The Ultimate Canon of Knowledge
by Alvin B Kuhn

Chapters 11 through 15

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The material of the preceding chapter is a brief and sketchy survey of what might be denominated the effort of the human logos, through its best minds, to delineate the structure of the Logos of God. It portrays the fruits of the human attempt to glean the noumenal import of the universe from observation and reflection on its phenomena. If it has not been registered on the minds of the readers, it is to be pointed out as a fact of notable significance that, as evidenced by the collation of the testimony presented, there is seen to be agreement, if not virtual unanimity, of the world’s best philosophical opinion on the basic thesis--the idea that the natural world is an epiphany of the creative thought of the mind of God. It stands before us as the divine theophany. God has revealed his nature and his thought and purpose in his creation. Likewise it is seen that there is agreement also upon the idea that the message inscribed by deity on the open face of nature is legible by the mind of man, if that instrument is sharpened to a certain adeptship in interpretative adroitness. It is obvious from the opinions advanced that many great minds had caught a vision of the possibility of a stupendous achievement of the human mind itself: of finding in nature the ultimate canons of knowledge. Back of and instigating this feeling must have been the conscious or unconscious haunting of the thought that these ultimate principia of truth, if they were to be discovered anywhere, would be found inwoven into the texture of the living universe. Many a mind must have put to itself the question: If they are not to be found there, where else, in all conscience, could they be looked for?

And these observations enable us to analyze the thought situation respecting this fundamental question of philosophy in its elementary simplicity. If not localized in the external world, there was but one other place to search for them: in the human mind. and so the philosophical quest for them advanced along two paths, the one external and objective, the other the path of introversion and subjectivity. It may be said that in so far as reflection suggested and pursued the possibility that both paths might be found or made to converge, that both at any rate led to the same destination, and that there was harmony, if not identity, between them, philosophical effort made substantial progress toward discovery. The nub of the ideological conflict was just this question: Was man only the detached spectator of the truth and reality of things; or was he himself the arbiter, if not quasi-creator, of the universe? The ancients seemed to possess authoritative understanding of the matter. But their sagacity was forgotten for the middle centuries, and it was Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and finally Kant who brought the issue out in sharp outline. The Greek philosophers had urged man to find the archai of truth within himself--"Man, know thyself, and thou wilt know all things." But the Greek philosophers realized that in knowing himself, he would find himself a being poised between two worlds, an outer objective and an inner subjective one, and that, through the operation of that majestic axiom laid down by thrice-greatest Hermes, he could in the main only know himself as his experience with that outer world revealed himself to himself. Religion, obsessed with the idea of the supremacy and hegemony of the spirit, lost sight of this balancing qualification to the science of self-knowledge and attempted to find the more stable realities in disdain of and detachment from the outer realm, to a large extent carrying the straining effort out into an ideal vacuum and warping devotional life into eccentricities and abnormalities.

Alexander Pope, reaching back to those Greek Mystery teachings, reminded the modern world that "the proper study of mankind is man." This gave the cue to Kant, who turned thought in upon itself and studied the structure of the human mind as no one in the West had done before him. He recognized the fact that man found himself immersed in an environment that vitally affected his existence and laid down some axioms that went in a corollary fashion with his determinations. So it was left for Fichte, then Schelling and Hegel, to attempt romantically to seek for final answers in the harmony and asserted identity of the order of man’s mind with that of nature. An essential ingredient of man’s knowledge of himself is that he is on his physical side a generic product of the natural order. Whatever he may be as a spiritual entity, a unit of the God-mind, he is one-half animal, as Plato told us. Theological infatuations swept religion into the persuasion that the animal portion of his nature was a horrible mire clinging to his feet, which he must stamp off at all costs. The romanticists, on the other hand, realizing that he was the child of Mother Nature, contended that the rationale of his nature was to be found in a deep study of the modus vivendi of that Mother’s organic life. Whatever codex and modus of being the total system of the living world revealed, it must deliver to man also the fundamenta of his existence and constitution. His life, as religion so fervently contended it was, could not be so drastically alien to his natural parenthood. Religion had long asked man to renounce his parentage, to revile his natural Mother. It even threw her out of the primordial Trinity. The romanticists were swept into high afflation of philosophical intuitions in contemplating the vision of the widely supported thesis that deep within the heart of nature would be found the cardinal principia governing man’s life. Their enthusiasm and the exhilaration of the enterprise carried them some distance toward the supreme vision of the unity of our minds with the logos of nature, but not far enough to have established the relation on an authentic platform of scientific demonstration, and the grandiose movement faded out.

It is now our task to inquire into the causes of this failure and that of many previous movements toward the consummative goal to which they should have led. This quest will take us into one of the most challenging mysteries in the field of religio-philosophical history. We face an anomalous fact of that history itself in this situation. Here was a principle of the best human thought that was endorsed in principle by all leading thinkers; yet in every case, in every age, it failed of substantial or general verification and has not achieved that status even yet. In spite of its having been accorded the accolade of approbation and endorsement by the greatest intellectuals in history, it is yet regarded with suspicion and distrust in the philosophical world, and considered largely as a poetic sentimentality and pretty theoretical fantasy.

Few realize how generally and almost unanimously endorsed by the consensus of opinion formerly and recurrently ever since. It was a maxim of the cryptic methodology of the Kabalists, the esoteric party among the early Jews. It was understood by Josephus, who attests to the fact--the significance of which has been disdained and ignored by the orthodox Hebrew religionists--that even Moses, the eponymous hero of Jewry, wrote the Pentateuch in a vein of figurism, rather than historically. In fact he says in the Preface to his great history that, now having completed his devoted task of recounting the history of the Jews in its external aspect and objective reality, it will be his purpose, if God gives him the strength and the time, to rewrite the substance of the Mosaic scriptures in their sub-historical and esoteric sense. Had the Jewish historian been privileged to produce this work, it is conceivable that the entire history of Western man could have altered in the direction of a humanistic uplift and the relapse of Medieval European mentality into servitude to ecclesiastical dogmatism been obviated. But while Josephus failed to bring his lofty purpose to accomplishment, effort of a quite similar kind was made by a perhaps even more perceptive contemporary, the philosopher Philo Judaeus. He developed the cult of semanticism to a fairly high degree of lucidity in his writings, as the basis of his undertaking to effect a synthesis of the Mosaic Hebraism of the Torah with the Platonism of Greece. His work was the inspiration of Ammonias Saccas, the founder of Neoplatonism, as well as that of Pantaenus, Clement and Origen, which found expression through these leading theologians of the great school of Christian exegesis at Alexandria, with their influence reaching on to Augustine, the prime formulator of the doctrinism of the Church.

But our claim will be challenged on the ground that this flourish of semanticism was in the domain of theology and had no connection with nature symbolism. The reply to that is that when theology is expounded allegorically and esoterically, it becomes an enterprise in semanticism, all processes reverting back to the archetypes furnished ultimately by nature. Incarnation of soul in body is seen as the death of the seed planted in the soil and resurrection its germination; or, under changed figure, the setting of the sun at eve or in the autumn into night or winter, or again as the fiery essence of soul going down into water--the human body being about seventy percent water--and thus in danger of drowning in the red sea water of the human body blood. The semantic genius of ancient sages grasped at a thousand aspects of nature’s life and employed them as analogues of spiritual truth. It has not been recognized that this was the predominant motif in most ancient scriptural composition. It may be said to constitute in essence the lost key to the interpretation of the sacred scripts of old. Clement and Origen made a valiant attempt to formulate Christian theology by this methodology, with a limited degree of real achievement. But again it was not virile enough to carry conviction. Sporadic movements followed through the Medieval period, but were mostly summarily suppressed by the jealous power of the Church, committed as it was to the literal-historical exegesis of the Scriptural legacy.

It has to be true that humanity in its historical evolution passes through crucial situations of the most momentous character, with future weal or woe contingent upon the issues, but never fully aware of the critical nature of the turn of events. That is, we can seldom be fully cognizant of what we have by the tiniest margin of luck happily achieved, or by the trickiest quirk of fate just missed. It is the humble opinion in this literary corner that the human family suffered one of the most catastrophic misses of this kind in all its mundane career when in the early centuries of our era the cult of esotericism in religion, with its foundations in semantic modes of literary expression, faded out and was replaced by gross literalism which kills the spirit by the deadness of the letter.

He who will succinctly expound the causes of this calamitous failure of intelligence at a most critical juncture in human affairs will render his fellow man a service of the first magnitude. It dimmed and almost totally extinguished a light that had previously gleamed in the minds of men of undoubted title to the status of Initiates, Hierophants, Illuminati, minds of near-Buddhic enlightenment. It marked the turn from intelligence to mental darkness, by which the ancient light of occult truth that had been kindled by perhaps the greatest luminary of all, thrice-greatest Hermes, suffered diminution and eventual obscuration. It produced that precipitation of the fogs that carried spiritual opacity into the night of Medieval Dark Ages.

Mystery it is and will long remain, but indications seem clear enough to warrant the explanation that the efforts of Philo and Origen simply did not achieve that degree of clarity and cogency, that brilliant luminosity in semantic imagery, requisite to establish the authenticity and authority of the method upon the mentality of the time. It was at any rate not adequate to bridge the enormous gap that always subsists between the power of genius to visualize clearly the concepts of abstract intellection and the stolid crassness of the dullard. The infinite tragedy in the case is that the down-draught of gross exoteric misconception that literalized the Scriptures overwhelmed and smothered out the candles of inner illumination, and took charge of two thousand years of history. That this debacle plunged these years into a darkness profound and disastrous is the accepted verdict of history.

In view of the recurrent efforts of sages and cult movements from time to time to resuscitate the allegorical-symbolic mode of interpretation and their invariable failure, it seems necessary to conclude that at no time has the consummate artistry, the subtle technique and the overall proficiency requisite to establish the methodology as incontrovertibly sound and valid been demonstrated to promote it to acceptance. That many minds of deep reflective apperception have been assured of its adequacy as the most competent tool for the apprehension of truth, but no one has ever apparently succeeded in formulating the principles that would make it operable as an applied science. As said, it has been left floating in the upper region of poetic fantasy, mystical rhapsodizing and rare flashes of vision that could never be marshaled into the semblance of organic systematism. And lacking such character of structuralism, there was nothing to restrict it to legitimate compass, to prevent wayward and whimsical fancy from running wild with it and in the end discrediting it with irrational excesses--much the same as Freud’s adventurous efforts to interpret dreams symbolically have run out into ludicrous extravaganza. It seems necessary to assert that no one has ever formulated the organic principles under a system of rationalization that would have given the method title to the character and name of a scientific technique. It remained in the status of loose visionary ideality.

A vast and formidable deterrent to its more authoritative vogue emanated from the side of dogmatic religion in the introduction into Christian theology of a tenet that came into the Church as a product of Hindu negativism--the doctrine of the so-called "malignancy of matter." Matter, the "opponent" of spirit, was loaded with contempt and stamped as the evil principle. Acceptance of this dogma inevitably inspired a hostile mental attitude toward nature, the material world. If nature reeked of poison to the soul, surely one should not look to it for any salutary message for the spiritual life. It is not to be denied that this noxious misconception inflicted a centuries-long blight upon the natural tendency of the mind of Europe to learn what nature could have taught it. The break-out into humanism and naturalism in the fourteenth century with the surge of Renaissance romanticism, and the secret and semi-occult and the first adventures of Roger Bacon, Paracelsus, Philalethes, Raymond Lully, Cardano and others in empirical science marked the first emergence of a drive back to nature. An Isaac Newton could find in the esoteric lucubrations of the mystic Boehme intimations which led to his formulation of the laws of motion. Sensing peril from the challenge of nature, entrenched pietism fought the interest in nature with a blind bitterness that, when the chilling annals are read, leaves one wondering whether faith and religion are not the most devilish of all human persuasions. When the obsession of a hypnotic power that might be called "sanctitude" can so warp the human mind that a purely physical phenomenon, the rotundity of the earth and its circulation round a central body, can drive fanatical zealots to the point of inhuman savagery against the humble individual who announced the discovery, there is ground for speculation whether religion is not all in all more demonical than angelic.

From the beginning of the resurgence of interest in nature, it required three or four centuries for dawning modernity to emancipate itself from the suppression of ecclesiasticism and proceed triumphantly on its course of ever deeper penetration into the interior wonderland of nature. Now the search has gone deep enough to have given us contact with a magic so mercurial that we can surpass the legendary feats of alchemy, convert a waterfall into light, waft a sonata across a continent and watch a baseball game three thousand miles away.

But this is all on the physical side. The dynamism we have extracted from matter can give us light for the eye; still we linger in the murky dimness--also largely produced by the shadow of the same religious obscurantism--that prevents us from extracting from nature its consummate blessing, light for the mind. Still our blessed and truly holy Mother is thwarted in her benign purpose of bestowing upon her children her most sanctified gift of all--knowledge of eternal truth.

Our quest over years for an explanation of the failure of all attempts since the day of Hermes Trismegistus to recover the ancient arcane science of nature-wisdom was happily rewarded by the discovery of one terse and sententious sentence found in one of the Upanishads of India’s religious lore. This sentence will provide the golden text for most of what will follow in this work. It is truly a priceless treasure for understanding, a formula for knowledge. The reference pointing to the central creative mind-soul of the universe, the statement stands: "By sharp and subtle intellect is he beheld." These words well deserve to be inscribed in imperishable characters, as Carlyle says, "on all walls,"--most appropriately those of churches, seminaries and universities. Here is the vindication at last of the religiously defamed intellect. Not besmirched with the calumny of its supposed baneful opposition to spirit; not belittled as the dissipator of integral unity of knowledge; not vilified and scorned as the block to intuition; but placed in its true and beneficent role as discerner of truth, at last intellect presides in our kingdom of intelligence. As far as nature is concerned, it is, in Wordsworth’s felicitous phrasing, "the master light of all our seeing."

The key, then, to understanding all previous failure to demonstrate the ineluctable legitimacy and cogency of the nature-mind kinship as source-spring of the highest intelligence, must be the fact that neither the Hermeticists, Plato, Philo, Origen or others who essayed to establish it as basic canon of knowledge, possessed or exercised the requisite sharpness and intellectual subtlety to certify its validity and command its acceptance. Their probing into nature was not done with sufficient acuity of mind or keenness of discernment to have lightened the darkness of the dullest minds and put the principle beyond denial. When they had done their best, the message of truth did not ring out with the enchanting clarity that would have made its music impossible to miss its effect on even the common level of mentality. All honor goes to them for their heroic championship of nature’s mighty Cause. It is still the unfortunate truth that their effort was not brilliant enough to carry their mission to ultimate victory.

And now the world of religion and philosophy is challenged to muster that "sharp and subtle intellect" by which finally the meaning of God written upon the creation of his intellect is to be grasped by his earthly children.

William Wordsworth, one of nature’s most fervent worshippers, has made us aware of three stages in the evolution of our adoration of nature in an individual’s lifetime. We begin, naturally, with sheer sensual delight in her forms and wonders. The beauty she flaunts before us in bush and tree, grass, sky, field, mountain and stream, sunshine, moonlight, spring and autumn, simply bend our spirits in thrall to her majesty and splendor. This is felt in our youth. Ruskin speaks with reverent feeling of the enraptured awe which his first sight of a mountain produced upon his mind and emotion in very early childhood. Wordsworth gives us a lively picture of this enthrallment of his senses,

"when like a roe

I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides

Of the deep rivers and the lonely streams.

Wherever nature led; more like a man

Flying from something that he dreads than one

Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then

(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,

And their glad animal movements all gone by)

To me was all in all. - I cannot paint

What then I was. The sounding cataract

Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,

Their colors and their forms, were then to me

An appetite; a feeling and a love,

That had no need of a remoter charm

By thought supplied, not any interest

Unborrowed from the eye.

The keen perceptiveness of our sight and hearing in childhood brought to him the full registry of nature’s charm and panoply of marvel. He needed only to roam at random amongst her rich display of beauties to revel in the fabulous wealth of her enchantments. So he says

That time is past

And all its aching joys are now no more.

And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this

Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts

Have followed; for such loss I would believe

Abundant recompense. For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes

The still sad music of humanity,

Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;

A motion and a spirit that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.

Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods,

And mountains, and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye and ear--both what they half create

And what perceive; well pleased to recognize

In nature and the language of the sense,

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being."

This may stand as poetry’s most lyric tribute to the enchantment of the earth for God’s children, whom he sent into this paradise, this Edenic "garden of delight."

It is in this citation that we find the poet’s delineation of the second stage of our response to nature. In it he has made the transition from simple sense delight to the beginnings of reflection, which, being mental, gives rise to emotion and sentiment. He begins to see in nature analogues to the life of man; he sees it mirroring aspects of human experience. Spring brings renewal of life, autumn steals it away, and winter seals its death. Morning suggests life in its freshness and novelty; evening shades and night’s darkness just as obviously depict for thought the fading out and extinction of everything positive and conscious. The aspects of nature begin to parallel the nuances of reflective meditation.

The clouds that gather round the setting sun

Do take a sober coloring from an eye

That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality.

