Section V. Organic Evolution and Creative Centres.
It is argued that Universal Evolution, otherwise the gradual development of species in all the kingdoms of Nature, works by uniform laws. This is admitted, and the law is enforced far more strictly in Esoteric than in Modern Science. But we are also told, that it is equally a law that:
Development works from the less to the more perfect, and from the simpler to the more complicated, by incessant changes, small in themselves, but constantly accumulating in the required direction[1717].
It is from the infinitesimally small that the comparatively gigantic species are produced.
Esoteric Science agrees with this, but adds that this law applies only to what is known to it as the Primary Creation—the evolution of Worlds from Primordial Atoms, and the Pre-primordial Atom, at the first differentiation of the former; and that during the period of cyclic evolution in Space and Time, this law is limited and works only in the lower kingdoms. It did so work during the first geological periods, from simple to complex, on the rough material surviving from the relics of the Third Round, which relics are projected into objectivity when terrestrial activity recommences.
No more than Science, does the Esoteric Philosophy admit “design” or “special creation.” It rejects every claim to the “miraculous,” and accepts nothing outside the uniform and immutable laws of Nature. But it teaches a cyclic law, a double stream of Force (or Spirit) and of Matter, which, starting from the Neutral Centre of Being, develops by its cyclic progress and incessant transformations. The primitive germ from which all vertebrate life has developed throughout the ages, being distinct from the primitive germ from which vegetable and animal life [pg 773] have evolved, there are side laws whose work is determined by the conditions in which the materials to be worked upon are found by them, and of which Science—Physiology and Anthropology especially—seems to be little aware. Its votaries speak of this “primitive germ,” and maintain that it is shown beyond any doubt that:
The design [and the “designer”], if there be any [in the case of man, with the wonderful structure of his limbs, and his hand especially], must be placed very much farther back, and is, in fact, involved in the primitive germ, from which all vertebrate life certainly, and probably all life, animal or vegetable, have been slowly developed.[1718]
This is as true of the “primitive germ” as it is false that that “germ” is only “very much farther back” than man is; for it is at an immeasurable and inconceivable distance, in Time, though not in Space, from the origin even of our Solar System. As the Hindû philosophy very justly teaches, the “Aniyâmsam Anîyasâm,” can be known only through false notions. It is the “Many” that proceed from the “One”—the living spiritual germs or centres of forces—each in a septenary form, which first generate, and then give the primary impulse to the law of evolution and gradual slow development.
Limiting the teaching strictly to this our Earth, it may be shown that, as the ethereal forms of the first Men are first projected on seven zones by seven Dhyân-Chohanic Centres of Force, so there are centres of creative power for every root or parent species of the host of forms of vegetable and animal life. This is, again, no “special creation,” nor is there any “design,” except in the general “ground-plan” worked out by the Universal Law. But there are certainly “designers,” though these are neither omnipotent nor omniscient in the absolute sense of the term. They are simply Builders, or Masons, working under the impulse given them by the ever-to-be-unknown (on our plane) Master Mason—the One Life and Law. Belonging to this sphere, they have no hand in, nor possibility of working on any other, during the present Manvantara, at any rate. That they work in cycles and on a strictly geometrical and mathematical scale of progression, is what the extinct animal species amply demonstrate; that they act by design in the details of minor lives (of side animal issues, etc.) is sufficiently proved by natural history. In the “creation” of new species, departing sometimes very widely from the parent stock, as in the great variety of the genus Felis—like the lynx, the tiger, the cat, etc.—it is the “designers” [pg 774] who direct the new evolution by adding to, or depriving the species of certain appendages, either needed or becoming useless in the new environments. Thus, when we say that Nature provides for every animal and plant, whether large or small, we speak correctly. For it is these terrestrial Spirits of Nature, who form the aggregated Nature—which, if it fails occasionally in its design, is neither to be considered blind, nor to be taxed with the failure; since, belonging to a differentiated sum of qualities and attributes, it is in virtue of that alone conditioned and imperfect.