The Ultimate Canon of Knowledge
by Alvin B Kuhn

Chapters 21 and 22

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The heavens, too, partake of the life of the natural, and in their celestial domain, night and day, season for season, earth’s two nearest stellar neighbors, sun and moon, enact a romantic drama that again stirs the gazing human on our globe to wonderment, if not awe. The sun, as masculine (spirit, fire) and earth’s satellite, the moon, as feminine, and associated symbolically with water, symbol of matter, play the roles of a monthly mating and generating process with a fidelity to analogy that affects one with an uncanny sense of design and dramatic planning. Could anything more faithfully dramatize the aggressive character of make fervor of courtship than the sun’s complete flooding of his paramour’s body with his attention and his light at full moon? Or the passivity and receptivity of the feminine party as manifested in the moon’s deadness and "privation of initiative?" He, the generator and prodigal lavisher of creative power, she the passive recipient. Then, from the angle of phallic symbolism, his attention to her, starting from the three dark days of the moon--her period of negation, as Hor-Apollo graphically depicted it--and visiting her night after night with growing ardor for fourteen nights, until at the stage of half-month he has glorified her entire body with his favor. If his light, reflected from her surface be thought of as his impregnation of her womb with the seed of his radiant being, then the fourteen days of its increase is fancied as the swelling of her body in gestation, with its culmination on the fourteenth night. If their meeting for copulation once each month, so closely watched by the Egyptian priests that they called in the cynocephali to fix the exact timing, took place in the west in the dark arc of the cycle, out of sight of the world in the privacy of the night, then the delivery of the child at the light of the full moon was the work of the mother in the glaring light of the whole world. The fatherhood of life is ever enacted in the darkness of night, for spirit and matter are in contact for intercourse and mating only in the dark underworld of incarnation. "It is only there in the darkness of body that the twain ever meet," says Gerald Massey. The light that is born in his body after the meeting is their divine child, and the nightly increase is his growth to maturity at full moon.

But the most trenchant significance of the luni-solar relationship is poetically divined in connection with a statement in the Gospel of John, where it is said that the forerunner and baptizer of the Christ was not that true light of divinity, but bore witness to it. This concept of the pure spiritual light is so remarkably dramatized by our planet’s satellite as to strike the deeply cogitating mind with the almost sublime wonder of it. The sun, being for us our true light, its reflection on the moon and its indirect transmission to earth make the quite perfect paradigm of the light of spirit that comes to us from the ultimate source, the sun, the Father of Lights. How precisely this comports with the Scriptural asseveration that man can not bear the full splendor of the Father’s glory, but must receive it dimmed and paled by its reaching him secondarily and in reflected form through a medium that reduces its glare. In Exodus there is that badly misinterpreted statement of Jehovah to Moses (man), when the deity says that he will place the man in the cleft of the rock, and the eyes of the man will not look full into the face of the blinding effulgence, but will be shielded from it. Following the passage of the glory, the Lord will remove his hand, and blindness will have been averted.

Even here nature matches the allegory with astonishing fidelity, as our eyes can not gaze into the full glory of the symbol of the supernal light, the sun, without danger of blinding. And along with this there is that statement of sage insight which tells us that "The Lord God is a sun and a shield from its light. If we were exposed to the untempered glare of pure spirit, we would be incinerated in short order. We can endure spirit’s stupendous radiance only in forms mitigated by its transmission through the various media of matter of requisite densities. Matter is our shield from the sunlight of God’s insufferable glory. St. Paul puts this in quite explicit form: "For God, who has caused the light to shine out of the darkness, hath shined in our hearts . . . but we have this treasure in earthen vessels." It comes to us, who, standing far down the scale of evolving life, are capable of giving play to any but a limited voltage of the divine radiation. And luna in the sky speaks to our semantic sense the same piece, as she receives the full complement of solar light, but relays it to us in pallid moonlight. That philosophy, then, is truly wise which affirms that the light of God’s life that can shine in our organic being, is not the full splendor of the deific glory, but bears witness to it. Yet it is that ineffable light, turned low for our blessing and protection. Our whole theme is the concept that nature is the reflection of the light of divine truth.

