MYSTICISM/PART 4

 

IV.

 

 

 

THE MAN-IDEA.

 

 

 

 

 

FRIENDS:

 

Once more in beginning with the Man-Idea, as I did with the God-Idea and the Christ-Idea, I propose to consider what have been the conceptions of man which we can find through a study of the history of the past - how the thought of man has presented itself in science, in religion; how far we can trace coherent conceptions of the human being, whether we turn to observa­tion as recorded in science or whether we turn to the scriptures of the world containing that which is put forward by highly evolved men as to the origin of man, as to his nature and the possibilities of his future becoming.

Let us first turn to science, for that is the furthest removed from what may be called the Mystical Idea of man, and I am thinking chiefly of the science of the last century, for the conception of man in the science of the immediate present has not been very distinctly  formulated and seems to be somewhat in a condition of flux, Science is certainly going away from the materialistic position in which the conception of man was naturally that of an evolving body rather than that of an unfolding Spirit. That thought is falling behind in the scientific world, and one feels, in describing the conception - a perfectly coherent and logical conception - which materialistic science put forward, that one is to a very large extent doing present-day science an injustice. It is not that I am really ignoring the progress which science is making, but only that I am in the position that that wider and larger thought of man which is beginning to express itself through some of the leading scientists of the day is hardly yet sufficiently formulated and developed to be very clearly perceptible, to be presented in a very intelligible way.

 

It is perhaps even more in philosophy than in science that the idea of man, among the great thinkers of our time, is showing a change from the materialistic thought to the idealistic or religious. If you take, for instance, the philosophy of Bergson, as presented by himself, you see at once that there we are going back to the thought that man is a spiritual intelli­gence and not only an intellectual being; and we shall see, in glancing at that later in connection with the theosophical thought, that he is there putting forward in philosophic garb what Theosophy has been teaching more along scientific and psychological lines.

 

Leaving that, however, for the moment, for it is one of the later conceptions, let us ask how science thought of man in those days well in the mind of the elder amongst us, that which was the foremost thought of the time when people of my own age were almost reaching middle age, and when many who now are elderly were young, progressive, as it was said, in their thought.

 

The evolution hypothesis, of course, domin­ated the conception of man, and so we had society figured for us as evolving from man in the savage state, that savage man having himself evolved from those that are spoken of as the social animals. You will be familiar, at least, from your study with the thought of the evolution from the social type of animal into primitive man, and you will be familiar with the thought of the gradual evolution of society first, of course, from the mating of the semi­-animal men; then the formation of the family as the first unit of the society which was yet to be; then that is traced onwards for us as families aggregate into tribes, later as tribes aggregate into nations. And so we find ourselves face to face with an idea which is not without its beauty, which is not without its splendour even, in which we trace stage by stage this growth of the animal into the man, of the men into the tribe, and of the tribes into the nation.

 

And side by side with that we are asked to realise the evolution of morality: first, the recognition of the family bond, in which, clearly for the defence of the family itself, any sort of rejection of obligation and of duty would have led very rapidly to the extinction of the family. Then we see morality extending to the tribal limit; within the tribe violence is forbidden, within the tribe murder and theft are looked upon with disapproval; and so gradually there grows up a rough tribal morality, binding within the limits of the tribe, but recognising no duty and no obligation to those who belong to other tribes, who are out­side this limit of the recognised tribe. Then we are asked to see how that gradually extends, as the tribes gather together into the nation, and you have a national morality in which violence is forbidden within the nation, in which theft and murder are not permitted within the boundaries of the State, but where, as regards other nations, morality has very little to say as regards the dealings of one with another.

And even up to the present time international morality is only, as it were, in the throes of birth. While we recognise that it is wrong, that it cannot be allowed, that one man shall murder one man, if you multiply the man by some hundreds of thousands, then murder becomes war, and the assassin is changed by the very largeness of his action, he is a general, a hero, a great warrior. And yet fundamen­tally, if you look at it, the crime of murder cannot become righteous by multiplication, nor can the killing of men turn into a virtue because performed on an international scale.

