor of Philosophy, University of California, at Los Angeles. (return to text)
180. "Mathematical physicists have enjoyed the atmosphere of mystification which their complicated formulae have made possible. They have informed us that we must not try to make any sensible models of the primary level of nature. We must think of it merely as mathematical waves or curves of probability. We must not ask what the waves are waves of. They are just waves in the equations. Recently there has been a reaction from this mystification. Physicists are beginning to recognise . . . that our mathematical models, however complicated, are merely symbolic statements of the data we derive from sense-experience . . . . The chemists have held aloof from the mathematical orgy and have tried to make workable the more imaginative models of Rutherford and Bohr . . . . A recent experiment by Jesse W. M. Dumond at the California Institute of Technology shows that the earlier imaginative model of the atom by Rutherford and Bohr contains important truth." -- Three Interpretations of the Universe, p. 159. Quoted by the kind permission of the author, J. E. Boodin. (return to text)
181. Lucifer, April, 1890, article 'Kosmic Mind,' Vol. VI, p. 89. (return to text)
182. Op. Cit., pp. 89-90. (return to text)
183. Op. cit., pp. 90-1. (return to text)
184. In passing, it seems appropriate here to allude to a beautiful and thoughtful book, Plant Autographs and Their Revelations, written by one of the most remarkable scientific men and thinkers that have appeared in the last century or so, the Hindu scientist, Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose. Before his time it was commonly thought that plants were not animate entities; that they had movement and substance, indeed, but that they had no individualized life or 'soul'; that they had no actual circulatory system; that they had no nerves; that they had no feelings. Indeed, as regards a circulatory stem, it was thought that such could not exist in a plant-body, even in the face of the seasonal mounting and descent of plant-sap, which truly marvelous phenomenon no scientist has ever explained because no one has ever understood it -- and such explanation as might have been made from such knowledge as was then to be had, was over-saddled by the dogmatic conviction that the human beings and the beasts were the only ones possessing life and more or less voluntary action.
Now this remarkable Hindu proves through his exceedingly clever apparatus, electrical and otherwise, for the study of plant-life and for recording the pulse-beat and functions of life in plants, that plants have indeed nerves and are plant-conscious -- not animal-conscious nor human-conscious, but plant-conscious; that they can be poisoned, and cured through the administration of the proper antidote; that they become tired; that they must have rest; that they have a circulatory system, and a nervous system also; that they are very much alive, in other words. The apparatus for this most fascinating study was invented by Sir Jagadis C. Bose himself, and great credit is due to him, not merely for that, but for his method in applying his apparatus to the study and consequent explanation of the circulatory and nervous channels in the plant's body. (return to text)
185. There is another still more recent conception of the structural character of the physical atom, still more ultramodern than was Bohr's. It is due to the work of physicists such as Schroedinger, de Broglie, and others, whose opinions may be found in any work of modern physics.
To the Theosophist, the newer conception of the internal structure and functions of the atom is as interesting and temporarily as acceptable as was the Bohr-atom. Either structure is in essence an electrical entity, whether it be diffuse as Schroedinger said, or more strictly patterned after the manner of our solar system as Bohr said. The point of importance is that the composition of the atom, whatever its structure and internal organization may be, is electrical, i. e., an entity builded of forces, expressing themselves as matter; this is strictly in line, as far as it goes, with the teaching of the Esoteric Philosophy. (return to text)
186. See footnote No. 180, page 408. (return to text)
187. Vide The Architecture of the Universe, pp. 56-7 (1934). (return to text)
188. The frequent reference to Einstein and his Relativity Theory as found in Theosophical writings does not imply a wholesale acceptance of this theory, and especially not of the mathematical deductions drawn therefrom. It is the fundamental idea of relation, or of relativities, that the Theosophist finds to be true in Nature, and therefore equally true to the teachings of the Esoteric Tradition. Yet the Theosophical student has always envisaged the high probability that after the Einsteinian theory has run its course, or has had a certain vogue, some new mathematician will come to the fore with another theory, perhaps more novel even than that which Einstein evolved, and this new theory would either greatly modify the relativity theory of Einstein, or perhaps even supplant it because of the newer theory's superior scientific worth and accuracy in prediction and explanation.
