Copyright © 1977 by Theosophical University Press. All rights reserved.
There is a cleansing wind sweeping over the human mind in our days, a breath, as it were, emanating from the spirit within; and the minds of men are beginning to respond to the messages which this wind is bringing to the understanding.
The ranks of the scientists also are as a matter of course feeling the call of these messages from the inner worlds. They sense the incoming of a new spirit, and in consequence their theories of the cosmos are changing very greatly from what they were some years ago.
In the building up of the scientific theories, which in our days are more or less outworn, the great researchers into the mysteries of physical nature did their best to interpret what they had discovered, in terms and formulae which might appeal to men's understanding; but it was like a putting of new wine into old wineskins, the old wineskins being the prejudices and the ideas which had been inherited by all Europeans from preceding centuries of thought prevailing in the Occident.
These new ideas have been fermenting now for some three hundred years more or less, and are today bursting the old wineskins in which they were confined. Old prejudices and ideas, once thought to be real interpretations of nature, are now cast aside as totally inadequate.
This fermentation of ideas is proceeding today, not only among our scientific researchers, but is being felt by mankind generally. It is significant of the breaking forth of a portion of the mighty powers of the human spirit, and actually signifies a wider opening of the understanding. It is, on the whole, a good thing; and, despite the rather numerous and perhaps regrettable sidelines of action we may be led into, the general line of motion is in advance.
Some of the newer discoveries in physical science are indeed remarkable, and are beyond any possible anticipation that men might have had of the future at the turn of the century. I do not allude merely to material inventions. They in their way are wonderful enough, but I allude here rather to the activity in speculation or theoretic thought which our greater scientists are occupied with; I mean in brief their attempts to find a somewhat adequate explanation of things not within the framework of the old materialistic theories, and thereby to formulate and build a newer and better philosophy in and of life, which really amounts to saying a new religio-philosophical science.
But the giving birth to this newer system of thought is by no means without confusion, and what are, to many, rather severe birthpangs. And there are other difficulties which our scientists encounter, barriers which prevent the free spirit of impartial investigation. These difficulties are not merely in uncovering the secrets of nature and in their interpretation, difficult as this work unquestionably is; they are faced also with difficulties of another kind. Brave men as they are, many of them, often they dare not risk telling the truth about all that they know or suspect, nor in some cases what they have discovered, and the far-reaching conclusions which such discoveries often compel them to draw. Do not think that this is meant as an imputation of moral weakness; conditions sometimes are exceedingly hard and unfair to these earnest men.
Let me quote here the words of Dr. Byron Cummings, professor of archaeology at the University of Arizona, during the course of an address delivered on New Year's day, 1926, before the convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Full investigation and careful tabulation of results have too often been retarded by the storm of ridicule and abuse that has been heaped upon the heads of those who brought to light anything unusual. Some of our leading anthropologists have condemned without a hearing facts that are really incontrovertible, and good men have been hounded from the profession by others who happened to hold the center of the stage at the time. A few years ago, some U.S. geologists were making investigations in southern Arizona. . . . [I] suggested to the speaker that it would be fine if be and his associates would continue investigations in this old lake bed until they uncovered some fossil remains of man. The answer came back quick and straight: "Not on your life! If we find any human bones in these fossil beds, we'll bury them instanter, pack our luggage and ask to be transferred to some other locality. We are not going to risk our professional reputation by finding any Pleistocene man." -- "Problems of a Scientific Investigator," Science, vol. 63, Jan.-June 1926, p. 322
The Pleistocene epoch is the geologic period which immediately preceded our own or Recent epoch, according to scientific chronology. Dr. Cummings continued as follows:
It seems a crime to some to bring to light anything new, anything that contradicts our published theories. Men uncover the bones of Pleistocene animals in California, Arizona, and many other places; and the finds are accepted without question; but if a human bone or implement is encountered in the same or similar strata, its presence must be accounted for in some other way.
And why? For the reason that the minds of our researchers are still under the influence of a dying, if not wholly dead, scheme of theoretic evolution. And that scheme is not true.
