Many passages recall “Light on the Path,” though Mr. Darby probably never saw that book; but life is one, and true occultism is one.
Speaking of mankind as divided into two classes, men in whom is the Holy Ghost, the Divine Spirit or the Logos, he says:
“With people self-wise or over-sufficient, with the proud and the uncharitable, with all who are without understanding as to the common good being the only good, with him who fails to see that gifts are in men as almoners only—with all these the Holy Ghost is absent, otherwise so lacking in measure as to be incapable of making itself felt.”
The italicised passages give the key-note of the true science and art of living. To quote again:
“Settled into tranquillity by entirely satisfactory recognition of noumenon through phenomenon an end is reached where instrument is prepared and ready for use. Analysis has shown the Rosicrucian what he is; more than this—what he can become as to his Ego. If out of his understanding, he puts office [the service of others.—Ed.] before self, he learns directly of the God, as the God comes to live in and to make use of him.”
“Proving to one’s self that one’s self is God”; and again, “God ... the One is in all; the All is in one.”
The next chapter contrasts strangely with the one just quoted from—strangely, that is, to the outer sense. The one full of deep philosophy, of questionings of God, the Self, the World, clothed in the profound and significant paradoxes in which wisdom finds expression; the other an idyll, a sketch of nature, deeply coloured by the influence of Walt Whitman, whose style, perhaps, has had too great an influence on Mr. Darby, who has caught its jerky and unpleasant strings of detached sentences.
This is Chapter V.; Chapter VI. deals with Matter in its relation to the Ego, the spirit of the treatment being indicated by the following conclusion:
“That there shows itself, out of a process of exclusion, conducted even only so far as the analysis of matter, a something which is not matter. The analysis demonstrates the something to be of individual signification; further, that it is to it what a flute or other instrument is to harmony.”
The final words express a purely occult doctrine, which is worked out at length in the succeeding chapter on the Ego.