If so, we might maintain with as much scientific right, that the proof of the existence of our three ethereal Races, and of the three-eyed men of the Third and Fourth Root-Races, “arises also from the necessity of an intermediate type” between the animal and the Gods. What reason would the Hæckelians have to protest in this special case?
Of course there is a ready answer: Because we do not grant the presence of the Monadic Essence. The manifestation of the Logos as individual consciousness in the animal and human creation is not accepted by exact Science, nor does it cover the whole ground, of course. But the failures of Science and its arbitrary assumptions are far greater on the whole than any “extravagant” Esoteric doctrine can ever furnish.[1595] Even thinkers of the school of Von Hartmann have become tainted with the general epidemic. They accept the Darwinian Anthropology (more or less), though they also postulate the individual Ego as a manifestation of the Unconscious (the Western presentation of the Logos or Primeval Divine Thought). They say the evolution of the physical man is from the animal, but that mind in its various phases is altogether a thing apart from material facts, though organism, as a Upâdhi, is necessary for its manifestation.
Plastidular Souls, And Conscious Nerve-Cells.
But one can never see the end of such wonders with Hæckel and his school, whom the Occultists and Theosophists have every right to consider as materialistic tramps trespassing on private metaphysical grounds. Not satisfied with the paternity of Bathybius (Hæckelii), “plastidular souls” and “atom-souls”[1596] are now invented, on the basis of purely blind mechanical forces of matter. We are informed that:
The study of the evolution of soul-life shows us that this has worked its way up from the lower stages of the simple cell-soul, through an astonishing series of gradual stages in evolution, up to the soul of man.[1597]
“Astonishing,” truly—based as this wild speculation is on the consciousness of the “nerve cells.” For as he tells us:
Little as we are in a position, at the present time, to explain fully the nature of consciousness,[1598] yet the comparative and genetic observation of it clearly shows, that it is only a higher and more complex function of the nerve cells.[1599]
Mr. Herbert Spencer's song on consciousness—is sung, it seems, and may henceforth be safely stored up in the lumber room of obsolete speculations. Where, however, do Hæckel's “complex functions” of his scientific “nerve-cells” land him? Once more right into the Occult and mystic teachings of the Kabalah about the descent of Souls as conscious and unconscious Atoms; among the Pythagorean Monad and the Monads of Leibnitz, and the “Gods, Monads, and Atoms” of our Esoteric teaching;[1600] into the dead letter of Occult teachings, left to [pg 709] the amateur Kabalists and professors of ceremonial Magic. For this is what he says, in explaining his newly-coined terminology:
Plastidule-Souls. The plastidules or protoplasmic molecules, the smallest, homogeneous parts of the protoplasm are, on our plastid theory, to be regarded as the active factors of all life-functions. The plastidular soul differs from the inorganic molecular soul in that it possesses memory.[1601]