Some such newer theory already seems to have come to birth, according to report, and is the mind-child of an Indian scientist and mathematician, Sir Shah Sulaiman, M. A., LL. D., who is Chief Justice of the High Court of Allahabad, India. This new mathematical prodigy -- the present writer here refers to the theory and not to the eminent Hindu whose child it is -- is stated to be more powerful in prediction and more accurate in explanation than is the theory of Einstein; and among other things it is claimed for it that the mathematical equations of this theory reduce to the equations of Newton as a first approximation and to those of Einstein as a second approximation.
As instances of its greater accuracy in prediction, it is stated that this new theory of Sir Shah Sulaiman foretells almost perfectly, if not perfectly, the amount of the shift of the Fraunhofer lines in the Sun's spectrum; and, as concerns the deflection of star-light as it passes close to the sun, this new theory is stated to be far greater in accuracy than is that of Einstein. (return to text)
189. In view of the confusion of ideas almost universally prevalent in scientific circles as well as in philosophical, a confusion with equal universality shared by the average 'man in the street,' concerning the nature of ether, or aether as the Theosophist prefers to write it, it may be as well to subjoin the following suggestions as aids to the thought of the reader or student.
The ether or ethers of scientific speculation of the nineteenth century, is by many thoughtful scientists today discarded as an outworn or outmoded idea; and not a few of the most progressive men of science today seriously question whether there is such a thing as the cosmic ether. Certain ones of these ultra-modern scientists, such as Eddington, for example, are inclined to look upon the terms 'ether' and 'space' as interchangeable -- and Eddington is even now beginning to write 'aether' after the manner of the ancient Greeks.
In strict accuracy it is quite wrong and without other foundation of fact than mere theory to suppose that space and aether are one and the same thing or identic, at least this is the fact in the view of the Esoteric Philosophy, in which Aether, cosmically speaking, is the material substratum of manifestation or differentiation or rather substantial substratum thereof, and therefore is virtually identic with what in the Ancient Wisdom is technically called Akasa or even what is almost the same thing, Mulaprakriti or Root-Nature, or Root-Space. Now it is obvious that in any particular cosmic hierarchy, the Mulaprakriti or Akasa thereof, otherwise its Aether, fills all the space of the said hierarchy and therefore is to be considered as virtually identical with the space of that hierarchy, being the Mother-substance of the said cosmic hierarchy.
Yet as these Cosmic Hierarchies are literally innumerable in the bosom of the Boundless and are therefore to be considered as infinite in number, the respective aethers of these incomputably great numbers of Cosmic Hierarchies are to be considered as all contained within the still more incomprehensibly vast SPACE of Boundless Infinitude. But this does not mean that SPACE is therefore an 'infinite emptiness' or mere spacial containment, in other words that SPACE is but a frontierless container; for this would be philosophically inaccurate and therefore faulty both in conception and in the reasoning flowing from the conception.
SPACE is in fact the term used by the Esoteric Philosophy to signify the Boundless cosmic deeps themselves, without frontier, without beginning, without ending, being from eternity unto eternity; whereas the Cosmic Hierarchies as they appear in their cyclical manifestations bring forth by evolutional emanation from within themselves the fields of aether, which from inner up-surging impulses directed by cosmic intelligence develop forth the diversity of differentiation.
From the foregoing it should be clear that while aether for any comprised 'portion' of Space is co-extensive with the space of such comprised portion, the aether therefore is a production in and of the all-inclusive spacial deep of that hierarchy. Again, from the foregoing we are obliged to draw the philosophical deduction that space is virtually interchangeable as a term with what we may call Divinity -- not any 'one' divinity which would mean limitation, but the abstract frontierless and timeless DIVINITY of boundless duration and frontierless being.
