It is very much the same when you come to deal with all questions of Woman’s Labour. Woman claims the right to labour, but very often she has forgotten that employers can play upon certain characteristics of the woman that nothing can alter, because they are fundamental and natural. When a woman has taken up the trade of the wife and the mother, and then goes out to work in the mill, leaving the children behind and the baby uncared for save by hired care, then wages are driven down because she is willing to work for lower wages, knowing the misery of the children she has left at home; then comes the playing-off of the wife against the husband, of the woman against the man; the children are the sufferers from the taking away of the mother to work in the mill, and the man is turned out to walk the streets because cheaper female labour has taken his place. These are some of the complicated difficulties that arise out of what seems the simple thing of allowing a woman to sell her labour. Women and men can never be equal in the labour market, because the woman is the childbearer, and there comes in the difference, and the question of the nation’s health and vigour. She can never command the same wage as the man, because, as I once heard brutally said when I was complaining about the starvation wage of some match-girls: “There is always another way the woman has to increase her income.” That is true, pitifully true; but it puts her at a disadvantage in the struggle of the labour market. That which seemed so promising at first has only increased the stress of economic conditions, has turned the man out into the streets while the woman is trying to do the double work of the mill and the home. That is an impossible condition of things, for which a remedy will have to be found.
And so to deal with these economic questions we want the best brains and the best hearts, the widest knowledge and the deepest sympathy. Those, and those only, can solve these terrible economic problems of the time. You cannot solve them by any rough-and-ready means, nor by any quick and sudden means. You must solve them by wisdom and by love, and by realising the nation’s interest is a common interest, not of class against class, but of union of all for the common good of the community.
But then it is said: What about politics? On the detail of that, frankly, I have naught to say, for I am concerned only with principles. But one thing I would like to put to you, coming back to that point of liberty with which I started. People have supposed that liberty means a vote. You could not have a bigger blunder. Liberty and the vote have practically nothing in common. The vote gives you the power to make laws, to coerce other people; it by no means gives you necessarily liberty for yourself. We have never yet had, as I said, liberty upon earth. We have had class legislation of every kind in England, but liberty never. Go back in history and you find the Kings ruling, and that built up the one nation of England. Then the Barons ruled, and they did not on the whole do so badly, for England was called Merrie England then, and certainly no one would dream of applying that name to it now. Then there came the England of Parliaments, getting duller and duller, deader and deader; then the England of Commercialism. And who is our ruler now? Neither King nor Lords nor Parliament altogether, but on the one side King Purse, and King Mob on the other. Neither of those is a ruler who is likely to make this nation great. Liberty is a great celestial Goddess, strong, beneficent, and austere, and she can never descend upon a nation by the shouting of crowds, nor by the arguments of unbridled passion, nor by hatred of class against class. Liberty will never descend upon earth in outer matters until she has first descended into the hearts of men, and until the higher Spirit which is free has dominated the lower nature, the nature of passions and strong desires, and the will to hold for oneself and to trample upon others. You can only have a free nation when you have free men to build it out of—free men and women both; but no man is free and no woman is free who is under the dominance of appetite, or vice, or drunkenness, or any form of evil which he is unable to control. Self-control is the foundation on which alone freedom can be built. Without that you have anarchy, not freedom; and every increase of the present anarchy is paid for by the price of happiness, which is given in exchange. But when Freedom comes, she will come down to a nation in which every man and every woman will have learned self-control and self-mastery; and then, and then only, out of such men who are free, out of such women who are free, strong, righteous, ruling their own nature and training it to the noblest ends—of such only can you build up political freedom, which is the result of the freedom of the individual, and not the outcome of the warring passions of men.
Lecture V
The Coming Race
Friends: Some of you who have been attending this course of lectures may remember that in speaking of the new doors opening in religion, science, and art, I made a somewhat hasty and imperfect reference to changes that would be taking place in the human organism and an unfolding of the human consciousness, and I promised, in that brief statement, to return to the subject when I was to deal with “The Coming Race.” The nature, the character of that unfolding of consciousness, the changes in the bodily organism of man that will accompany those unfolding powers in consciousness, and make it possible for them to be manifested in our physical world—those changes naturally fall under the heading which I have taken for to-night’s discourse, “The Coming Race.” For it is of one of these great changes in the type of humanity that I have specially to speak to you to-night. In order to lead your thoughts to that rationally, and without gaps or chasms, I shall ask you to consider with me for a few moments certain great principles of study which we find continually used by the Mystics of the past, and in our own day adopted to a very considerable extent by modern science. The reason why science has adopted them is the same reason that made Mystics originally work them out, and that is, that science in our own time has been dealing with such enormous periods of growth, with such vast extent of these periods, that the scientific man cannot observe; that he is obliged to try to find a principle by which, observing what is near, he may be able, by a process of induction, to discover what is far off.