Out of the blending of astronomy and nature, building on the reflection of the heavens upon the earth, was born that mimeograph of recondite meanings, the zodiac. It was in fact the first of Bibles, if only pictorial and semantic, the word of God written upon the earth and matched in the sky. It is a hieroglyphic photograph of the interrelated life of man and the world. Said the sages, man is destined to evolve twelve facets of Godhood, which will slowly emerge into manifestation in his being as he, like the sun (in appearance), makes its long series of cycles of life and death in shuttling back and forth between heaven and earth. The six houses above the horizon line represent heaven, or discarnate life; the six below are the mansions of earth which it fleetingly tenants during incarnation. The Greeks depicted this in the myth of Ceres and her daughter, Persephone, the latter being caught and dragged down into the underworld (not below the earth, but on it), and only by her marriage with the king of this lower region, Pluto, did she win the right to return to heaven during the other six months of the year. It is the sun’s journey back and forth between Capricorn and Cancer; rather--for this is what religion has forgotten--it is the solar analogue of the soul’s migration back and forth from heaven to earth. Ignorance of hagiographic semantics has warped the human mind into the very reverse of the true occult significance. This means to say that tribal rituals were designed to implement or facilitate the movement of sun and moon, as well as the spring rebirth and autumn fecundity of earth, whereas it was these natural phenomena that were memorialized to quicken man’s communal realization of the fact that he harbored within himself a sun and moon whose interaction made his life. The subtle ruses of sagacity resorted to the phenomenal to bring home realistically to consciousness the noumenal and spiritual verities. It was too much for the capabilities of general mental acumen; stupid inertness of mind could not transpose the significance from the physical to the metaphysical, but left it there, to harden into gross misconceptions.

Imagine the absurdity of what has been called in anthropology "sympathetic magic," involving the actual assumption that tribal ritualism could persuade nature to attend properly to its functions, which it might fail to do if the tribe did not strengthen its hand. The misconstrued actuality behind these ceremonials is simply the fact that more ancient enactment of symbolic dramatic structures to make vivid outward and visual representations of spiritual realities of mind. They were ignorantly believed to be magical operations affecting nature’s operations. When a civilization deems the preservation of structures designed to preserve the durable images of supernal truth a sufficient motive for the erection of a great pyramid, or sphinx, the carving of a zodiac in the landscape of Somersetshire in southern Britain covering one hundred square miles, erecting the round towers of Ireland, the twelve-pillared temple of Stonehenge, the great mounds, obelisks, and streak the plateau of Nasca in Peru with an elaborate design of stone-filled trenches to indicate the position of the sun at solstices and equinoxes, it is tragedy when following ages can only gape in uncomprehending wonder at the meaning; or, worse, regard these hoary relics of past intelligence and semantic art as the product of infantile superstition.

Studied comprehendingly, the zodiac yields a fairly comprehensive chain of meanings that seem endless and fathomless. It is somewhat like the modern mechanical computer or brain machine which, fed with the elements of a problem, will turn out the answers. Each of the twelve houses marks in the solar system a segment of the total spiritual influence, and the soul (the sun) as it passes through each sign assimilates into the texture of its make-up a portion of that influence, until eventually it has absorbed the entirety of the divine transforming power. "I am a soul and the soul is divine; I am divinized in every part," chants the ego of man in the Egyptian Ritual.

The circle of the figure, with Cancer (not Capricorn) at the top, represents the course of the swing of the soul round its repeated cycles of incarnation. Also it stands for the whole evolutionary cycle. The figure emblemizes the experience of each cycle or of the summation of all cycles. One minor cycle is a miniature of the whole cycle. The soul’s position on June 21 in Cancer represents the apex of return to spirit and reabsorption in its essence. Then the next cycle of outgoing begins the descent toward matter, and at September 21, it crosses the horizon and sinks down into the earth and water of the body, its planting in matter. Losing its spiritual light as it descends, it reaches the nadir of outgoing and at the December solstice it turns to return. Gerald Massey, competent Egyptologist, is authority for the statement that the very idea of swinging around on a hinge and turning from involution to begin evolution is precisely the meaning of the Hebrew "Sinai," which he traces to the Egyptian word sheni, shenai, meaning "turning to return."