The student of the Esoteric Philosophy smiles, yet smiles with sympathetic understanding, when he hears the 'ether' of science, whether accepted or rejected, described as a 'jelly' or when he hears attributes given unto it such as fluidity or rigidity, etc. What the scientists really mean when they speak of ether is truly the root-nature or Mulaprakriti or Mother-substance of any one cosmic plane, and of course our scientists mean the physical plane or physical world, for it is the only world they know anything about. As a matter of fact, there is a Mulaprakriti for every Cosmic Hierarchy, otherwise an aether Mulaprakriti for every Cosmic for every such hierarchy; and the 'ether' or 'ethers' of the science of the nineteenth century was or were merely the grossest and most material lees or dregs, sediment, so to speak, of the original Mulaprakriti of the Physical Cosmic Plane.
Still, there are signs that our forwards-looking and thoughtful scientists are beginning to have intuitions more closely approximating the teachings of the Esoteric Philosophy, as witnessed by some interesting statements on the matter of the ether made by Eddington in his most recent book, New Pathways in Science (1935).
The main thought for the reader therefore to bear in mind is that, as said above, every Cosmic Hierarchy has not only its primordial or general or cosmic aether, which is its Mulaprakriti or Akasa or Mother-substance, but that every one of the seven (or ten) Planes of such Hierarchy has as its root-substance or root-nature a subordinate aether of its own. All these subordinate aethers interblend. (return to text)
190. It is perhaps proper to call attention here to the fact, not so commonly recognised, even among Theosophists, that the manner of presenting the relation of Akasa and matter adopted in the text above, is, strictly speaking, inaccurate, and is followed only for purposes of easier illustration. In fact it is the Akasa which is the infinite sub-stance or spiritual substratum of all manifested being. What we humans call 'matter,' in all its manifold forms, is simply the lowest dregs or heaviest lees, so to speak, of Akasa. Thus, Akasa is but another name or term for what with equal technicality is called in the Esoteric Tradition, Mulaprakriti -- Root-Nature. Out of Akasa come forth all beings into manifestation, from within the boundless fields of Akasa itself in its multi-myriad degrees of spirituality, ethereality, or materiality; and back into the Akasa return all beings and things for their variously long periods of rest or recuperation, only to reissue forth therefrom anew when again the cycle of manifestation opens a new drama of life, whether Kosmic, Solar, or Planetary. (return to text)
191. The reader or student is earnestly advised and indeed warned to be on his guard during the perusal of the present work, against accepting too easily or too 'literally' -- as the popular phrase runs -- the words 'dense' or 'density,' and 'tenuous' or 'ethereal' as found in this and the following chapter and possibly in other places, where the varying stages of concretion of matter or substance are alluded to. This warning is given because of the extreme difficulty in finding in any modern European language terms adequate or sufficiently subtil to express exactly what is found in Nature's grades or stages of essential substance or of matter.
To illustrate: there is perhaps no word which is so vague, with such slight precision in significant definition, as is the word ether, because it has been used in science until recently to signify one thing, while Theosophists have used the same word to signify a similar but not identic thing; and in making an effort exactly to place the different stages or grades of substance or matter, adjectives have been used which, though giving an adumbration of the idea it is desired to express, are nevertheless feeble in conveying the thought. These adjectives are 'dense,' 'tenuous,' 'ethereal,' 'essential.'
Even modern science has never had any precisely exact understanding of the term 'ether' which it formerly used so commonly, and there was always a more or less diffuse or vague frontier of meaning surrounding this otherwise useful term.
In esotericism the difficulty is one thousandfold greater, for the simple reason that there are 'ethers' or substances in tenuous and ethereal conditions or states 'above' physical matter, and other 'ethers' in variously 'dense' or compacted states or conditions 'lower' or far grosser than physical matter is; yet the one term 'ethers,' just because it is conveniently vague yet suggestive, is applicable both 'above' and 'below' that cross-section of Nature which we call the plane of the physical sphere.
But this again is not a sufficient explanation of the difficulty. The 'ethers' below or grosser than the physical sphere, although in certain instances enormously denser and more complicated than is physical matter, nevertheless permeate physical matter and fill all its holes so to speak, precisely because physical matter has these 'holes' or intermolecular, interatomic, and interelectronic spaces or 'emptinesses.' It is just these 'holes' or 'emptinesses' which not merely are filled with these sub-physical 'ethers' but actually are these sub-physical ethers; and yet the most dense and compact and gross of our physical matters, such as lead or gold, etc., are permeated and all their interatomic spaces filled with these ethers, which by analogy we may call either 'dense' or 'tenuous' according to the manner of considering the situation.