Yet despite the difficulties that are encountered, it is a very good thing that this change that I speak of is taking place, because if we are to gain some real knowledge of the things that are, some comprehension of reality, we must have a free and untrammeled understanding. Prejudices must be cast aside from us entirely; and the only things that we should hold to are those which have stood the test of time through unnumbered centuries.
What are these things that endure and to which we should hold? They are the fundamental principles of ethics, the fundamental principles of thought and action which the human intellect instinctively recognizes as founded on truth -- these never vary. It may be that our understanding or comprehension of them, or rather our interpretation of them, may vary from age to age, but those great ethical principles remain the same forever.
Similarly, the principle, that what can be expressed in a logical category as based upon a fact of nature should be understood as an intellectual formulation, is a correct rule to follow. This is vastly different from taking such a fact or facts of the cosmos, and forcing them to fit into preconceived theories or speculations that one or another researcher may have evolved from his own mind, in an attempt -- honest doubtless, but an attempt only -- at explaining the mysteries of nature.
The scientists themselves are the first to recognize this modern change of spirit; and may we not say that this readiness to recognize and follow the new shows an expanding consciousness, a new life, a new spirit of growth? It is a good thing, for when an idea becomes so fixed, so crystallized, in the mind that almost nothing can displace it, then indeed there is the beginning of a new "church," a new saddling upon the human spirit of still another religious or scientific system. It matters little whether this system or church be a religious or a scientific one, for the human spirit is crippled equally in either case.
We may indeed speak of a scientific church arising under such circumstances. But if such an unfortunate event were to happen, then the scientific ideas ruling such an organized body would make it as dogmatic and as perilous as any dogmatic religion that the world has ever seen, perhaps even more so, because these scientists have stood to us and still stand to the mass of men as the interpreters of the mysteries of the cosmos, and in some vague sense as high priests of truth.
This awakening of the mentality of men to the wonderful secrets of nature dates very largely from the last quarter of the 19th century, from about 1875, when H. P. Blavatsky came to the Western world. She it was who re-enunciated the wondrous philosophy-religion-science -- Theosophy -- acting as the messenger of those sages or great seers who hold in their keeping a formulation of the truths of nature which they have put together and tested in age after age, searching out the roots of things, and following those roots through trunk and branch and twig, until every detail of what they began to look for was found, every detail as far as our present universe goes.
The theosophist, however, claims no monopoly of truth. No one who knows anything of theosophy could accuse an honest adherent of making any such extravagant claim. But we do claim that there is a formulation of the mysteries of being, which each one of us understands according to his capacities.
It may be of interest to state here that the entire structure of modern scientific thinking, apart from the truths of nature brought to light by research and investigation, is grounded upon ancient thought, mostly that of ancient Greece. The atomic and biological theories of those early thinkers, the metaphysical and philosophical conceptions which those great men of olden times left on record in their different literatures, have come down to us of modern times, and have provided the bases of thought above spoken of.
It was during the awakening from the dark night of the early medieval period that these old conceptions brought into existence new ideas in that benighted epoch, gave thinking men new out-sights and in-sights, new visions into the nature of the universe surrounding them.
It was on these old and inspiring ideas that, for instance, the early European chemists based the theory of their science as being founded on atoms, and the manifold action and interaction of those atoms. They took over the old ideas, sometimes misunderstanding them, but nevertheless they were there -- the old vital thoughts -- illuminating, constructive, awakening the scientific imagination and the intuitions of those men. They did not have to begin absolutely anew or from the ground up. They took those old thoughts which they knew had been proved good and sound by generations of great ancient thinkers before them, and they constructed around those ideas what have become in our modern times respectively the science of biology, the science of chemistry, the science of physics, and many more such.
The greatest thought of all, however, lying in the background of these old conceptions, has escaped the perception of modern thinkers. And what is this greatest thought of all? It is the absolute unity of the universe, the absolute oneness of being, the full and all-comprehensive nature of the cosmos, as being, every part of it, interlinked with every other part, so that nothing is vagrant or estranged from any other part, but all hang together. And because the universe is obviously such (for we know nothing to the contrary of it), naturally the mentality of man, his intellectual faculties, man being a child of this universe, follow the same course of necessity.