This poet’s motif in virtually every one of the thousand places he molded in verse was the abstraction of some felicitous moral apologue, some touch of similitude caught by fancy, some pertinent and revealing affinity between the natural scene or object that came under his observation, and some moral, intellectual or spiritual intimation of inner truth. For him nature came to be a never-failing panorama, if not an open book, of moral apothegms. If in contemplating a tumbling brook, a butterfly, a single daisy or a host of daffodils in a meadow, he caught the pattern of some idea in the area of human life, his mind seized upon it with avidity and sought to express it in lines of beauty. Nature thus has been the inspiration and soul of most poetry.

This, then, is the second stage. It is an intermediate and transient station between the first and the third. And into this upper story of the house of nature-revelation it must be said that few poets, philosophers, mystics or even intellectuals have lifted their message, and when they have done so, it has been more by a happy inadvertence than by following a known methodology. For into that exalted realm of vision and understanding the passport of admission is this sharp and subtle intellect. And the attainment of this talisman as an open sesame to this crowning hall of enlightenment is not too common.

A number of achievements in this third stage have been registered in poetry, but there is one performance of the kind that both deserves quotation for its own majestic beauty and will serve to illustrate the third type of nature appreciation. It is by our same English bard, Wordsworth. It has often been regarded as the most sublime poem in our English language. In this one piece at least, he soared into the third stage and gave us a masterly exemplification of the type. The poem is -- one would readily guess -- his Ode on Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood. Here a higher vision than massive feeling, delicate sentiment or felicitous fancy was in command. In a moment of insight, probably flashing into thought as he was reading something of Plato’s philosophy, he became vividly aware of a parallelism between the glow of brilliant color in the early sky of dawn and the brightness and joyousness in the mind of childhood. There it was, a beautiful thing in mind matched with surprising fidelity by a beautiful thing in nature, the one occurring in the morning of the day, the other in the morning of life, a correspondence between mind and nature to make a poet’s heart beat high with discovery and wonder! Just as this brilliance in the first--and only the first--brief moments of dawn lights up the sky, then quickly "fades into the light of common day," so in the first years of life there glows a splendor of happiness in the consciousness of

childhood, as, lingering,

Heaven lies about us in our infancy,

then it, too, dies out in the commonplace, and

There hath passed away a glory from the earth.

The basic theme of this majestic rhapsody was thus an idea that took shape from the sudden perception of a similitude between a natural phenomenon and a purely conceptual one, of a fact of human experience mentally conceived, and in it we have beyond question a magnificent instance of the play of the "sharp and subtle intellect" demanded by the Upanishads for the envisioning of deific mind in the related worlds of man and nature. It is safe to surmise that in the intellectual exhilaration engendered by this discernment, Wordsworth’s mind experienced a sublimation to a "lucid moment" that inspired also the beauteous forms of language which alone would match the beauty of the conception. It stands as one rare and glowing illustration of the cathartic power that nature may exercise to purify the human mind and soul that can stand reverently enough in her presence to "see into the life of things."

CHAPTER TWELVE

Evidence that these illuminating analogues of truth require this highest acuity of intellect for their apprehension is found in the expressions of many thinkers. Plotinus states that if we are to catch the voices of spiritual truth, we must keep the "soul’s perception bright and quick." The wisdom of ancient Egypt admonishes that there is a little sun of divine light within the core of the being of man and that we must keep it bright and shining, star-like." The deep mind of the great Medieval reformulator of Catholic theology on the basis of Aristotle’s system, Thomas Aquinas, wrestled with this problem of discovering the divine images from the contemplation of nature. He dilates on the necessity of the mind’s utilizing to the utmost the resources of imagination, so that it may reify before it the structure of a spiritual concept in such sharp and clear outlines that it is transformed into virtually another physical object itself. Thus held clearly before the inner eye, its likeness to some object in the external world may become apparent and so find still greater clarification. Obviously what is required for keen perspicacity in this high art is a nimbleness and mercurial alacrity of thought, a readiness and aptness to trace analogies between seen things of the world and their noumenal ghosts or shadows--or, as Plato would have it, their true formal realities.

Many authorities inclined to idealism have loudly extolled the legitimacy of the claims put forth for the principle of analogy as ground for truth-finding, or at least as a sound and reliable guide to it. But minds geared closely to the exactitude which scientific investigation demands, have always been inclined to depreciate the value of the analogical method. It has always been repudiated as too diffuse, too loose, too indefinite and in the end, fallacious. It invariably lacks dependability.

The exponent of the validity of analogy, while recognizing the deficiencies thus advanced, contends that its alleged defects do not disqualify it as functional technique for truth discovery, and asserts that they only come in because the scientific mind asks that the method do more than can legitimately be expected of it, or should be required of it. Science rejects it because it fails to produce what is called "proof." But the idealist insists that the production of proof is not its function and is in fact not in its power. But what it is fully qualified to do is to point to similitudes of pattern and principle between the known and the unknown thing, in such a forceful way that a mind of sufficient alertness and acuity will catch an intimation of relationship not otherwise discernible. It is hardly in all cases able to offer verification, but it points the direction of search and renders the mind keen on the scent, as it prods with hints and suggestions. It may not furnish proof, but it can almost unfailingly point to the region where proof may be found. As an illustration of the idea, if science had been awake at any time since at least the seventeenth century to the utility of the analogical principle, it could have divined the degree of certitude that if and when the atom was to be dissected, it would be found to be organized over the more or less general pattern of a solar system. Indeed ancient and Medieval "occult" science had predicated this fact. Analogy would have furnished the general conception; now the marvel of electronic techniques can come up with the "proof." The scientific mind is impatient and skeptical about the serviceability of analogy because he demands that it shall present not merely parallels and correspondences, but precise copies exact to every detail. The similitude can be expected to carry as far as pattern and principle; it should not be asked to reach as far as to minute detail. Nature everywhere is loudly vocal about genera, but always she has introduced variations in the species and goes on to infinite variety and diversity in the individuals.

With so much factual corroboration of the principle now before us, it should be possible, on an accredited basis, to use analogy in all speculative enterprises. What can be said with finality on the matter is that there can be no impugning the method of analogy as a mode of enlightening the mind. As far as our acquaintance with objective things is concerned, the mode of acquiring knowledge is by direct observation, then inferential digestion of the sensual data. Man could not know his world in the first instance if he had not sensory apparatus to contact it. But when it comes to knowledge of things which have a semi-existential reality only in consciousness, as to which not his senses but his mind or imagination gives him a secondary kind of apperception, there is really no other instrument available to his capacity but analogy. Even if it be claimed that some logical faculty--of the kind Kant called a priori--operative in the void above the strictly intellectual reach was able to conjure up and imprint images on his secondary or subconscious mind, he still would have no way of giving them classification or meaning save as he could discern a likeness to images already made familiar through sensory experience. This is the confirmation of what Locke meant when he said that there can be nothing in the mind which had not been first in the senses. And if this be true it virtually validates the principle that nature furnishes the fundamenta of all ratiocination that leads to knowledge. And that it is true is a main contention of this essay. It is the summary conclusion underlying and justifying all that either Plato or Jung have in mind in their predication of the divine archetypes. And it is obvious that nature furnishes all of them.

In broad outline, Jung’s position has been set forth, but his vast and penetrating researches have brought to light some vital elements of nature symbolism that it will be most profitable to rehearse. In his scintillating interpretation of the symbols of the occult alchemical system of semantic values, he quotes an excerpt from a Medieval document called the Roasrum Philosophorum. The "salt" referred to when the Jesus figure, speaking in the Sermon on the Mount, likens the divine spark in the heart of man’s life to the "salt of the earth," and reminds that if its savor be lost the body is deprived of its vital force, suggests interesting connotations. The alchemists used it as the light and power of life, considered chemically. They even developed the thesis that in the correspondence between mind and matter, and in the balance of the subtle forces of nature, the particular force implemented by the influence of each sign of the zodiac was congenitally related to a certain chemical salt, so that persons born under each sign would always stand in a close affective affinity with the salt connate with his sign. So the passage quoted by Jung from the document runs:

Who therefore knows the salt and its solution knows the hidden secret of the wise men of old. Therefore turn your mind upon the salt; for in it alone, that is, the mind, is the science concealed and the most excellent and most hidden secret of all the ancient philosophers.

On this Jung gives the comment or exhortation of one of the astute purveyors of Medieval science, Khunrath, as follows:

Therefore direct your feelings, sense, reason and thoughts upon this salt alone. The work must be performed with true and not with fantastic imagination.

Here we find a Medieval alchemist echoing the Upanishad’s "sharp and subtle intellect."

Another excerpt cited by Jung from this same source proves amazingly apt for our theme:

The philosopher in the Book of Dialogues said: "I walked around the three heavens, namely, the heaven of composite natures; the heaven of discriminated natures; and the heaven of the soul. But when I wished to walk around the heaven of intelligence, the soul said unto me: ‘This is no way for thee.’ Then nature attracted me, and I was attracted."

If the crypticism here veiled for the "initiated" means that insights into the truth of things is sought in realms of fancy above and detached from the ground reality of nature, but is not to be found there, and instead is to be found in nature, it strangely corroborates our thesis. Jung summarizes the theme by saying that as a result of the projection of the salt archetype in the mind, an unconscious rapport is established between the psyche of the alchemist and the arcane transforming substance, the spiritual "salt" impregnating matter.

The assumption underlying this train of thought, says Jung, "is the causative effect of analogy." And he quotes another writer, Dorn, as stating: "From this the attentive reader will conclude that one must pass from the metaphysical to the physical by a philosophic procedure." It would seem that the writer here is attempting the analogical rule in reverse, as the natural direction is from the physical to the metaphysical. However, once the mind has long dealt with the natural archetypes and through them envisaged their noumenal significances, it often finds itself searching in nature for the physical analogues of spiritual conceptions.

"There is in natural things a certain truth which can not be seen with the outward eye, but is perceived by the mind alone (sola mente). The philosophers have known it and they have found that this power is so great as to work miracles. In this truth lies the whole art of freeing the spirit (spiritus) from its fetters, in the same way that, as we have said, the mind (mens) could be freed (that is, morally) from the body. As faith works miracles in man, so this power, the veritas efficaciae, brings them about in matter. This truth is the highest power and an impregnable fortress wherein the philosopher’s stone lies safeguarded."

The first sentence of this excerpt directly states the thesis of our work: the things of the natural world yield their appearance to the eye, but they only yield their meaning, their cosmic import, to the mind, and a subtle one, adept to trace analogies.

As to the power of such mental perceptiveness to work miracles, it seems obvious that the reference is not to physical miracles but to exaltations of mind. It is intimated here also that the alchemist’s aim is to free the soul from the incubus of body. This idea seems to be an objective of religion and philosophy generally, and it has operated to throw the mind into a negative posture toward the body. Ultimate release of soul from its physical vehicle at the end of the cycle is understandable and unobjectionable. But this attitude must ever be held in proper balance by competent understanding of the beneficence and high evolutionary purpose of the soul-in-body relation in the first place, being the prime condition of life’s advance, its escape from static inertia toward expanded being. At this point nature offers one of its illuminating analogies of the type under discussion, and its robust cogency is at once evident. The persistent persuasion of so much assumedly "spiritual" philosophy that the soul’s immersion in watery body is an evil to be expunged by tearing it loose from its anchorage to "set it free," matches in error and folly the stupidity of the gardener who would think to promote the growth of his plants by (prematurely) tearing them out of the soil. And it is not overstressing the "miraculous" efficacy of the natural archetypes, when intensively lucubrated upon, to declare that the soulful brooding upon these analogical parallels does truly work intrinsic cathartic prodigies. Numberless highly sensitive minds have testified to this transforming power, beside Wordsworth.

Another sentence from this astute Khunrath begs for our consideration:

I pray you, look with the eyes of the mind at the little tree of the grain of wheat, regarding all its circumstances, so that you may bring the tree of the philosophers to grow.

Jung subjoins: "This seems to point to the active imagination as the thing that sets the process really going." This is indeed the core of this heightened use of the imagination that is the specific function of the mind essential to the sensing of correspondences. A nimble fancy, not wayward but pursuing true leads, is the spur that goads into activity the intelligence lying latent in the unconscious. Every concrete object and phenomenon in nature thus knocks at the door of mind to open and come forth to behold a truth. The difference that measures the yawning gap between our stolid incomprehension of nature’s mute eloquence and a keen sense of her message, is just the failure of the living world and its objects to bestir in us the lively powers of intellection in catching the analogues between things and their meaning.

Reflection suggests the mirror, and this is one of the symbols of Medieval alchemy that challenged Jung for interpretation. He handles it most competently:

The ‘mirror’ as an ‘indispensable instrument of navigation’ doubtless refers to the intellect, which is able to think and is constantly persuading us to identify ourselves with its perceptions (‘reflexions’). The mirror is one of Schopenhauer’s favorite similes for the intellect. The term ‘instrument of navigation’ is an apt expression for it, since it is indeed man’s indispensable guide on pathless seas.

It should be noted that, as Jung puts it, this faculty of intellect is constantly prodding us to identify ourselves with its operations. India’s supreme philosophy centers about the concept that we are identical with the great Total, Brahm. "Thou art That." Here the psychologist says that the world is at every instant trying to bring us into awareness of our community with it. It is silently pleading with us to open blind eyes and recognize the identity. Until this awakening we are much like Wordsworth’s rustic bumpkin, Peter Bell:

A yellow primrose by the river’s brink,

A yellow primrose was to him,

And it was nothing more.

Jung’s study of the archetypes and their provenance from nature gave him the insight by which he could challenge the position of idealists and mystics who eternally huckster the shibboleth of the superiority and validity of "intuition" over the solid work of the intellect. It flaunts defiance also in the face of India’s philosophies of flight into the void above the mind. Referring to an exponent of this transcendental philosophy, he makes this notable statement, which we deem worthy of emphasis:

But when the ground slips from under his feet and he begins to speculate in the void, seduced by soaring flights of intuition, the situation becomes dangerous.

It is inevitable that the free and unstable mind will speculate, both in wayward roving vacancy and in earnest search for truth, in all possible directions. But speculation, says Jung, becomes a peril when it abandons the ground of reality testified to by the objective creation of the cosmic Mind and attempts to fly off into regions where there is nothing to give thought a foothold. The hazard arises from the fatal tendency of minds not too strong to mistake in time the chimeras of its own fanciful origination for the veridical forms of truth. In weak minds these fixations of uncritical thought become veritable Frankensteins dominating the entire consciousness. Man can not fly to heaven without at least the resistance of the earth to give fulcrum to his thrust.

In view of the devastation of human sanity which the wild excesses of irrational religiosity have inflicted upon the human mind, one is impelled to dilate more at large upon this pronouncement of the psychologist. It holds the potential of an epochal reassessment, "an agonizing reappraisal," of cardinal elements in the life of religion; it should dictate a radical reconditioning of religious technique. Intellect must be elevated from a secondary and subservient position to feeling and faith and steady the vagrant impulses of arrant pietism. To whatever extent it may be legitimate for souls to attempt to fly the mystical heavens of some transcendental superconsciousness, the effort must be made with eye steadily fixed on the realities on the ground. For at least the soul must have some place to land and be at home after its dizzy flights. Does this decry and disqualify mysticism? Not at all. Mysticism is ineluctably a station on the upper reaches of the pathway souls must travel on the road to grander being. It can lift us into truly diviner experience of beatitude. But the afflations that loft the soul into those giddier heights pose dangers to the adventurous spirit if they are not kept in close relation to the realities of the earthly experience.

At his peril man attempts to substitute his own wild vagaries of unrestrained fancy, buoyed by extravagant and unwarranted hopes of imagined bliss and liberty, and beauty extant in the living world. His mind is susceptible to realizing a blessed exaltation of sense and thought that arises naturally out of his contact with and reflection upon the order and beauty of the world. Jung elsewhere has endorsed our thesis that a mysticism that is generated out of the real experience of souls with its incarnational realities is safe, sane and salutary; whereas a feeling extravaganza concocted out of the errant and unreasoned fantasies of a misdirected imagination are hazardous. Intellect must stand guard to hold the soul in paths of safety. The Greek myth of Phaeton, son of Apollo, who essayed to drive the chariot of the sun across the heavens, and letting the horses of passion and wild free adventure have their way, with the result that earthly vegetation was consumed, points the moral of this situation. If we attempt to build our castles in Spain and eyries in the sky without solid foundations on earth, they are bound to collapse.

It is a psychological problem, whether our straining to launch ourselves on the wing is based on fantasy or on reality. If "divine love" be the power to thrust us off the ground, it must not be love in the abstract, but love of something real: love of an adored one, love of music, love of nature, love of the delights of reason, to which all philosophers testify as the most exalted of human experiences, love of health, bodily exercise, duty, skill, and happiness that can flow forth only from these achievements in the earthly sphere. When souls can soar into mystical realizations from these grounds, they can fly with safety, because they will maintain a balance with the world of present reality that will hold their chariot in its normal orbit. Whenever man abandons earth for the vacuity of the skies, physical or ideal, he risks losing his footing on the ground and being blown about by wind of fantasy. He can not maintain his balance in midair. It was neither for purposes of punishment nor on a whim of deity that souls were sent from heaven to earth. Part of the divine motive was that they should face the pattern of the Logoic thought stamped upon the physical world. Their education in cosmic creativeness--for they are destined to become co-creators with their Father--could not better be consummated than by confronting them here with the forms of ideal reality in their daily existence. God thus committed them to the care and rearing of their Mother Nature, in whose world every stalk that grows would enlighten them about the principles in whose handling they were to become adept.

