“This has been written sixty or seventy years ago, written by a person of very broad, elevated mind, progressive, a teacher or writer—perhaps both. He had a great deal of will power, strong, and decisive, was very independent, not afraid to give his views, but had a great deal of opposition to his sentiments. He was of a scientific cast of mind, was acquainted with medical science, and was more interested in the brain than anything else. He would talk, lecture, and write about the brain, and had very correct views in advance of others. He is in spirit life now. There is a warmth and nearness in the impression as though he would be attracted to the science you are engaged in. His mind broadens out into different lines of thought in spirit life—things appertaining to what he was interested in here, and kindred subjects. He thinks you are developing in the right direction. I think he has communicated with you. I think he has an overshadowing approval of your work. He feels that you are in an original line of thought, not dominated by any other minds. There seems an overshadowing influence that stimulates you.”
As to his having communicated with me, it is true that over thirty years ago I received some remarkable communications from him, through a rapping medium, the messages being spelled out by the alphabet, and his suggestions entirely in consonance with my teachings.
I then asked, “What views does he have of the process of creation and development of life on the globe?” Which was answered “His views are such as have been expressed by the believers in evolution, from the lower to the higher orders of creation. I feel a pressure of intellectual conceptions, but my nervous system is not in a state to express it.”
I then read through the statement of Spurzheim’s views (his name being still unknown to Mrs. B.), and asked how they coincided with the sentiments she perceived in the person she described. She replied, “I think he accepts or approves it generally. He would certainly sanction such ideas. I think he has communicated, and that he would, in control of a medium, express such ideas.”
The messages of Hahnemann and Spurzheim have been so well translated by a correspondent of the Golden Gate, that I reproduce them as given in that journal, as follows:
“If you consider the high development of the Caucasian race, it is repulsive to your sentiments to believe that man belongs to the animal kingdom as its highest link, and springs from this kingdom. Yet this feeling is false, and must be destroyed, since it originates only in self-conceit and it is not so very difficult to arrive at a juster view. Only go back to the time of Charlemagne or to that of Augustus, and observe the great mass of your forefathers, and you will find so great a difference, that you will be as much alarmed as if in the presence of Indians, when such a tribe of Germans is brought before you. Then go still further back into the pre-historic times, and form an image of the pile-builders and their mode of life, and of the cave-dwellers and their imperfect weapons and tools, and you will have to confess that these are separated from the present Europeans by a greater gap than are the uncultured inhabitants of the earth of to-day. And yet these cave-dwellers and pile-builders had already reached a high degree of culture in comparison with those who had preceded them by thousands of years; and if we thus join link to link in the chain backwards, we must come to the conclusion that the original men were but little distinguished in form and bodily structure, as well as in intellectual capacity, and at first hardly at all, from the animals standing next them, the four-handed ones.
“The assumption that God has created man perfect, i. e., in body, but without power of judgment, and that he obtained this only by transgressing a command and a prohibition, and thus by a crime, so that he first began to degenerate upon the awakening in him of the divine intellect and reason, we leave wholly one side as absolutely contradicted by positive science, and only inquire, how, then, did man originate in so low a form? There are but two answers to this question. The one is, that man was placed upon the earth by an outside power in full size, rudeness and stupidity, in order to be left to his fate there in an unknown land, and to struggle for his existence with unknown animals. Or, on the other hand, that man was developed in a quite natural way, according to the law of evolution, out of the class of animals standing next below him. You are aware that we do not favor the first view, but so much the more earnestly embrace the latter. According to the law of evolution and adaptation the talents and capacities of animals were steadily changed in the course of thousands of years, following the changed relations of climate and soil, so as to fit themselves for the new conditions of sustenance and existence. In proportion as all nature became changed, so that at the end of a so-called geological period no comparison could be made with the beginning of the next preceding one, in that same proportion and measure the plants and animals had also changed, so that scarcely any more resemblance existed between these and those from which they originated. It is self-evident that amid such changes only those specimens continued to exist, which had adapted themselves in their progressive development in their organs and capacities in the best way to the new conditions of their existence. All those which had not thus changed lost the conditions of their existence and died out. But where did these organs and capacities, fitted to the newer relations, gain their form and development? In the mother-pouch of the female, undoubtedly! And of course this improvement advanced with each succeeding generation, so that animals which originally only lived in water, through gradual efforts to go on dry land also, to which, perhaps, they were forced to preserve their species, thereby changed the original fins into legs and later into web-feet by which they were adapted to live in water as well as on land (amphibia).
“Now likewise there was developed in the gigantic four-handed Saurians such a change in the mother-pouch of the female animals as the ever finer organized brain created, so that in the course of thousands of years, a creature was gradually developed which overstepped the last stage of the sense-developed understanding and comprehension, and was in a position, through the putting into activity of the upper and front brain, to distinguish evil from good and to think independently. Of these creatures, likewise, only those survive that had in themselves the capacity for further development, while the rest perished. The survivors were the original men; those that perished formed the intermediate link between man and the brute. Thus, out of the infinite efforts of nature to create a finer organized species from the four-handed Saurians, came forth not only men, but the failures, the apes. So man does not descend from the ape, but both have only one stock, which is the four-handed animals sprung from the flesh-devouring Saurians.