 

And so again, when you are dealing with theft. You must not steal a man’s purse, he would at once call upon the police; but if you steal his land and call it annexa­tion instead of theft then it becomes the recognised attitude of the strong nation towards the weak, of the civilised nation towards the savage. Looking at it again, you realise at once that an act does not change its nature simply by transferring it to the international platform. And, although we may fairly recognise the fact that, in the case of the private murder, the root is anger or desire for individual gain, while, in the case of war, many other motives and thoughts may mingle with it, none the less it is well, I think, to realise that we have not yet reached a truly international stage of morality. We see a glimpse of it here and there, as where arbitration is preferred to war, and justice is appealed to instead of guns and battalions; but that even now is only attempted where a nation thinks the matter under dispute to be comparatively unimportant, and no great nation as yet has taken the step of daring to trust some grave matter of national importance to the arbitrament of justice. Rather would it fly to arms and make the strength of its armies and its navies the measure of right and wrong.

 

But, while we may realise there is much that is logical in that evolution, the difficulty  in it is that it is not supported by fact, and that history, as far as it exists, does not show us these traces of the savage unfolding into civilisation, of the barbarian growing into a high state of education and culture. It seems so natural, that perhaps you hardly realise that there is no such case known in history. The savages that we know are all tending to disappear, not to grow into a higher state of civilisation. We find them dying out where civilisation approaches them. On every occasion that we know of where a nation called more highly civilised has invaded the territories of a comparatively barbarous people, the result to the savages has not been growth in civilisation but either extermination or gradual decay. Nowhere, so far as I have read history, have I found or heard of a single case in which savages, left to themselves, evolved into civilisation. And that is some­what remarkable if the scientific theory be a true history of the past.

 

Many other difficulties arise as well as the absence of proof, for history goes the other way. Civilisations, as we know them in the past, have the same strange mark and characteristic that, as Bunsen said of Egypt, they seem to spring “full formed upon the stage of history”. We cannot trace them in their infancy, their youth, their growth; we only come across them in their maturity, and dig down as you will through ancient civilisations you do not dig down into a savage state. You find cave men; you find men of the Stone Age, but you never find traces of evolving from the Stone Age into civilisation. That bridge is never crossed; that gulf always exists.

 

And we begin to wonder, looking at this, whether the later science - which has really struck away the foundations from this theory of the evolution of man - is not right when it tells us that qualities are not transmissible. We wonder whether, after all, Huxley was not right in his latest view, when he pointed out that the evolution of human qualities was destructive to their possessors, so that they had no opportunity of handing them on to their offspring. It is fairly clear that the theory of the evolution of social qualities in man, the moment you look closely into it, breaks into pieces in your hands, for where the social quality shows itself, such as the love of the mother to the child, the love of the parent to the offspring, you see it far more in the social animals than you see it in savage man. The animal risks its own life for the saving of its young; the savage takes his babe and dashes out its brains, if the food supply is likely to run short and he wants to get rid of a mouth of no immediate use to the tribe.

 

Not only is that an observed fact, but you find also, if you think of it for a moment, that, the animal that sacrifices its own life for its young dies in the sacrifice and so cannot hand on that quality, that tendency to love, because it perishes in the very moment of its  expression. So, even were acquired qualities transmitted - as science tells us now that they are not - you would not be helped as to the evolution of the social qualities, which are a disadvantage in the struggle for existence, and, practically eliminate their possessors in the frantic struggle for life.

 

And so again, when we are studying human kind, we do not find that the most highly evolved men - the geniuses of the race - are those whose families after them manifest the high mental or moral qualities which the father may have shown. When you have thought over this idea of how man evolved, you must have been struck with the difficulty placed in the way of evolution by the fact of the genius. “Genius is sterile” is one of the phrases of science, and it is true. The genius does not have a higher genius for child; his genius is not handed on to those who come after him. On the contrary, where, as in the case of artistic genius, you sometimes find one or two generations of talent preceding the birth of the genius, you find, after he has flowered into his great and splendid manifes­tation, that the family then disappears. It seems to have done its work. It is true that, especially in music, you will find one or two generations of talent proceeding a Mozart, a Bach, a Mendelssohn; but they are leading up to the production of a body sufficiently sensitive and sufficiently delicately organised to make it a fit temple for the incoming genius. The family is a preparation for the genius which is to flower into splendour, and when it has done its work, when it has built up the sensitive body, when the nervous system has been made delicate and responsive so that the incoming soul of genius may find therein a fit instrument and a fit expression - then, with the death of the genius, that exquisite delicacy of body disappears. There is no posterity to genius; there is only seldom anything that you can call an ancestry.