The dying light obscured in matter is at any rate rekindled from the point of the winter solstice, and on March 21, the soul that began its plunge into matter’s darkness in September is resurrected out of its material tomb to shine again in brighter glory than before. The thousand corollaries of meaning that flow out from the soul’s actual experiences in the rounds, are implicit in the structure, and the arcana of Scriptural writing are cryptically embedded in the fabrication, in the signatures and nomenclature of the twelve signs. The discovery of these relevancies and intimations is indispensable for comprehension of the rational and intelligible meaning of the Bible, the Book of the Dead and many other ancient esoteric documents. This is made necessary by the fact that the divine spark in our nature, the Christ-Messiah grade of mind, is represented under the figure of the sign of each house in turn, as the sun moves around the circle of the ecliptic. That is, in Taurus, he is the bull, or golden calf; in Aries, the lamb of God; in Pisces the Fish Avatar, as food to be eaten by man; in Aquarius, he who pours out the water of life in two streams, blood and water; in Capricorn he is the sacrificial goat, led submissively to the slaughter; in Sagittarius, the archer, half-animal and half-human aiming at the bull’s eye directly across the zodiac from him; in Scorpio he is the sexual nature that stings the divine soul into a coma on its descent into its "death" in incarnate life; in Libra he is the Lord of the Balance, weighing all hearts in the pan against the symbol of truth; in Leo he is the lion of Judah, the "Lion of the Double Force" of spirit and matter; in Cancer he is the Good Scarab, the symbol of the fiery soul of the sun; and in Gemini he is dual as the two brothers, soul and body.

In the first Christian century, or just before it, the sun was in the sign of Pisces, and this fact gave prominence to all the emblemism of the fish; fishers of men, twelve fishermen as disciples, the miraculous draught of fishes that tore the net; the fish symbol of the Christos as Ichthys; and the name Pisciculi ("little fishes") given to the Christians themselves by the Romans; and other piscatorial references. Still lingering from the two previous periods in Aries and Taurus were the poetisms of the sacrificial lamb and the bull of the Mithraic cult. "Washed in the blood of the bull" had been as common a slogan in religion at an earlier time as "washed in the blood of the Lamb" became later.

The heavens adumbrated the life of spirit, and the north polar star was the symbol of the eternal fixity and stability of the universe. Those stars nearest the pole star were the highest orders in the spiritual hierarchy of the cosmos, and those that never dipped below the horizon were such logoic spiritual powers that nevermore descended into incarnation. The axis of the earth was, as it were, the backbone of the creation, the support of all. In Egypt it was the Tat cross, an upright stout pillar. The point of September 21 was called the Tuat, or Gate of the Underworld, where souls plunged down into the night of incarnation. It seems to be repeated in the Hebrew name Delilah, for lailah means "night" and "D," the fourth letter of the alphabet, daleth, means "door," the Door of Night.

Of two stars standing for the poles of duality, as one rose in the east, the other would be setting in the west; this was nature’s portrayal of the alternate succession of the predominance of the spiritual and physical epochs in the soul’s history. As the spirit gained, the power of the flesh diminished, and vice versa. A similar polar opposition was graphed in the structure of the sphinx; for when Aquarius, the one man in the zodiac, is at the forefront of life, that is, in the head, directly opposite and behind him is Leo, the Lion. So he is depicted with the human head and the rear body of the lion. Some symbolic dramatization of this imaginative sort perhaps pertains to every one of the twelve zodiacal constellations and the thirty-six other figuratively conceived in the sky. Orion prefigures the divine soul, as the mighty hunter, pursuing the Seven Sisters, the Pleaides, while his animal soul, in the character of the great Dog-Star Sirius, follows him. For the body, our lower animal self, is following behind soul on the upward path. Most interestingly the Great Bear is the seven-starred mother of all that lives, and eternally circles the pole star close at hand. Mother Nature operates on the number seven, the geometrical base of the physical world. Massey suggests that she is the Great Bear in the sense of the Great Bearer, the prolific mother.

A most intriguing etymological signification arises here. In the old Egyptian, the original word for the "fire" of spirit was ur (found in our ur-anium); and the original term for matter (its universal symbol, water, the sea) was sa. The conjunction of the two made the parentage of all life and birth. Thus the combination giving this parentage was therefore ur-sa, ursa, the Latin word for "bear." So the Great Bearer is Ursa Major. As man is a triad of the conscious qualities of spirit-soul-mind, joined in incarnation on to the four lower elements of physical body, so the three stars of the handle of the "Big Dipper" (so called because at the lowest point of its round, it touches the ocean and dips up some of its water) represent the trinity of spirit, and the body carries the quatrain of the physical life.