It is possible now to see what a profound maxim of truth is embodied in the Latin of an alchemical treatise called Tractatus Aureus li, p. 12: Verum masculus est coelum foeminae et foemina terra masculi.--"The male is the heaven of the female and the female is the earth of the male." Only through the motherhood of nature is the divine form of the spiritual conception brought to manifestation. Without the gestating function of the mother, the creative Lord would never see his cosmic ideas materialized.

Khunrath again comes in with an appropriate tribute:

This light is the light of nature, which illumines all God-loving philosophers who come into this world. It is in the world as the whole edifice of the world is beautifully adorned and will be naturally preserved by it until the last and great day of the Lord; but the world knows it not. It is…the great Stone of the philosophers, which the whole world has before its eyes and yet knows not.

The ancient mythographers included in their pantheons, along with the twelve supreme heavenly deities on Mt. Olympus, the gods of the earth, the chthonic powers. One of the primary family of the Egyptians Gods was Seb, the "god of earth." So we find Jung speaking of the "chthonic femininity of the unconscious." This would bring together in one category the earthly, the feminine, and the unconscious. And precisely that is the connection of these three, if not their identity. Earth, matter (mater, Latin "mother"), is the eternal feminine, and it is passive and negative to the polarized activity of the conscious. All its consciousness is, so to say, subterranean to the conscious. It receives from the mind forces of creation the energies they project into matter and simply nurses them into bud, flower and fruit. The Egyptian Seb is etymologically cognate with Sevekh, also a water-earth divinity, and his name is the origin of our "magic number" seven. As Pythagoras told us, earth is the domain in which the constitution of things physical is grounded on this number. It is ubiquitous throughout all ancient occult religion and is the basic key to interpretation and understanding of cryptic arcana. Yet in two thousand years, the exegesis of the Scriptures has shown no signs of comprehending the fundamental relevance of the number. The soul in the Egyptian drama says that it descends from on high to partake of the "bread of Seb," or the "food of earth," and to be renewed thereby. From a higher world of unity it was to descend into a world of septenary constitution, to receive there its instruction in the art of governing the seven archangelic creative powers. All the sanctimonious diatribes that have been fulminated against the world as the enemy and destroyer of the soul receive their fitting rebuke when one reads in that treasure of pristine sagacity, the Book of the Dead,--in an address to the soul: "Through Seb thou dost become a spirit, and when through Seb thou dost become a spirit, thou art more a spirit than the spirits." To the descending soul it is said: "Thou art glorified there." It replies: "I come that I may purify this soul of mine in the most high degree."

And Jung descants most lucidly upon the advent of soul upon earth, and its relation to earth and body, as essentially the basic fact underlying all religion. His system or orientation of the conscious-unconscious tie-in would seem to be integrated, he says, with the incarnation in an earthly human, or chthonic, nature of a purely spiritual God, and this is effectuated by an act of impregnation by the Holy Ghost of the womb of the Virgin Mother. In this action we have the higher, the spiritual, the masculine inclining to the lower, the earthly, the feminine, the chthonic, and thus the mother, who was prior to the fatherhood, and who, receiving the insemination of the divine spark of mind, gestates and in the fullness of time produces her Son. The divine Child, being the progeny of the union of the spiritual Fatherhood and the mundane Mother, embodies jointly in himself the hidden potential of soul with the passive nature of the unconscious.

It is thus seen that in its unearthing of the "unconscious" modern sagacity has, after centuries of blindness, recovered knowledge of the compound of positive and negative elements in man’s psychic life which the world has lacked ever since the third century, when the Christian hierarchy cast out the Mother from its Trinity and substituted the Holy Ghost. Under the psychological influences of this persuasion, religion in this system was so overbalanced by the unmitigated overemphasis on the functional cult of the spirit, and the corresponding militant negation of the physical and the natural, that Christian devotion was warped into forms of morbidity and corruption. The psychological consequences of this distortion became so patent in the history of the Church that a rectification of the imbalance was perforce dictated by polity and the Holy Mother was restored as a fourth member of the divine Quaternity, as the blessed Virgin, Mother of God. The Son of the Mother thus became the Salvator Microcosmi, or Savior of the World, by virtue of his uniting in himself the mundane or chthonic unconscious lower potencies in polarity with the superior conscious divine powers. Through its discovery of this dual composition of both the natural world and of man, modern psychology has recovered the intellectual dynamic of true religious science, and the prospect of a more propitious balance between the two forces of conflict in human life looms brightly ahead.

So engaging became this new insight on the part of the psychologist that he went so far as to declare that even the highest powers of spiritual order, which he equates with the Greek term Gnosis, are rooted deep down in the unconscious realm. He deduces that with the incarnation the potential of Gnosis is lodged in the chthonic area of consciousness, the unconscious. We find him saying:

We are moving here in this psychological region where, as a matter of fact, the Gnosis is rooted. The message of the Christian simply is Gnosis, and the compensation effected by the unconscious is Gnosis in an even higher degree. Myth is the primordial language natural to these psychic processes, and no intellectual formulation comes anywhere near the richness and expressiveness of mythical imagery. Such processes deal with the primordial images, and these are best and most succinctly reproduced by figurative speech.

Alchemy, he says, is preeminently concerned with the "seed of unity which lies hidden in the chaos of Tiamat, "--Babylonian mother-principle--"and forms the counterpart of the divine unity."

Jung feels the massive power of the archetypes and symbols so strongly that he attributes the controlling power of the Roman Catholic Church over its masses of devotees to the fact that it never ceases to flaunt these insignia of its mission and function before the eyes of its ignorant following. So that even though there is no "sharp and subtle" intellectual comprehension of their meaning, there is still enough dynamic by way of intuitive suggestiveness and dim apprehensions of hidden force in them to sway the feelings of the communicants. He ventures the statement that even a mistaken idea of the meaning of a symbol or other semantic representation may sometimes produce a tremendous psychic and moral-spiritual effect. This anomalous phenomenon must be obviously possible, since history records no end of the fierce sweeps of massive religious persuasions based on misconceptions and in periods of better vision later abandoned. Many a clergyman and seminarian would freely admit that to a lamentable degree neither the Christian hierarchy nor the laity fully grasp the recondite significance of their symbols.

In this connection the psychologist has impaled himself on both prongs of the two-tined fork of his analysis, as he has laid prime emphasis on both the intellect and the intuition, the clear and the vague aspect of perceptions, giving each just about equally beneficent function. This is a matter of vast importance for knowledge, and the opposing claims made for each over the other leaves philosophical science uncertain and dangerously in the dark over one of the most crucial items of understanding, which should be clear, and can be psychologically a salutary influence only when it is clear.

We have glanced cursorily earlier at this widely alleged superiority of "spiritual intuition" over intellect. We hold it to have been the product of unsound religious maundering. It gained a foothold and entrenched itself by default of the influence of the ancient arcane science as perpetuated in the Mysteries and Gnostic societies and cults carrying on the esoteric tradition. with the sages of old, the proficients in archaic wisdom, there was never any belittling of the mind, the intellect; it was man’s divinest faculty, an instrument painstakingly evolved by natural evolution over ages of time as the highest light of consciousness for the guidance of man on earth. It was the mark of man’s transcendence over the beasts, the badge of his divinity, actual or potential. It embraced the whole of his ratiocinative faculty; there was no distinction of grades and degrees in its function, one rising above the other in power or authority. It was the highest power of consciousness to see things according to reason; it would safeguard the human from plunging into error and point him to truth. The sages never asserted that the most exalted envisioning of truth and beauty was achieved through the more magical development of the intellect itself. The most ecstatic transports of elevated thought and feeling did not discredit the intellect, but confirmed its perfectibility. From slow discursive syllogistic reasoning, its mercurial powers flared out in brilliant mastery of thought processes, giving instantaneous insights in a single flash. This might seem to be a higher power than intellect, but is only its own genius come to maturity and mastership. Slow reasoning in the dark gave place to quick flashes of almost electric rapidity and clarity. It is man’s wielding of Jove’s lightning, his portion and voltage of it.

Religion’s spurning and deprecation of the intellect still prevails in many quarters and has contributed massively and hurtfully to falsities in the psychic and philosophical domain. The acclaim of the mystic viewpoint at times seems to rest on the assumption that a touch of elevated consciousness is all the better and holier for not being logically rationalized. But B. A. G. Fuller in his splendid History of Philosophy, with a touch of irony, shows that when it comes to the matter of the efficacy and cathartic power of religious experience, it must be a strange perversion of reason not to realize that, however exalting a mystical uplift can be in the realm of feeling, it would generate a still more dynamic benefaction to the soul if it is also intellectually comprehended. Mystery has its romantic charms, but any experience must be the more ennobling for being understood. God’s potential of wisdom and beatitude for man may, as the Scriptures assert, be past finding out, transcending our limited thought powers. But man is happier if he can rationalize the import of all his experience, preferably to his standing in ignorance and awe of their incidence. In the end the mind must determine the actual status, the practical value and the handling of all experience, however transcendent. The Scriptures put wisdom and understanding beyond all other values.

The great Hegel comes in here with a clarifying analysis of this problem with an analogue from that final authority, nature. Feeling, he says, is like a wild wind. Intellect is the windmill, or the sail of a boat, the instrument needed to grasp the powerful force and turn it to useful purposes. The wild ecstasies of feeling can, as Jung warns, become devastating scourges of fanaticism, if not chastened by reason. The dissociation of feeling and thought has been a most disastrous cleavage in human life. Hiding in, but at any time springing out from the unconscious, desire, appetency, feeling, would sweep with fell force over the area of consciousness and motivate conduct. Intellect must act like the old draft-controls of a stove, or like any gauge that regulates the force of any motive power. If reason is disregarded, life’s ship will have no captain at the helm. Hegel’s voice of admonition on this point should not go unheard:

Thought is a rising up from the limited to the Absolute Universal and religion is only through thought and in thought. God is not the highest emotion, but the highest thought . . . The opinion that thought is injurious to religion and that the more thought is abandoned the more secure the position of religion is, is the maddest error of our time. It is only in thought that God is worshipped.

Those who will contend that this expresses an extremely one-sided view of the experience of worship, expostulating that the most intense forms of worship transcend thought, hold such an opinion only because they limit thought to the narrow range of its discursive reasoning processes. In the highest rhapsodies of mystical afflation, the soul is not holding the intellect in abeyance, but is exercising it at such a pitch of keenness and electric freedom and accuracy of mobility, that its ordinary less mercurial function seems indeed to be far transcended. The great German thinker corrects this impression and goes far ahead to assert that, "since the Absolute is intrinsically Thought, the doctrine of thinking must be the doctrine of being." As to that, modern science itself, on its side, is hovering on the brink of identifying the basic force of the universe as the energy of mind. It is time that religion gives over its contemptuous disappraisal of the intellect.

Jung joins Hegel in a succinct statement of this matter. Speculating on the sanifying efficacy of Mephisto’s matter-of-fact point of view on Faust’s emotions as he gazes at the spooks and bogies of the classical Walpurgisnacht, he writes:

Would that more people could remember the scientific and philosophical reflections of the much-abused intellect at the right moment! Those who abuse it lay themselves open to the suspicion of never having experienced anything that might have taught them its values and shown them why evolution has forged this weapon with such unprecedented effort. One has to be singularly out of touch with life not to notice such things. The intellect may be the devil, but the devil is the strange son of chaos who can most easily be trusted to deal effectively with his mother. The Dionysian experience will give the devil plenty to do, should he be looking for work, since the resultant settlement with the unconscious far outweighs the labors of Hercules.

If the intellect is this Satanic power that seems to analyze life into the disruption of its wholeness, this holds only on the outgoing arc of the cycle of emanation and return, since a beneficent Providence must itself break its own unity into fragments in order to distribute its largesse to the infinite hosts of its children who are to share its inexhaustible bounty. Each unit of the divine life, starting from the point of its initial ignorance, faces the evolutionary task of reunifying the broken body of the Lord, reassembling the dismantled unity. And this is the work of the intellection. If it is the dishonor of intellect to tear the primal unity apart, it is then its infinite glory to reassemble it, but now with understanding of the dialectical integration of all its parts. A common illustration may clarify this point with finality. Who can be said to know the unity of an automobile better, the man who purchases a new machine without any knowledge of its construction, or the mechanic who does know every one of its parts and the relation of each to the whole, by having taken it all apart many times? How is man, the Son of the Father, to become proficient in his work of cooperating with his Sire in the running of the universe, if he does not become familiar with every part and process by analysis? The philosophy that decries the analytic power of the intellect is banal because it stifles the movement of the mind toward proficiency in its aeonial task. How can the human mind move toward the vision of unity unless it knows how to relate all the parts properly to sense their basic integrity? The Creator, so to say, sets his Sons down in the midst of a world of infinite diversity of its constituent elements, but equipping them with the potential of a genius of understanding capable of discovering the principles that reveal the unity of the whole. This is the province of the intellect, and they render a vast disservice to mankind who decry it. Intellect is not to be surpassed and degraded, but needs only to be perfected. And that perfection, as the sequel will show, must be achieved mainly through collaboration of mind with nature.

A mind as clairvoyant as that of the philosopher Santayana has caught the vision of this transcendent utility of the intellect:

"But when the force of intellect, once having arrested an idea amid the flux of perception, avails to hold and examine that idea with perseverance, not only does a flash of light illumine the mind, but deeper and deeper vistas are opened there into ideal truth.

"The principle of dialectic is intelligence itself; and as no part of man’s economy is more vital than intelligence (since intelligence is what makes life aware of its destiny), so no part has a more delightful or exhilarating movement. To understand is preeminently to live, moving not by stimulation and external compulsion, but by inner direction and control."

The philosopher, from the other side, may smile at our presumption in inserting the italics. The spirit of Hegel also may nod in approval, as he, too, has told us that true being is Thought. For the expression of a sane judgment that has been sorely needed in philosophy and religion, this passage is beyond praise. It should be noticed that the philosopher says that light breaks on the mind when it grasps and holds an idea with perseverance. Generally it will be only with long and steady surveillance of a concept that the full deep relevance of its meaning comes aglow. God’s precipitation of his Sons into the seeming melange of the infinite diversification of his primal unity imposes on them the evolutionary task of studying the relationship of the parts to the whole. We see the parts, says St. Paul, but must become sharply watchful of their action to discern their relation, until eventually the overall Gestalt takes shape. The jig-saw puzzle of the diversity must at last reveal the articulation and beauty of the unity. This brings that intellectual vision of wholes lauded by the Greeks and the synthetic unity of apperception extolled by Kant and the intellectual love of God glorified by Spinoza. The soul’s tremendous challenge to raise its vision from isolated particulars to a height of view that will take in a sweep of the whole scene can be likened to the work of an organist, who takes the thousands of dots on a musical composition and by perseverance and nimbleness of mind and hands transmutes them into the ravishing rhapsodies of beautiful movement. The consciousness of unity is only exalting when it embraces a synthesis of the diversity. As Santayana observes, the achievement of the grand view yields a vast enrichment of mind. Prodded by the constant impingement upon it of the outward natural symbols, the soul gradually transforms the external world into an inner intellectual experience, says Hegel. The principle of subjectivity accomplishes the synthesis of itself with the objectivity. On the moot subject of intuition, the German thinker says that "intuition has to join discursive reflection. It has to become reflective itself. The intellect has to transcend itself, not by mere intuition, but in a rational fashion methodically." (Our emphasis.) If intuition has any superiority over reflection, it must exert its dominance by effecting a veritable "resurrection" of the unity it has analyzed into its parts. If by analysis intellect has "killed" the unity, it must by synthesis restore it to its living power. As the head executive of a great industrial concern will require his son and prospective successor to master by actual experience every constituent element of the production, so as to know how to govern the whole expertly, so, it seems, God has sent his Sons out into the factory of creation for an apprenticeship in the cosmic operation, requiring of them a pilgrimage through all the ranges of being, in order to become adept in their later work of supervision of the order. So Hegel says that the mind that leaves its heavenly vision of unity must return from its apostasy, but return enriched by its "victory over itself." It is as if God demands that his Sons go out into the universe that he has taken all apart and learn how to put it together again.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

It is almost certainly true that no theologian has ever caught the idea that this is the truth that the Jesus figure dramatizes in his institution of the Christian Eucharist. Having broken his body symbolically into fragments and distributed the pieces to his disciples, with the injunction to eat them to be inoculated with the germ of immortal life, he concludes by exhorting them to do this "in remembrance of me." Theology has unwittingly missed the esoteric significance of this dramatism. The "remembrance" Jesus suggested was not memorial but an actual spiritual transaction physically allegorized. What he asked for was not sentimental memory, but physical reunification of the body he had dismembered for them. The "remembrance" should have been translated "rememberment." "I have dismembered my (spiritual) body," he said; "now it is your task to ‘re-member it." "That each of you may have the essence of immortal life, I have disintegrated my body; now it is for you, by love and brotherhood, to reintegrate it. My dismemberment must be followed by your re-memberment.

