According to Theosophy, "primitive" man in Europe was as the successor of a highly civilized man who lived ages before on the sunken continent of Atlantis, passing through a cycle of degradation as a consequence of his abuse of his opportunities in previous incarnations. Though the cubic capacity of the skulls of the earliest primitive races, so-called, is about the same as that of modern races, the possession of a large brain does not imply that they had a high civilization. This can be seen clearly in the case of the Eskimo, who have even more capacious skulls than some highly civilized races. A low condition of life amid a people who possess good brain development means either the presence of undeveloped Egos of limited experience, or of those who are suffering disabilities in consequence of past wrong-doing. In either case they are necessarily using the physical vehicles provided by heredity. H. P. Blavatsky says the evil Karma (the influence set in motion by past actions) generated by the sins of the Atlanteans heavily handicapped those Egos when they reappeared on the newly-forming European and Asiatic (in part) continents, and prevented them for long ages from rising out of the primitive conditions in which they found themselves.
It is a fact that man's mind is an incarnation from something very different from the material plane; it comes into humanity from its own plane. The Theosophical teachings show how each of the complex "principles" or constituents which compose the human personality, the vehicle of the Immortal Ego, is derived from its own plane or source, i. e., the physical body from the material, molecular world; the body-center of passions and desires from the plane or world of Desire, Kâma-Loka; and so forth. This is fully explained in the Theosophical literature, especially, of course, in the writings of the Theosophical Leaders. It is a most important clue, leading to many practical consequences, owing to the better understanding it gives of the causes of many of our human sufferings, of the rationale of the death-process, of the spread of epidemics, both physical and mental, and so forth. Theosophy does not fall into the materialistic error of imagining that mind is the product of some jugglery of blind forces playing with the molecules of inert matter—that the less can be the origin of the greater. When our psychologists have learned how the mind comes from its own plane, evolving in its own way, and incarnating in material forms to help them on in their evolution, they will find a new sphere of research, and the text-books will have to be rewritten.
While the idea, now being dimly suspected by some anthropologists, that man's mind is not the result of a very long and slow development from the beast, is correct according to the records of Theosophy, we must remember that the incarnation of the "Manas" or Thinker, which made incomplete man into the perfect septenary he is today, took place long before the temporary decline of the "primitive" man after the disappearance of Atlantis. One eminent scientist at least, Professor F. Soddy, F. R. S., lecturer on physical chemistry and radio-activity at Glasgow University, has lately suggested that in his opinion some great civilization may have existed (long before the "primitive" Stone Ages) which ruined itself and descended into barbarism by the abuse of the power to disintegrate matter and so to release forces of terrible potency whose existence the discovery of the properties of radium has faintly revealed to us, but which we have, fortunately, not the slightest idea how to unloose. Theosophy tells us that something of the kind did happen; but the mind of man was even then long ages posterior to the time when the "Sons of Mind" settled into the forms which only then, properly, could be called mankind.
For many years the existence of hundreds of giant portrait-statues on the wild volcanic Easter Island, two thousand miles from the coast of South America, has been known, and their origin and meaning is still one of the greatest of the world's enigmas. What was the mysterious race that carved them? How is it that such works, which obviously required the presence of a large and intelligent population, should be found on such a small island, so far from the continental lands? Archaeologists in general seem to avoid the problem; certainly no adequate theory has been advanced by the recognized authorities to meet the case. H. P. Blavatsky gave us the key to the mystery when she briefly described parts of the pre-Atlantean continent of Lemuria: Easter Island is an Atlantean vestige of that really primitive land whose truly primeval inhabitants were of larger proportions than ourselves. Well, lately we have seen three or four articles in different American and other magazines discussing the problem and trying to explain it upon the very lines of the Theosophical teachings, no other being considered reasonable.