There is but one cosmos. There can be but one fundamental truth about that cosmos; and that truth is itself expressed in the formulation in logical categories of the facts of nature which we know, and the further facts of nature which we learn by investigation and research, and which fit into their proper places in the temple of science, as into niches waiting to receive them. That is the grand conception which comprises the fundamental basis of all theosophical thinking.
There is an immense difference, however, between an established fact of nature, of being, and a hypothesis, a theory, a speculation, a scientific fad. Facts we accept; theories we accept or reject according as we feel, or as we know, that they are true or false, as the case may be. So then when we compare theosophy and modern science, we do it solely on the ground of established facts; because after all, that is what true science is -- the classification and the establishment as actualities of the facts of nature.
It is interesting to watch the progress of modern science and see how closely it is approaching to certain truths clearly enunciated or plainly hinted at in the theosophical philosophy. Let me enumerate some of these:
This statement, in its philosophical, scientific, and religious reaches, is more or less accepted by the greatest men of science today, at least in principle.
It should be remembered, however, that when we speak of the "unreal nature" of the physical universe, we do not mean that the physical universe does not exist. We mean first, that our understanding of it is unreal, because we do not know it in its essence; and also that considered in its phenomenal aspects it is not a fundamental reality, because it is temporal, changing -- effectual, not causal.
These last two items have now been fully admitted by philosophical scientific thinkers and researchers.
Modern science has not yet come to the point where it is willing to acknowledge that magnetism, the alter ego of electricity, is particular or corpuscular, as it now admits electricity is.
Much of this is now practically admitted by the scientists, at least in principle. All of it would be fully admitted were there some alternative explanation that they could accept. This they have not yet discovered or evolved from their understanding of the facts before them.
I could readily lay before you additional instances of foreshadowings of other facts of nature and of universal being, which are now on the highroad of acceptance by the scientific leaders of our time. However, let me mention just one more, before passing on. I refer to a statement by a British scientist, Sir Oliver Lodge, of a new theory of vision. It was to the effect that vision consisted of two factors: light radiating from an object, which entered the physical eye, and also a ray from within the man himself, which left the eye and centered upon the object. In other words, what appears to have been in Sir Oliver's mind was the existence of a crosscurrent of etheric energy, both together comprising conscious vision -- either one lacking, then vision failed.
Now this theory is but the old Platonic and Aristotelian doctrine of vision which was likewise accepted by most Greek and Roman philosophers; and it seems to be very largely the theory of vision as held in other parts of the ancient civilized world.
Much discussion takes place in these days in regard to the work of the scientists -- both for and against. Let me quote what was said by the Bishop of Ripon (E. A. Burroughs) in an address given at Leeds, in England (1927), at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Certain ideas in this clergyman's address are very fine in some respects, but on other points we are inevitably compelled to differ from him. He said:
We could get on very much more happily if aviation, wireless, television and the like were advanced no further than at present.
Dare I even suggest, at the risk of being lynched by some of my hearers, that the sum of human happiness, outside of scientific circles, would not necessarily be reduced if for, say, ten years every physical and chemical laboratory were closed and the patient and resourceful energy displayed in them transferred to recovering the lost art of getting together and finding a formula for making the ends meet in the scale of human life?
It would give 99 per cent. of us who are non-scientific some chance of assimilating the revolutionary knowledge which in the first quarter of this century 1 per cent. of the explorers have acquired. The 1 per cent. would have leisure to read up on one another's work; and all of us might go meanwhile in tardy quest of that wisdom which is other than and greater than knowledge, and without which knowledge may be a curse.
As things stand today, we could get on without further additions for the present to our knowledge of nature. We cannot get on without a change of mind in man. -- As reported in The Literary Digest, Oct. 1, 1927
Let me point out, first of all, that it is not knowledge itself, but the abuse of knowledge, which is wrong; and abuse will inevitably follow when knowledge falls into weak and evil minds. It is not aviation, or television, or the working at full pressure of the physical and chemical laboratories of the scientific men, which is wrong; but the misuse of the knowledge which is given to all and sundry without safeguards or reticences of any kind.