Dealing further with religion’s chronic infatuation with the idea of hastening souls back to heaven by disdaining homely earth, Jung astutely rationalizes the necessity of the soul’s unbreakable tie to earth. Man may have lost his Saurian’s tail, he muses, but still finds himself bound to a mundane routine that is generally very unromantic and unheroic. But, he reflects: "That we are bound does not mean that we cannot grow; on the contrary, it is the sine qua non of growth. No noble well-grown tree ever disowned its direct roots, for it grows not only upward, but downward as well." The onus of our task, he says, is to strike a dead center between the two tendencies, the downward drag, the upward pull. For true poise and balance, the aims of the higher must be accommodated to the mechanism of the lower. His final pronouncement is of crucial import; "These two aspects must never be separated." His rationalization of the cosmic utility and beneficence of the "war of opposites" is magnificent. Without it there could be no experience of wholeness. Most pertinent to our exegesis is his statement that for the evolutionary purposes to be realized through the individual soul, "consciousness must confront the unconscious and a balance between opposites must be found." This, he says, is not to be had through logic; logic must be enlightened by the power of symbols, "which make the irrational union of opposites possible. They are produced spontaneously by the unconscious and are amplified by the conscious mind." The opposite pulls of soul and body generate the powers of consciousness. But the developing powers of the conscious mind would long grope in darkness without a guide if it was not for the prods to intelligence that come from symbols. And nature mostly supplies these archetypes.

The conflict so lugubriously decried by religionists, who would fain consign human life to the peace of the cemetery, brings to birth all positive values in the evolution of consciousness. The animating and presiding spirit-power of life comes charged with its pattern of structure for the physical domain. It must lay hold of the power potential in the atom of matter as its instrument. Mind must seize upon the raw energies of nature and direct them into the preconceived channels. In man’s constitution this required the subjection of the wild free forces of sense and feeling to the mandates of the soul’s reason and intelligence. This joins the battle. It is the struggle of the two natures in man, higher and lower. "Two souls, alas, contend within my breast apart," moans the poet Goethe. The Old Testament glances at the idea, in the conception of the twins Jacob and Esau in the womb of Rebecca:

In your limbs lie nations twain,

Rival races from their birth;

One the mastery shall gain,

The younger o’er the elder reign.

This is one form of the allegory of the eternal polarity. The one destined to win the battle in the end is of course the conscious mind, which, as the child of the great Mother, the unconscious, is the younger in manifestation. As Jung hints, it will have its work cut out for it in dominating the energies of its mother, to bring them into subjection to the designs of soul. The exigencies of the battle, the tensions of the struggle, open the way for the young divine Child to step out of the unconscious area and assert its right to take its rightful place on the throne of the individual life. Its imperial splendor can then shine forth. This is the background reality that inspired the homely adage that man’s extremity is God’s opportunity. If potentially higher consciousness "rests in primal unconsciousness," this first domain of life must harbor deep within its womb the seeds of a primal divine superconsciousness. "Only by virtue of psychic existence do we have any being at all," Jung tells us. There must be deep within the womb of being "a sort of unknown prima materia," out of which issues the miracle of consciousness. For the sensual perception of this order of consciousness the eye of the senses is needed; but for the apprehension of a rational scheme of meaning in its order symbols are the indispensable requisite. Hegel agrees that this work of synthesis and integration can be done by philosophy alone. This implies that the intellect must in the finale be called in to do what faith, beatified contemplation and mysticism have never been able to do. Hegel elaborates:

Philosophy is no longer assigned to a place below religion; on the contrary, it is destined to replace religion, completing the development initiated by the Reformation. Philosophy is called upon to do what faith can never do: the absolute reconciliation of absolute opposites.

Striking at the false sentimental preachments that the soul’s transition back to heaven at death restores its visions of beauty and rapture, he avers that there is no such transition beyond what the divine light in man’s own nature can disclose to his cognition in his tensional experience with the natural life here. Mankind contains its own absolute principles within itself, and is equipped with "a fixed and insurmountable finitude of reason" by which to bring its self-illumination into focus. This is its task rather than to attempt to bask in a splendor reflected from beyond his station.

If philosophy is to supplant religion and give a new enlightenment, it must be examined for the principia that will provide the torch for our advance through the darkness. It would seem that Jung’s affirmation that consciousness emerges out of the unconscious would ground our understanding on a great basic truth. Nature and physics would seem to endorse the dictum in the scientific fact that the visible universe emerged out of invisibility, passing through stages from etheric and aeriform and gaseous into materialization. The sacred Scriptures affirm also that God caused the light to shine out of the darkness, to which St. Paul adds the sensational assertion that he also caused this light to shine in our hearts. The universe sprang out of the void, declares Genesis. The initial Biblical statement that God began with the creation of the heavens and the earth is the first of Jove’s two-pronged forks of lightning. The one fork was consciousness, the other, matter. Philosophy, speaking through Heraclitus, declared that the one life initially divides itself into opposites, to unite them again in the cycle’s end. And it does this rhythmically, recurrently, cyclically, periodically. The Hindus speak of this as the inhalation and exhalation of the eternal Brahm. Analogy can equally well call it the circulation of the life-blood of the universe, expelled from the heart of being, returning with the diastole of the pulse. Also it can be figured as the alternation of the life of Brahm between sleep and awaking. He throws himself into the conscious effort of creation and returns at eve to sink into repose. The analogy with our experience--since we are made in his image--assures us that back of the grade of consciousness that he discards at night there abides at a higher level that great unconsciousness out of which, according to Jung, all self-consciousness emerges. If it were not so, Brahm would not awaken to another day. In that undying Conscious-Unconsciousness philosophy, from Aristotle, has perforce had to locate the omniscient Cause of all things, the One Cause behind which there could be no other.

The two forces, then, having moved ab initio out from the inner core of infinite being, the one essence, the other consciousness, and taken their position at the opposite ends of the polarity, the great battle of Armageddon begins, the war that Heraclitus said is the father of all things. This is simply the tension of polarity. It is the operative modus of creative activity.

The great question toward whose answer we are working is as to how the generative procedure succeeds in disseminating the principle of conscious intelligence throughout the total body of its production. Tied in with this main problem are all those subsidiary ones challenging thought to the limit of its powers. Prominent among these are the ideas of the tabula rasa, the innate ideas, Kant’s concept of the a priori forms of intellection, preestablished harmony between outer forms and inner constructs--in short, all the problems of epistemology, the whole science of philosophy is a derivative of the whole basic fact of polarity between the two modes of being, which are inseparable even when lined up in polar opposition, and merged back into total unity and identity when not so separated. The universe, so the ancient wisdom proclaimed, is suspended on a web of force attached to spirit at the summit and to matter at the nadir. When that tension relaxes, the universe fades out of existence and Brahm enjoys his night of sleep. But he awakes to a new day of tension and adventure.

In the cryptic mode of ancient hagiographic writing, when the intent was concealment of esoteric truth from the ignorant masses, and its release to the initiated through cryptic symbolism, this principle of life’s self-renewal through the seed was the hidden meaning of the ark-and-flood allegory. It adumbrated the truth that when at the withdrawal of the breath and blood energies of Brahm from his aeonial embodiment of matter, the flood of dissolution washed away his physical fabric of creation, so that the nucleus of life had to retreat within the arche (Greek: ark or beginning), out of which it had emanated in the first instance. This makes Noah’s ark story pure allegory, and removes it from the pale of history. It is safe to aver that, while there may have been subsidence of continents, as the fabled sinking of Atlantis and Lemuria, to create traditions of catastrophic deluges, the Genesis account is not a record of one of them. It is too clearly a semantic construction. When a giant oak is blown down and rots away, its life force retires into its ark, the acorn. In that haven of safety it rides out the flood of dissolution, awaiting the morn of its new cycle, when it, like the seed in April’s garden, emerges from its arche for a new beginning. And where does it set foot again to root its new ebullition of life? On the "Mount of Earth," as Ararat is obviously from the Hebrew arets, the earth. It seems at one time to have been spelled areth.

The next stage of the creative or emanative process clamors for explanation. The two polarized forces, locked in tensional stress and strain with each other from the beginning, as they swing apart like two dancers who whirl out from a first embrace, yet keep hand-hold, begin to interrelate their influence mutually. So the human individual has his psychosomatic ground problem. As Browning puts it,

Nor soul helps flesh more now

Than flesh helps soul,

so the universe has its basic conflict between world-soul and world-body. As seed and soil in the garden exchange influences and thereby grow, so consciousness, germinal at first, and matter interact to their reciprocal benefit. Occult mystery though it be, it is the indefeasible reality of living fact. And it is one of the primal archai of being, as nature instructs.

But now a legitimate question arises as to how sheer force of consciousness, which can not bodily move objects, can influence matter, which is primarily inert; or how on its side matter can induce changes in consciousness. How is the vast unbridged gap between mind and matter to be spanned for the effective interchange of mutual influence?

For answer we must resort to ancient knowledge, which held solutions that have been lost out of the wisdom-codes of antiquity. The secret cultus of divine mysteries postulated an elaborate system of elements in the constitution of man, so that between pure consciousness at the summit of his life and the coarse matter of his physical body, there was a gamut of instrumentalities composed of matter in varying grades of subtlety and ethereality--such as modern science can now recognize--which form the linkage of a bridge between top-spirit and bottom-matter. At least one of the traces of the survival of knowledge of this inner equipment is found in St. Paul’s affirmation that "we have a natural and a spiritual body," Greece had inherited knowledge of such arcana from the earlier Egyptians, who distinguished seven such bodies in the total constitution of man. In the order of grossness to tenuity they were named: the khat, or khabit, the ren, the ab, the ba, the ka, the sahu and the glorious khu, or body of the resurrection, transfiguring the whole man with shining light.

By means of the electric or vivific powers of spiritual dynamic, currents of living force were transmitted from body to body, both up and down the scale, giving spirit and matter effective intercommunication. As thought to brain cell, cell to nerve force, nerve to blood to muscle and flesh, the creative mind energies operative in the process could course up and down this Jacob’s ladder between spirit-heaven and sensuous earth. And if the infinitely fine nuances of this relationship were known, answers to most of the problems and mysteries of living process would be available.

Open self-registering consciousness is manifest only normally in the lowest or most "material" of the seven, through the activity of brain cells. The grades of consciousness that are registered in the three bodies ranking above the physical, too high in frequency and short wave-length to be instrumentalized through the brain, would be operative within the area of the unconscious.

It was the occlusion of the knowledge of the existence and intermediatory function of these psycho-spiritual bodies in man’s nature that has left Medieval and modern science bereft of basic data for the resolution of problems in epistemology and psychology. After all, a civilization whose highest guiding light is what can be gained only from a study of the superficies of life’s organic forms, will not be likely to discover the secrets that are locked in the intricacies of an internal and unknown mechanism. We are still stunned by our discovery of the seemingly endless "withinness" of the mechanism of the atom; nature gives evidence of being as infinite in minitude as in magnitude. The claims of ancient seers for the existence of psychic bodies within the physical are now no longer either fantastic or bizarre. Science confronts increasing tenuity of organization whenever it looks inward. Nature does not make one leap across an unbridged gulf from gross materiality to pure spirituality. The realm we call the metaphysical is certainly not as metaphysical as we thought. The notion that man is equipped with a psychic mechanism as well as a physical can be ridiculed no more. Man’s body is an animate instrumentality for life and consciousness, a dynamo and purveyor of forces ranging from nerve currents to the electronic flashes of thought. Without our knowledge of rays, frequencies and voltages, with the varieties of subatomic structures, a summary dismissal of old Egypt’s predication of six sublimated bodies of psycho-spiritual constituency is no longer intelligent. It is nothing but the lingering power of an inveterate religious bigotry, unworthy of the modern scientific posture. That ancient sages knew of man’s interior psychic organization intensifies our sense of the direful loss of knowledge which was once held so precious as to be transmitted only to initiated students and tested adepts in a technique considered requisite to safeguard such knowledge from abuse.

From one of the last of the ancient illuminati, the eminent Plutarch, we have a statement that puts in clear light the fact of this intermediary mechanism:

"But in his (Plato’s) Book of Laws, when he was now grown old, he affirmed, not in riddles and emblems, but in plain and proper words, that the world is not moved by one soul, but perhaps by a great many, but by not fewer than two, the one of which is beneficent, and the other contrary to it, and the author of things contrary. He also leaves a certain third nature in the midst between, which is neither without soul nor without reason, nor void of a self-moving power, but rests upon both of the preceding principles, but yet so as to affect, desire and pursue the better of them."

Here is ground-work on which psychic and spiritual science can intelligently build. Between soul and body stands a living organic structure, with an apparatus of communication of forces from part to part. Each intermediate element is obviously both a receptor and transmitter of messages, which is enough to remove the operation from the realm of magic to that of science. Thus intimations generated at the level of soul sweep clear down to the body and transform it in some way and to some degree; in response soul profits by whatever the bodily readjustment may mean for its economy of life in the body. Thus flies back and forth the shuttle that weaves the web of life.

Clearly this mechanism would implement the function assigned by theology to any principle postulated as mediator between the human and the divine natures in man. The ancients, simplifying their more complex knowledge, referred this mediatorial principle to the mind. Mind was thus the keystone in the arch of "divine philosophy." Intellect thus stood in the place of intercessor between man and the human and his God.

Brilliantly illuminating are the allegorical representations of this "certain third nature" between soul and body handed to us by the semantic genius of ancient Egypt. This middle principle was personified in their dramas by their great Christ-figure Horus, son of the wedded forces of the cosmic polarity, Osiris, Father, Spirit, and Isis, Mother-Matter. In complete fidelity to nature’s symbolism, they pictured the divine son as standing on the frontier line separating heaven (spirit) and earth (matter) in the constitution of man, symbolized by the line of the horizon. Standing on the western horizon at evening, Horus dramatized the soul descending with the sun into the underworld of dark night for its incarnation in the dungeon of the body on earth. He was thus pictured as Horus the Elder, enriched with the accumulated treasures accruing from his many previous existences, about to descend into the grave or tomb of his "death" of spirit. But standing on the eastern horizon the following morn, he prefigured the soul rearising out of incarnate "death" to a new day of glorious experience, as Horus the Younger. He cries: "I die, and I am born again, and I renew myself and I grow young each day."

From his position on the "Mount of the Horizon," he could survey the skies above and the earth below, as his function was to conjoin and correlate the life of the two. So the Egyptian texts recite how he "cultivates the crops on both sides of the horizon; he surveys the two lands; he pacifies the two lands; he unites the two lands." Also he is said to reconcile the "two sisters of the two lands, the two Rheti goddesses; he destroys the enmity which is in their hearts, and makes them to be at peace. Here is sagacious old Egypt’s presentation of the doctrine of the divine atonement thousands of years before it was promulgated by Christianity. Here is the architectonic blueprint of that conflict between the two sides of the cleavage in man’s nature that is the foundation of all moral and spiritual cultism and is the crux of the modern psychology of the conscious-versus-unconscious battle.

The aeonial struggle pits the active conscious power of spirit-soul against the passive inertia of unconscious matter. And between the two stands mind, the mediator. It receives the impact from both sides, and Hegel with astute discernment, detailed some aspects of the shifting fortunes of the battle. There is much sheer deadlock, many an impasse, and eventually much compromise. The reason and intelligence of the conscious side has the onerous obligation of breaking up the stolid commitment of the unconscious to habit, instinct, appetite and tradition. Jung has called this the work of the divine Child, the Son, against his mother. Plato in the Timaeus has informed us that this "Horus of the Horizon" was enjoined by his Father to discipline himself for creative activity on his own independent account, "imitating in your creation the power which I employed in your generation." God has sent his Son (collectively the host of his Sons) into the world to continue at their level his work of creation. But if these Sons are to serve an apprenticeship in the handling of the forces locked up in the atom, they must in turn win, and wed the same negative pole of being as did the Father. Hence they are figuratively dramatized as uniting with their own Mother--Matter.

This brings in the fourth principle, or the second one twice, as first the Father, then the son, copulates with the eternal feminine. In the monograph that represents the fourfold base of all cosmic manifestation, as formulated by the ancient Jewish Kabalists, this mother principle is symbolized by the two V’s in the famous tetragrammaton of the Hebrew divinity, J-H-V-H (Yodh-He-Vau-He). In its seven-letter form it became the Biblical Jehovah. The Yodh is the divine Father, the He the matter principle (or in modern terms the latent energy in the atom) and Vau is the Son (the symbol of Vau is the "nail," the linking or mediatorial power). The second He brings in the motherhood for the productivity of the Son, as in the first instance she was the spouse of the first God. She is eternally the universal Mother, her bosom bared at all times to the embrace and copulation of the forces of spirit, for the perpetual generation of the cosmos. This prodigality of her lavish favors has earned for her in the language of ancient typology the sobriquet of the "Great Harlot." She is Isis of the Egyptian system, and her function is vividly portrayed in the inscription carved at the base of her beautiful statue found at Sais:

I am the goddess Isis, the mother of all the living. No man hath lifted my robe, and the fruit I bore was Helios.