In the lower six signs lurks the great water serpent, Hydra (in the Egyptian he is Apap, in Syrian he is Herut), symbolized as the deadly dragon that captures the young soul. Its elongated body trailed over all six lower signs, with its head and open jaws coming directly under the feet of the Virgin, who is standing in her sign with the Christ-child in her left arm and the great star Spica--a head of wheat--in her right hand, prefiguring the divine babe as the coming of the Son of Man, in the symbol of that divine bread whose consumption will redeem humanity. If she should let the babe fall, he would be devoured by the monster of the lower nature. Away down in the southern heavens far below the horizon of the northern sky rises the astrological river of life, the Egyptian Iarutana (the Greek Eridanus and the Hebrew Jordan), which flows north and empties its stream right under the feet of Orion, the Christ. This depicts the natural evolutionary current, arising out of the atom, the lowest depth of matter, and flowing up (north) to the point where it joins the descending spiritual current to implement the birth of the mind power of Christliness. When semantic fancy will write the legend of human life and evolutionary science in such graphic terms on the surface of the sky, we can realize in a strange new way that in very truth "the heavens are telling."

If the area of sense and emotion is the lower hemisphere of man’s conscious life, thought and spiritual aspiration are his heavenly kingdom. If, then, it is true, as all religion asseverates, that in heaven we see the verity of things that were opaque to us on earth, is it not possible that in our celestial home of mind and soul we can now see the veritude that eludes us when we use no higher lens of vision than the sense?

Viewing all things from the high point of heavenly vision, we can discern why the thirty-seventh Euclidean geometrical theorem was an exemplification of one of the instructive divine principles. The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides of a right-angled triangle. And a bit of reflection of our seraphic faculty lets us into the mystery of this illuminating realization. Life is doubly aspected, as spirit and matter, and four-square as constituted of the four conscious processes of sense, emotion, thought and high aspiration. Therefore the soul must traverse in evolution a course from one corner of a rectangular plane to the corner diagonally opposite. That is, it can not move only in the horizontal direction, that of sense, or only in the vertical, that of spirit, since the two forces about equally impinge upon him. Therefore his course, with reference to his maintaining his balance on that Egyptian horizon line, is the diagonal across the rectangular square of life. If, say, his course is upward from lower left-hand corner to upper right corner, his direction parallel to the base and top lines represents sensual experience, and his upward direction spiritual advancement, the analogy reveals exactly what lies behind ancient discernment, to give this figure its deep significance. The perception of this diagram’s intimations yields understanding of great import. With each step soul takes across the plane of life in lateral direction, i.e., in purely physical life and effort, at the same time it advances vertically upward--spiritually. Thus by the sheer logic of geometry our lives are certified to be moving upward even in the most barren and dreary days of mundane existence. So that, however mystical the conception, the sum of the square’s diagonal must equal the squares of the other two sides. In our "heavenly" discourse that says that the product of our horizontal physical experience is at the same time a gain in spiritual progress, so that the final squaring of our life circle brings us to the unity of the two elements. For religion it offers a conception of consummate reassurance that if our progress here below seems to be moving sidewise, still the movement is in some degree upward.

Then we contemplate the singular phenomenon of a gyroscope. Ocean liners have been equipped with powerful ones to stabilize the vessel in stormy voyaging. It is the principle of the spinning top. Its motion, like the swift spiraling of the gods, is so rapid that it can not fall down. So the energic impulsion of the original creative force has enough of the gyrating drive to give the universe its stability.

Then there is another singular mechanical phenomenon that amazingly illustrates one of the more obvious principles of life’s modus operandi. It is the modern phonographic record. What is analogical here is especially striking. If life is, as the arcane science insisted, an infinite or extended series of cyclings of souls round infinite circles of experience, then both philosophy at large and Aristotle’s "entelechy" in particular find their confirmation in the revolving record. As to circularity of movement, it imitates the gods. To the pessimism that bewails the endlessly repeated round of daily life, which allegedly "gets us nowhere," the record registers its positive rebuttal. It does not swing in the same groove, but cuts a new and in some way novel path at each turn; and it does carry its song on to a climax. And how suggestive the thought that the melody of life starts out at the rim, the outer circumference of life, and cycle by cycle takes the movement at each round a perceptible step toward center.

Another physical phenomenon, common in daily observation, perhaps deserves mention for one very salient point of interest. It is that common spectacle of a boy riding a bicycle. This simple exploit, however, on reflection challenges the mind with one of the most perplexing questions, one that matches closely that other debate as to which was first, the hen or the egg. Here it takes the form: Does the bicycle hold up the boy or the boy hold up the machine? In a moment the light of truth flashes and releases a principle of great basic import for philosophy. The fact is that each reciprocally holds up the other. For mental enlightenment, the principle emphasized is that it is only through the conjunct interaction of the two sides of conscious being that anything stands up in the cosmos at all. And what is oracularly revealed to intelligence here is that every living organic entity is composed of a physical instrument housing and implementing an interior conscious intelligence, but controlled by it. When this is fully realized, it may indeed be that in the boy-bicycle situation we have the ultimate key to the philosophy of all existent being. For how can crass materialist philosophy any longer, in the face of such patent dramatization of factual truth, deny the presence and activity of mind and purposive direction in all living action, when it is demonstrated universally that intelligent mind is one half of life’s polarity?