The sub-physical 'ethers' to our ordinary sense-apparatus are so far outside of the sense of touch, for instance, that being unable to touch them directly, they seem to us to be extremely thin or tenuous, just exactly as the fingers are unable to 'touch' or grasp air, and yet atmospheric air is a relatively 'dense' gas.
The matter therefore, as may be intuited by the thoughtful student from the preceding paragraphs, is one which is extremely difficult adequately to describe; and it is for this reason that in order to convey this, that, or some other viewpoint which may at the moment be in mind, the same particular 'ether' or 'ethers' are indifferently described as being 'tenuous' or 'dense,' according to each case. Take a particularly difficult thought as a striking illustration: consciousness or mind-stuff, or thought, is so fine and subtil, so tenuous and ethereal, that philosophy and religion from time immemorial have looked upon it or them, as being, cosmically speaking, the essence of everything, permeating everything, washing through everything, or underlying and inhering in everything; and this usage is fully justified because it is, abstractly, perfectly true; but let us likewise note just here that if Cosmic Mind or Consciousness is thus all-permeant, and the essence of everything, it must be more minute, more infinitesimal, than the most compact, dense, concreted entity that it is possible to figurate in the imagination; and therefore although it is so essentially and cosmically tenuous, mere logic compels us to add that it is infinitely more dense, because underlying it, than even the ether of modern science, which is '2000 million times that of lead,' i. e., two billion times denser than lead.
Or, to phrase the same striking paradox in other words, Cosmic Consciousness is Cosmic Force, and force and matter are fundamentally identic; and this force is 'denser' and more 'compact' than the densest matter is and yet it is incomparably more 'tenuous' and more ethereal -- and this precisely because it is both.
The author hopes therefore that with this note of warning, the reader will not take amiss nor stumble over in perplexity any statement made in this work about the 'ether' or its 'density' or the 'tenuousness' of substance and matter, which he may meet, and which may seem to him to be statements involving contradictions.
Finally, it should be pointed out that this difficulty illustrates very clearly somewhat at least of the enormous philosophical import of the archaic teaching of the Esoteric Philosophy about the maya or mahamaya -- Illusion, cosmic or otherwise -- which comprises so important a part of its teachings, and which bears directly on this difficulty itself. The entire Universe surrounding us is in all its phases of manifestation, high or low, essentially mayavi, or illusory, to us humans; which does not mean that the Universe is non-existent per se, which would be an absurd supposition, but that we percipient and intelligent beings do not understand it as it is in itself, an sich as the Germans say. (return to text)
192. My Philosophy, p. 24 (1933). (return to text)
193. The esotericist feels compelled to register an emphatic objection to the idea contained in this word 'unmodified,' although the balance of the citation would seem to be such as one can gladly welcome as a new and far-sighted contribution to the general theme here under discussion. The point that the 'ether of science' of which Sir Oliver Lodge here writes, far from being 'unmodified,' is in every possible sense of the word already enormously modified or changed as compared with primordial spiritual world-stuff, otherwise Mulaprakriti or Akasa. The ether of science is so highly modified that it is but one degree only less material, i. e., more tenuous, than is physical matter; for the ether of science really is the dregs or lees of Akasa, and physical matter can properly be considered to be these lees or dregs aggregated or solidified. (return to text)
194. Ibid. (return to text)
195. 1596-1650. (return to text)
196. Italicized here for emphasis. (return to text)
197. Such is the shape commonly ascribed to the Galaxy by astronomers of the last generation. More modern research and investigation has changed the Galactic spacial figure somewhat, so that our ultra-modern astronomers are of the opinion that the Galaxy is more or less the shape of a cart-wheel, a more or less flat body with protuberant globular center which in a cart-wheel is the hub.
A number of admirable photographs taken by the magnificent telescopes of the present day prove that a large number of extragalactic systems approximate to the cartwheel shape very closely, as is instanced by the nebula NGC 4565 found in Berenice's Hair.