But no longer is her virginity secure; modern man has at least lifted a corner of that sacred robe and now stands shaken and terrified by the glimpse he has gained of that power of Helios, the sun, that lies germinally in the depths of her womb--the more than Jovian might locked up in the atom.

As number is one of the natural categories, the role it plays in ancient semanticism is profoundly significant. One of course represents the primal and eternal unity, and two the duality and polarity. The triad has its basic reference to the first productivity of the primal parenthood, the two parents and their child. But four is the first number that expresses the completeness of a manifestation. This would seem to say that the stability of organic life is not assured until it rests upon a fourfold base, as a table standing on its four legs. In Biblical symbolism the structure representing this truth is the Altar. It was the base on which man could burn his sacrificial offering to deity. And man’s life does rest on a fourfold base even in consciousness and organization. For of the seven principles postulated by the Egyptians as the full complement of the compound of forces constituting the human organism, only the lower four are in function. The evolution and exploitation of the upper three powers lie in the future. Through the implementation of the lower four man’s conscious life functions at the four levels of sensation, emotion, thought and spirituality. It is truly enough seen that the fires of man’s physical and psychic life burn on these four lower levels. His range of consciousness extends only over the area of these four distinct strata.

The four is seen in its relevance to the actuality of man’s situation in the cosmos if we trace the origin and evolution of manifest life by the simplest symbolic forms. At the beginning of an epoch of manifestation, life emerges from the void, which must be represented by the circle zero, the most apt symbol of empty space. Then the first appearance of organic existence must be represented by a dot in the center of the circle. Then as God first "moves on the face of the waters," the dot would move across the circle, dividing it into its upper and lower "firmaments." Plato describes this as the divine unity bifurcating in space, and it gives the first idea of the cross. The establishment of the polarity pits the two forces at right angles to each other, giving the four-armed cross. God then squares the circle and life rests on its foursided base. But the trinity of spirit-matter-child operates in each of the four levels of consciousness, so that the ideal structure of human life is wondrously symbolized by four triangles, giving basic value and significance to the two most prominent numerical symbols in all the sacred Scriptures of the world: seven as four plus three, and twelve, as four times three. Here we have the basis of two such amazing symbolic structures as the great pyramid of Gizeh, with its four-sided base and its four triangular faces, and the zodiac, with its four elements of earth, water, air and fire in three active phases. The zodiac in particular is a mathematical structure of the most amazing semantic significations, almost fathomless in its intimations. And the pyramid (meaning etymologically "a measure of fire") is no less suggestive of the play of the fiery energies of our life in a marvelous cosmic pattern. Of utmost importance for semantic understanding is the fact that the seven resulting from the addition of four and three is the number of the basic physical structure of the universe, while twelve, the number resulting from the multiplication of three and four, is the spiritual foundation of the world.

The great and mysterious number twenty-two, called in esoteric reference the "perfect number," gains this character no doubt from the fact that it is the number-value of the circumference of a circle who diameter is seven. The number then would pertain to the outer, not the inner, aspect of being, the divine mind in action and manifestation. The Hebrew alphabet was in all probability limited to twenty-two letters because of this fundamental signification, as the alphabet is the instrument for the expression of the universal being. Pythagoras having proclaimed the construction of the universe on number, the Hebrew Kabalists declared that it was founded on the letters of the alphabet. But as each letter carried a numerical value, the two theories coincided.

Then, strangely enough, the basic four and seven, when multiplied, as the creation swept on from initial unity to infinite multiplicity, gives the significant twenty-eight, approximating the days of the lunar month, divided into four Sabbaths, and thirteen such months (13 times 28) giving close to the 365 days in the year, or 364 days.

If the circle zero represents the unconsciousness of non-being, the vertical line, I, represents the conscious creative spirit. It is therefore the symbol of the individual ego consciousness, as the first personal pronoun, the egoic I. As the wedding of the universal consciousness generates all existent being, the union of the I and the O, generating all things, becomes the unit number of all counting--10. Thirteen lunar months in the year, the moon always emblemizing the feminine, negative, matter-unconscious pole of being, gave to this number the character of ill-omen which it has borne. In addition to his twelve sons, Jacob had a thirteenth child, his daughter Dinah. Also there were the five days of the epact, the "extra" five beyond the 360 of the solar year, and they, too, were considered "nefast," unpropitious, with the powers of evil traditionally abroad during their period.

But another number that is featured in the sacred Scriptures with some prominence, and has stood there virtually uninterpreted for an age, is three and one-half. It is next to a certainty that its cryptic significance is only to be discerned in the context of a diagram which takes form in an attempt to draft the outline of the position and relation of the seven interior bodies composing man’s total organic existence. As indicated previously, the two currents of force, spirit and matter, take their opposite ways out from the center of primordial unity, reach their opposite positions at the limit of their initial propulsion, then turn to face and battle each other under the law of the attraction of polarity. Each advances toward the other under mutual pressures, and, at the proper juncture, they meet in the middle point of distance from the outer boundaries. That is, they meet exactly on the line of middle distance between spirit and matter, so well symbolized as the horizon line between heaven and earth. On this line stood Horus, the Christ potential, the divine Child, renewing his youth by, as he says, bathing "in the divine pool beneath the two divine sycamores of heaven and earth." The total gap between spirit at the top and matter at the bottom is occupied, of course, by the seven-strata scale of organic bodies from coarse physical up to most "immaterial" spiritual. The diagram shows man, the potential Horus-Christ, standing right on the horizon line both of the zodiac and of existence. And his position is the station marked by the number three and one-half:

As will be seen, the human kingdom stands exactly midway between the "heaven" of spirit and the "earth" of matter, putting man at the point of balance between the two forces of his nature, the conscious and the unconscious. As well as of the constitution of man, the diagram is an abstract representation of the organization of the cosmos, of which man, said the ancient seers, is himself a complete epitome. Man is in miniature the world in himself. By this rule he would know that his organic life structure would be a copy of the sevenfold design of the cosmos. And in a universe built on the number seven, he would know that his position would be at the halfway station, numbered three and a half.

It is exceedingly significant that in the Gospel drama, the Jesus character, who unmistakably personifies this Horus-Christ principle, distinctly tells his disciples that he is the divine ray that came down from the heights of spirit, to meet the natural man coming up from below. For he says: "Ye are from beneath; I am from above." There we have the lost truth. He might in the scenario have elaborated it a bit, as follows: You are the men of the natural order, evolving upward from planted divine seed; I am the man of the spirit, the ray from the mind of my Father. I have come half-way down from the heights of soul to meet you and share life with you, as you have come half-way up from the earth to meet and admit me into fellowship, as guest in the house you have built. It is the house of an animal, and from time to time needs cleansing, which I shall attend to. I will gradually change the order of things for you, and we can eventually live together amicably and delightfully in the marvelous house of your existence.

Clearly Tennyson had this situation in mind when he wrote:

God lent the house of the beast to the soul of the man,

And the man said: ‘Am I your debtor?’

And God said, ‘make it as clean as you can,

And then I will send you a better.’

If the diagram represents truly the facts of life, it establishes that man’s body is the playground of the equilibrated cosmic forces of spirit and matter, the focal point where the unconscious becomes conscious, and he is therefore fully potential and to some degree actual god. He is the compound of the energies of spirit descending from on high and of atomic energy arising from the depths, united in a partnership that is zestful because it is stressful under polar tension. The tragedy of religion, of philosophy, of history is that the once well-instructed knowledge of the elements of this situation has disappeared even among the world’s intelligentsia. Where is there this certified knowledge that the human individual is this Horus who stands on the "hill of the horizon," cultivating the crops of mingled wheat and tares on both sides of the boundary, a spiritual crop when he concerns himself with the realities of the order of intelligibles, and a natural crop when he sows the seeds of gross animal sensuality and any form of beastliness? And how rare is the intelligence that, for the happy issues of life, one must cultivate both these crops, must "pacify the two lands" and in the end "unite the two lands"? Pitiably oblivious is the world today of the comforting knowledge that the divine Father dispatched us here designedly that we might be born from and nourished by this prolific Mother Nature, instructed by her as his alma mater and reared to adult Sonship of divinity under her beneficent tutelage. Forgotten is Egypt’s living intelligence that "his mother suckleth him; she giveth to him her breasts on the horizon." Still the world gazes uncomprehendingly at the image of the Madonna, of Mary, Isis, Venus, Ishtar, holding her divine infant in her arms. So far askew of true understanding has errant misconception led religious fantasy that, most largely in the Western domain of earth and history, for some twenty centuries man’s natural happiness has been crushed down under the persuasion that this nature, because it is the polar antipode of the soul, must be trampled under foot and snuffed out. The warped theological infatuations that in the third century exulted in the death of Pan have darkened the sunlight of the world to this day.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

If God sends out his Sons and future coadjutors in the work of his cosmic enterprise, to be born, bred and adorned summa cum laude with the laurels of wisdom in the lap and the school of his fond Mother Nature, the question for our intelligence arises: Whence did this infallible instructress derive the wisdom and the knowledge to serve as her children’s teacher? If the right answer to this query can be divined, we shall be able to solve a score of the riddles that have perplexed the philosophical genius of the race for ages. If true knowledge is available here, enlightened thinking processes may proceed to build the house of philosophy more beautifully.

The many philosophical citations that have been marshaled in review in the study have openly expressed or implicitly intimated some aspects of fundamental truth. But to a disappointing degree, they have lacked conclusive demonstration. They so vaguely savor of the character of "pretty theory." The grand fact is that Mother Nature has the requisite elements to instruct her man-child in the essential principia of truth, because she is herself the truth, the actuality of the cosmic Father’s mind. And this is so because, as wise ancients have told us, this cosmic divine mind, wishing to behold its archetypal ideas concretely pictured before it, stamped those ideas upon the face and form of the body of nature. There they stand in sculptured forms before our eyes, needing only to be properly read.

If, as our diagram represents, mind and matter both emanated primordially out of the same womb of being, they were both expressions of the same one thing, the one positive, the other negative. The same being was expressed in the one case concretely, in the other ideally. The cosmic mind had stamped its thoughts upon something that would hold their form and image long enough to be contemplated with satisfaction and a workman’s artistic delight in his craftmanship. God, as Sri Aurobindo declared, was free to indulge his fancy in the delights of creative activity. If we put God under bondage of any kind, we surrender our own freedom with it, for we are ourselves, in our place and function, involved in God’s doing. As this will becomes the ordinance of universal life, it is the business of us his children to catch the spirit of his creative impulse; indeed our happiness depends upon our harmonizing our whole effort with it. This necessarily involves the duty of our learning more and more clearly what the will and the spirit of the Father’s Lila is. This objective can be achieved only by our associating ourselves heartily and sympathetically with the actual creative process, as it is enacted before us.

We have, then, the divine mind producing its universe according to the pattern of its wishes and its ideas. Everything generated in the grand procedure bears the stamp of its purpose and its meaning. The naive human sense does not miss the truth of this matter, nor does the most involved sophistication negate this simple judgment. But deepest thought holds that God beholds himself as in a mirror, as he gazes upon the product of his mind and hand. This conception emboldened Kant to say that only God could know the things that he had made. But his children are created in his likeness and image; are they to remain forever incapable of knowing these things also?

Here is the turn or crux of the situation that reflection has not squarely enough faced--or so it would appear. Philosophical speculation has not studiously enough followed the nuances of the problem as it shifted from God’s knowledge to ours. High as the heavens are above the earth are God’s thoughts above ours, the Scriptures admonish us. Nevertheless those same Scriptures enjoin upon us the necessity of gaining the wisdom and understanding essential to our basic happiness. They even exhort us to a perfection like unto the Father’s. The certainly of our ability to achieve knowledge is a postulate of our sonship in God’s family. "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work," says the type-figure of our filial relation to God. He has set his children down in the midst of his infinitely diversified creation and made their happiness contingent upon their mastery of its laws, modes and meanings. Hence our task definitely is to gaze upon, to live with, and to absorb into our consciousness the thoughts of the mind of God as revealed in his creation. St. Paul most beautifully says that as we behold the glory of the Lord reflected in his works, we are transformed into the same glory.

But the Western mentality has not caught the benignant glow of God’s reflection in nature because errant theological doctrinism turned his gaze away from the mirror where the glory was reflected and fixed it upon a region where it was not to be found. Ideas of the "malignancy of matter," the evil power of the world, contempt for nature, all thrust their darksome shadows between the mind and nature and cut the mind off from the radiance. Religious percussions prevented the Western mind from holding the mirror up to nature; instead sought to hold it up to the void of imagined heavenly realities. If God looked to nature to catch the reflected glory of his own mind and found delight therein, it is obvious that if his children are to partake of their due measure of that same delight, they must find it in looking steadily upon the same world.

And now, with so much of the foundation laid, reflection brings us at this point to a conclusion of the most momentous significance, one based solidly on the premises both of nature and of logic. On the basis of the Scriptural doctrine that God’s progeny are made in his own image and likeness, and the validation then of the thesis that both parent and offspring possess similar or at least analogous qualities and attributes, there is every legitimate ground for deducing the truth of the proposition that the laws of nature are the operation of God’s unconscious mind.

If man is an epitome of the cosmos, if he is a seed unit of God’s life, the similarity between Father and Son must prevail throughout, extend to all areas. The inference then that god has a subconscious, as well as a conscious, mind derives from man’s possession of two such minds; otherwise the analogy would fail of truth. For God and man alike the law would operate according to what man has discovered of his own psychic processes. This law prescribes that what the conscious mind thinks often enough is taken over by the mechanism of the subconscious and becomes fixed as what goes by the name of habit. The effective factor here is repetition. An act of consciousness repeated often enough becomes a fixation. It, so to say, causes the first impression upon plastic substance to harden for permanency. Even a single impression of a thought upon consciousness, psychologists assure us, is never forgotten. A fortiori, mentation that is many times repeated or held steadily or vividly in consciousness, becomes established as a fixed operation of the unconscious. God’s archetypal creative thought-forms, then, were stamped upon the plastic protyle of the universe and became the unalterable, the so-called immutable, fixations of the creative will.

Next a corollary of this startling denouement of the rationale leaps into mind with astonishing force for what it implies in the domain of all world religion. It is the realization of the fact that all subconscious operations carry on without the conscious awareness or attention of the conscious mind. This is clearly true for man; it must therefore be true also for God. The staggering conclusion that emerges from this train of logic is that God is giving no conscious attention to the running of the natural order of the universe, with the subsidiary implication that human prayers could not possibly alter the course of nature in any special way for man’s behoof. The underlying presupposition of the prayer motive is that God consciously hears and answers petitions.

The alternative question whether God could or would or might or actually does hear his children’s prayers and give his conscious attention to them and might then initiate changes in the order already fixed by habit is something for religious speculation. Proponents of the prayer cultus readily cite the Scripture’s assurance that not a sparrow falls without the Father’s notice. But as it appears that the Deity has arranged to take care of all essential processes and details of the salutary natural order through his fixed laws, the sparrow’s fall could still be a part of his mental action, though subconsciously. Again, that God manages the natural order through his subconscious habitudes, but gives his conscious attention to his dealing with things in the spiritual order, might be argued. And in the theological systematism as formulated by the great Medieval Doctor, Thomas Aquinas, the position taken is that God is free to interpose his conscious mind in the working of the "immutable" natural law, and change it if such is his pleasure or whim.

In one way or another, by logic or in spite of it, the human mind, at least at the "average" level, clings to the belief that Deity hears and answers our prayers, that he can not be deaf to our needs and our pitiable cries. But as far as logic that is grounded on the obvious premises can carry the human mind, it would appear to be futile for man to appeal to God to alter, suspend, redirect his own immutable laws. When the whole question is considered in the context of a larger view, even under the most indulgent concession to the prayer motive, would it not be unconscionably presumptuous on the part of man collectively--and how infinitely more so for one or a few individuals--to beseech God to intervene, to thrust out his mighty arm and hold up, tamper with, switch or juggle with or inhibit the normal established run of his cosmic operation? Even the thought of such a thing shocks any balanced thinker’s sense of fitness and proportion.

Yet the prayer cult can still justify itself on the analogy of the God-Mind with the mental nature of man. For if it is possible for a human to bring the power of his conscious mind, will and resolution to change a long-fixated habit, certainly God could not be denied the same power. The pious posture of the religious mind will never endorse the view that God has become a helpless prisoner of his own laws. If he made those laws, and is omnipotent, surely he can change them, is the attitude of religion. But again the positivist can advance the riposte that the present cosmic order is the one God did ordain as the expression of his mind and will, and it is so vast and so inextricably interwoven in all its stupendous mechanism that the idea of his being entreated to change a single item or detail at the plea of one of his prodigious family of mortals is preposterous beyond all other crazy hallucinations that have in all ages obsessed the religious mind. Then, too, how can our minds conceive of any power of consciousness that could give careful consideration to millions of petitions that, as world religion stands, are being addressed to it at virtually every moment of time? If the God-mind is not supposed to take care justly of all phases of the operation of his cosmic plans by the instrumentality of his subconscious habitudes and ordinances, then, on the supposition that he does consciously hear and answer prayers, it is obvious that this service to his children would consume all his time, leaving him no time for other use of his conscious mind. Unless there is in the case some absolute transcendence that overrides and nullifies all that the word "logic" means for mankind, it is obvious that the prayer addiction runs out into dead ends of the most incredible absurdity and illogicality at every turn. Yet despite all this, it is not an infatuation for the human mind to trust that God is in full charge of his universal order, and that justice rules the order. A sane and considerate philosophical attitude of an intelligent mind, it would seem, would be that it is impertinent on our part to presume to remind God of his obligations.

