“The Egyptians,” says Dunlap,[132] “distinguish between an older and younger Horus, the former the brother of Osiris, the latter the son of Osiris and Isis.” The first is the Idea of the world remaining in the Demiurgic Mind, “born in darkness before the creation of the world.” The second Horus is this “Idea” going forth from the Logos, becoming clothed with matter, and assuming an actual existence.[133]
“The mundane God, eternal, boundless, young and old, of winding form,”[134] say the Chaldean oracles.
This “winding form” is a figure to express the vibratory motion of the Astral Light, with which the ancient priests were perfectly well acquainted, though they may have differed in views of ether, with modern scientists; for in the Æther they placed the Eternal Idea pervading the Universe, or the Will which becomes Force, and creates or organizes matter.
“The will,” says Van Helmont, “is the first of all powers. For through the will of the Creator all things were made and put in motion.... The will is the property of all spiritual beings, and displays itself in them the more actively the more they are freed from matter.” And Paracelsus, “the divine,” as he was called, adds in the same strain: “Faith must confirm the imagination, for faith establishes the will.... Determined will is a beginning of all magical operations.... Because men do not perfectly imagine and believe the result, is that the arts are uncertain, while they might be perfectly certain.”
The opposing power alone of unbelief and skepticism, if projected in a current of equal force, can check the other, and sometimes completely neutralize it. Why should spiritualists wonder that the presence of some strong skeptics, or of those who, feeling bitterly opposed to the phenomenon, unconsciously exercise their will-power in opposition, hinders and often stops altogether the manifestations? If there is no conscious power on earth but sometimes finds another to interfere with or even counterbalance it, why wonder when the unconscious, passive power of a medium is suddenly paralyzed in its effects by another opposing one, though it also be as unconsciously exercised? Professors Faraday and Tyndall boasted that their presence at a circle would stop at once every manifestation. This fact alone ought to have proved to the eminent scientists that there was some force in these phenomena worthy to arrest their attention. As a scientist, Prof. Tyndall was perhaps pre-eminent in the circle of those who were present at the seance; as a shrewd observer, one not easily deceived by a tricking medium, he was perhaps no better, if as clever, as others in the room, and if the manifestations were but a fraud so ingenious as to deceive the others, they would not have stopped, even on his account. What medium can ever boast of such phenomena as were produced by Jesus, and the apostle Paul after him? Yet even Jesus met with cases where the unconscious force of resistance overpowered even his so well directed current of will. “And he did not many mighty works there, because of their unbelief.”
There is a reflection of every one of these views in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Our “investigating” scientists might consult his works with profit. They will find therein many a strange hypothesis founded on old ideas, speculations on the “new” phenomena, which may prove as reasonable as any, and be saved the useless trouble of inventing new theories. The psychic and ectenic forces, the “ideo-motor” and “electro-biological powers;” “latent thought” and even “unconscious cerebration” theories, can be condensed in two words: the kabalistic ASTRAL LIGHT.
The bold theories and opinions expressed in Schopenhauer’s works differ widely with those of the majority of our orthodox scientists. “In reality,” remarks this daring speculator, “there is neither matter nor spirit. The tendency to gravitation in a stone is as unexplainable as thought in human brain.... If matter can—no one knows why—fall to the ground, then it can also—no one knows why—think.... As soon, even in mechanics, as we trespass beyond the purely mathematical, as soon as we reach the inscrutable, adhesion, gravitation, and so on, we are faced by phenomena which are to our senses as mysterious as the WILL and THOUGHT in man—we find ourselves facing the incomprehensible, for such is every force in nature. Where is then that matter which you all pretend to know so well; and from which—being so familiar with it—you draw all your conclusions and explanations, and attribute to it all things?... That, which can be fully realized by our reason and senses, is but the superficial: they can never reach the true inner substance of things. Such was the opinion of Kant. If you consider that there is in a human head some sort of a spirit, then you are obliged to concede the same to a stone. If your dead and utterly passive matter can manifest a tendency toward gravitation, or, like electricity, attract and repel, and send out sparks—then, as well as the brain, it can also think. In short, every particle of the so-called spirit, we can replace with an equivalent of matter, and every particle of matter replace with spirit.... Thus, it is not the Cartesian division of all things into matter and spirit that can ever be found philosophically exact; but only if we divide them into will and manifestation, which form of division has naught to do with the former, for it spiritualizes every thing: all that, which is in the first instance real and objective—body and matter—it transforms into a representation, and every manifestation into will.”[135]
These views corroborate what we have expressed about the various names given to the same thing. The disputants are battling about mere words. Call the phenomena force, energy, electricity or magnetism, will, or spirit-power, it will ever be the partial manifestation of the soul, whether disembodied or imprisoned for a while in its body—of a portion of that intelligent, omnipotent, and individual WILL, pervading all nature, and known, through the insufficiency of human language to express correctly psychological images, as—GOD.
The ideas of some of our schoolmen about matter are, from the kabalistic standing-point, in many a way erroneous. Hartmann calls their views “an instinctual prejudice.” Furthermore, he demonstrates that no experimenter can have anything to do with matter properly termed, but only with the forces into which he divides it. The visible effects of matter are but the effects of force. He concludes thereby, that that which is now called matter is nothing but the aggregation of atomic forces, to express which the word matter is used: outside of that, for science matter is but a word void of sense. Notwithstanding many an honest confession on the part of our specialists—physicists, physiologists and chemists—that they know nothing whatever of matter,[136] they deify it. Every new phenomenon which they find themselves unable to explain, is triturated, compounded into incense, and burned on the altar of the goddess who patronizes modern scientists.
No one can better treat his subject than does Schopenhauer in his Parerga. In this work he discusses at length animal magnetism, clairvoyance, sympathetic cures, seership, magic, omens, ghost-seeing, and other spiritual matters. “All these manifestations,” he says, “are branches of one and the same tree, and furnish us with irrefutable proofs of the existence of a chain of beings which is based on quite a different order of things than that nature which has at its foundation laws of space, time and adaptability. This other order of things is far deeper, for it is the original and the direct one; in its presence the common laws of nature, which are simply formal, are unavailing; therefore, under its immediate action neither time nor space can separate any longer the individuals, and the separation impendent on these forms presents no more insurmountable barriers for the intercourse of thoughts and the immediate action of the will. In this manner changes may be wrought by quite a different course than the course of physical causality, i.e., through an action of the manifestation of the will exhibited in a peculiar way and outside the individual himself. Therefore the peculiar character of all the aforesaid manifestations is the visioin distante et actio in distante (vision and action at a distance) in its relation to time as well as in its relation to space. Such an action at a distance is just what constitutes the fundamental character of what is called magical; for such is the immediate action of our will, an action liberated from the causal conditions of physical action, viz., contact.”