An Occultist would have put it otherwise. He would say that man was indeed made in the image of a type projected by his progenitor, the creating Angel-Force, or Dhyân Chohan; while the wanderer of the forest of Sumatra was made in the image of man, since the framework of the ape, we say again, is the revival, the resuscitation by abnormal means, of the actual form of the Third Round and of the Fourth Round Man as well, later on. Nothing is lost in Nature, not an atom: this is at least certain on scientific data. Analogy would appear to demand that form should be equally endowed with permanency.
And yet what do we find? Says Sir William Dawson, F.R.S.:
It is farther significant that Professor Huxley, in his lectures in New York, while resting his case as to the lower animals mainly on the supposed genealogy of the horse, which has often been shown to amount to no certain evidence, avoided altogether the discussion of the origin of men from the apes, now obviously complicated with so many difficulties that both Wallace and Mivart are staggered by them. Professor Thomas in his recent lectures (Nature, 1876), admits that there is no lower man known than the Australian, and that there is no known link of connection with the monkeys; and Hæckel has to admit that the penultimate link in his phylogeny, the ape-like man, is absolutely unknown (History of Creation).... The so-called “tallies” found with the bones of Palæocosmic men in European caves, and illustrated in the admirable works of Christy and Lartet, show that the rudiments even of writing were already in possession of the oldest race of men known to archæology or geology.[1713]
Again, in Dr. C. R. Bree's Fallacies of Darwinism, we read:
Mr. Darwin justly says that the difference physically and, more especially, mentally, between the lowest form of man and the highest anthropomorphous ape, is enormous. Therefore, the time—which in Darwinian evolution must be almost inconceivably slow—must have been enormous also during man's development from [pg 770]the monkey[1714]. The chance, therefore, of some of these variations being found in the different gravels or fresh-water formations above the tertiaries, must be very great. And yet not one single variation, not one single specimen of a being between a monkey and a man has ever been found! Neither in the gravel, not the drift-clay, nor the fresh-water beds and gravel and drift, nor in the tertiaries below them, has there ever been discovered the remains of any member of the missing families between the monkey and the man, as assumed to have existed by Mr. Darwin. Have they gone down with the depression of the earth's surface and are they now covered with the sea? If so, it is beyond all probability that they should not also be found in those beds of contemporary geological strata which have notgone down to the bottom of the sea; still more improbable that some portions should not be dredged from the ocean-bed like the remains of the mammoth and the rhinoceros, which are also found in fresh-water beds and gravel and drift!... The celebrated Neanderthal skull, about which so much has been said, belongs confessedly to this remote period [bronze and stone ages], and yet presents, although it may have been the skull of an idiot, immense differences from the highest known anthropomorphous ape.[1715]
Our Globe being convulsed each time that it reäwakens for a new period of activity, like a field which has to be ploughed and furrowed before fresh seed for its new crop is thrown into it—it does seem quite hopeless that fossils belonging to its previous Rounds should be found in the beds of either its oldest or its latest geological strata. Every new Manvantara brings along with it the renovation of forms, types and species; every type of the preceding organic forms—vegetable, animal and human—changes and is perfected in the next, even to the mineral, which has received in this Round its final opacity and hardness; its softer portions formed the present vegetation; the astral relics of previous vegetation and fauna were utilized in the formation of the lower animals, and in determining the structure of the primeval Root-Types of the highest mammalia. And, finally, the form of the gigantic ape-man of the former Round has been reproduced in this one by human bestiality, and transfigured into the parent form in the modern anthropoid.
This doctrine, even imperfectly delineated as it is under our inefficient pen, is assuredly more logical, more consistent with facts, and far more probable, than many “scientific” theories; that, for instance, of the first organic germ descending on a meteor to our Earth—like Ain Suph on its Vehicle, Adam Kadmon. Only, the latter descent is allegorical, as every one knows, and the Kabalists have never offered this figure of [pg 771] speech for acceptance in its dead-letter garb. But the germ-in-the-meteor theory, as coming from such high scientific quarters, is an eligible candidate for axiomatic truth and law, a theory people are in honour bound to accept, if they would be on a right level with Modern Science. What the next theory necessitated by the materialistic premisses will be—no one can tell. Meanwhile, the present theories, as anyone can see, clash far more discordantly among themselves than even with those of the Occultists outside the sacred precincts of learning. For what is there, next in order, now that exact Science has made even of the life-principle an empty word, a meaningless term, and insists that life is an effect due to the molecular action of the primordial protoplasm? The new doctrine of the Darwinists may be defined and summarized in the few words, from Mr. Herbert Spencer:
The hypothesis of special creations turns out to be worthless—worthless, by its derivation; worthless, in its intrinsic incoherence; worthless, as absolutely without evidence; worthless, as not supplying an intellectual need; worthless, as not satisfying a moral want. We must, therefore, consider it as counting for nothing in opposition to any other hypothesis respecting the origin of organic beings.[1716]