Use and disuse, combined with selection, elucidate [?] the separation of the sexes, and the existence, otherwise totally incomprehensible, of rudimentary sexual organs. In the Vertebrata especially, each sex possesses such distinct traces of the reproductive apparatus characteristic of the other, that even antiquity assumed hermaphroditism as a natural primæval condition of mankind.... The tenacity with which these rudiments of sexual organs are inherited is remarkable. In the class of mammals, actual hermaphroditism is unheard of, although through the whole [pg 195]period of their development they drag along with them these residues, borne by their unknown ancestry, no one can say how long.[427]
“The animals separated the first,” says Shloka 31. Bear in mind that at that period men were different, even physiologically, to what they are now; the middle point of the Fifth Race being already passed. We are not told what the “huge she-animals” were; but they certainly were as different from any we now know, as were the “men” from the men of to-day.
This was the first physical “fall into matter” of some of the then existing and lower races. Bear in mind Shloka 24. The “Sons of Wisdom” had spurned the early Third Race, i.e., the non-developed, and are shown incarnating in, and thereby endowing with intellect, the later Third Race. Thus the sin of the brainless or “mindless” Races, who had no “spark” and were irresponsible, fell upon those who failed to do by them their Karmic duty.
What May Be The Objections To The Foregoing.
Thus Occultism rejects the idea that Nature developed man from the ape, or even from an ancestor common to both; but, on the contrary, traces some of the most anthropoid species to the Third Race man of the early Atlantean Period. As this proposition will be maintained and defended elsewhere, a few words more are all that are needed at present. For greater clearness, however, we shall repeat in brief what was said previously in Volume I, Stanza VI.
Our teachings show that, while it is quite correct to say that Nature had, at one time, built round the human astral form an ape-like external shape, it is also as correct that this shape was no more that of the “missing link,” than were the multitudinous other coverings of that astral form, during the course of its natural evolution through all the kingdoms of Nature. Nor was it, as has been shown, on this Fourth Round Planet that such evolution took place, but only during the First, Second, and Third Rounds, when Man was, in turn, “a stone, a plant, and an animal” until he became what he was in the First Root-Race of present Humanity. The real line of evolution differs from the Darwinian, and the two systems are irreconcilable, unless the latter is divorced from the dogmas of “natural selection” and the like. [pg 196] Indeed, between the Moneron of Hæckel and the Sarîsripa of Manu, there lies an impassable chasm in the shape of the Jîva; for the “human” Monad, whether “immetallized” in the stone-atom, or “in-vegetalized” in the plant, or “inanimalized” in the animal, is still ever a divine, hence also a human Monad. It ceases to be human only when it becomes absolutely divine. The terms “mineral,” “vegetable” and “animal” Monad are intended to create a superficial distinction: there is no such thing as a Monad (Jîva) other than divine, and consequently having once been, or having in the future to become, human. The latter term has to remain meaningless unless this difference is well understood. The Monad is a drop out of the Shoreless Ocean beyond, or, to be correct, within, the plane of primæval differentiation. It is divine in its higher and human in its lower condition—the adjectives “higher” and “lower” being used for lack of better words—but a Monad it remains at all times, save in the Nirvânic state, under whatever conditions, or whatever external forms. As the Logos reflects the Universe in the Divine Mind, and the Manifested Universe reflects itself in each of its Monads, as Leibnitz put it repeating an Eastern teaching, so the Monad has, during the cycle of its incarnations, to reflect in itself every root-form of each kingdom. Therefore, the Kabalists say correctly that “Man becomes a stone, a plant, an animal, a man, a spirit, and finally God,” thus accomplishing his cycle or circuit and returning to the point from which he had started as the Heavenly Man. But by “Man” the Divine Monad is meant, and not the Thinking Entity, much less his Physical Body. The men of Science now try to trace the immortal Soul, while rejecting its existence, through a series of animal forms from the lowest to the highest; whereas, in truth, all the present fauna are the descendants of those primordial monsters of which the Stanzas speak. The animals—the creeping beasts and those in the waters that preceded Man in this Fourth Round, as well as those contemporary with the Third Race, and again the mammalia that are posterior to the Third and Fourth Races—all are either directly or indirectly the mutual and correlative product, physically, of Man. It is correct to say that the man of this Manvantara, i.e., of the three preceding Rounds, has passed through all the kingdoms of Nature. That he was “a stone, a plant, an animal.” But (a) these stones, plants, and animals were the prototypes, the filmy presentments of those of the Fourth Round; and (b) even those at the beginning of the Fourth Round were the astral shadows, as the [pg 197] Occultists express it, of the present stones, plants and animals. And finally, neither the forms nor genera of either man, animal, or plant were what they became later. Thus the astral prototypes of the lower beings of the animal kingdom of the Fourth Round, which preceded the Chhâyâs of Men, were the consolidated, though still very ethereal sheaths of the still more ethereal forms, or models, produced at the close of the Third Round on Globe D, as set forth in Esoteric Buddhism; produced “from the residue of the substance; matter from dead bodies of men and [other extinct] animals of the Wheel before,” or the previous Third Round—as Shloka 28 tells us. Hence, while the nondescript “animals” that preceded the Astral Man at the beginning of this Life-cycle on our Earth were still, so to speak, the progeny of the Man of the Third Round, the mammalians of this Round owe their existence, in a great measure, to Man again. Moreover, the “ancestor” of the present anthropoid animal, the ape, is the direct production of the yet mindless Man, who desecrated his human dignity by putting himself physically on the level of an animal.
The above accounts for some of the alleged physiological proofs, brought forward by the Anthropologists as a demonstration of the descent of man from the animals.
The point most insisted upon by the Evolutionists is that, “The history of the embryo is an epitome of that of the race.” That:
Every organism, in its development from the egg, runs through a series of forms, through which, in like succession, its ancestors have passed in the long course of earth's history.[428] The history of the embryo ... is a picture in little, and outline of that of the race. This conception forms the gist of our fundamental biogenetic law, which we are obliged to place at the head of the study of the fundamental law of organic development.[429]