It is of course obvious enough that such a galactic or constellational figure or form represents a fairly late stage in the history of a Galaxy, such as our own Galaxy is, and consequently it must have been preceded by other shapes differing somewhat from the cart-wheel shape; thus in this manner the astronomers trace back the different forms of galactic or constellational evolution to what they now suppose to be a primordial form in Kosmic Space -- i. e., a vast and slowly rotating mass of highly tenuous cosmic gas. The Esoteric Philosophy runs parallel with this idea to a certain extent, but would insist upon the fact that the mere tracing of the changing structure or form of a galaxy, while interesting enough, tells us little or nothing of the causal factors in the galactic evolution which are of a spiritual, intellectual, and psychical character. The Galaxy, like every other entity in the Universe, is an individual builded up of minor individuals; so that the component minor individuals enclosed within the surrounding life-sphere of the Grand Individual thus form a hierarchical system, with its own spiritual-intellectual-psychical swabhava or individuality. (return to text)
198. The above estimates of 300,000 light-years and 10,000 light-years, are, of course, tentative, but, within only a year or two of the writing of this chapter, seem to meet with scientific approval as being fairly accurate estimates. Time may, or may not, change them, as knowledge of the matter becomes greater. (return to text)
199. Fragments on Nature and Life. (return to text)
200. The reader or student may perhaps wonder that little or nothing has been said in the course of the present work about a theory of ultra-modern science which seems to have attained some large vogue of scientific popularity, to wit, the notion or theory of "an expanding universe," or, even more extraordinarily quaint, the notion of "expanding space."
The reason is that the present writer has not considered it of sufficient importance to give it any locus standi in a work dealing with the teachings of the archaic Wisdom-Religion, although the theory certainly is most quaintly interesting as a specimen of the manner in which ultra-modern scientific mathematicians are growing unconsciously both subtil and abstrusely metaphysical. It is an exceedingly good sign of the times in one way, provided that these speculative theories or theoretic speculations are consistently remembered to be just that, and not facts of nature; although the energetic claim is always proffered that modern metaphysical scientific speculation is based on observational facts alone. Yet this claim is obviously untrue. Mathematics, per se, cannot prove anything, although it is one of man's finest and most subtil methods of reasoning, and will return to the mathematician exactly what he puts into it. Mathematics, therefore, brings answers through correct reasoning, concerning what has previously been laid down as premisses or postulates.
It is really interesting to observe how some of these mathematical theorists lean so greatly upon their theory or theories. Supposedly, science is co-ordinated knowledge based on facts of observation; and from such facts of observation, theory or hypothesis is supposedly deduced or born. But a great many scientists today seem to think that if they openly state a theory, that theory should guide the understanding, or deductions, to be drawn from observational facts. Thus the always genial and frequently humorous Eddington, one of the most eminent and kindly of modern scientific thinkers, so believes, apparently, as is shown in his last book, New Pathways in Science, (1935), p. 211.
This is really curious logic. There can be no scientific theory without observational facts; theory is born from the observed facts. Yet according to the above notion, the theory born from the facts must be turned about to decide whether the observational facts themselves accord with truth -- seemingly a curious fallacy in reasoning and embodying a vicious circle. The theorist in such cases gets all the profit from both beginning and end of his thinking, and poor Mother Nature has to do the best she can in the outer cold.
Pretty much the same confusion in highly metaphysical 'stunts' of reasoning seems to have given birth to the idea of the so-called "expanding universe," or, worse still, to the notion of "expanding space." The present writer speaks subject to correction by the great men of modern science, but if he understands the situation, the main observational fact which brought about the birth of the theory of an "expanding universe," is the shift to the red of certain lines in the spectrum of far distant stellar or galactic astronomical objects. This the present writer believes is called the Doppler effect, meaning that if a distant astronomical object is approaching us there will be a shift towards the violet-end of the spectrum; and contrariwise, if the distant celestial object is receding from us, the shift of the spectral lines will be towards the red. Admitting the truth of this, it is risky to say the least, to suppose that because the observed shifting of these spectral lines to the red is the greater the farther the celestial body is, therefore the farther the celestial body is the more rapidly is it receding from us; because it is quite possible to suppose, equally by theory or hypothesis, that there may be other causes producing this shift.