 

And there again the view of man taken by science in its more materialistic days gave us no proof, gave us no hope even, that our race would really rise generation after generation  into some future splendour of achievement that would dwarf all the achievements of the  present. On the contrary, that terrible phrase: “Genius is sterile” was, as it were, the death knell of the progress of the human race.

 

Looking at it from that standpoint and asking what genius is, we have been given various definitions of it, of which I think the most materialistic and the most untrue is that remarkable definition that “genius is the capacity for taking pains”. I cannot think of anything more absolutely divorced from the reality, for surely genius is the ability to do well with­out practice that which other people do only to an average extent with infinite pains. And that seems to me the characteristic of genius­ - an inborn faculty, an untrained manifestation. And so it well may be if genius be the power of the descending Spirit manifesting itself in a form prepared for the manifestation. Then we can realise why the child will show it forth, why a Mozart will show his musical genius while still his baby fingers are unable to compass the notes which would express his thought; and we begin to realise also how that marvellous child who is conducting an orchestra at the age of seven is able to show out such power and yet be a mere child when he is off the platform and when no longer he is putting forth the wonderful power that he has.

 

And so, looking at the idea of man as science gave it, it strikes us as incomplete, unsatisfactory, unproved, not answering to the facts, and undermined by the later conception of the very science that gave it forth.

 

Suppose we turn from that to the religious ideas. Those we find fall into two great divisions. One is the idea that man is created by God, the idea put forward chiefly by the Jewish and the Christian religions, Islam following those along the same line of thought; the idea of a special creation, so that man is unique, unrelated to the animals that went before him, with no past to explain the nature of the individual, but supposed to have an unending future, although he begins with birth. The religions that we may call those tending to anthropomorphism show out this idea of man as God’s creation. The pantheistic religions, on the other hand, give us, as we shall see in a moment, rather the idea of man as an emanation from the Divine nature, sharing that nature and containing within himself all divinest possibilities.

 

But let us pause for a moment on the Hebrew and Christian conception of man. And here, as regards the Hebrew thought, in order that one may not be in any sense unfair, let me remind you that in the books called the Apocrypha of the Hebrew scriptures you find suggestions and hints of deeper and sublimer views than you find in the Canonical scriptures. There the inner teaching of the Hebrew faith was beginning to show itself, whereas in the Canonical scriptures, especially the earlier ones, you have rather the popular view, the view preached to the people.

 

And I am not forgetting in this that you have in the time of Josephus at least a full recognition amongst the Jews of the great truth of Reincarnation, although in the earlier  scriptures you find no trace of it, but, on the contrary, the idea that man, specially created at birth, perished at death. You may remember how it is written in one of these “who knoweth [the difference between] the spirit of man that goeth upward and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?” You may remember also that it is said that “In the grave there is no remem­brance”. The idea that dominates the older Judaism is the idea of death as an end, a real end to the life of man. You do not find that reasserted in the prophetic books after the Captivity; you do not find it in the Apocrypha, where you have a verse that stands out, and stands out in startling contrast with a somewhat similar verse occurring in the book of Genesis. You remember how it is said in Genesis: “God created man in His own image, in the image of God create He him; male and female created He them”. You may remember also that it is written in the Apocrypha: “God made man in the image of His own eternity”. How different the atmosphere! How changed the thought! In one case the image of God is the outer form; in the other it is a likeness of nature, an identity of existence.

 

And in that view that God made man in the image of his own eternity, the Hebrew faith joins hands with all the religions of the East in which man is, as I said, not a creation  but an emanation of the life God.

