The world stands divided this day and hesitates between Divine Progenitors—be they Adam and Eve or the Lunar Pitris—and Bathybius Hæckelii, the gelatinous hermit of the briny deep. Having explained the Occult theory, it may now be compared with that of Modern Materialism. The reader is invited to choose between the two after having judged them on their respective merits.
We may derive some consolation for the rejection of our Divine Ancestors, in finding that the Hæckelian speculations receive no better treatment at the hands of strictly exact Science than do our own. Hæckel's Phylogenesis is no less laughed at by the foes of his fantastic evolution, by other and greater Scientists, than our primeval Races will be. As du Bois-Reymond puts it, we may believe him easily when he says that the
Ancestral trees of our race sketched in the Schöpfungsgeschichte are of about as much value as are the pedigrees of the Homeric heroes in the eyes of the historical critic.
This settled, everyone will see that one hypothesis is as good as another. And as we find Hæckel himself confessing that neither Geology in its history of the past nor the ancestral history of organisms will ever “rise to the position of a real ‘exact’ science,”[1567] a large margin is thus left to Occult Science to make its annotations and lodge its protests. The world is left to choose between the teachings of Paracelsus, [pg 694] the “father of modern chemistry,” and those of Hæckel, the “father of the mythical Sozura.” We demand no more.
Without presuming to take part in the quarrel of such very learned Naturalists as du Bois-Reymond and Hæckel à propos of our blood relationship to
Those ancestors [of ours] which have led up from the unicellular classes, Vermes, Acrania, Pisces, Amphibia, Reptilia to the Aves
—we may put a brief question or two, for the information of our readers. Availing ourselves of the opportunity, and bearing in mind Darwin's theories of Natural Selection, etc., we would ask Science—with regard to the origin of the human and animal species—which theory of Evolution of the two herewith described is the more scientific, or the more unscientific, if so preferred.
(1) Is it that of an Evolution which starts from the beginning with sexual propagation?
(2) Or that teaching which shows the gradual development of organs; their solidification, and the procreation of each species, at first by simple easy separation from one into two or even several individuals; then a fresh development—the first step to a species of separate distinct sexes—the hermaphrodite condition; then again, a kind of parthenogenesis, “virginal reproduction,” when the egg-cells are formed within the body, issuing from it in atomic emanations and becoming matured outside of it; until, finally, after a definite separation into sexes, the human beings begin procreating through sexual connection?
Of these two, the first “theory”—or rather, a “revealed fact”—is enunciated by all the exoteric Bibles, except the Purânas, preëminently by the Jewish Cosmogony. The second is that which is taught by the Occult Philosophy, as has been explained.