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Viewed as a psychological experience, man’s life is an adventure in the dual realm of fact and fantasy. By bodily constitution he is inseparably tied to a basis of factuality. An activity necessary for his physical existence demands that he act in relation to what he must consider the material realities of the world in which he finds himself. Abstruse reflection has led philosophers to question whether the objective appearances of the world are themselves "real." Kant contended that at any rate we can not know what they are in their real identity. Others think they exist only in our own area of consciousness and are our own ideal constructions, interior to us, not exterior.

However these questions may be resolved, it is clear that it is the ineluctable experience of all mortals that the environment of man is an objective order, imposing on him the need of acting in relation to them, as if they were completely real things. This is all that needs to be established here as the basis of a summary of our work. It is assumed that in regard to his physical existence, man’s life is a contact with physical factuality, the ideal question of its reality being adventitious. It is in any final analysis the actuality of his living experience, and must be accredited as in so far real.

But, as for the rest of his conscious content, a close reading in particular of George Santayana’s perceptive insights into the content of our ordinary consciousness, it can not widely miss the truth to say that our existence is passed in a welter of more or less factually grounded fantasies, whimsies and vagaries, capricious flights of imagination and even outright hallucinations. It appears that the moment our minds draw away from the sensory immediacy of contact with concrete pressures of objective things, they tend to fabricate a world of conscious contents, under the impulsion of situations impacting upon them. Minds must react to the challenge of the outer world, and they do so in accordance with their capabilities of analysis, feeling, understanding, knowledge, or the default of these. The character of this digest of individual experience is determined by the degree of evolutionary progress and mastership achieved by the person. It is an inescapable function of the mind thus to make a constant digest of its activities. It engages every soul in deep entanglement in the play of forces which bear him onward to his destiny, with his weal or woe contingent upon his gaining mastery over all the forces prodding him from all sides. His endeavor is to maintain as even a balance as possible between salutary and harmful conditions. The ultimately chief business of mortals, thus committed by their heavenly Father to drift along on the current of life toward a presumably high glory, is to master the ars vivendi, to the degree of proficiency requisite to move with the stream in tolerably happy state. It is, of course, the greatest, the consummate art of arts, man’s training for divinity. And it embraces and synthesizes all other parts.

In sum this area of our conscious activity is filled with all the feelings, thoughts, imaginations, idle reveries, meditations, day-dreams, all the drift of ideas that float either unbidden and unnoticed; or those generated by the most purposeful and serious thoughtfulness. In a word, the conscious area is filled with all the motions of the mind that sweep through the brain in the course of the day’s run of waking awareness. Equally the nature and content of much of this activity of mind can be the emptiest vaporings of the dullard, or the sagest and most elevated visions of truth of the philosopher.

And this is the region in which flourish all the interests and activities of the religious interest of mankind. After that follow philosophy, art, psychology, ethics, education, culture, social life and the drive of intelligent minds for every kind of human uplift. Every motivation of an ideal kind finds play here. But our chief object of study here is the obsession and concern of the human mind with religion.

The issues in this field have been drawn with a severity and even asperity that records perhaps the fiercest and most inhuman savagery of the human race, all the stranger for its exploiting at the same time the most ideal and godlike qualities of the nature of man. In the exercise of the freedom claimed on grounds of the completely inviolable privilege of committing one’s mind to any concept of reality, any interpretation or meaning that either wisdom may suggest, earth’s people, led in large part by designing priestcraft, has fallen under the dominance of orders and systems of the most tyrannical sort. That this is not merely one writer’s biased thought, Dean Milman, in his fine History of Christianity, speaks of "the tyranny exercised over the human mind in the name of religion." By the invincible power of traditional subservience, the inertia of the general mind, enhanced by the gullibility of ignorance, the masses have slipped under the force of a victimization that is both pitiable and tragic. The forces of religion have thus exerted their rulership over a vast segment of humanity and virtually provided the masses with their conventional ideas and concepts as to the meaning of the world ordeal.

A catalogue, however, of the run of group persuasions, individual idiosyncrasies, personal obsessions, notions of the operation of exceptional agencies in cases, countless forms of extraordinary beliefs, surrender of reason, credulity as to the manifestation of special acts of Providence, would fill the largest library in the world. All of it has produced a veritable chaos in the ideological life of the race. It has set person against person, group against group, nation against nation, and one half the world against the other. Once attached to or subverted by one or another such form of fixed ideation, the individual tends to become rigidly stultified in his faith, remains obtuse to any enlightenment and with mind closed, becomes the bigot. This would be bad enough, but the force of mental possession tends to fill its victim with the conviction that they are gratuitously authorized by deity to do his will as their impulse dictates. They become slaves driven by one salient idea, for which they may even be willing to sacrifice life itself. If unable to enforce their creed on the public, they indulge in a martyr-like tolerance of sullen character. But if by the contingencies of history, they may ride into power, the suppressed violence of their former restraint breaks out with vindictive ferocity.

But perhaps worst of all in a long perspective is the awesome phenomenon of the development under religious hegemony of what would now be called a cult--the cult of the magical, the miraculous and the supernatural in the religious domain--and from it, permeating the secular mind. This was bound to occur and to be calamitous to an enormous degree, and so it has been. Religion, as hinted, swept into force in history because it was the expression of that content of consciousness that began to function when the mind passes from its dealing with concrete things and begins to speculate on the nature and meaning of the living experience. Religious thought has detached itself from nature and searches in the illimitable areas of feeling, thought, and wonder for what understanding these may yield it. With no guides, checks, clues or competent intelligence to recognize truth, imagination all too readily conjures up wayward, extravagant and strange surmises as to the presence and intervention of forces not naturally operative. The bizarre, the extraordinary, the exceptional, are what these addicts to providentialism come to look for as the product of their devotion and their pleading with deity. Their religion, as a mental support, becomes insipid, uninspiring, unless something in the order of apparently magical phenomenalism comes forth. That God’s great benefactions come to them through the normal order of natural law is not ever a matter of interest to them. Religion must yield much in the way of the miraculous, which is interpreted then as certain evidence of God’s direct intervention in their favor.

Religion is not the realm of knowledge, or even of thought, but purely of belief, as for the masses. Belief in its efficacy as miracle may be generated by presumptive evidence, the faith and testimony of others, or the lavish promises of the Scriptures for wonder-works in response to faith and prayer. Religion’s emphasis on faith, as distinct from knowledge is its charter as a cult of belief. Faith of this sort is always looking for God to produce a marvel. Most of the psychic endeavor that goes with this sort of religion is bent toward the business of cajoling deity, through prayer, into some special demonstration of his beneficent supervision of the world. There are specific ritualisms, or cult practices designed to engage this special attention of deity. Prayer is the most usual resort. Ancient tribes instituted elaborate ceremonials, rituals or customs ostensibly to invoke the favoritism of their god. How far the super-intelligent modern man may be above crudities of the sort, when he still presumes to gain living refreshment and divine grace by eating the essence of the body and drinking the blood of his God may be a question.

The outcome of all this has been one of the most flagrant outflares of the human mind into the wild region of hallucination and delusion ever to obscure man’s sanity. It amounts in its most virulent expression to an endless petition ascending continually to God for favors and blessings. Ignoring his natural laws, it amounts to a collective demand that God alter or negate those laws and give attention to unctuous entreaties. The pleas themselves presuppose his willingness to stop the run of his natural order and interpose a miracle for the praying soul. It is a good question whether the cult of prayer, in the crude sense of asking God for favors and blessings is not the most childish infatuation that ever seized the good human mind.

Stress has been laid upon all this religious aberration because it drew the mind and interest of the religious world completely away from nature, and sent it whirling dizzily into the boundless area of the speculative imagination and the unguided realms of the wildest theory. While this run of havoc in the cultural area was most flagrant in the field of religion, it spread widely through all the other ideal interests, tingeing the arts and literature with subtle influences.

One of the most virulent aberrations resulting from the cult of anti-nature has been the exhibition of near masochism throughout the history of religion. The reference is to the cult of asceticism. With the full sweep into Western Christian consciousness of the doctrine of the sinfulness of the flesh, there came the preachment of the evils of the world, the flesh and the devil, giving rise to the practique of self-mortification and brutal suppression of all natural impulses. To indulge the instincts and propensities of the flesh was not only pagan, but the direst sin. Because the body blocked the freer motions of the spirit, it had to be crucified. The spirit was all, the flesh was evil, and the deadly enemy of the immortal soul. The vehemence with which this trend swept the early Church is little dreamed of by those who have not read the record. Thousands withdrew from the life of the cities and towns of Europe and joined a veritable crusade to the deserts of Assyria, Egypt, Palestine, and Asia Minor to sequester themselves in caves or hovels in order to expiate their succumbing to the "lusts of the flesh, in penance, self-torture and even self-mutilation." Certain seasons of self-denial and self-abasement became established items in the routine of worship, and religious orders were founded to build the spiritual life substantially on the severest of self-disciplines. As the body is an extension of nature into the human system, this special form of pietism had to attack it there where its power over the spirit was most gripping. The devilish power of nature could not be tolerated in such close and dangerous access to the spirit. Great Pan was the deadly enemy. Nature had to be throttled at its source, rooted by original sin in the deepest nooks of man’s constitution.

All this chaos in the religious area was attended, accentuated, if not largely inspired by, one of the most staggering phenomena in the history of the race. This was--and is--the presence, power, and influence of a--Book. This momentous tome appears to be a collection of ancient documents, of predominantly hagiographic nature, about which the tradition of their personal authorship by God himself, ostensibly using "holy men of old" as amanuenses for purposes of dictation, has tenaciously clung. It gained the name and renown of being the sole transmission of God’s wisdom in literary form to his children on earth. To all intents and purposes, it was regarded as God’s manual of instruction, knowledge, wisdom and truth. Under the power of such a persuasion, which spread to virtual universality in the West, this extraordinary volume gained a veritable homage and reverence that would not be erroneously described as the worship of a fetish.

The Book proves to be in many ways undeniably exceptional. It is replete with the maxims of high morality, the soundest incentives to spiritual aspiration and truth and wisdom of unchallengeable authority. But the oldest portion of it purports to record the dealings of God with one particular tribe of early herdsmen in Palestine, whom, for reasons unknown to the rest of humanity, he had chosen to be the special beneficiaries of his favor and his agents for the consummation of his cosmic purposes in the redemption of mankind. The second and smaller portion of the Book is another collation of venerable documents which are claimed to recite chapters of history taking place in Palestine about the beginning of the first Christian century, which are interpreted as being the fulfilment of God’s designs for future human history, but in a manner contrary to the expectations of those people he had chosen in the first part of the Book.

The influence of the Book has done nothing to mitigate the virulence of the Western religious bias against nature. Its glorification of the person and function in history of the Son of God has in effect diverted all interest in the religious field away from man’s relation to nature.

Having taken a cursory glance at the disastrous outcome for religion and culture of the free mind’s efforts to capture truth in the open mental sky looming above nature, it is now our task to examine the activity of more stable-minded and deeply reflective thinkers, who, with better aim and control, have likewise sought out the roads that stretch out in all directions through the vast domain of human psychology. These were not haphazard efforts, but reflection grounded on principle and logic and with an eye never taken completely off the evidence afforded by nature. Here we shall have more balanced and rational consideration of nature. Her testimony will not be scorned. There will be caught also a recognition that nature holds a kind of final jurisdiction in all decisions.

In the use of the free action of the mind in the search for truth, scholars--and one might give outstanding prominence in this respect to George Santayana--have pointed to the way of discovery as running through the region of the imagination. Many speak of the truth-seeking agency of the "literary imagination," and Santayana constantly refers to the broad human effort of the most cultured minds as "literary discourse." By these phrases is connoted that whole cultural enterprise of refined society to carry on the pursuit of knowledge and the refinements of character. Embraced in it are the highest cogitations of philosophers, the most enlightened pronouncements of the clergy, the higher-aiming portion of the output of periodical literature and the finest books of first-grade authors. It represents the most direct effort of a civilization to maintain its most vital relation to the influences of culture.

It is therefore imperative now to trace the possibilities that may be implicit in this liberal but controlled use of the creative imagination, as that implement suggested by learned thinkers as the most eligible pathway to the deepest truth. But what is to distinguish the free use of the imagination here from that same free use of the function that, as we have shown wrought havoc in the realm of religious pietism? This is the big point and the crux of the discussion. In the one case, it was wild license of thought and fancy without restraint of any basic standard of truth or value. In the other it is the play of thought over the ground of reality in a world where the living order itself prescribes the terms of the problem and hints at the answers. All adventuring of the mind in search of truth has had to exercise the power of thought, but the vast difference between some thinking and other consists of the absence or presence of basic principles derived from an authoritative source. So the intellectual quest goes on, with far from futile results. And the aim in this work has been to demonstrate that there is no authoritative source of verity but the world of nature. The human mind may rush into the most active use of its great imaginative powers, but unless it is guided by the principia of a fundamental reality, it runs the risk of wandering astray from truth.