 

Now the Jewish and the Christian idea of man as a special creation carried with it the idea that man fell from original righteousness; man is a fallen creature. You find that in such verses as: “The heart of man is corrupt and desperately wicked” - a terrible idea of man’s nature. And yet more than once that phrase is used in the scriptures - a fallen being. And that is the idea of man which is quite definitely put forward, you must re­member, in the Church of England. I do not mean that Anglicans believe it now; they have outgrown it; but it is not right, it is not quite straightforward, to put one view in the documents of a church and another view as represented in the minds of the believers in that church. Take for a moment the idea of man as put forward in the Articles of the Church of England - and remember that every clergyman who is inducted into a cure is obliged to read these articles out in open church, and to declare that he accepts them too in their literal and grammatical meaning. You read there in the Ninth Article on Original Sin an explanation of what Original Sin means and it depends of course on the fall of man. “Original Sin,” it is said, “standeth not in the following of Adam (as the Pelagians do vainly talk), but it is the fault and corruption of the Nature of every man, that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam; whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth always contrary to the spirit; and therefore in every person born into this world, it deserveth God’s wrath and damna­tion”. Now that is the Article still obligatory upon every clergyman, and surely it is not well for a Christian church to allow itself to be bound by an idea of man so blasphemous as regards God, so insulting as regards man, for it stands there for the mockery of every unbeliever; and you cannot blame the un­believer for mocking, when he has the right to point to that as the religion established by law in this country. Original sin a defect with which every one of you was born because you are descended from Adam; no fault of yours, but you are specially created with this original sin in your nature! If there be an imperfection in a work, you blame the maker of the work and not the deficiency of the work itself; and so, if man be inclined to evil by the mere fact that his nature has the taint in it of original sin, so that he is naturally evil, then how can he come from a perfect work­man? Does not the blemish in the creation point to the inefficiency of the creator? That is why I called it blasphemous; it is an insult to God.

 

And after all, what was the original righteousness from which man fell? He fell at the first temptation, so that certainly original righteousness did not carry him very far. But there is a worse thing to remember than that, if we are to take the words of scripture, and we have nothing else on which to base this doctrine. It is said there that man knew neither good nor evil. But if he did not know right from wrong, good from evil, then he did not know that it was wrong to disobey the command that was given to him, and he ought not to have been blamed that, in his ignorance of right and wrong, he broke the command which his Maker gave him.

 

It is these things that point the arrows of the unbeliever, and it would be well if Christianity, which is developing so much towards Mysticism, towards higher and nobler views of God and man, should change these printed documents, and no longer leave them as a bond and fetter on every thoughtful priest of the church, as well as meaningless as regards the laity who have grown far out of these conceptions of long past ignorance.

If you revolt against that conception of man as tainted with original sin, as needing Baptism in order that it may be removed from him; if you are unwilling to believe that man cannot turn and direct himself by his own natural strength and that we have no power to do good works acceptable to God unless God enables us to do them; if you feel that that idea is absolutely impossible of accept­ance - then what remains from the standpoint of religion? You have then the ancient view of man that comes out from the older eastern faiths as embodied in their scriptures, and is the very opposite of the idea to which I have been drawing your attention. It is the thought that every Spirit of man is a direct emanation from God and a partaker in the Divine nature - a phrase of S. Paul’s, remember, but utterly at issue with what I have just been reading to you. That thought of man is expressed in the well-known words put into the mouth of Shri Krishna: “A fragment of Myself, a living Spirit, comes forth into the world of matter, and draws around itself the senses, with mind as the sixth”. That is the fundamental idea of man, as we find it in the East. Man is not corrupt and wicked naturally; his nature is divine and is unfolding its divine possibilities. Man, being divine in his essence, must inevi­tably flower into deity, and the story of man’s evolution is not a story beginning with a fall but beginning with an ascent, and the only original sin which has any existence is the ignorance in which he begins his upward climbing and out of which he gradually and slowly emerges.