Had not ancient arcane philosophy been forgotten, occult wisdom would have obviated the predicaments involved in the above discussion. The sagacious Greek esotericism declared that "the gods distribute divinity," allotting to each mortal his due share. The enlightening solution to all the questions posed is found in the knowledge that God has implanted a unit portion of his divine consciousness in the heart and soul of every son of man, itself competent to take care of all the individual’s problems. Why bother the central intelligence of the universe with a person’s petty interests and woes, when an accredited agent of that intelligence is already and unfailingly at hand for all needed help? The infinite tragedy of most religion has been that distorted theological conceptions have almost entirely turned the focus of human attention away from the presence of the agent at his post in the consciousness of every mortal and directed it out into the vacancies of an egregious hallucination. The tragedy here springs from the sad fact that for the mortal to pray to the imagined head of the cosmos, while neglecting to deal with the agent duly commissioned to handle all exigencies, breeds neurotic instability, even psychotic derangement, permitting the life to grope helplessly in darkness and confusion. The psychologist Jung has certified these disastrous effects of religious misconceptions.

As has been hinted at herein before, religion has regarded the natural order as at enmity with spiritual evolution. Hence its culture of miracle, its demand on God that he obviate the inexorability of nature and set aside his laws for our benefit. But true religion and undefiled should all along have had the wisdom to realize that infinitely more precious to man than any breach of nature for special blessings is the complete dependability he can put upon natural law. Pietism has even carried minds all the way to the delusion that holiness and surrender to God’s will can lift the righteous devotee above the reach of the natural law, granting him complete absolution from the order of life under nature and absolute freedom to revel in the "liberty of the Sons of God." But this is a fatuity that would prove disastrous, since it would disrupt the harmonious order of human life and lead directly to the chaotic clash and confusion of individual wills disturbing the balance of things. Human wills do clash at all times, it can be argued; but the natural order tends always to readjust the forces and reestablish balance. If the natural law could be superseded by individual wills, there would be chaos indeed. If the harmonious order of the world were to be rendered subject to interference by individual piety, the resulting chaos would soon drive us back to letting nature take its own course. If all individual prayers were answered, the world would be a madhouse. An observation of Hegel’s is of great import here. As he considers all nature as the manifestation of the presence, power and purposes of the divine mind, he says that the divine action in the world is the restoration and expression of the oneness of life, uniting in one association nature, man and God. Hence, he says, "miracle is the supreme disservice." For miracle would break into and disrupt this beneficent relationship.

When thought can be profound enough, it is seen that nearly all questions of epistemology, psychology, indeed of our life as a whole, hinge upon what is the reality behind the common concept of the human soul. The ancient mind postulated the existence of an entity or distinctive unit of conscious being which comprehended in itself the essence, the power and the reality of our existence. The modern mind is by no means certain of this postulation, by tradition concedes its existence on the religious side of common thought, but is quite sceptical of it on the side of science. On the basis of the predicated sevenfold physical-psychic-spiritual constitution of man, the ancients could deal with such an entity in a mental schematism that fitted it harmoniously into its place in the seven. As suggested by our diagram, it was a unit of sublimated material composition, that stood at the midpoint of the seven, and became the instrument of egoic consciousness because it equilibrated in itself the forces of both matter and spirit. Only under such conditions could consciousness become objectified to itself.

Working under the terms of this situation, the deep-prying ancient intelligence was able to arrive at many determinations regarding the facts of psychic life to which the modern mind, laboring without a foundation of this sort, has no clues. Such questions as the tabula rasa, innate ideas, a preestablished harmony between mind and the world and in fact all a priori postulations can be seen to have rational status and explanation under the terms of the ancient arcana of knowledge. If one does not know what the soul is, or whether it is a fresh creation of life at the birth of the present personality, or whether it can exist beyond the demise of the body, one lacks grounds for understanding and premises for thought. If, on the other hand, one accepts the claimed knowledge of the ancient savants and finds that the conclusions to which, on those premises, logic leads the mind comport harmoniously with the living experience of the soul in the world, one at least has in hand a systematism that consistently withstands the pragmatic test. If one has found a schematism that successfully meets the pragmatic test, it is generally considered determinative. We can hardly ask more of any theory than the "practical" demonstration that it "works." And if it works, it must be presumed to have established its validity. Any more finally authoritative criterion that might be demanded would entail an ultimate determination of the terms "it works," and "validity" themselves. This would take us into a regression so deep that all possible question of what constitutes "knowledge" would be well-nigh indeterminable.

If, then, we are discovering that there was extant in what we still regard as "ancient" times of a few thousand years ago a comprehensive system of psycho-spiritual arcana and esoteric knowledge that has in our day at least won the distinction of being acclaimed as the "perennial philosophy," and is definitely seen to have been the primary source of our Scriptures and our most widely accepted religio-philosophical traditions, we are at least challenged to see if the principia of that systematism do not yield to investigation answers and solutions of basic problems more rationally acceptable than those achievable on the grounds of either conventional orthodoxies in religion or the speculations of philosophy or the current predications of science. And in this investigation we are morally challenged to see if, in the context of the great organic structuralism envisaged by the arcane philosophy, the existence and reality of the soul does not receive a plausibility, if not a positive authentication, that would give it a validation in the face of modern scientific scepticism.

The arcana of old embraced a purported knowledge of the cosmos and a bold outline of its history. As to man, it affirmed that he was truly the Son of God, made in God’s image and destined to grow into the likeness of his Father. He is a miniature copy of the cosmos all in himself. That unit fragment of his Father’s life that constituted him what he is, is his soul. God being imperishable and eternal, this Son-soul must be likewise indestructible. But, being a Son, this entity must be generated ab initio by the Father, and sent out into the conditions of existence in which its growth could most propitiously take place. This required its involvement in organic material bodies, its incarnation, its pilgrimage through the cycles of embodiment in all forms and conditions of existence in the gamut of the construction of material universes. It was required to traverse the whole distance from unconscious inertia of matter up to the highest pinnacle of cosmic consciousness. And since the fundamental law of all manifested existence was the methodology of alternate cycles of life and death, or repetition of smaller cycles to compose larger ones, souls were destined to undergo their pilgrimage through the grades of matter in a series of cyclical embodiments alternating with release and disembodiment, in a virtually endless progression. If the total cosmos of Brahm sets the rhythm of eternal out-breathing and inhalation, man in his image must advance by rhythmic succession of lives and "deaths." The idea of one life and death of soul in matter becomes thus an unconscionable fatuity. The law of all life is the "eternal renewal."

The soul-character in the Egyptian Book of the Dead exults in the fact that he has come to earth to renew himself by bathing in the pool beneath the two divine sycamores of heaven and earth. "I die and I am born again and I renew myself and I grow young each day." "I am eternity and everlastingness, and I proceed to the confines of heaven." "I am yesterday, today and tomorrow; I am he that was, that is, and that is to be." "All things are in my hand."

Who would not concede that the sweeping majesty, the grand sublimity of such conceptions sink into comparative ignominy and paltry insignificance the barren idea that the soul has a fleeting tenancy of one earthy body and passes into non-existence with that body’s dissolution? Under such terms soul could not be said to have a history; or such a history would be meaningless. So the archaic wisdom postulated for souls a history, and in the light of that history, all questions relative to its life and nature could find intelligible and rational answers.

If it was a young god on a pilgrimage through the stages of evolution to highest divinity, it stood at any given moment of its journey at a point where its present status would be the resultant of all the elements of its past experience. As Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress bore on his back the packet of his weakness and sins, the young deity bore in and on his soul the "karma" of his past. Through weal or woe, this burden of his lot could be reduced and lightened as he, life by life, learned, obeyed and mastered the laws of righteousness and the principles of truth. From wild flinging of his physical energies about in sensuality in the early stages of his progression, he came to dominate these strong forces by the sober control of reason and increasing joy in the delights of rational understanding, as the power and genius of divinity flashed into expression.

Lacking scientific grounds and therefore rational certitude as to the existence of souls as imperishable entities, modern philosophy prolongs its tenancy of the anomalous position of postulating progression for the creature man without either positive or rational assurance of continuity of the entity that progresses. This is its weakness, and it spells futility and dubiety for speculation until it is corrected. How can life progress if the organic beings that carry its values and gains do not themselves persist in perpetuity? Modern concept of progress rests almost entirely on the thesis that values and gains are preserved and enlarged by their transmission from one generation to the next in a chain. The following generation inherits the accruements won by the present one. But this predicates that the entities that win the higher values do not hold them, or carry them on as their permanent possession; each generation labors under the heavy stresses and pressures of polarity, wins some precarious advance, only to see its grasp on the hard-won treasure wrenched loose by death. The theorization fails on two distinct counts to accredit itself to reason: cosmic injustice is suggested, yes, specifically implied, by the reflection that neither is the egoic unit of life that struggles to expand the stream and the glory of existence in his tiny cycle rewarded even to the point of being permitted to retain and enjoy the fruits of its effort, nor has the successor to whom it transmits its accrued blessedness and advantage earned this benison through its own exertions. The first worker in the vineyard is robbed of what he justly earned; his successor inherits and enjoys what he has not himself earned, but the fruits of another’s stressful labors.

Ancient "occult" science of the soul lifted the mind clear of the fogs and dialectical blankness of this thought predicament by positing, on both natural and rational grounds, the perpetual existence of the egoic unit of consciousness that advanced through the scale of graduated levels of being from lowest to highest and carried all its gains with it. Life itself could make no advance or retain its gains if the units that through rough experience added the gains could not hold them. Philosophy and religion must struggle on in irremediable poverty of rationality as long as they can not fill the vast dialectical gap and vacuum left in their systems by want of a fully rational science that gives both existence and continuity to the soul. If religion comes forward with its pitiable bleating cry that there is a soul and that it carries the values on in a realm of wholly spiritual existence for all eternity, to that rash gesture of despair reason replies that then the human mind has no possible resource that enables it to rationalize one incarnation of soul in earthly body. On the theory of continuity of soul and its progressive advance through successive swings between polarity with matter and rest and recuperation in a return to its primal unity, human life gains rationality and meaning leading on to a transcendent glory as the goal of divinity is neared.

Since, then, the soul is known to be this invincible hero advancing upward through the grades of evolution’s curriculum, all fundamental queries of philosophy receive at least elementary answers. If his potential of an eventual godlike order of consciousness was an unwritten slate at the start, each life in embodiment inscribed the record of its experience upon it. Life after life added its scribble, but at any time in the progression accrued insights and wisdom could erase the old scribble and writer a clearer and more legible diary. If the entity started out with innate ideas, they were but potential until experience imprinted them boldly on consciousness. They were innate only in the sense that at each succeeding incarnation they were there subconsciously as the remembered impressions brought over from the past. If there was an established harmony between the soul’s mental life and the perceived order of nature, it had been built up by deeper and deeper reflection over many lives. And if any elements of rationality, any categories of thought, could be described as "a priori," it could be only in the sense that they were from the beginning there potentially. They were there from the outset seminally. Once experience divulged them to consciousness, they became a posteriori.

The postulation of the soul’s real existence and continuity puts the needed substantial pillars under the porticos of the temple of philosophy, not to add that it both strengthens and beautifies the temple of human life itself. Symmetry, proportion, balance, the rudiments of beauty and the happiness that accrues from the mind’s sense of the fitness of things, all embellish the daily run of human life by their gracious influence. If the present life is understood to be the current episode in the soul’s peregrination up the ladder of continuous progression to a glorious goal, the science of psychology becomes the charter of prospective, if not presently actualized, happiness. And a philosophy that fills the yawning abysses left by unintelligent faith and unrationalized hope with a reasonable certitude as to rewards of obedience to known laws will tend to lift the humdrummery as well as the anguish of life up to the plane of real beatitude.

The science of soul progression could of course stand on valid grounds only if it be found true that the entity called soul possessed the capability of registering and retaining forever the impression of all its experiences consciously imprinted upon its constituent essence. If the soul could not remember its experiences, it could neither make nor hold any gains. Only by comparison of present experience with past can we make a choice for the better. Without memory life would have no pedagogical power. It could not educate us.

The fact, then, that the subconscious mind never forgets an impression is an item of the utmost value for knowledge. It is the guarantee that soul is the ultimate and essential substance of our being, underlying and pervading the whole area of life. While it is permissible to say that we are the body and have a soul, it is doubtless more accurate to say that we are the soul and it has or wears a body. If the body is perennial, it is also true to say that soul dons and doffs bodies as it would a garment. Science is hedging close to the concept that ultimate being itself is mind; and back of mind, it is averred, is soul; and back of soul is spirit. We have the testimony of our revered Scriptures that God, the total, is spirit. Modern science has made us acquainted with the existence of matter in an endless variety of forms, many of which are so tenuous, volatile and ethereal that it is inappropriate to apply to them the term material at all. We now face the reality of such terms as "spiritual." We find the atom composed of many interior bodies of sublimated matter; no longer dare we scorn as puerile superstition old Egypt’s asseveration of the human being’s constitution of seven bodies.

Deeper reflection on the question of Leibnitz’ "preestablished harmony" may take us into the deepest heart of the major thesis of this work, namely the fundamental relation of the three elements, God’s mind, man’s mind and the mind of nature. On the premises that nature is God’s mind objectified in matter, and that man’s mind is a seed-atom or unit of God’s mind and therefore potentially identical with it, the logical conclusion is incontrovertible that all three minds are akin. On the same grounds it is equally determinable that there is but one Mind in and behind the universe. If we insist upon segregating it into three minds, it is simply that it has presented itself to us under three aspects or manifestations, due to its power to split itself polarity-wise into subjective and objective aspects and to generate seeds of its own nature for the infinite dissemination of its consciousness throughout its objective manifestation. Having effected its own objectification in nature and having generated its infinite progeny of seed-sons, and having set these seed-units of its own being down in the midst of its material objectification, the situation simply requires that the sons of God, standing face to face with God’s objectified thought, turn their own thought potential into the realization of its essential identity with that of the Father expressed in nature. As it has been expressed epigrammatically, man is confronted with the necessity of reading God’s thoughts after him. And the only book from which he can read them is the open book of nature. Mysticism has egregiously assumed that somehow our minds can galvanize themselves into a vibrational rapport with God’s mind and synchronize the activities of the greater with those of the lesser, so to say, in the thin air of pure ideation without the intermediary offices of any objective representations of the divine thought. This presupposes that our minds can "tune in" with the radiations of God’s thoughts and pick them up in midair, thus bringing them within the range of our consciousness. This is what mystical religion has ever based its claims upon, a telepathic communion of our minds with the mind of God. It is the basis of most Hindu religionism. Given a sufficiently intensive effort, it is believed that man can sink his consciousness into that of God and become one with God. This is supposed to be the function of the much-extolled "intuition," the capability of which the mystical philosophy always denies to intellect. Our refutation of that claim has already been succinctly outlined.

But how does this "tuning in" theory stand when one scrutinizes it "scientifically"? Our veridical knowledge of the science of vibrations, which seem to be the undersupport of all existences, is quite thorough. We know definitely of the vibrational scale spanning the gamut from a few hundred oscillations a second to incalculable frequencies. Every creature at its station in the order has the capability of responding to its own limited range, whatever it may be. Above and beyond that range it cannot go. The idea, then, that the mind of man, with its specific span of capability of response, can synchronize with the mind of God at its level and rate, must be seen as the grossest misconception. And this is the stupendous possibility that mystical infatuation postulates.

But a conception that is quite scientific and legitimate puts the matter in more acceptable form. If the total of God’s creation is the concretion of vibrational forces projected by the Father, why are not all rates and frequencies equally eligible to the divine rating? Are lower frequencies to be put in one category and the higher ones in another? Even if it be that the lower ones give us matter and the higher ones spirit, is it legitimate for us to attribute different moral values to the differential? If it be the bent of our minds to attribute evil to material rates and good to spiritual rates, let it at least be understood that this differentiation is but a whimsy of our minds. Our experience with the two rates may justify our figment of thought and feeling. But it can not exist intrinsically in the actual order.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

An earlier elaboration placed such emphasis on the significance of the statement of the Upanishads of India that the true reading of God’s thought is to be achieved only by "sharp and subtle intellect" as to make this fact almost the central axis of our work. It is now necessary to explore the potentialities of this thesis if we are to pierce to the heart of the relation between the human mind and nature. If it is the evolutionary assignment of man by his creator to read the creative archetypes as exhibited in nature, and the task demands the utmost keenness and subtlety of which our minds are capable, the nub of the discussion centers upon this crucial matter of the quality of mind that is requisite to yield us the truth. It has previously been asserted that, from Philo down to the present, efforts in the right direction to establish the requisite procedures have failed for want of the special astuteness of mind demanded for the task. The method was never illustrated and exemplified or demonstrated with sufficient completeness to carry conviction of its absolute soundness. The possibility of supplying that lack must now be more profoundly investigated.

