There are things, perhaps, that may have escaped the far-seeing—but not all-seeing—eyes of our modern Naturalists; yet it is Nature herself who undertakes to furnish the missing links. Agnostic speculative thinkers have to choose between the version given by the Secret Doctrine of the East, and the hopelessly materialistic Darwinian and Biblical accounts of the origin of man; between no soul and no spiritual evolution, and the Occult doctrine which repudiates “special creation” and the “Evolutionist” anthropogenesis equally.
Again, to take up the question of “spontaneous generation”; life—as Science shows—has not always reigned on this terrestrial plane. There was a time when even the Hæckelian Moneron—that simple globule of Protoplasm—had not yet appeared at the bottom of the seas. Whence came the Impulse which caused the molecules of Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, etc., to group themselves into the Urschleim of Oken, that organic “Slime,” now christened Protoplasm? What were the prototypes of the Monera? They, at least, could not have fallen in meteorites from other Globes already formed, Sir William Thomson's wild theory to this effect notwithstanding. And even if they had so fallen; if our Earth got its supply of life-germs from other Planets; who, or what, had carried them on to these Planets? Here, again, unless the Occult Teaching is accepted, we are compelled once more to face a miracle—to accept the theory of a personal, anthropomorphic Creator, the attributes and definitions of whom, as formulated by the Monotheists, clash as much with philosophy and logic, as they degrade the ideal of an infinite Universal Deity, before whose incomprehensible awful grandeur the highest human intellect feels dwarfed. Let not the modern Philosopher, while arbitrarily placing himself on the highest pinnacle of human intellectuality hitherto evolved, show himself spiritually and intuitionally so far below the conceptions of even the ancient Greeks, themselves on a far lower level, in these respects, than the Philosophers of Eastern Âryan antiquity. Hylozoism, when philosophically understood, is the highest aspect of Pantheism. It is the only possible escape from idiotic Atheism based on lethal materiality, and the still more idiotic anthropomorphic conceptions of the Monotheists; between which it stands on its own entirely neutral ground. [pg 168] Hylozoism demands absolute Divine Thought, which would pervade the numberless active, creating Forces, or “Creators,” which Entities are moved by, and have their being in, from, and through, that Divine Thought; the latter, nevertheless, having no more personal concern in them or their creations, than the Sun has in the sun-flower and its seeds, or in vegetation in general. Such active “Creators” are known to exist and are believed in, because perceived and sensed by the Inner Man in the Occultist. Thus the latter says that an Absolute Deity, having to be unconditioned and unrelated, cannot be thought of at the same time as an active, creating, one living God, without immediate degradation of the ideal.[366] A Deity that manifests in Space and Time—these two being simply the forms of That which is the Absolute All—can be but a fractional part of the whole. And since that “All” cannot be divided in its absoluteness, therefore that sensed Creator (we say Creators) can be at best but the mere aspect thereof. To use the same metaphor—inadequate to express the full idea, yet well adapted to the case in hand—these Creators are like the numerous rays of the solar orb, which remains unconscious of, and unconcerned in, the work; while its mediating agents, the rays, become the instrumental media every spring—the Manvantaric dawn of the Earth—in fructifying and awakening the dormant vitality inherent in Nature and its differentiated matter. This was so well understood in antiquity, that even the moderately religious Aristotle remarked that such work of direct creation would be quite unbecoming to God—ἀπρεπὲς τῷ Θεῷ. Plato and other philosophers taught the same: deity cannot set its own hand to creation—αὐτουργεῖν ἅπαντα. This Cudworth calls “Hylozoism.” As old Zeno is credited by Laërtius with having said:
Nature is a habit moved from itself, according to seminal principles; perfecting and containing those several things which in determinate times are produced from it, and acting agreeably to that from which it was secreted.[367]
Let us return to our subject, pausing to think over it. Indeed, if there was vegetable life during those periods that could feed on the then deleterious elements; and if there was even animal life whose aquatic organization could be developed, notwithstanding the supposed scarcity of Oxygen, why could there not be human life also, in its [pg 169] incipient physical form, i.e., in a race of beings adapted for that geological period and its surroundings? Besides, Science confesses that it knows nothing of the real length of geological periods.
But the chief question before us is, whether it is quite certain that, from the time of that which is called the Azoic Age, there ever was such an atmosphere as that hypothesized by the Naturalists. Not all the Physicists agree with this idea. Were the writer anxious to corroborate the teachings of the Secret Doctrine by exact Science, it would be easy to show, on the admission of more than one Physicist, that the atmosphere has changed little, if at all, since the first condensation of the oceans—i.e., since the Laurentian Period, the Pyrolithic Age. Such, at any rate, is the opinion of Blanchard, S. Meunier, and even of Bischof—as the experiments of the last Scientist with basalts have shown. For were we to take the word of the majority of Scientists as to the quantity of deadly gases, and of elements entirely saturated with Carbon and Nitrogen, in which the vegetable and animal kingdoms are shown to have lived, thriven, and developed, then one would have to come to the curious conclusion that there were, in those days, oceans of liquid carbonic acid, instead of water. With such an element, it becomes doubtful whether the Ganoids, or even the Primitive Trilobites themselves could live in the oceans of the Primary Age—let alone in those of the Silurian, as shown by Blanchard.
The conditions that were necessary for the earliest Race of mankind, however, require no elements, whether simple or compound. That which was stated at the beginning is maintained. The spiritual ethereal Entity which lived in Spaces unknown to Earth, before the first sidereal “jelly-speck” evolved in the Ocean of crude Cosmic Matter—billions and trillions of years before our globular speck in infinity, called Earth, came into being and generated the Monera in its drops, called oceans—needed no “elements.” The “Manu with soft bones,” could well dispense with Calcium Phosphate, as he had no bones, save in a figurative sense. And while even the Monera, however homogeneous their organism, still required physical conditions of life that would help them toward further evolution, the Being which became Primitive Man and the “Father of Man,” after evolving on planes of existence undreamed of by Science, could well remain impervious to any state of atmospheric conditions around him. The primitive ancestor, in Brasseur de Bourbourg's Popol Vuh, who—in the Mexican legends—could act and live with equal ease under ground and [pg 170] water as upon the earth, answers only to the Second and early Third Races in our texts. And if the three kingdoms of Nature were so different in pre-diluvian ages, why should not man have been composed of materials and combinations of atoms now entirely unknown to Physical Science? The plants and animals now known, in almost numberless varieties and species, have all developed, according to scientific hypotheses, from primitive and far fewer organic forms. Why should not the same have occurred in the case of man, the elements, and the rest? As the Commentary says:
Universal Genesis starts from the One, breaks into Three, then Five, and finally culminates in Seven, to return into Four, Three, and One.
Stanza VII. From The Semi-Divine Down To The First Human Races.
24. The higher Creators reject in their pride the Forms evolved by the “Sons of Yoga.” 25. They will not incarnate in the early Egg-born. 26. They select the later Androgynes. 27. The first man endowed with mind.