 

Now what is that conception as we find it traced in these ancient religions, as you find it now put forward on exactly the same lines in our Theosophical literature? The Spirit which is to be man emanated, as I said, from God Himself, is Divine in his nature. Another phrase is once used: “Brahma [the Creator] meditated, and man came forth”. Man is a thought-form of God, and that is the real essence of the image of God which is of the deepest nature of man. That phrase I quoted from the Apocrypha that “God made man in the image of his own Eternity” is true concerning the human Spirit. You are far more than immortal, far more than everlasting; you are eternal as God is eternal, and while God lives man cannot perish. That is the essential truth. You share the Divine nature, eternal as He is eternal. And so you find it written that this Spirit in man is “unborn, undying, ancient, constant, perpetual”.

 

And then you find it pointed out that all men coming forth thus from God were like each other in their origin. If you ever care to turn to the Puranas - those ancient scriptures of the Hindus - you may read of a far off age when all men were alike, when they had not yet developed qualities which differentiated them the one from the other, but were all simple childlike creatures, undeveloped, unevolved, the mere beginning, as it were, of a sketch, an outline, of a human being.

 

Then we find how this Spirit, the divine fragment, drew around itself portions of matter. You may say: why? Because when a world is coming into manifestation, God ­- who is One-- becomes many in order that that universe may be; and every fragment of God is embodied in matter, and the object of the embodiment is that that embodied fragment may develop within those material appropria­tions, or coverings, the power of knowing, of perceiving, and of ruling, throughout the whole of this universe of manifested life. Enclothed in matter, plunged into matter in order to unfold the possibilities that lie hidden within this fragment of God, he is at first blinded by the matter that veils him; his powers of perception, that can only act in the divine world with matter so subtle that it can hardly be thought of by us as matter, thrown into grosser matter, are cut off one after another as he gradually draws around himself denser and denser veils of matter, each veil limiting him further, each veil shutting him in more closely. And so when our physical matter, as we call it, is reached, and that surrounds this divine fragment, at first every power of perception is covered over with the matter, and it is said in an old Islamic saying that “God sleeps in the mineral”. If He were not there, there would be no possibility of growth, no possibility of evolution. If life were not hidden there, how should life appear in a world where, at one time, only the mineral existences were found? The possibility of the dawning life of God was embodied in the mineral world, and in that embodiment the essence of life was sleeping. And then you may trace onwards from that mineral life.

But let me for a moment break off to remind you that it is an Eastern of the Easterns, a Brahmana of Bengal in India, who proved for the first time in the Western world that the life that was dwelling in the mineral is like the life which is dwelling in the vegetable, in the animal and in the man. He has proved by scientific demonstration, that that life can be shown in its manifestation, that it can be poisoned, that it can be checked, that it can be driven out of a particular form, so that the form becomes dead. And, after many an experiment and many an exposition, at last your Universities of Oxford and of Cambridge have waked up to the recognition of a mighty genius in that Indian electrician, and have invited him to come and lecture in their halls of learning, and demonstrate scientifically what he has said his ancestors proclaimed on the banks of Ganga - that “there is One Life without a second” and that all that is, is an embodiment of that life.

 

And gradually that life working within the mineral begins to organise, begins to move  onwards towards the crystalline forms, and then onwards into the vegetable crystal, and so onwards to the plant, when we may quote again that saying of which I have already quoted the first words, and say: “God dreams in the vegetable”. And then we find it going still further onwards in its inward evolution, unfolding a little more power, out­-folding a little more of its inward-turned consciousness. And so in the animal you have additional proof of the unfolding life, and the sentient animal is found. Are you aware that in a very ancient commentary on a Hindu Upanishat it was explained that the life of God entering into the mineral was different only in the quality of the existence from that which entered into the vegetable. In the vegetable it began to show out the quality of feeling; afterwards, when it went on into the animal, then it showed out desire and sensation. And then, after at last unfolding into man, you had the consciousness that looked before and after, that remembered and imagined. And that old commentator wrote hundreds of years before Darwin, and showed that evolving life definitely, distinctly, clearly.

 

And man, the life that was to be man, evolving in the animal, evolved the senses and so began to prepare a physical embodiment in which a higher form of intelligence could work.