In the preceding chapter, the claims of mystical religion for a direct telepathic rapport between man and God were treated negatively. Then, since man is incapable of reading God’s mind by this form of immediate intuition, the technique by which this great feat is to be accomplished must be the next theme of discussion. How, in fine, is the requisite sharpness and subtlety to be acquired for the task?

While mysticism mistakenly seeks this quality of consciousness in a veritable entrancement of the mind, the highest genius in the realms of philosophy and psychology has indicated a more rational and eligible technique requiring only the competent refinement of normal mental faculty and using the tools provided by nature for the purpose. The gap between God’s mind and man’s being directly unbridgeable, the reapproachment between the two minds must be engineered by the intermediary office of a medium instrumentality, a visible something that will confront man’s feebler intellect with a sensual representation of the invisible divine thought. This is the symbol. Outside of the mystical area of religion and philosophy, all great thinkers have recognized the indispensable function of the symbol. It is the illustrator, the expositor, the monitor mutely nudging the mind toward understanding. If it can not present a clear picture of a noumenal concept, it builds up at least a shadow-form of the actuality. I carry or suggest clues, it says to mind, which, with the exercise of a little agility, may lead you to the mystery. I belong to, am part of, that real world which is the condensation of the thought of our common creator, and I therefore represent some nuance, phase or aspect of that reality. I represent some portion of the body of truth, and can therefore be to you a guide and revelator. It can not be that the divine author has created a false or a meaningless universe. I am a veritatis verbum, a word in the dictionary of truth. My adumbration may appear to be only mute dumb-show; not so, my message glows luminously for the sprightly mind.

Many deep thinkers have penetrated to the inner core of this consummate art of reading God’s mind as reflected in nature, and some have come close to divining the mental technique requisite for successful legibility. The almost universal consensus of thought on the subject establishes the fundamental method as that of analogy. What is demanded is a quick and lively sense that discerns similarities and correspondences between the symbol and its noumenal counterpart. And most philosophers and psychologists agree that this is the special work of the imagination; and it would not misstate their meaning if one said, the special work of the poetic imagination.

It is Santayana who has dealt with this approach with much particularity. Speaking of three great ages of philosophy, he asks:

Can it be by accident that the most adequate and probably the most lasting exposition of these three schools of philosophy have been made by poets? Are poets at heart in search of philosophy? Or is philosophy in the end nothing but poetry? Let us consider the situation.

Here I think we have the solution of our doubt. The reasonings and investigations of philosophy are arduous, and if poetry is to be linked with them, it can be artificial only and with a bad grace. But the vision of philosophy is sublime and the order it reveals in the world is something beautiful, tragic, sympathetic to the mind, and just what every poet is trying to do.

Theoria, he says, is a steady contemplation of all things in their order and worth. "Such contemplation is imaginative." It is unattainable by any one who has not enlarged his mind and chastened his heart. In attaining it, a philosopher is for the moment a poet, and a poet who has focused his passionate imagination on the order of all things, seeing the relevance of single things in the light of the whole, is for the moment a philosopher. If there is a difference, it is that philosophy is laboriously reasoned, heavy; poetry is a freer, lighter flow, "winged, flashing, inspired." "A quicker eye, a more synthetic imagination, might grasp a larger subject with the same ease."

He is never so much a poet as when in a single cry he summons all that has affinity to him in the universe and salutes his ultimate destiny. The light of poetry is to speak the language of the gods.

But poetry can not be spread upon things like butter; it must play upon them like light and be the medium through which we see them.

Certainly there is little to distinguish the philosopher and the poet save the tenor of their feelings and mood and the form of their expression, if they deal with the same problems of thought and seek answers to the same questions. A philosopher could be as passionate as a poet and the poet as soundly dialectical as the philosopher. The requirement in both for the attainment of visions of truth and beauty is the lively imagination, the "quick eye" for glimpses and flashes of sublime meaning and the light that shines when truth is discerned. All this matches the "sharp and subtle intellect" of the Upanishads.

In thus extolling the function of the poetic imagination as the instrument of insight it still can be that we have only one-half of the story. We have here again the dichotomy and the antithesis of thought and feeling. Commonly in philosophy thought, the intellect, is supposed to predominate; whereas in poetry it is feeling that gives wings to inspiration and fires the imagination. But feeling is ever less able to guarantee truth than is intellect, or at least to adduce the evidences of truth. And imagination can offer even less reliable credentials for truth. It has all of heaven and earth to roam through and can dilate on things seen and unseen. It can accept heaven and earth as seen, or it can substitute another world of its own creation. Unless restricted by the intellect, it is irresponsible, footloose and fancy-free. Its vagrancy can take it anywhere and cause it to see anything. It is obviously no safe guide. It can be as wrong as right, as false as true.

If, then, it is to be the handmaid of philosophy in the discovery of truth, its fine service is rendered in its power to goad and stimulate the intellect, to sharpen and subtilize its operation, to lift it out of its ponderosity into an exhilaration that has the extraordinary effect of intensifying the clarity of the mind’s vision and the power of its concentration. This is what Santayana means in saying that poetry must play on things like the flashing of a light. It has the happy effect of rendering the intellect more mercurial, more mobile, both more swift and more sure in the lightning movement of its thought. It is a truism that strong feeling intensifies the power of thought. Basically that is all that is here under review, but it is an important element in the unfoldment of the general theme of the essay. It is supreme adeptness in discerning the subtleties of analogy.

The summary truth that emerges out of this item of reflection is the extremely significant recognition that all use of the imagination, whether set aflame by poetic afflations or used normally to recover things in the memory, must be held in close relation to the realities of the living world. If it is not to lose itself in the heavens of fantasy, it must keep its sight on guidepoints on the ground. It dare not stray at random out of orbit into empty and meaningless space. It can render no aid in the discovery of truth if it cuts itself off from its base in actuality. Its consummate function is not to picture things that have no existence, to create fantastic worlds either grotesque or marvelous, but to help the mind discern the unapparent truth and reality of the world that is. As the mind can see more than the eye, the work of the imagination is to make keen this inner vision.

It is of course the faculty that enables the mind to induce general principia from the observation of actual phenomena, or to discern universals from particulars. In the turbulent flux of things and events, it discerns the outline of a pattern, the operation of a law. This process Aristotle called epagoge, best translated as "induction." It detects uniformity of process amid the run of variables, and thus reifies "principle." The Greek word for this is arche, and its plural is archai, the name Plato gave to the primary creative ideas of the cosmic mind. In summation of this whole analysis, Jung maintains that these archetypal ideas exist in the universal unconscious and that the human mind can penetrate to their noumenal meaning through the mediumship of symbols, and these are extant in the realm of nature. And Aristotle is explicit in stating how these archai are to be beheld. They do not yield their import to casual observation; they require the power of a sort of "second sight," a light that the physical eye can not give. They are to be apprehended by nous, the word back of all Greek philosophy--mind. They are discerned by the eye of intellect. Plato considered them the substance and the "forms" of ultimate reality, only dimly, faintly adumbrated by the things on earth. They darkly remind the soul on earth of its memory of them in the supernal preexistence.

Whether in their immaterial noumenal form in the divine mind or in their material objectification on earth, Kant asserted that we can not know them in their reality. But it is time some one asked the question: Why not? Either man has the faculty to know things or he does not. And of things to be known, would he be more likely to know unreal things than real ones? If he is constitutionally incapable of knowing realities, he stands externally condemned to live in deception and blindness. The cecity is not in the things as unknowables; there they are, they stand naked before us. If there is ignorance of their true nature, it inheres in the limited degree of the exploitation of our divine genius for knowing. As our knowing capability is sharpened and brightened, our knowledge of things becomes more complete and more luminous. And the ultimate guarantee that we can and shall know these realities is implicit in the fact that this knowing faculty of ours is of the same order as the creative mind that forged them in the furnace of its primordial thought. If the mind of the Father comprehended these its productions, it is rational to assume that the mind of the Son will in its maturity comprehend them likewise. It is our prerogative to view the world with at least a rudimentary stage of the same vision which conceived them in the first instance. It seems obvious that God has immersed our life in the milieu of these realities so that our child-minds could not miss growing into a knowledge of these basic realities of being. To impart to us eventually the power of envisioning his spacious creation with something of the thrill of Lila that he experienced in the formative effort, he set the archai in objective form over against the consciousness of his progeny, with the inevitable certitude that they would with maturity sense the kinship and finally the identity of the objective world with the order of their developed consciousness.

Students of philosophy are aware that Aristotle went a certain distance in modifying Plato’s ideas in the direction of granting more reality to the archai as objectified on earth. Is it possible that he would have been warranted in taking another seven-league step away from Plato’s position and landing in a realization that would have revealed that his great tutor’s theorization was in fact the exact reversal of the truth of the matter? The reversal would postulate that, contrary to Plato’s theory, the supernal world of noumena, so far from being the locale where the infant Sons of the Father beheld with delight and comprehension the archai of truth and beauty, was on the contrary just the place where they could not envisage their reality and their meaning, since mind can become conscious of real being only when polarized with matter. Since these conditions could not be provided in purely noumenal-spiritual heavens, the younglings of divinity had perforce to be sent out into a world where they could find equilibration with matter and undergo the stress of polarity.

It is a fact little known that the Christian creed contains this item of ancient sapience. It is found in three words, in the statement that the second Person of the Trinity, God’s only-begotten Son, was "begotten, not created." Clues from ancient Egypt’s store of wisdom, where it is said that Horus-Christ was conceived by one mother, Isis, and given birth by another, Nephthys, doubling his motherhood, indicate that the Christian phrase might more clearly be put "conceived (but) not born." Even the Christian version has the two stages of the process separately stated, as it has featured both the "immaculate conception" and the "virgin birth." Must birth not always be preceded by conception? And the fact of colossal significance here is that conception, in the cosmic and theological sense, is an act of mind, whereas birth is physical. Hindu systematism called the progeny of Brahm the Manasaputras, the "mind-born," or begotten in mind, as the Egyptian phrase has it. Egyptian sagacity also states that Horus was conceived in heaven, but born on earth. This puts the dual motherhood in its most obvious form, as one of the simplest of truths. Any project carried out by man is conceived in mind then executed in matter. Any child is conceived by the father and given birth by the mother, and in theology fatherhood stands for spirit-mind. The fatherhood of the universe is the God-mind, the motherhood with which it copulates is matter. The almost stunning revelation of truth here is indeed a correction and reversal of Plato’s theorization, for these divine soul-entities who, he affirms, had basked ecstatically in the joys of celestial contemplation of the archai in heaven, had not yet been born; they had only been conceived there. To be born, they had to be sent to earth. Why? Because a birth has to be where the mother is! "Our Father which art in heaven;" "Mother Earth." Only on earth can souls conceived by the divine mind achieve birth into the kingdom of self-conscious and immortal being. "The tunnels of earth have given me birth," cries the soul in the Egyptian Ritual. And Mother Earth is Mother Nature.

If the many statements of eminent philosophers assembled herein have given overwhelming endorsement of nature’s educational power, the stage is set now for the citation of one more that should cap the pyramid with a golden apex, the reflected light from which should almost blind our intellectual vision with its dazzling brilliance. As India has furnished us with the shibboleth expressing our central theme--the sharp and subtle intellect--so it is Indian intelligence that supplies us with this other climactic pronouncement. The expression comes from the pen of that eminent Hindu thinker, who, if he gave his splendid powers of mind to the pursuit of "divine philosophy," did not permit it to abstract him from the world of practical and political interests of his native land. For he sits now at the head of the government of the second most populous nation on earth, India’s most distinguished sage and philosopher, President Servipali Radhakrishnan. The substance of the golden truth he presents to us is found in the Upanishads, those depth-probings of the Hindu soul into the innermost core of conscious being, as commentaries on the Vedas. In his monumental work on Indian philosophy, he expatiates on a discourse between the gods Indra and Prajapati. Based on the gods’ statements, he reminds his readers that in the attainment of the assumed consummate peak of blessed release in a dreamless occlusion of consciousness in the Nirvanic state, "there is no self at all." Indra, he says, has the forthrightness to declare that the soul does not exist when it has no conscious content. "It is indeed destroyed." The exaltation that is conceived and expected to bathe it in the ecstasies of samadhi and moksha ends by obliterating it. "This," he pauses to warn before pronouncing his fateful formulary of the staggering truth, "has an important lesson which is again and again forgotten in Indian thought." Then he pens the eleven words that should irradiate the whole world’s darkened religious consciousness with the benignant light of a new day of intelligence: "TO DENY THE LIFE WITHOUT IS TO DESTROY THE GOD WITHIN."’

It can be doubted whether any single utterance in all the realm of religious philosophy carries a more dynamic power to awaken human intelligence to the realization of man’s opportunity to push his evolution Godward in the lifespan on earth. Only to be omitted to our loss are the sentences that elaborate the significance of the fateful pronouncement.

Those who think that we reach the highest point attainable in pure subjectivity must turn to the dialogue of Indra and Prajapati. The condition freed from the limits imposed upon the organism from time and space, from the existence of objects, is simply annihilation, according to Indra. This contentless Ego, this abstract Cogito of Descartes, this formal unity of Kant, this objectless subject supposed to stand behind, unrelated to all empirical consciousness, is an impossibility. Philosophical reflection, as well as psychological analysis, leads to this result. Prajapati shows that ‘the whole world is one process of self-realization of the Absolute thought.’

Since philosophers have debated the matter for some thousands of years, we may listen a moment to the debate of two gods with profit. Prajapati had argued that "when the sun is set, when the moon is set, when the fire is put out, the self alone has light." This carries the usual implication that the pure self will shine in all its divine serenity the brighter for the removal of the veil of the lower consciousness.

But Indra was too much of a psychologist for Prajapati. He felt that this self, freed from all bodily experience, from the shapeless mass of dreams, etc., this objectless self is a barren fiction. If the self is not what it knows, feels and reacts upon, if it is divorced from it and thus emptied of its contents, what remains? "Nothing," said Indra. To be free from everything is to be nothing.

Again and again Radhakrishnan seeks to steady Indian religious thought by the reminder that the Upanishads do not convey the message of making of the deepest self an abstract nothingness. It is potentially the fullest reality, the completest consciousness, and not a mere negative calm, untroubled by any unrest and unpolluted by any blot or blemish. By a positive attitude and method it has to find its true selfhood in the life and being of all.

A necessary corollary of this affirmation of the living reality and value of every phase of the soul’s mundane experience would be the importance of soul’s contact with nature. Where could we have encountered in all literature a more inexpugnable confirmation of our central theme than this statement of Radhakrishnan’s?

The human self can not think, conquer and love nature, were it unthinkable, unconquerable and unlovable. Nature . . . exists for man . . . nature summons us to the spiritual reality of life and answers the needs of the soul. It is formed, vitalized and directed by the spirit.

Only perhaps in the light of the regained significance of such a clarion reminder of warped religious aberrancies regarding the evil of life in the world, the sinful nature of the fleshly appetencies, and the whole slanderous derogation of matter, can we begin to see the pressing need of a renaissance of reverence for nature. It were a grievous pity and shame on our ignorance, that in our pious yearning for the ecstasies of our Father Spirit we think we have to berate, vilify and besmirch the nurturing embraces of our benignent Mother Nature. It augurs happily for the future of the world that this rebuke to our disparagement of nature comes to us from, of all countries, the President of India! "To deny the life without is to destroy the god within!" Only perhaps through a complete about-face on the part of world religious thought, a drastic revolution in the house of philosophy, a turning of direction from the heaven of mystical allurement back to the beneficence of our life with nature, may mankind be able to gain a steadier footing on earth.

This sweeping assertion that denial of the world without would kill the soul is a realization that would never occur spontaneously to naive thinking or the common mentality, but can only be discerned by abstruse dialectic. It is, however, the natural and direct outcome of principles of truth generally recognized. No one denies that the development of a skill, art, genius, aptitude or function depends upon effort and exercise. A capability, even an organ not sufficiently exercised tends to atrophy. From the start life gives us nothing but potentiality. It never hands us matured and full-grown products. All things would remain in latency unless evoked out of it by the tensions of polarity, when the unity of being squares away and faces itself in duality. And the simple truth here is that the potentiality that is destined to evolve into spiritual consciousness could not so evolve unless it faced the reality of something to exercise its untried powers upon. This foil to its capability, this challenge to its self-exertion, is the "life without" and the world of nature. It reduces to the simple proposition that if latent capacities are to develop into active powers by exercise, they must have something to exercise upon. If consciousness is to rise to the dignity and glory of godlike knowledge and a beatific blissfulness, it must traverse the path of mastery of the actual forces of the universe of which it is a part and product. Says Santayana most pertinently:

Truth depends upon facts for its perspective, since facts select truths and decide which truths shall be mere possibilities and which shall be the eternal forms of actual things. The dialectical world would be a trackless desert if the existent world had no arbitrary constitution. Living dialectic comes to clarify existence; it turns into meanings the actual forms of things by reflecting upon them.