Now, this principle is called the principle of correspondences. You find it, as I said, used by Mystics of all types in the past: the great scientist-mystic, Swedenborg, of Sweden, based a very large part of his thought on the system of correspondences, of trying to discover what was far off and extensive by a study of that which was near and comparatively small. So in our own day with regard to science; and I remind you first of that in order to show you that in using this principle we are on ground which is recognised as being firm and stable, and is adopted in all the greater researches which have to deal with the distant and the extensive. Science has made specially good use of this system of correspondences in two lines of its thought: one, that of evolutionary growth, illuminated by the study of embryology; the other, that of the evolution of consciousness in humanity at large, illuminated by an observation of consciousness in the child, the youth, and the man. If, for a moment, we stop on the great evolutionary series or cycles of the past, we shall at once recognise that direct observation is only possible to a very small extent. It is true that by the aid of geology many buried skeletons of the past may be brought to the surface and examined, and thus light may be thrown on the various classes to which the skeletons in the time of the living animal belonged. Fossil remains certainly help us to a very great extent in trying to study the evolutionary past of our globe; but, as everyone knows who has studied the geological record, that record has large gaps occurring in it from time to time. It is exceedingly imperfect, exceedingly unsatisfactory, and only along some limited lines of evolutionary study is it possible to find from the fossils of the past the principle of life as it has gradually grown and branched upon our earth. Hence, in the difficulty of thus unveiling the past, evolutionists have turned to the study of the near, the growth of the individual, the stages through which his body passes, especially during ante-natal life, and it was very largely the study of embryology that threw light on the evolutionary truth. For it is observed, in tracing the growth of the human body of the individual, that it passes through certain clear, definite, marked stages. There is a stage at which the characteristics are those of the fish, bringing about some very curious results as regards especially the distribution of some of the nerves; then a stage which is that of the reptile; then a stage which is that of the mammal; and so on up to the highest in the mammalian kingdom, man himself. From the standpoint of mere observation from outside, without use of reason, this sequence invariably followed would say little, would signify little; but when man looks at that with the eye of reason, and not only observes the succession of certain stages, but applies his reason to solve the problem as to why those stages constantly appear, then it is he realises that in the body of the individual the whole evolutionary course of nature is traced and repeated; that in that highest, the human, form all the past history of the evolution of forms is broadly indicated; and that while, of course, details cannot be observed, the great succession is seen there, the invariable sequence ever repeated in the highest, the noblest form. And, working back with the light of that, science was then able to recognise very clearly the evolutionary stages of which geology yielded up its imperfect fossil record; for there it found the great age of the fishes, with no higher form of vertebrate life existing; then it found the age of the reptiles, then that of the mammals, finally the human kingdom; and looking over the past in that way, illuminated by the observations of the present, science recognised the truth of that ancient principle of correspondences which serves as a clue in distant regions where observations well-nigh fail us, and enables us, by the use of analogy, to trace our way among the labyrinths of the past.
It is not only along this line of æonian evolution and embryological growth that science has found help from this application of the principle of correspondences. It has found that not only in the state of bodies but also in the state of minds the same principle serves as its best clue once again in the labyrinth of the past. It has found out that the stages of human consciousness may be traced from the earliest stage of the will to live, then upwards through the unfolding consciousness of the child, in the stage of passions of the youth, in the stage of mentality dominating the maturity of man; and it goes along these lines into very much of detail, showing us how at a certain stage the child is reproducing the savage condition of consciousness; how a little later it grows out of that into the passional and barbarous; then through that into the emotional, where art and beauty begin to show themselves as outgrowths from human nature; and then on, at later stages, to that splendid mentality which it regards as the crown of human consciousness. Along these lines, which will be familiar to all the thoughtful and the cultured amongst you, science has been led to new discoveries, has been able in this fashion to find out many of the hidden things of nature.
But while this is true, there is a point at which science always stops. It uses correspondences to explain the past; it never struck science to use them to try to forecast the future; and naturally, for along the scientific line such forecast of the future is practically impossible; science works by induction, not by deduction, gathers together innumerable facts, arranges them, classifies them, compares them, and out of all that gathering, arrangement, and comparison it tries to find by a process of logical induction some great principle in which all the classified facts find their explanation, and thus a law is discovered. But further than that induction cannot take us. It cannot take us beyond the facts that are observed. Nothing in the facts observed presages that which is to come; and it is only when you use the other logical method—not that of induction, which is the scientific plan, but that of deduction, which we find in the philosophies of the past, which we find in the one perfect science, the science of mathematics, the Platonic method as against that of Aristotle—it is only then that we find it possible by a process of deduction not only to explain the past, but also to draw out a chart of the future. And it is by using that noble form of logical thought that Occult Science has ever been able to presage the future from the principles that it finds existing in the universe, unfolding stage by stage. I want, if I can, now to show you how that method may be applied; how, knowing the nature of man, we may be able from that to indicate not only the past through which he has come from far beyond the range of what is recognised as history, but also to throw a light along the road that mankind will travel in the future, seeing the heights up which he will climb, realising the powers yet hidden within the partially unfolded and evolved man.