During the past ten years the trend toward the Theosophical interpretations of some of the most pressing astronomical problems has been very marked. The re-opening of questions hither considered closed or else insoluble, has been an interesting feature of recent times. For instance, the belief that gravitation alone explained the movements of the stars has been seriously shaken lately, and, if we may venture to prophesy, it looks as if physics will have to return to the ancient and Theosophical acceptance of dual forces, attraction and repulsion—perhaps magnetic—to explain the new problem of astronomy, having found that gravitation is only a half-understood truth, as Theosophy teaches. In his inaugural address, Professor Bergstrand, newly appointed to the chair of astronomy at the university of Upsala, Sweden, made a special point of the fact that some utterly unknown force or forces besides gravitation must be operating to explain some of the newest discoveries in stellar physics. He was alluding particularly to the binding together of certain groups of stars in connected drifts across the depths of space. Several of such drifting collections of stars moving together across the vast depths of kosmos at equal speed are now known. There would not be anything so extraordinary in this, and nothing that might call for the postulate of some unknown law, but for the fact that in some cases members of the same star-group are found at far distant parts of the heavens separated from each other by many other stars drifting in various directions between them—our sun for one. What is the mysterious binding tie, and how may it be reconciled with the known action of gravitation? One of the fundamental principles in nature, according to Theosophy, is the Duality of manifested forces: in The Secret Doctrine H. P. Blavatsky treats of this very fully, plainly declaring that the other half of gravitation will have to be reckoned with before long by physical science in the West. In the East there is practical knowledge of it, among a chosen few.
The newest speculations about the processes of solar and planetary development from nebulae are bound to lead to the discovery of the truth of the Theosophical teaching that there is an archetypal world, a world of causes, lying concealed behind all manifested material forms. Once this is admitted by scientists, once a sane metaphysical basis for the universe is found logically necessary, there will be a great change in the way of looking at phenomena, including the problem of human life, and we know that what the most advanced thinkers proclaim will be followed before long by the great mass; see, for instance, the strong effect the Darwinian theory of Natural Selection, incomplete and materialistic as it is, has already made in every department of modern thought. Of course the acceptance of a merely metaphysical foundation for the facts recorded by our ordinary senses does not mean the acceptance of the reality of a spiritual world; that is a far deeper problem, and has to be approached through the experience of the intuition, trained and untrained, but a long step will be made when it is thoroughly realized that the material plane is not the plane of ultimate causes.
According to one of the nebular hypotheses of today the collision of two suns, (dark and "dead" or otherwise) crashing into each other at tremendous speed, results in a vast nebula, in which, owing to the enormous heat produced, the atoms would be reduced to the state of "corpuscles," the root of matter on our plane, all alike, and without any of the characteristics of the elements, even in the most rudimentary form; there would be no metallic vapors, no gases, not even helium or coronium, nothing but the primitive corpuscular basis of matter. Then, as the nebula formed by the collision condensed and perhaps cooled, it would begin to rebuild its substance into the well-known elements, combinations would take place, and the evolution of a new solar system would be started. But now arises the important question: What causes the perfectly homogeneous or uniform "corpuscular" substance, the mass of sub-atoms of unknown nature, to perform the astonishing feat of transforming itself into the marvelous complexity we find even in the simplest star? The problem is similar to that of the egg. In a new-laid egg the great mass of its constituent materials is structureless, but in a short time of incubation the eggshell is completely filled with a most complicated living organism. Is it not clear that behind both nebula and egg there must be an archetype or model form, invisible to ordinary eyesight, which is being used as the pattern into which the simple materials are being woven? and that there are Builders, who know the plan and work it out in a conscious harmony that we call the correlation of "natural laws"? "Blind forces," "necessity," "unconscious laws," are meaningless terms which only disguise ignorance, or stave off the anti-materialistic and dreaded so-called "teleological" view that there must be "a Divinity that shapes our ends."
Theosophy offers as a fact, demonstrable from the very presence within of the higher, divine nature, that men in time will attain the stature of Creative powers, Builders of future world-systems, just as the Higher Beings who are the guides and directors of the present evolution were once men and lower than men in past aeons. Evolution of men will not stop with the perfecting of the mental and moral nature; once the godlike nature of the Higher Self is admitted, it follows that there can not be a limit assigned beyond which man may not go.
There may be some truth in the collision-theory of the origin of certain nebulae; it seems to explain the sudden appearance of "temporary stars," at least; but, by its very nature, it cannot explain the origin of the universe of suns as a whole. Again, after each collision the speed of the new body formed from the material of the two colliding spheres would be less than their combined speed, because much or all of their motion would be arrested and transformed into the energy which would be needed to scatter their substance in all directions. If two equal bodies, moving at equal speed, met in a line joining their centers, the resulting nebula would have no motion at all. It has been pointed out that if the collision theory alone is relied upon to explain the structure of the universe it must fail, because during the infinity of past time a condition of absolute stagnation would have been attained, the universe would have "run down," nothing being left but one gigantic dead and dark globe!