Why try to cripple the soaring of the human spirit, even for ten years? And then the idea that "it would give 99 per cent. of us who are non-scientific some chance of assimilating the revolutionary knowledge which in the first quarter of this century 1 per cent. of the explorers have acquired," seems to me to be entirely arbitrary, because there is no guarantee of any such assimilation of the acquired knowledge so called ever taking place; nor indeed have we any absolute certitude that it is knowledge per se. It may be merely imperfect information based upon the facts of nature more or less inadequately investigated. This ten-year moratorium might give the ninety-nine percent an unfortunate opportunity to accept as dogmatic truths the changing theories which the one percent have collected together or have evolved from their inner consciousness during the past hundred years or more.
In one sense it is the salvation of science from dogmatism that it advances with gigantic strides and without interruptions of any kind, and that the theories of one day, then taught as dogmas and accepted by the people as "religious truths," scientifically speaking, should be shown perhaps in the next five years to be merely theoretical speculations. Nothing so much as this saves science from even greater dogmatism than it now unfortunately has in some respects, as shown by the writings of certain exponents of prevalent scientific theories. Such was the case as regards transformist theories of biology in an attempt to explain progressive development and deriving man from the apes, a theory which is now very largely abandoned by biologists themselves.
The idea, however, that the one percent would have time, during this so-called scientific moratorium of ten years, to read up "on one another's work," is an excellent one, and it is a pity that such does not take place, because in point of fact our scientists today are too largely separated from the work and thoughts of each other.
The fundamental principles in all lines of scientific research today are in question as to whether they represent truths or untruths or half-truths -- falsehood or reality. The bases of science itself are called in question, and this is an excellent thing; for nothing is so easy as to slide into dogmatism, from the feeling that we have points of information which are actual realities.
It is an unfortunate tendency of the human mind to insist upon the value of its own understanding and the reality of the theories which it propounds. Hence arise dogmatism, impatience with the views of others and, if the time should be ripe and the mind should be uninformed, the arising of persecution of those who differ from us. The lesson, therefore, that we should draw from it all is that we must ourselves find the key of nature within ourselves, and of our own initiatives accept nothing that is taught to us as authoritative, except that which we inwardly find to be true.
It may be that our knowledge is small and our judgment weak in our present stage of evolution, and that we may reject or pass over some truth by following the noble rule of individual initiative and judgment; but in following that rule, we are cultivating the faculties of our will and discrimination, and of our own understanding. Very soon these faculties will become so strengthened by this exercise that the possibilities of error or of misjudging some truth of nature will, with the passage of time, grow ever more remote, until finally these possibilities of error vanish.
The Bishop of Ripon is right in saying that wisdom is other than and greater than knowledge, and that without wisdom knowledge may be a curse. Wisdom is interior illumination. It is greater than the mere accumulation of scientific facts or the mere evolving of scientific theories. Knowledge in that sense, or a blind following of theories stuffed into our minds by our modern-day methods of instruction, is sterile; also, the ideas floating in the air which enter into our minds and affect us similarly, psychological subjects as we all are, may actually be an automatic curse -- not because information or vagrant ideas or any one of various theories are in themselves wrong, but because they did not originate with us. Hence, they are alien to our will and even to our understanding, which fact makes us unfit properly to understand them and to use them aright as masters ourselves rather than as slaves.
Let our laboratories, then, be kept open; let work go ahead. But let there be an end merely to theory-spinning and hypothesis-forming. We do not object to the forming of theories or hypotheses when these are useful in classifying the results of research and in attempting to deduce laws from them. We do not object to the most fervid and continuous use of the scientific imagination when that is helpful to the same ends. On the contrary, that is a laudable pursuit. What we do object to is the postulating of theories and hypotheses as proven facts of the cosmic process, that is, as representing the procedure of the universe itself.