“Thus we can settle whence man comes and how he arose, but that does not solve the problem whence comes life or how it arose, yet on this point I will give place to friend Spurzheim.
“Dr. Spurzheim then took control and spoke over half an hour in his peculiarly striking, logical and convincing way, yet it is quite impossible to repeat this discourse as it was given. It ran about as follows:
“Worthy friends, friend Hahnemann has just given you an explanation of the origin of man to which I have nothing to add. The question whether the egg existed before the hen or the hen before the egg has often been called an idle one, and yet it obtrudes itself upon everybody. Our eyesight teaches that the egg comes from the hen, but at the same time also that the hen is developed from the egg, and if we go farther back we are lost in infinity. The theological view that God put into the world all that exists, all animals from the smallest seen by the microscope to the largest gigantic creatures in pairs and fully grown, seems to solve the problem of the egg and the hen, but has long since been refuted by science, so that we need not further meddle with it, and so much the less as thereby the question of the origin of life is not even touched. Let us now make a violent leap from man out into infinite space and back millions of years before the origin of man upon the earth. What do we see there? Unnumbered worlds, all which, like the sun, have brought forth other worlds dependent on them, and these by their development taking place according to like uniform laws in their infinite differences in size and specific gravity, yet ever striving after the same great end, the production of beings endowed with reason, offer the most glorious picture of Godlike power and harmony. The worlds born of these suns (planets) all originated in like manner, since the parts lying along the circumference of the suns, by their motion in space cooled off the sooner, broke away in irregular masses, and while contracting into globular shapes and revolving upon their own axis, yet by the force of attraction and their original motion bound to the bodies, whirl around these and with these move on in space. And though these balls of glowing gas, as the earth for example in its origin, in contrast with the mother-body (sun) are somewhat cooled off, yet is the heat of the same still so great (some reckoning it at two or six thousand degrees while others hold it incomputable) that absolutely no life can exist within such balls of fire. But after the more solid parts are formed (granite, porphyry, etc.,) gradually by cooling off and contracting, and these are fused together into larger masses, then begin the ribs of the earth-structure, the rocky foundations of the super-structure, and as soon as the development of the earth is so far advanced that oxygen and hydrogen can be formed into water, which falls down in frightful masses upon the hot rocks and dissolves them on the surface, then begins the condition productive of cells and carbon entering into the connection, and the first plants are brought forth; the algæ first, then the lichens and ferns, which are developed into gigantic dimensions. Prior to and simultaneous with the formation of cells went on the production of crystals and the mineral as well as the vegetable kingdoms were further and further developed. Contemporary with the first plant-cells the conditions were plainly offered for the formation of the first life-cells. And now the question arises, What is life? Whence comes it? Although it is certain that in the process of development of the earth after its separation from the sun no life was present.
“It is asserted that life is motion and is an attribute of matter; yet that is something wholly different from what is understood by the term. Thus far science has pointed out no distinction between dead and living protoplasm, and the affirmation that the primordial cells are the source of life is not tenable, since the cell is an organization that presupposes life, and so, at most, the original cell could be designated as but the first expression of life. For a short time it was assumed that life came to the earth through meteors or parts of worlds that had gone to pieces, but this idea was soon given up, because neither the manifold nature of life nor the origin of the same could thereby be explained or determined, and thus the question was only pushed farther back, since what was desired to be known, was, how life originated on the world that was destroyed.
“When, and under what circumstances, life began on the earth can not be accurately fixed, yet it is clear that at the time when the ocean still covered nearly all the earth and was so hot that not a single one of the now existing plants and living beings could then exist, the life in that ocean and on its bottom was so infinitely grand in its proportions that men can now form no adequate conception of the same. The force of growth as well as of decay was immense, and all that was grown or made by its decay only increased the mass of life-producing substance.
“There are three theories as to the origin of living beings:
“1. God made all animals, including man, in pairs and of full size.
“2. The elements of physical nature and the forces dwelling in matter by a lucky arrangement of atoms developing living organs out of matter.
“3. An intelligent, intellectual force permeates matter, and wherever this in its development attains the conditions for the maintenance of life (and so a higher manifestation of force than in the mineral) it brings forth the intellectual life in the protoplasmic germ for the finest organism. Through the laws of inheritance, of change, of the multiplication of progressive development, of natural selection and of the persistence of the most gifted individuals, living beings are developed through all classes and species up to man.
“With the first theory we need not concern ourselves further, as we have already branded it as hostile to reason and knowledge, although theologians have sought to maintain that Almighty God has made the earth with all that is in it and upon it, just as it now exists, and have even gone so far as to affirm in opposition to the effect of geological discoveries, that God himself had created or deposited the fossil remains of animals found under the bed of the Euphrates (the spot where paradise is said to have been) exactly there and in a petrified condition.
“The second theory seems more probable; it assumes that force and matter are one and the same, matter possessing force as a quality; but overlooks the fact that what is called matter first came forth as a product out of the glowing mass of primary gas or world-material, and hence that matter, or world-material, to which the life-producing force is attached, is to be sought away back before the time when began the formations of worlds in their incandescent state, whereby it is, of course, conceded that life in the ordinary sense was destroyed, if it really subsisted before the heating of the particles of matter.