For instance, the so-called 'constant' of the invariant velocity of light: this today is one of the clauses in the modern scientific creed; yet one may suggest with some confidence that the future may show that light itself is greatly affected by passing through the vast distances of interstellar space and meeting on its way even the thin and tenuous interstellar ether. Query: Can light itself suffer retardation when passing through the incomprehensibly immense distances of intergalactic space? Why not? To consider the velocity of light as invariant, i. e., as a universal constant, may be sufficient for all ordinary astronomical purposes, but the present writer is one who believes that the velocity of light is no such universal invariant constant as is supposed. Hence the shifting towards the red end of the spectrum may be due to change in the light itself, as regards either diminution of velocity, or, possibly, an as yet unknown fact of absorption; and consequently the suggestion is made that some future day will bring about a change in the present theory of light. Either one or both of these suggested causes, or something like them, the future may show to be true.
The recession of the galaxies of 'outer space' is stated to be proceeding at a rate of speed strictly proportionate to the distances of the galaxies from us. Thus a galaxy 120 million light-years from us, by this quaint modern theory, is supposed to have a speed of recession of 12,000 miles a second. Now, suppose we continue with the idea: at 2000 million light-years distance, we should, by this quaint theory, expect to see a galaxy receding at 200,000 miles a second. This is a speed a good deal greater than the speed of light itself, which is supposed to be a constant, and the maximum possible speed in our universe of relativities -- according to the modern relativity-theory. How about it?
The scientific 'reserves' are here rushed to the front in the shape of the renowned Einsteinian theory of finite space which cannot have distance beyond a certain amount, and by thus -- always in theory -- making the universe finite or closing it up, it is obvious, by theory, that light itself cannot wander too far. Convenient to say the least!
But even these 'reserves,' due to the fertility of the Einsteinian scientific imagination, seem to be dissolving into intangible mist -- or mystification -- because, if recent reports which have appeared in the press are to be given credence, Einstein himself, a truly great scientific mind, is stated to be no longer certain that 'space' is 'finite,' but that it may be infinite, after all. The theory of light considered as an invariant cosmic constant, also, has just recently received some severe jolts. (See the report of the French scientist Dr. P. Salet, to the French Academy of Sciences, and the latest measurements of light-velocity made in 1933 at Pasadena, California.) Evidently, since the supposed expanding universe theory is based upon one important observational fact only, the shifting towards the red-end of the spectrum of light received from distant galactic universes, and as light as an invariant constant is now being questioned, it is clear that the theory of an 'expanding universe' or, worse still, of 'expanding space' reposes on the shakiest of foundations.
Thus it is that one theory is made to bolster another: observational facts are forced into the Procrustean bed of theories born from their own bosom, and we thus return to the beginning of our reasoning just like Einstein's "curvature of space" -- we are just where we began. The present writer prefers to believe that the theory of light as a constant or invariant, is merely an interesting theory; but that light like everything else in the universe, is relative, in pretty much the sense of the relativity-theory of Einstein himself, and therefore that light is not an absolute or a universal and invariant constant, but that it is subject to change or changes in its relations with other things.
Nor must it be forgotten that the so-called "observational facts," on which the theory of the "expanding universe" is founded, are indeed facts, but facts from which deductions have been drawn in order to form metaphysical mathematical theories which, undoubtedly, time itself will show to be fallacious in more than one direction. Perhaps it is just because the whole idea is so speculative and theoretic, that our modern scientific mathematicians are so ultra-sensitive about their ideas being called 'metaphysical,' for in philosophy shaky metaphysics of this type would be run out of camp in short order.
The present writer submits the foregoing observations with the hope that the argument will be understood and that it will not be considered presumptuous for a layman to criticize the 'mind-born' children of scientific professionals. At any rate, of one thing we are sure: that, deny it if they will, repudiate it as they please, the numbers of men in the scientific camps who are becoming with every passing year more and more 'mystical,' are growing constantly larger. The truth is that modern scientific mathematical speculation is shot through and through with a curious modern mysticism originating in the minds of the mathematicians themselves, although the present writer is well aware how greatly words like 'mysticism' and 'mystical' are disliked by the very minds which are most inclined to trust to it. Strange paradox in human psychology! (return to text)