 

And through all these long aeons of evolu­tion, the life evolving through the mineral, the vegetable, the animal, up to the animal man, the Spirit that was to become the Spirit of  man was brooding over these evolving forms and trying to send into them, through their very atoms aggregated together, new streams of his ever unfolding life until, when a point was reached in which a further evolution was possible, then the Spirit came closer into touch with the vehicle prepared for it through this long course of evolution in the lower kingdoms, and the indwelling of the Spirit in the body was the beginning of man as man.

And then you have a slow building up, a gradual change and unfolding, the evolution  by way of Reincarnation, which is the universal teaching of the ancient world, how the Spirit in the human body, the body only of the child-man, gathered there a little experience; how then it passed on into the second world, and there worked off the part of experience in which having broken itself against the laws of nature - pain was the inevitable reaction; and how then, passing on into the third world of human pilgrimage, all the good experience that had been gathered was evolved into faculty, mental and moral; how with that little beginning of faculties, the child-Spirit came back again to human birth, gathered a little more, went again through similar experiences of pain following on law disregarded, of increased faculty following on law obeyed; and so backwards and backwards again to earth through the gate-way of birth, onwards and onwards over and over again through the gateway of death, ever growing, ever expanding, ever unfolding more and more of the divine consciousness

 

latent within him, growing upwards from the child state of man at first into a partial  civilisation, then upwards still in unfolding power to higher and higher stages of evolution,  going on still ascending the heights of human knowledge and human greatness, till he reaches  the summit of human civilisation as far as that special type of form can go.

Child nations at first, we see, not savages in the brutal sense, but ignorant and childish, never left to themselves, never left unguarded; ever in the care of divine Instructors who taught them their earliest lessons in knowledge, in art, in the laws that must govern anything worthy to be called society. I used the phrase that Bunsen used of the Egyptian civilisation that it “sprung full formed upon the stage of history”, but that is equally true of every civilisation; for the civilisation in its founding has the divine Instructors, the divine Kings, guiding the infant peoples, training their young intelligence, teaching them as tender fathers might teach them. Child nations, obedient, ready to be taught, ready to be helped, and  rearing under the guidance of those great Instructors the mighty monuments that still exist, testimonies to the civilisation of the most ancient world. You must often have marvelled how it was such buildings were made, such extraordinary stones were lifted, such exquisite sculptures and paintings were created; and you will never understand it till you realise that the child nations were the hands while the mighty Teachers were the brains, gradually evolving their child pupils to higher and higher possibilities.

 

And then came the time - as the child goes out of the nursery, as the child goes on to be the boy in the school - when the Instructors drew a little backward and left the child  nations to grow into youth and into manhood, gaining their own experiences, no longer ruled  autocratically, no longer with rulers that were absolute, but taught to guide themselves, left  thus to guide themselves, to make many a blunder, many an error; and yet the errors of youth, of humanity are greater than the child - perfections of its early stages; for they mean that the God in the man is unfolding his own powers, and that he is no longer in leading strings to those more highly evolved than himself.

 

It is true that in such a civilisation as that of ancient Peru you have an enormous amount more of happiness than you have in your modern civilisation. It is true that human life then, guarded and caressed, was a happy childlike life, fair and beautiful in its expres­sion, as children in the nursery are beautiful and gay. But it is also true that it was a child life, and that man was not always to remain a child; that the experiences passed through in later times, the struggles and the conflicts, the difficulties and pains, were all making him man instead of child, and bringing him on to the maturity into which the nations are beginning to grow today. It is true that every fragment of liberty that ignorant nations have grasped has been paid for in happiness for the time; but it is also true that very gradually and slowly a higher, nobler, liberty will come to the front and that man - learning self-control as he could never learn it while controlled from outside - will grow into a nobler liberty, a more splendid freedom, his will becoming one with the will of the whole, and an ordered harmony shall replace the ancient monotone of childish obedience.

 

And so you begin to realise how man grows, unfolding ever from within, developing ever greater and greater possibilities.