“Another objection to this theory is this, that if organizations spring from the favorable union of atoms, this surrenders the rule to chance and excludes a unitary order of the world, while failing to explain the origin of thinking, moral and reason-gifted beings; since, if thinking, reason and moral sentiment spring from matter, they must be attributes of the same; and since the product is always less than the producer, it follows that intelligence, reason and ethics must be present somewhere in matter in a concentrated form; and this reflection brings us quite naturally to the third theory.
“The intellectual, divine principle penetrates matter as the positive element, which under definite conditions steadily works upon the negative element of the original substance and forces the same under constant changing of form and combining parts, to realize definite, universally similar ideas, and to attain definite aims; and wherever matter in the process of development offers certain conditions, there the intellectual element produces what is called life. And this takes for granted that life may spring up spontaneously there where there was no life before; and this fact has been established beyond all reasonable doubt. The juice of mutton, beef and a mixture of gelatine and sugar have been put in separate vessels, these made air-tight and exposed for a long time to a heat of as much as three hundred degrees of Fahrenheit, so as to be quite sure that all living germs were destroyed. Yet after the lapse of weeks in some cases and of months in others, living beings were developed in the vessels.
“Under the relation of the earth as existing to-day, life would again be developed, if we were in a condition instantaneously to annihilate all life; yet the same results would not be produced as in the original period, because the needed materials are no longer present in the mighty masses, nor in the requisite fluid and gaseous conditions to attain so powerful effects, to which belong also as necessary conditions the far higher temperature and the greater humidity of the atmosphere of that epoch. In the first creative period the force as well as the material were present in colossal measure and then arose those gigantic plants and animals, which laid the foundation for all later organisms. Without the colossal ferns and lichens and palm-like growths of the early ages, the plants of to-day would have been impossible, and without the monstrous giant creatures of old, which became more and more refined through gradual adaptation to altered relations, the modern animal kingdom could not have arisen. This adaptation is one of the most wonderful phenomena in the history of the development of the earth and is found as well in the realm of plants as in that of animals. Originally there were only aquatic animals, but as the relations changed so that it became necessary, partly for the procuring of food and partly for the safety of the offspring, that animals should go on land, their attempts constantly repeated to do so, gradually produced a change in the limbs fitted for motion, and so came about the transformation of fins into wings in the creatures that wanted to rise out of the water into the air, which then had far more carrying power than at the present day.
“Whatever may be said about the qualities of matter and the force united with it (more truly the force manifesting itself therein), it cannot be denied, that the plan of creation is a unitary one, moving on according to definite laws and striving towards definite final results. This presupposes that a conscious idea lies at the basis of the creative plan, and this implies an original consciousness which we call God. God and nature are one, just as intellect and body are one in man. Nature, i. e., substance, changes according to the impulses that go out from God, but God remains unchanged. All that possesses form, all organization must be destroyed in the incandescent process of forming world-bodies, but the divine, the intellectual principle is indestructible; and when matter under the impulses that went forth from God, has reached the grade of development at which organization is possible, then the divine principle steps into force as the positive element, and that is life. This positive element works on and on, steadily producing higher forms and higher organizations, until in man it fashions itself into a self-recognizing, conscious and individual essence, which, as derived from God, is indestructible, and after the consummation of its earthly organism, is capable, as an individual, intellectual being, of an infinitely progressive development.
“So far man can attain by a chain of logical deductions; but to define the idea that lies at the basis of the world-order is impossible; just as also a man will never be in a condition to find out or to comprehend how the working of the intellectual element, upon the substance capable of change, is made possible. Life is the self-manifested working of the intellectual element upon matter. Man never understands the laws of life, though he can understand the laws necessary for the preservation of life, since he can deduce them from the outward manifestations of life. Man must be contented with this; he can never understand God; and since life is the expression of the divine activity, its origin must ever remain a mystery to him.”
Though concurring generally in the foregoing views (which may have been materially modified by their channel) I do not accept them as a finality. That a brooding spiritual power has to do with all development and progress I do not doubt. But this power is not necessarily a monotonous and universal influence like gravitation or caloric. There is no reason to forbid special acts of the creative spiritual energy, for we observe to-day the production of plants and of beautiful fabrics by spiritual power where the necessary conditions exist. Moreover, the greatest potency of spiritual power is at the beginnings in the most plasmic conditions of matter. It is in the animal germ and the vegetable seed that the invisible world is most potential, and I am inclined to think that naturalists have attached too much importance to the exterior environment, and too little to the interior conditions in which the higher potencies of organization are to be found, and in which alone we may find the entrance of life from the true world of life.
The hasty conclusions of naturalists as to evolution do not explain the evolution and the vast variety of the vegetable kingdom. To attribute this to any power of modification by environment, when we see how little environment can do to make any essential change in vegetation, would require more credulity than I would consider justifiable in the pursuit of scientific truths. So in the evolution of the animal kingdom, I believe the power of the physical environment has been greatly overrated.