Analogy is the guiding law in Nature, the only true Ariadne's thread that can lead us, through the inextricable paths of her domain, toward her primal and final mysteries. Nature, as a creative potency, is infinite, and no generation of Physical Scientists can ever boast of having exhausted the list of her ways and methods, however uniform the laws upon which she proceeds. If we can conceive of a ball of “fire-mist”—as it rolls through æons of time in the interstellar spaces—becoming gradually a Planet, a self-luminous Globe, to settle into a man-bearing World or Earth, thus having passed from a soft plastic body into a rock-bound Globe; and if we see on it everything evolving from the non-nucleated jelly-speck that becomes the Sarcode[355] of the Moneron, then passes from its protistic state[356] into the form of an [pg 163] animal, to grow into a gigantic reptilian monster of the Mesozoic times; then dwindling again into the (comparatively) dwarfish crocodile, now confined solely to tropical regions, and the universally common lizard[357]—if we can conceive all this, then how can man alone escape the general law? “There were giants on earth in those days” says Genesis, repeating the statement of all the other Eastern Scriptures; and the Titans are founded on an anthropological and physiological fact.
And, as the hard-shelled crustacean was once upon a time a jelly-speck, a “thoroughly homogeneous particle of albumen in a firmly adhesive condition,” so was the outward covering of primitive man, his early “coat of skin,” plus an immortal spiritual Monad, and a psychic temporary form and body within that shell. The modern, hard, muscular man, almost impervious to any climate, was, perhaps, some 25,000,000 years ago, just what the Hæckelian Moneron is, strictly an “organism without organs,” an entirely homogeneous substance with a structureless albumen body within, and a human form only outwardly.
No man of Science has the right, in this century, to find the figures of the Brâhmans in the question of chronology preposterous; for their own calculations often exceed by far the claims made by Esoteric Science. This may easily be shown.
Helmholtz calculated that the cooling of our Earth from a temperature of 2,000° to 200° Cent. must have occupied a period of no less than 350,000,000 years. Western Science (including Geology) seems generally to allow our Globe an age of about 500,000,000 years altogether. Sir William Thomson, however, limits the appearance of the earliest vegetable life to 100,000,000 years ago—a statement respectfully contradicted by the Archaic Records. Speculations, furthermore, vary daily in the domains of Science. Meanwhile, some Geologists are very much opposed to such limitation. Volger calculates:
That the time requisite for the deposit of the strata known to us must at least have amounted to 648 millions of years.
Both time and space are infinite and eternal.
The earth, as a material existence, is indeed infinite; the changes only which it has undergone can be determined by finite periods of time....
We must therefore assume that the starry heaven is not merely in space, which no [pg 164]astronomer doubts, but also in time, without beginning or end; that it never was created, and is imperishable.[358]
Czolbe repeats exactly what the Occultists say. But the Âryan Occultists, we may be told, knew nothing of these later speculations. As Coleman says:
They were even ignorant of the globular form of our earth.