 

But now there is one other point you ought to notice in that growth. It is not entirely what you would call continuous. I will show you in a moment what I mean by that. A civilisation grows, it reaches its highest point, it decays; another civilisation is growing up,  as it were, while this is decaying, and it rises again to a high point and in its turn decays.  How often in the history of the world has civilisation been carried to a splendid height of achievement. How often has it broken down and men have begun to build again from a comparatively barbarous condition, rising higher than the older, but beginning again so low down as though past experience were useless, as though man could never learn. It may not have struck you that the impulses which brought into manifestation one set of Spirits after another were successive and not simultaneous; that new waves of life came ever pouring out from the divine source of life and that it was necessary to have the lowering of a civilisation as the fresh Spirits came into it in order that they might learn the lessons for which their infantile condition fitted them; and that again and again the upward path had to be climbed, again and again experience had to be won by these ever successive waves of life - and every wave of life myriads of human Spirits. It may be that a time is coming­ - and that is the hope which some of us are trying to realise - when the human Spirits will have so far unfolded that this civilisation need not break into shivers as other civilisations have done under the incoming rush of rougher and less developed people, so that the treasures of civilisation for the time were apparently lost. It is the hope of some of us that such a stage has been reached in the evolution of man that the misery on which our civilisation is builded will not grow so terrible, will not grow so bitter, and life become so overwhelmingly intolerable, that once again civilisation shall be overthrown and the weary rebuilding be again begun by some people less civilised but also less corrupt.

 

It may be - we hope it is - that we have reached a stage where the elder Spirits amongst us will realise that they are here to help and not to dominate, that they are here to use their power for service and not for oppression; and if enough of them come among us, if enough of them are born into our people, then we may save what civilisation has accumulated and carry it on into the next civilisation, which will then begin at a higher level and not from the lower stage at which previous civilisations have begun.

 

And there is some possibility of that, and I must now remind you of that new philosophy now spreading among us, the latest word of philosophy, which represents our Theosophical idea, that in the gradual evolution of man, in the evolution of the bodies and the unfolding consciousnesses, you have stages: first a stage of Instinct, of strong sensation, of violent desires, of the instincts that belong to the life working through undeveloped forms; that then those are gradually thrown into the back­ground as the Intellect of man develops and in the early evolution of that there grows up, dominating those instincts, an intelligence that, learning to cognise the world outside it, turns outwards and works upon matter and creates apparatus for the understanding and the mastery of matter, but knows nothing of the mastery of life, for its look is outwards and not inwards; and that then a stage comes where this feeling, this knowledge, presses against the boundaries it cannot overleap, when the inner life takes a new impulse upon it, when there is a new unfolding, and in that stage of evolution mind is transcended; and then that which was instinct, which lay half dormant, dominated by the intellect which was higher, that rises into still loftier development and begins to show itself as Intuition, higher than the intellect, a fragment of life itself realising its own possibilities. And hidden in that intuition which is now but as a dream, hidden in that intuition that gradually shall evolve, you have the divine self-conscious life unfolding which shall make man at last know himself divine.

 

That is the realisation of man as man that exists in the ideal world, when the Spirit that came forth from God, that was blinded and cabined and controlled by matter, gradually  spiritualised the very matter that blinded him and began to shape and mould it to his own  purposes; then came the unfolding of the intellect for the mastering of matter and the  understanding of its forces and its powers; and then, deep within the God within the man,  there arises the self-consciousness that will make him consciously divine, above and beyond the intellect, rising into the region of the spirit; becoming divine with that divinity that last week I spoke of as the Christ Idea, realising himself as divine, knowing in his own consciousness that he is more than instinct, more than intellect, that he is God himself  unfolding into his own self-knowledge. Then and then only shall the idea of man become perfect, then and then only shall he reach his crown as man. Before him still will stretch avenues of infinite progress, in which greater possibilities of divinity within him will unfold into the actualities of a divine existence, when he shall utilise all the experiences he has gathered, when he shall become the maker of new worlds, the builder of new universes, working into them the knowledge that now he is acquiring and expanding it with that expanding consciousness whose very centre is God. To that consciousness there is ever a centre but it knows no circumference - progress unending, ever continuing, new bodies and new universes revealing themselves, man unfolding into God and using his divine powers. That is the Mystical Idea of Man; that is the union with God which every Mystic proclaims.

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