This is called nervous excitation, but no one, except the Occultist, knows the reason of such nervous perturbation, or explains the primary causes of it. The principle of Life may kill when too exuberant, as much as when there is too little of it. But this “principle” on the manifested plane, that is to say, our plane, is but the effect and the result of the intelligent action of the “Host,” or collective Principle, the manifesting Life and Light. It is itself subordinate to, and emanates from, the ever-invisible, eternal and Absolute One Life, in a descending and reäscending scale of hierarchic degrees, a true septenary ladder, with Sound, the Logos, at the upper end, and the Vidyâdharas[936], the inferior Pitris, at the lower.
Of course, the Occultists are fully aware of the fact that the vitalist “fallacy,” so derided by Vogt and Huxley, is, nevertheless, still countenanced [pg 589] in very high scientific quarters, and, therefore, they are happy to feel that they do not stand alone. Thus, Professor de Quatrefages writes:
It is very true that we do not know what life is; but no more do we know whatthe force is that set the stars in motion.... Living beings are heavy, and therefore subject to gravitation; they are the seat of numerous and various physico-chemical phenomena which are indispensable to their existence, and which must be referred to the action of etherodynamy [electricity, heat, etc.]. But these phenomena are here manifested under the influence of another force.... Life is not antagonistic to the inanimate forces, but it governs and rules their action by its laws.[937]
Section VIII. The Solar Theory.
A SHORT ANALYSIS OF THE COMPOUND AND SINGLE ELEMENTS OF SCIENCE AS AGAINST THE OCCULT TEACHINGS. HOW FAR THIS THEORY, AS GENERALLY ACCEPTED, IS SCIENTIFIC.
In his reply to Dr. Gull's attack on the theory of Vitality, which is inseparably connected with the Elements of the Ancients in the Occult Philosophy, Professor Beale, the great Physiologist, has a few words as suggestive as they are beautiful:
There is a mystery in life—a mystery which has never been fathomed, and which appears greater, the more deeply the phenomena of life are studied and contemplated. In living centres—far more central than the centres seen by the highest magnifying powers, in centres of living matter, where the eye cannot penetrate, but towards which the understanding may tend—proceed changes of the nature of which the most advanced physicists and chemists fail to afford us the conception: nor is there the slightest reason to think that the nature of these changes will ever be ascertained by physical investigation, inasmuch as they are certainly of an order or nature totally distinct from that to which any other phenomenon known to us can be relegated.
This “mystery,” or the origin of the Life Essence, Occultism locates in the same Centre as the nucleus of prima materia of our Solar System, for they are one.
As says the Commentary: