Theosophy: A Modern Revival of Ancient Wisdom

Alvin Boyd Kuhn

Chapter 10

CHAPTER X

ESOTERIC WISDOM AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE

It is interesting to scan Theosophic doctrine with an eye to noting its relation to the discoveries of modern science. We might begin by comparing it with the Darwinian conception of evolution. Madame Blavatsky puts the Theosophic view of the evolution of man in four propositions in The Secret Doctrine:

1. Man is a product of animal evolution on our planet only with reference to his physical body. The Deva evolution in other worlds was the source of his independent spirit and his intellect, his will and his divine nature.

2. Man preceded the mammalian animals on earth, instead of being evolved from them.

3. Man is not at all a descendant from any ape-like ancestor in an advancing line of evolution; on the contrary, the monkey is the descendent of (early) man.

4. Man has never been other than man, though not always as now.

Darwinian evolution and materialistic science envisage the development of matter into organic form, and out of that the unfolding of subjective ideation or psychic life--consciousness, reason, intuition--as products of the two elements, matter and motion or energy. Occultism views this process as predicable only of the building of the physical forms. Instead of regarding the body as having evolved the faculties of reason and intelligence, the secret teaching speaks of a spiritual evolution as going on concomitantly, and in attachment with, a physical one. The conscious intelligence in man is not the evolved expression of the psychic life of his organism. There is such a cell psychism in the body, and its totality is the subconscious mind, but it is in no sense the thinking, willing soul of the man. There are many "missing links" between organic instinct and con-

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scious rationality. Evolution in its higher aspects can not be accounted for if we limit the agencies at work to the blind forces of matter and motion acting under the mechanical influences of environment. "Nature unaided fails." The purely mechanical or semi-intelligent energies are able to carry the growing organisms of any kingdom from the lower to the higher forms of life in that kingdom, but without the aid of the superior intelligences of the kingdom just above them they are never able to leap over the gap--the difference in the atomic structure--which separates them from the next realm of higher vibratory existence. Plants bring minerals over the gap to cell organization; animals introduce plant cells to some degree of sensation experience; man tutors the higher animals right up to the door of rudimentary intelligence. In similar relationship the Deva evolution, completed in the Venus chain, is linked with animal man to bridge the gap for him into the kingdom of spiritual intelligence.

In line with this thesis Madame Blavatsky asserts that the principles of wisdom and spiritual aspiration never were evolved out of the material constitution of man's bodily life. They were superadded to his organism from the celestial worlds. They could not have come up to him from earth; they descended upon him from the skies. Each succeeding wave of outpouring life from the Logos carries evolution a step higher, and the law of the interrelation of all life is that each higher grade reaches back to help its lower neighbor ahead, the while it reaches out to grasp the hand of its superiors. This must be taken as accounting for the fact that all the religious Saviors have been depicted as Mediators coming down from a heavenly or celestial realm. Man's divine nature is the beautified angelic product of a former cycle of growth, and his true Self is itself the Deva that had consummated its salvation elsewhere. The fragment of divinity that constitutes our innermost Selfhood had itself been refined and purged in the fiery furnace of earlier experiences. Between man's purely physical development and the evolution of his spiritual nature

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"there exists an abyss which will not easily be crossed by any man in the full possession of his intellectual faculties. Physical evolution, as modern Science teaches it, is a subject for open controversy; spiritual and moral development on the same lines is the insane dream of a crass materialism."1

To trace the origin of human morals back to the social instincts of the ant and the bee, and to affirm that our divine consciousness, our soul, intellect, and aspirations have worked their way up from the lower capacities of the simple cell-soul of the "gelatinous Bathybius," hopelessly condemns modern thought to imbecility and renders its efforts to understand our growth futile. Instead of blind forces Madame Blavatsky posits not only a germinal design, but Designers.

"They are neither omnipotent nor omniscient in the absolute sense of the term. They are simply Builders, or Masons, working under the impulse given them by the . . . Master-Mason, the One Life and Law."2

Nature works not blindly, but through her own highly perfected agents, the Logoi, the Creators.

The second proposition--that man preceded the mammalian orders--runs counter to Darwinian hypothesis. The Secret Doctrine affirms that the mammalia were the products of early man. Man had gone first over the evolutionary ground of the stone, the plant, and the animal realms. But these stones, plants, animals were the astral prototypes, the filmy presentments, of those of the Fourth Round, and even those at the beginning of the Fourth Round were the spectral shadows of the present forms. No forms of life had as yet become physical. Around these ethereal shells, then, in the succeeding Round, which brought them closer to the physical scene, were aggregated the bodily forms which brought them into objective existence. The cast-off shells of man's former embodiments became the moulds of lower species. Before astral man descended into physical begetting,
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1 The Secret Doctrine, Vol. II, p. 650.
2 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 654.

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he had, it will be remembered, the power of Kriyasakti, by which he could procreate his replica by "the will, by sight, by touch, and by Yoga." So before the separation into sexes,

"all this vital energy, scattered far and wide from him, was used by Nature for the production of the first mammalian-animal forms."3

All lower types, struggling toward man as their "divine" goal, are helped by receiving the effluvia from man's own life as animating principles and constructive models.

The third proposition follows: that man is not the descendant of any line of animal evolution, hence certainly not of the apes. The truth is, the monkey is the descendant of man. The case is stated as follows:

"Behold, then, in the modern denizens of the great forests of Sumatra, the degraded and dwarfed examples--'blurred copies,' as Mr. Huxley has it--of ourselves, as we (the majority of mankind) were in the earliest sub-races of the Fourth Root-Race. . . . The ape we know is not the product of natural evolution, but an accident, a cross-breed between an animal being, or form, and man."4

The apes are millions of years later than the speaking human being. They are entities compelled by their Karma to incarnate in the animal forms which resulted from the bestiality of the latest Third and earliest Fourth Race men. The numberless traditions about Satyrs are not fables, but represent an extinct race of animal-men. The animal Eves were their foremothers and the early human Adams their forefathers. All this means, as we are told, that the late Lemurian or Third Race men cohabited with huge female animals. This occurred when these early forebears of ours had not yet been endowed with the Manasic principle, or Mind. Their animal appetencies being fully active, with no check of mind or discernment of good and evil upon their acts, they thus committed the "Sin of the Mindless" in begetting hybrid monsters, half man, half animal. This is the occult explanation of the blending of both animal and human
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3 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 170.

4 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 262.

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characteristics in the one creature. Later on in the Fourth or Atlantean Race, the men of that epoch, who were now endowed with Mind and should have known better, committed the same crime with the descendants of the Lemuro-animal conjunctions, and thus established the breeds of monkeys of the present era. But these semi-intelligent creatures will reach the human stage in the next cycle.

Madame Blavatsky endeavors to show that in animal evolution we see anything but an unbroken steady drift toward perfection of form. Evidence of one continuous line of unfoldment is totally wanting. There are many diverse lines, and furthermore, some of them apparently are retrograding.

Then the argument based on the study of the human embryo is pressed vigorously. Occultism accepts the evidence that the human foetus recapitulates quickly all the previous stages of racial evolution. Based on that fact there should be found a stage of foetal growth in which ape characteristics predominate. But there is no monkey stage of the foetus in evidence.

The fourth proposition--that man has never been less than man, though to be sure he has been different--is the outcome of the basic statement that he is, in his inner nature, a being who had already perfected his evolution. Theosophy claims that a thousand oddities and disparities manifest in our present life are elucidated by the assumption that we are high beings functioning at a level far beneath our proper dignity--for the sake of lifting up a host of animal souls to their next station. We have never been less than divine; it is our animal lower self that presents the aspects of fallibility and depravity.

But in relation to all these theories as to man's constitution, the question always arises: What is the authority for all this secret knowledge? Theosophy stands firmly on the affirmation that the only basis of authority in the revelation of any religion is long training in actual experience with life. Knowledge can be engendered only by living experience. There is no road to knowledge other than that of

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learning. Theosophic knowledge comes from our Elders in the school of life. They alone have been through enough of earthly experience to have acquired a master knowledge of its laws. Hence it is the position of Theosophy that no religion can claim more empirical authority than the esoteric ancient wisdom.

Madame Blavatsky declared that occultism had no quarrel with so-called exact science "where the conclusions of the latter are grounded on a substratum of unassailable fact." It is only when its exponents attempt to "wrench the formation of Cosmos and its living Forces from Spirit, and attribute all to blind matter, that the Occultists claim the right to dispute their theories." She declares that Science is limited to the investigation of one single aspect of human life, that which falls within the range of sense objectivity and rational inference. There are other aspects of that life and of nature,--the metaphysical, the supersensual, for the cognition of which science has no instrumentalities. Science is devoting its energies to a study of the forces of life as they come to expression in the phenomenal or sense domain. Hence it is constantly viewing nothing but the residuary effects of the activity of such forces. These are but the shadow of reality, says Madame Blavatsky. Science is thus dealing only with appearances, hints, adumbrations, and effects of life, and this is all it ever can deal with so long as it shuts its eyes to the postulates of occultism. Science clings to the plane of effects; occultism rises to the plane of causes. Science studies the expressions of life; esotericism looks at life itself, the real force behind the phenomenon. To bring the elements of real causality within his cognition,

"the scientist must develop faculties which are absolutely dormant--save in a few rare and exceptional cases--in the constitution of the offshoots of our present Fifth Root-Race in Europe and America. He can in no other conceivable manner collect the facts on which to bear his operations. Is this not apparent on the principles of Inductive Logic and Metaphysics alike?"5
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5 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 478.

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Science, however, asserts that we can predicate nothing of the nature of the metaphysical realm, unless and until our instruments bring its data within our sensuous purview. Occultists answer: earlier beings evolved on this or other planets have already developed the powers through which these metaphysical realities are brought under observation. Occultism adds that these claims are not based on imagination, but on the experience of those who have taken the trouble by right methods of discipline to prove for themselves the existence and reach of the powers in dispute. They are simply latent capacities of the human soul, as all our other capacities were once latent, and time and training will convince any one of their presence in the organism as an integral part of the endowment of man. The occultist rests his case at last, not on fantasy, but on a fancy empiricism. He ends by flaunting in the face of science its own present-day admissions that the door to further scientific knowledge of the world is barred by the limitations of its instruments and methods, not by the limitations of human experience.

Madame Blavatsky, fifty-odd years ago, prophesied the arrival of the present scientific predicament, and were she alive today she would doubtless register the "I-told-you-so" expression. She would tell the modern world that it is at the end of its survey of the mechanical activities of matter and that the search has left it uninstructed and unenlightened; it has but driven the mystery from the realm of the actual into that of the occult.

The development of Madame Blavatsky's treatise on the relation of the Old Science to the upstart modern pretender proceeds with the presentation of many angles, sides, or facets of the theories above propounded and the introduction of much evidence in support of the position. She begins by showing that science admits knowing nothing in reality of Matter, the Atom, Ether, Force. The atom is a fanciful construction, and variously constituted to suit the needs of each separate department of science, be it physics or chemistry. It is not known what Light is, whether corpuscular or not. First it was an undulation of matter, waves in the ether;

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then it was the passage of particles. Now it is discovered or believed to be both waves and particles, or wavicles.6 "The atom is the most metaphysical object in creation," she says. "It is an entified abstraction."

Matter, in its true inner essence, can not be fathomed by physical science, for the actual components of it lie several degrees (of rarefaction) further back on the inner planes. It is ether, and the soul of that, in its turn, is the elemental primordial substance, the Akasha. "It is matter on quite another plane of perception and being," and only the occult science can apprehend it. Newton is quoted7 as saying that "there is some subtle spirit by the force and action of which all movements of matter are determined." He adds that it is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should act upon other matter in the billiard-ball fashion, without the mediation of something else which is not material. Occultism sees the universe run by the Noumenon, "which is a distinct and intelligent individuality on the other side of the manifested mechanical universe." Matter is not the agent; it is rather the condition, the necessary vehicle, or sine qua non, for the exhibition of these subtler forces on the material plane.

We have noted Madame Blavatsky's references in Isis to the idea that gravitation was the wrong concept for the attractive power exerted by all bodies, and that magnetism was the better description. The same idea is emphasized in The Secret Doctrine repeatedly. She says that Kepler came to this "curious hypothesis" nearly three hundred years ago. It was what Empedocles meant by his Love and Hate, symbols of the intelligent forces of nature.

"That such magnetism exists in Nature is as certain as that gravitation does not; not at any rate in the way in which it is taught by science."8
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6 A. S. Eddington: The Nature of the Physical World (Cambridge, 1928). Madame Blavatsky had long ago hypothecated this dual nature of light. See The Secret Doctrine, passim.

7 Section XI of the Introduction to the Principia.

8 The Secret Doctrine, Vol. I, p. 517.

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Matter, to the occultist, has many more forms of existence than the one that science knows, and these more refined ones are the most important. Theosophy is largely built up on the supposed gradations of matter from the gross to the ultimately fine. It is the existence of the rarer ethereal grades which supply to thought the data essential for the construction of a metaphysical science. The true or essential nature of the higher potencies can never be inferred from their remote existential manifestations; and this is why science can never hope to come upon more fundamental knowledge while misled by the merely phenomenal phalanx of outward effects. Matter in its outer veil of solid substantiality is illusive, for it is the dead appearance of a living thing.

"It is on the doctrine of the illusive nature of matter and the infinite divisibility of the atom that the whole science of Occultism is built."9

This, she says, opens limitless horizons to states of substance of unimaginable tenuity, but all informed by the Divine Breath. Nature is as unlimited in her possibilities of fineness as she is in those of gross size, in the interior direction as in outward spatial extent.

Occult philosophy describes the Sun as a living glowing magnet. The photosphere is the reservoir of solar vital energy, "the vital electricity that feeds the whole system." The real living Sun, its Spirit, is continually "self-generating its vital fluid, and ever receiving as much as it gives out."10 There is thus a regular circulation--analogous to that in the human body--of vital fluid throughout our solar system during its Manvantaric or life period. The sun contracts rhythmically at every return of it, as does the heart. Only it takes the "solar blood" eleven years to pass through its auricles and ventricles before it washes the lungs and passes thence to the great veins and arteries of the system.
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9 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 520.

10 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 541. Prof. Millikan's recent conclusions as to the constant refueling of the spheres by the influx of atomic structures "fixated" out of the ether of space may perhaps be regarded as in some sense corroborative of Madame Blavatsky's statement on this subject.

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Madame Blavatsky notes modern science's statements about the eleven-year periodicity in the increase and diminution of sunspot activity as corroboration of her circulatory theory. The universe breathes as men do, and as our globe breathes every twenty-four hours, she asserts.

Madame Blavatsky has to reconcile the two seemingly contradictory statements of occultism "that matter is eternal" and that "the atom is periodical and not eternal." The trick is done by resorting to the distinction that matter, while eternal in its undifferentiated basic form, assumes periodically the atomic structure during each stage of manifestation. Sir William Crookes' "meta-elements" are referred to and his statement that atoms of certain elements showed "sensitive character" in effecting certain combinations. Sir William's assertion that the atoms share with all other creatures the attributes of decay and death is also noted. There will be a dissolution of the universe at the end of the Manvantara; but not a destruction, in the terms of physical science. That is, the energy will not be lost.

Sound is said to be--

"a stupendous force, of which the electricity generated by a million of Niagaras could never counteract the smallest potentiality, when directed with occult knowledge."11

In the chapter on the "Elements and Atoms" chemistry is affirmed to be the science that will lead to the discovery of occult truth. Crookes, she says, is near to the lair of the "protyle." Scientists have often sought for an element of sub-zero atomic weight, hydrogen equalling 1. "A substance of negative weight is not inconceivable," says Helmholtz. Such a substance would approach the nature of the occult protyle, or sub-atomic spirit-matter. In other spheres and in interstellar regions there are infinite variations of material composition, of life formations, of semi- and super-intelligent beings.

Yet the life forces of these higher and lower existences are interblended with our own objective world; they are around
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11 The Secret Doctrine, Vol. I, p. 547.

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us, and, what is more, in us; and they vitally affect our life. All forms of life are linked together in one immense chain. Some of these existent worlds may be as formless as Breathe, like the tail of a comet, which would sweep over our globe unknown to us, yet not without influence upon us.

Chemistry, she announces, once the unit protyle is hypothetically accepted, as ether was, will perish, to be reincarnated as the New Alchemy, or Metachemistry. "The discoverer of radiant matter will have vindicated in time the archaic Aryan works on Occultism and even the Vedas and Puranas."12

Madame Blavatsky formulates a law of occult dynamics that a given amount of energy expended on the spiritual or astral plane is productive of far greater results than the same amount expended on the physical objective plane of existence. This law becomes fundamental in the Theosophic system of ethics.

On page 612 of Book I, Madame Blavatsky makes a prophecy which was remarkably fulfilled, that "between this time (1886) and 1897 there will be a large rent made in the veil of nature and materialistic science will receive a death-blow." All science is familiar with the rapid incidence of new discoveries and revelations that fell within that period, crowned with the enunciation of the electrical nature of matter and the facts of radiant energy.

Madame Blavatsky's position with regard to modern scientific discovery and theory has been provocative of much discussion since her day. The same general situation obtains in her case as with Paracelsus, Boehme, Swedenborg, and other mystical prophets of science, who spoke with a show of authority of the hypotheses which science has in recent years taken up. They have repeatedly anticipated the propositions of our most advanced learning. Madame Blavatsky's achievement in this line is notable; and it is the common assertion of Theosophists that science in the past five decades has done little but verify their Founder's scientific pronouncements. Dr. A. Marques' book, Scientific Cor-
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12 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 631.

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roborations of Theosophy and William Kingsland's The Physics of the Secret Doctrine have set forth the many basic confirmations of H.P.B.'s work by our evolving physical science.13 It must be remembered in this connection that the scientific theories put forth by Madame Blavatsky can not be credited to her as spiritual intuitions or guesses, a certain proportion of which chanced to be well grounded. She did not arrive at these constructions in her own mentality; she gave them out as elaborations of an ancient science, of which she was merely the reinterpreter. Furthermore the various theories are put forward, not as isolated items of knowledge, but as integral parts of a comprehensive system which in its reach and inclusiveness has hardly elsewhere been matched. While science is obviously not proving the correctness of that large portion of her ideas which pass beyond its domain, in those matters touching its special province, into which she so boldly ventured now and again, it has frequently substantiated her "re-discoveries," though not all of them.

It is significant that Madame Blavatsky's occult philosophy aims to restore to scientific method the deductive procedure. It is her insistent claim that materialistic science, with its inductive method--an attempt to work from the rind back into the kernel, from effects back to causes--could never learn anything deep or true of the real universe. The world can only be explained in the light of great archaic principles; and these the modern world foolishly contemns, not knowing they were taught to disciplined students of old. They postulated that all things had their origin in spirit and thence they reasoned outward and downward; until they saw facts as items in a vast deductive plan. If man persists in rejecting such deduction, he will naturally never find the key to the great mystery; for by mulling around amongst the shadows of earthly existence, he merely learns to know the interplay of shadows. To understand the shadows he must start with the light.
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13 The magazine Theosophy, published monthly by The United Lodge of Theosophists, runs a "Lookout Section" in which for fifteen or more years comment has been made upon the argument of current scientific discovery with Madame Blavatsky's systemology.

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