And he adds that were dialectic clearer or physics deeper than it commonly is, the points of instructive contact between mind and nature would be greatly multiplied. We fail in works of imagination, he says, when we swing too far out to what is fantastic and without roots in the world. A free mind and a creative imagination rejoice at the harmonies they can find between man and nature. Were it not for what we know of the outer world and of our place in it, we should be incapable of attaching any meaning to subjectivity. The flow of things in nature would pass by us and mean nothing to us. So it is our knowledge of physics and our reliance upon the world’s material coherence and stability that marks our awakening to consciousness and that constitutes our discovery that we exist as minds. Certainly it is our confrontation by the things and the life of the world in which we have to fend for our very physical existence that prods us to perceiving, thinking and eventually knowing. Says the philosopher:

If we consider critically our motives and our ideals, we should find them springing from and directed upon a natural life and its functions, and not at all on disembodied and timeless ecstasies.

This vision of the dissociation of religion from its prime reference to life transcendent and its closer relation to the mundane area is fraught with crucial issues for all the future of mankind. In these elucidations, particularly of Radhakrishnan and Santayana--but echoed by others--there are seen to be implications and corollaries which would appear to be nothing less than epochal and drastically revolutionary for religion universally. As has been sufficiently emphasized already, religion has to a degree of extreme preponderance sought to magnify the predicated values of the spiritual life to the disparagement of the physical, the heavenly life rather than the earthly, glorifying the one, disdaining if not vilifying the other. It has been primarily the cult of otherworldliness, holding the world’s interests at minimum valuation.

This is not entirely abnormal and is seen as reaction from and compensation for the engrossment of world life--particularly in the West--in the interests of the sensual and the material. It could even be that the trend toward higher spiritual development might be intensified to actual advantage, if the proper balance with the bodily life could be maintained.

But this is where the dereliction lies; the balance has been inordinately overweighted on the side of heaven and spirit. And, as the idealists would be shocked to be told, the overbalance on the side of spirit, so from advancing the efflorescence of the spiritual nature, has been disastrous to it. For if it is the even balance between the two forces of the polarity that evokes latent potential, any undue disturbance of the equilibration will hurtfully affect the outcome. History reveals the corruption and the evil of this disequilibration. It is indicated, then, that the shifting of the focus of the effort at spiritualization from the mystical to the physical level--as also to the intellectual--would tend to restore the inequable balance and thus give free flow to the forces of the higher consciousness, which might then be thought of as emerging upward out of the depths rather than downflowing from above. If the physico-material energies of the motherhood of matter are choked off, they can not exert their nurturing influence and the soul’s development is thwarted. Mens sana in corpore sano is ever a vital condition of spiritual growth.

This reorientation of view and approach would proliferate its benefits throughout the whole area of religion, in ways unforeseen and incalculable, but readily imagined. But one specific gain of great significance might happily accrue in the achievement of a sound and fully acceptable resolution of the ever-mooted "conflict between science and religion." Much current religio-scientific literature expresses genuine concern for the possibility of a harmonization of the two. It is not too much to affirm that, in view of the principles of the arcane philosophies of old, as elucidated herein, the grounds of a complete harmonization are in view and need only to be succinctly elaborated and utilized.

It is necessary to start the exposition from Aristotle’s predication that there are two states of being in creational operation, potentia and act, or potentia and object. A thing-to-be emerges out of non-being as sheer potentiality, then begins a process of materialization and finally crystallizes into substantial entification or objectivity. Between the first steps of the departure out of non-being toward becoming and the full consummation of the process, the energies driving it forward express themselves in a scale or gamut of vibrational frequencies from slowest to infinitely rapid, similar or analogous to the mathematically calculable table of atomic weights in the series of the hundred or more chemical elements. It seems undeniable that the unit entities that bear the torch of life, so to say, start at the lowest rung of this ladder of ascent and march up the hill from one grade or frequency rate to the next, destined to mount to the summit. It further seems clear that a point midway in the series--the point indicated by the line in the diagram numbered three and one-half, precisely where man stands in his evolution--the progressing entities step out of the kingdom of unconsciously motivated activity into that of self-consciousness. Up to that point they have been driven by what is called instinct, animated by the superior power of a higher agency directing the total process. But from that point onward, they remain no longer puppets, but begin to exercise self-initiative under the spur of a dawning intelligence of which they become more and more definitely aware. Their future evolution then passes under their own control, and the exercise of this budding intelligence, consciously functioning, strengthens and sharpens it to ever greater efficiency. Man then becomes to ever fuller degree the master of his own destiny, instinct now replaced by conscious volition and decision.

Man, this beneficiary of the great gift of self-consciousness, this highest product of the evolving fires of life, has pushed the development of his higher intelligence to the point at which he knows much about the scale of energic frequencies and wave-lengths of the propelling forces. He can in fact count and measure those quantities. But beyond a certain stage, they surpass any power of his to measure them. It is at this point, broadly speaking, that science and religion sever their harmonious relation. For science abjures any interest in forces or phenomena which it can not bring under the inspection of its powers of observation, measurement and verification by its authentic sensual or intellectual means of establishing virtual certitude. Its concern can not go beyond the bounds of the positively verifiable. When it comes to dealing with forces that lie in the super-realm of the intangible, the immeasurable, the imperceptible and unknowable, science has nothing to say. Hence science and religion part company at the point where, in such terms as have come into usage to express the concepts, the phenomena with which science can deal, the physical, pass into the category of the metaphysical. Here, in a loose form of expression, is where science drops out of the competition and religion steps in.

With regard to the world of the metaphysical, the spiritual, the mystical, science is simply, and from its basic nature, justifiably agnostic. It declares that it has no ground for certitude in exploring that "upper" region. It knows of no laws, no certain principles governing the play of forces in that area of consciousness. The phenomena are undependable and unpredictable, not to say lawless, whimsical, sporadic, bizarre and irregular. Science does not deny categorically that they are real in their domain, valid as experience and authentic, possessing genuine values. But it forswears any judgments upon them because it, as said, lacks the means of verification. Religion is not its province.

Therefore its field of investigation is confined to the lower half of the scale of vibrational energies lying below the mid-point at which man injects his budding self-consciousness into the process, a region which, as our earlier thesis asserted, is the area of the operation of God’s subconscious mind. The phenomena of that domain, being under the rulership of the cosmic mentality, manifest invariable regularity, certitude and predictability. So science confines its scrutiny to nature, whose activities can be studied with the assurance of dependable knowledge. Here the operation of law can be discerned.

But religion begins where the unconsciousness, the instinctiveness of nature, becomes self-consciousness in the mind of the creature man, and since the burgeoning of this conscious self-initiative dowers man with the godlike attribute of freedom, and this at the outset is to be exercised, so to say, to the tune of ignorance, all law can be shattered, all regularity ignored, all dependability flies out the window. Where could science get a foothold for law, for immutable principle, in the welter of wayward and fantastic ideas and experiences to which the psyche of humans has given evidence in all history? It is some clue to the unscientific nature of religion that one of its valuable books bears the title: Varieties of Religious Experience. Nature itself manifests an infinite diversification, but this seems but to be a flourish of artistic playfulness to grace and beautify the steady working of the regular formulae. Her main modes of procedure can be followed with general uniformity.

It is true that studies in the field of the psychology of religion have not failed entirely to discern certain patterns of uniform and dependable experience. The psyche of man is of sufficiently uniform texture that its modes, postures and afflations do not lack a certain degree of unanimity. The behavior systems of many types of religious expressions show much similarity, and given certain conditions and stimuli, more or less dependable outcomes may be predicted. Ecclesiastical systems have arrived indeed at a proficiency in the manipulation of religious psychology that has enabled them to maintain a rigorous hold on the loyalty of their millions of devotees. This is so true that there may be said to be a science of practical or empirical religionism. But this is still far from an answer to the central question: Can religion ever be brought legitimately into the category of a science? This is the nub of the issue here. The general expression of physical scientists is that there is little hope of so desirable a consummation. The psychic phenomena that constitute religious experience are so multifarious as to defy systematization. Nature, with her invariance, is not in charge here. Man, the young god, has the reins and in the exuberance of youthful adventure, heady with his new-found freedom to initiate action, unsteadied by wisdom, plunges into very attractive interest and reaps the consequences. The possibility of organizing the infinitude of mental and psychic and spiritual reactions flowing from his experience into a well defined science is too remote for hopeful achievement. One might say that in the investigation of physical nature the phenomena run straight or hold still, permitting close examination and increasing the chances of discovery. But in the domain of man’s religious behavior, there is no such steadiness; the phenomena, so to say, wriggle all over the place, blurring the outlines of every conceivable pattern, wrecking every attempt at structuralization.

Men of science, however, have been broad enough to admit the possibility that the elements of religious life may still be amenable to scientific status. In the words of Dr. Theodosius Dobzhansky, of Columbia University, there might be such a thing as a "metascience," subsuming all those potential afflations of consciousness which lie beyond normal experience, or even, as mystics and some Hindu systems claim, transcend human experience altogether. Man’s experiences at its present stage of capability can not be supposed to be the final product of evolution of consciousness; vast regions extending above man’s reach at this stage may become amenable to charting and organization in the distant future. Such a possibility is not excluded from speculative thought, but science has no tools adequate for its investigation. In full corroboration of our central thesis, Dobzhansky says that mans stands with one foot in his biological past and with the other in his divine future. The resultant of his biological past has become the substance of his present existence; his divine future still lies submerged in his unconscious. His progressive experience is charged with the task of bringing these submerged capabilities up to expression in his surface consciousness. The Columbia professor may be quite right in thinking that this divine potential of future manifestation is carried in our physical, or psycho-physical organism by the genes. And he outlines logically the conditions of the great spirit-matter conflict in the polarity in saying that the potential spirituality locked up in the genes struggles with their environment, which, being negative to their positive, presents opposition. The environment resists the formative action of the genes, but it is just this battle between the genes and their environment that unfolds organic evolution. This eminent confirmation of our announced thesis itself carries a scientific principle into the realm of religion.

If science is only now discovering, or certifying, this principle of truth, it should now be duly impressed, if not a bit abashed, to realize that religion itself has formulated and announced this as one of its cardinal dogmas. Tremendous emphasis in the Scriptures is laid upon the doctrine of the two dispensations, the old subjection of man under the "law," and the new freedom of the Sons of God through the prerogative of spirit; man’s sin-bound dominance under the old Adamic nature, and his liberty through the Christly oblation that wiped away all sinfulness. At a certain point in his evolution, he would pass over that three-and-a-half line which separates the period of his dominance by unconscious natural forces from his self-conscious rulership of his own destiny. Early Jewish Kabalism which exploited the principles of the archaic esotericism, expressed the conception by stating that in the first period man was under the dominance of severity, rigor, inexorable law, or Geburah, then in the second or spiritual stage he came under the benignant rule of Hesed, or grace, and even of Tiphereth, or beauty. There are many more ways, also, in which science is corroborating Scriptural formulations; so that a greater scientific respect for the claims of religion to scientific character would be indicated.

Santayana has surveyed these problems from almost all conceivable angles and expressed many notable truths about them. As regards science, he asserts that it does not suffice for ideal knowledge and can feel no adequate sympathy for reality. That is, in the whole area of our life in consciousness and ideality, it has no interest and expresses no sentiments. And referring to the body of the world’s religious literature, in which the burden of the message of all human idealism and spiritual truth is carried by myth, allegory and symbolism, he avers that until this immense corpus of semantic representation is surveyed scientifically, there can be nothing but mutual repulsion and incapacity to understand between religion and science. The issue here is tremendous, the penalties for misconception are heavy in human society and the need for clarification most sore. The sacred Scriptures ostensibly carry the message of divine truth, or so the universal legend of religion has it. If truth is there, it must be amenable to scientific verification, for science is knowledge, and knowledge and truth can not contradict each other. The frightful tragedy of misconception has come into the picture all down the centuries through the misinterpretation of the great accomplishment of ancient semantic adeptship, in representing the archetypal constructs of spiritual truth through myth and symbol. When the genius for esoteric understanding suffered decay and eclipse in the religious field and the divine allegories lost all their occult significance and remained as empty husks of truth, the semantic treasures came to be considered the mere froth of ancient infantilism of mind. It is even yet the attitude of "science" and even of conventional religious belief in its best intelligence, that the Scriptures are the expression of an ancient child-mindedness, and are not to be taken seriously as full-fledged truth. That is, they are regarded as "mythical," with an interpretation put on the word that shows a complete miscomprehension of the true nature of this thing called myth. Still lingers in the modern academic mind the conception of myth as the effort of semi-ignorance to portray truth that misses the mark. It is supposed to be the play of fancy and the dance of imagination around the fire of truth, but never fully capturing the light. In brief, myth is still regarded as the libertinism of sheer fancy, the idea that it could be the shrewdest genius of dramatization of impregnable truth being still almost a shocking claim. Science has therefore been aloof to religion largely because of this astounding fact that the mighty truth that the Holy Scriptures of the world expressed in myth and allegory is still considered to be a farrago of childish nonsense. Santayana is supremely right: there can be no reapproachment between science and religion until the sublime semantic constructions of ancient sagacity and wisdom are interpreted at the level of comprehension at which their edifying truths can be seen as scientifically demonstrable.

All this is to say that if the age-old myths of the sacred books were interpreted allegorically, at the level of semantic undermeaning, and not twisted all awry by being forced to fit the Procrustean bed of "history," they would be found in almost every case to be vivid pictorializations of great and completely scientific principles. A statement of this kind will naturally be received in the temple of science with amazement, semi-shock and disbelief, doubtless even scoffed at. It may mean something to these minds adjusted to positivism to remind them that it would not have occasioned the least surprise or eyebrow listing to men of the intelligence of Plato, Aristotle and Philo. And these men were not just novices and fledglings in mental power. Depending of course on the accuracy and felicity of the mythicist’s semantic devices, perhaps it is the height of truth to aver that myth is ever truer than history. Events of objective history in their single occurrence may reveal something remotely illuminative of the eternal reality of whose expression they constitute a tiny segment; myth builds an immediate formal construction of the eternal archai, the truths that are the very ribs of real being. It is said that we have learned little from history; in spite of the atrocious mishandling of the myths of Scripture, they have instructed the general cultured mind of humanity profoundly.

It is not to be doubted that an immense treasury of precious truth is locked up in all that goes with this conception of the subconsciousness of the first or natural order or dispensation and the active self-consciousness of the second or spiritual order. It may hold the key to our more scientific understanding of the law of cause and effect, as to which science itself has had grounds for the expression of some dubeity. It is still probably assumed in general that cause is one thing and the effect another; that effect is non-existent until cause generates it. There is evidence that this crude view has been refined to the status in which the effect is simply the cause itself come to manifestation. If the transition from cause to effect is achieved through a movement or process, the cause may be considered to be the thing in its inception phase and the effect the same thing in its end phase. Now it may be a clearer view of it to say that cause and effect are the two nodes of a polarity, the positive and negative poles of the one thing, the cause being hidden in the invisible world and the effect becoming manifest visibly in the physical world. On the basis of the philosophical principles already adduced, thought could go further and reach the conclusion that cause resides and operates in the sphere of the spiritual-noumenal and effect comes into manifestation in the outer physical sphere. Cause is noumenal, from nous, mind; effect is physical, the appearance of cause in matter. In the cycling movement of the forces of life in the spiral of progression, the two states alternate, the swing from one pole to the other increasing the potency of the one and diminishing that of the other. The physical must decrease and the spiritual increase--as John the Baptist expressed it. The ancient sages made much of the symbolism of one star disappearing below the horizon in the west as its opposite rose in the east. So in human history our moral insights are sharpened by the reflection that as the instincts of the animal nature, the sensualities, brutishness, ignorance and grossness of the first dispensation fade out of conscious motivation, the qualities of the higher spiritual order, intelligence, unselfishness, charity, reason and equity, not to say divine love, increase in potency.

The theorization even reaches to the polarization of the two opposites, life and death. It never comports with truth to think that life is the expression of the total reality and death its annihilation. Death is never the destruction, but the polar negation of life. Again they are the two phases of the one reality, which is being, in the act of becoming. "Death" is a necessary foil for the manifestation of life. It is the negative phase, by tension with which the positive becomes manifest. As any organic existence is the resultant of the polarization of consciousness with its material body, we have naively assumed that the dissociation of the two at the cycle’s end spelled death. It can be understood now as the cyclical shifting of the polarity. At the middle point of the cycle’s activity the two stand each other off in equilibrium, at the cycle’s end and beginning the energic force retires into quiescence in one end or sweeps out into activity at the other. As Heraclitus expressed it, the one lives the death of the other.

Would it need any extended elaboration to accentuate what the application of this scientific principle to the moral-spiritual life of humans would release into knowledge? It would show that good and evil, just as much as spirit and matter, cause and effect, life and death, are the two nodes of polarity, and that the increase of the one necessitates the diminution of the other. This is why the ancient Egyptians weighed the soul of the "deceased" against the feather of right and truth, in the hall of judgment. This sets the inviolable seal of certitude on the truth of the contention herein announced that, from every theological point of view, the judgment posited for all souls takes place in the living phase of the cycle on earth, and not in the after-life, since it is only on earth that the two struggle in polarity to maintain their equilibration. Nature here gives us the scientific key to one of the most basic principles of religious truth.