THE ASTRAL BODY: by H. A. W. Coryn, M.D., M.R.C.S.
IT is safe to say that science will never accept the astral body—by that name: at any rate not until philosophy accepts the prototypal Ideas of Plato.
Yet the evidence, if not for them, then for something discharging the same function and therefore after all for them—is irresistible.
One thinks first of the growth of living animal tissues in glass jars, demonstrated at the Rockefeller Institute. Removed from the body to which they belong and placed in nutritive fluids which they can absorb, they attain a size that would constitute them fatal diseases if they were in situ at home. They would in fact be malignant growths of highly organized types.
Why don't they grow to that size? Because "the nervous system" restrains them within the limit of usefulness. How does "the nervous system" know that limit? Has it a picture in its "mind," a plan according to which it works, according to which it variously restricts or encourages?
When some of the molluscs are cut in two each half grows the part it has lost, the head an after-part, the after-part a head. Two animals result, each exactly like the original. As the severed cells are called upon to perform and do perform new and unexpected work, what and where is the architectural plan by which they do it?
The cells of a leaf have finished their growth. Now comes their work, the fixing of carbon from the air, transpiration, and so on. But cut off, say, a begonia leaf and place it on damp soil properly protected. It proceeds at once upon a wholly new program, sending down roots, sending up stalk, fresh leaves, and finally flower. It is obviously working according to a plan. When a germ cell or seed does that the problem can be concealed by talking about its chemical constitution and so forth. We are told that the seed behaves as it does because it is constituted by nature to do so, molecularly arranged for just that function. But the cells of the leaf were not arranged for that but for quite other functions. How come they to be able to stop their proper line of work and follow this one, generating not only leaves like themselves but all other parts of the plant including seeds?
We are of course pressing the problem of heredity, the persistence of racial and family type. But heredity is only a word that expresses the observed facts without a gleam of explanation.
The consciousness of the mollusc, as an individual, and that of the leaf on a lower plane, can be only sensational. They do not intelligently arrange and design what they are doing. But to ascribe it to molecular mechanism only, is no better than to say God did it. Either is such a form of mere words as unwise parents throw at a too questioning child to stop, without satisfying, its mind. No idea corresponds. The gap in conception remains exactly what it was.
When a chimney is blown down, the builder notes the gap and builds another. His mind contains a picture of what ought to be there.
An architect does not deliver the whole plan of his building to each of the workmen. Each follows his ordinary work, being merely told where to begin and when to stop. When all of them have done their part the building is complete.
Why may we not suppose that the cutting-in-two of a mollusc constitutes some such appeal to some intelligence somewhere in nature as the missing chimney constitutes to the builder? The force flowing in the cells of the injured animal is thereupon directed to the work unexpectedly required. Science now speaks freely of human "subconsciousness," meaning sub-mental consciousness in man. And it knows that that sub-mental consciousness can, when properly called upon (and also habitually on its own account), do reparative work upon the body whose method is not comprehensible to the man himself. It is, within its limits, intelligent; it knows what it has to do and what it is wanted to do; and it commands the necessary forces—which are beyond the man's reach, owner of them as he may be or think he is.
This subconsciousness is embodied with the man, but is not the man and is not an ego. May it not be regarded as a part of nature-consciousness, focused in an organic body and with the intelligence necessary to do its work?
And it does not follow that the lower down the scale of mental intelligence is an organism, the lower down a parallel scale is this intelligence. What we call, when in our own bodies, the subconscious, may be just as fully present and just as intelligently at work, in the bodies of plants and animals.
If we say that the plan of repair and the plans of hereditary type are in the conscious intelligence of this diffused nature-mind, we are at any rate reasonably proceeding from the known and not glossing the unknown with mere words. The astral body of any plant or animal is its plan of structure in this nature-mind. It is subjective substance, just as is a picture in our own mind. And it contains the vital energy necessary for the guidance of the protoplasmic matter that will clothe it, an energy that guides but is not one of the physical forces. As an analogy from higher up the planes of being, conscience guides mental thoughts and desires but is not among their number nor of their nature. It is the divine-astral form or plan, of what the thinking man should be. On both planes the form and the guiding energy setting from it become the negative and positive aspects of one thing.
THE BIRTH OF DAY
by A. F. W. (Manchester, N. H.)
FROM the darkness, O Eternal One,
From the pale light of diamond stars,
From the quietude of dreamless night,
Into the grayness and the formless mist,
Comes the first whisper, the first murmur
Of Life awakening.
Merges then the dim outline and the shadow,
Floating nothings, pregnant with the promise
Of the coming birth of Morning.
Gradually, slowly, silently,
The shapes resolve themselves
And grow less misty and more huge;
The grayness becomes less gray;
And, as it so becomes, the horizon
Erstwhile faint and indistinct,
Slowly as a line appears, not sharp,
But blended with both earth and sky.
A sleepy twitter from the birds, the first call
Of mate to mate; the faint, soft rustle
Of the leaves, the vapor rising from the earth—
All betoken the oncoming.
The ghostly outlines of the forms
Are clearer now; and the vivid streamers
Of the eastern sky change to the white light
Of the advancing Morn.
Now approach the fuller tones of nature:
Insistent the notes of the tiny feathered ones,
And from the nests and branches come
The piping calls to morning quest.
Now the silver white takes on the faint
Tinging of the purple glow.
The purple to a blue transforms itself;
The gnomes of dawn are hard at work
Transmuting the base metal into finer gold.
As distant fire, urging on the horses of wild Fear
Mounts higher and more high,
So Apollo urges on his horses, and the golden gleam
Of his chariot heralds itself
To follow after.
The horizon blazes with the power of Light—
More red and fiery grows the hue;
A point appears, a rim, an arc
Of coppery luster; then
Glowing with the radiance of the parent Life
The Sun!—And Day is born.