Yet what a strange prospect is unrolled here for our contemplation! What the astute thinkers and writers are saying is that ultimate truth is to be reached by poetic imagination! Not science, not history, not logic, not mathematics lay our path to highest truth, but it is for poets to lead us to truth. Poets, philosophers, romanticists have long used this agency in the enterprise of apprehending truth. But never has this methodology gained any authentic recognition in circles of science or academic authority. In those circles the poetic imagination has been regarded as something undependable, extraneous, outside the pale of either evidence or revelation, amenable to no code of evaluation or judgment. It lay in the sphere of the visionary, the emotional, the fling of fancy. It could not be taken seriously. Now the astutest minds look to it for the clearest perceptions of basic truth. It may be the right road to knowledge, to discovery, to revelation of recondite verity. It can never ignore the basic facts of science, nor can it disregard natural law. But, taking off from there, it can use the faculties of the exploring intellect to envisage inner realities and discern the eternal laws. And why not? The intellectual processes of a poet may be just as keen and subtle as those of the scientist; his logic may be as good, and by nature he may be more discerning of hints and clues to meaning than the scientist. It is the tradition at any rate that the most lucid visions of truth in man’s moral-spiritual life have been caught by men who had nothing in the way of science on which to ground their conclusions. The impression still lingers that there is a capability in the as yet unexploited genius of human intellect adequate to pierce to the heart of knowledge. If truth is to be captured, mind must be the agent, whether of the scientist or the poet.

The stage is set finally for the conclusion of our effort. We can go on relying on the faculty which Hindu intelligence has indicated as the one workable tool in the human equipment capable of giving man his deepest and clearest insight into the realities of being. As far as they are apprehensible by man, man can grasp them. Outside of this capability, there is no other road of communication between human consciousness and truth’s realizations.

But the ultimate understanding of this transcendent question is to be subsumed under the authoritative principle that links the entire subject with the theme of nature. The vast region of as yet undiscovered truth stretches ahead of man and extends presumably to the heights of the conscious powers of mortals on to the intelligence of minor deities, and on up to the inconceivable summits of the knowledge of archangels and gods, as the Greeks asserted. Into this illimitable field of conscious potential, the mind of man is destined to advance, as his evolving organism develops more sensitive instrumentalities and powers. The road of evolution to higher being beckons man ever onward.

Now the crown of the argument can be put on the whole discussion, with the statement that the human mind may safely and profitably advance into the field of speculative truth if it proceeds with the manual of nature’s instruction in hand. Mind has essayed to explore the immense reaches of possible discovery in the area above nature. But to proceed into that terrain without nature’s manual as a guide is to risk aberrancy at every turn. Henceforth, investigation must start from nature, and as full and comprehensive a formulation of nature’s cardinal principia, her representation of the divine archai, as can possibly be outlined and organized in systemic form must be constructed as primary knowledge. Every speculative theory must be held up to nature to see if nature endorses it. Nature must be made the criterion of all judgment and decision. If no analogy or correspondence with a theory can be found in nature, or phenomena contradictory to it are found, it stands discredited. Somewhere in nature will be found a parallel to whatever is true.

The whole problem calls for the intensive cultivation and clever use of what Hindu wisdom called the "sharp and subtle intellect." No powers within reach of a commonplace order of mind can ever discern these analogues. Minds of this caliber look upon nature with no sense of meaning in it whatever. It is, after all, the philosopher, the poet, the mystic, and no less the scientist who may have conditioned his mind to look for the reflection of God’s thought in his works, who may be expected to glean a harvest of truth from the cultivation of nature. Thought, divine or human, always precedes and initiates overt action. In every human and divine action, there is implicit the flash of a mental determination.

Nature and spirit together are revelatory of truth. It is the task of spirit to discern truth from the evidences nature presents. As we have seen, nature is the expression of the modes and forms of God’s subconscious mind. They are therefore impersonal, immutable products of mind. The child of God who would live his divinely ordained life moving always with the inexorable current of life will be wise to observe the phenomena, study them for discovery of purpose or beneficence, and in the end prudently conform his life to them and the courses they intimate.

THE END.