ПОГЛАВЈЕ II
“Pride where wit
fails, steps in to our defence
And fills up the
mighty void of sense…
-POPE
…Years ago, the old German
philosopher Schopenhauer, disposed of this force and matter at the same time; and
since the conversion of Mr. Wallace, the great anthropologist has evidently
adopted his ideas. Schopenhauer’s doctrine is that the universe is but the
manifestation of the will. Every force in nature is also an effect of will,
representing a higher or lower degree of its objectiveness. It is the teaching
of Plato, who stated distinctly that everything visible was created or evolved
out of the invisible and eternal creation, and after its fashion. Our Heaven –
he says – was produce according to the eternal pattern of “Ideal World”,
contained as everything else, in the dodecahedron, the geometrical model used
by the Deity. With Plato, the Primal Being is an emanation of the Demiurgic
Mind (Nous) which contains, from the
eternity, the “idea” of the “to be created world” within itself, and which idea
he produces out of himself. The laws of nature are established relations of
this idea, to the forms of its
manifestations; “these forms” says Schopenhauer, “are time, space and
causality. Through time and space the idea varies in its numberless
manifestations”.
These ideas are far from being
new, and even with Plato they were not original. This is what we read in the Chaldean Oracles: “The works of nature
co-exist with the intellectual, spiritual Light of the Father. For it is a soul
[психи] which adorned the
great Heaven, and which adorns it after the Father”.
“The incorporeal world then was
already completed, having its seat in the Devine Reason” says Philo, who is
erroneously accused of deriving his philosophy from Plato’s.
In the Theogony of Mochus, we find Ether first, and then the air; the two
principles from which Ulom, the intelligible
God (the visible universe of matter) is born.
In the Orphic hymns, the
Eros-Phanes evolves from the Spiritual Egg, which the Etheral winds impregnate,
Wind & being “the spirit of God”, who is said to move in Ether “brooding
over the Chaos” the Divine “Idea”. In the Hindu Katakopanishad Purusha, the Divine Spirit, already stands before
the original matter, from whose union springs the great Soul of the World,
“Maha = Atma Brahm, the Spirit of Life”; these later appellations are identical
with the Universal Soul, or Anima Mundi,
and the Astral Light of the theurgists and kabalists.
Pytagoras brought his doctrines
from the eastern sanctuaries, and Plato compiled them into a form more
intelligible than the mysterious numerals of the sage – whose doctrines he had
fully embraced – to the uninitiated mind. Thus, the Cosmos is “the Son” with Plato, having for his father and mother
the Divine Thought and Matter.
“The Egyptians” says Dunlap,
“distinguish between an older and younger Horus, the former the brother of
Osiris, the later the son of Osiris and Isis”. The first is the Idea of the world remaining in the
Demiurgic Mind, “born in the darkness before the creation of the world”. The
second Horus is this “Idea” going from the Logos,
becoming clothed with matter, and assuming an actual existence.
“The mundane God, eternal,
boundless, young and old, of winding form”, say the Chaldean Oracles.
This “winding form” is a figure
to express the vibratory motion of the Astral Light, with which the ancient
priests were perfectly well acquainted, thought they may have differed in views
of ether, with modern scientist; for in the Ether they placed the Eternal Idea
pervading the Universe, or the Will
which become Force, and creates or
organizes matter.
“The will” says Van Helmont, “is
the first of all powers. For through the will of the Creator all things were put
in motion…” The will is the property of all spiritual beings, and displays
itself in them the more actively, the more they are freed from matter”. And
Paracelsus “the Divine”, as he was called, adds in the same strain: “Faith must confirm the imagination, for
faith establishes the will… Determined will is a beginning of all magical
operations… Because men do not perfectly imagine and believe the result, is
that the arts are uncertain, while they might be perfectly certain”.
The opposing power alone of
unbelief and skepticism, if projected in a current of equal force, can check
the other, and sometimes completely neutralize it. Why should spiritualists
wonder that the presence of some strong skeptics, or of those who, feeling
bitterly opposed to the phenomenon, unconsciously exercise their will-power in
opposition, hinders and often stops altogether the manifestations? If there is
no conscious power on earth, but
sometimes finds another to interfere with or even counterbalance it, why wonder
when the unconscious, passive power
of a medium is suddenly paralyzed in its effects by another opposing one,
though it also be as unconsciously exercised? Professors Faraday and Tyndall
boasted their presence at a circle would stop at once every manifestation. This
fact alone ought to have proved to the eminent scientists that there was some
force in this phenomena worthy to arrest their attention. As a scientist, Prof.
Tyndall was perhaps pre-eminent in the circle of those were present at the
séance; as a shrewd observer, one not easily deceived by a tricking medium, he
was perhaps no better, if as clever, as other in the room, and if the
manifestations were but a fraud so ingenious as to deceive the others, they
would not have stopped even on his account. What medium can ever boast of such
phenomena as were produced by Jesus and the apostle Paul after him? Yet even
Jesus met with cases where the unconscious force of resistance overpowered even
his so well directed power of the will. “And He did not many mighty works
there, because of their unbelief.”
There is reflection of every one
of these views in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Our “investigating” scientists
might consult his work with profit. They will find therein many a strange
hypothesis founded on old ideas, speculations on the “new” phenomena, which may
prove as reasonable as any, and be saved the useless trouble of inventing new
theories. The psychic and ectenic forces, the “ideo-motor” and
“electro-biological powers”, “latent thought” and even “unconscious
cerebration” theories can be condensed in two words: the Kabalistic Astral
Light.
The bold theories and opinions
expressed in Schopenhauer’s works differ widely with those of the majority of
our orthodox scientists. “In reality” remarks this daring speculator, “there is
neither matter nor spirit. The tendency to gravitation in a
stone is as unexplainable as thought in human brain… If matter can – no one
knows why – fall to the ground, then it can also – no one knows why – think… As
soon, even in mechanics as we trespass beyond the purely mathematical, as soon
as we reach the inscrutable, adhesion, gravitation, and so on, we are faced
with phenomena which are to our senses as mysterious as the WILL and THOUGHT in
man – we find ourselves facing the incomprehensible, for such is every force in
nature. Where is then that matter
which you all pretend to know so well? And from which – being so familiar with
it – you draw all your conclusions and explanations, and attribute to it all
things? …That which can be fully realized by our reasons and senses, is but the
superficial: they can never reach the true inner substance of things. Such was
the opinion of Kant. If you consider that there is in a human head some sort of
spirit, then you are obliged to
concede the same to a stone. If your dead and utterly passive matter can
manifest a tendency toward a gravitation, or like electricity, attract and
repel, and send out sparks, - then, as well as the brain, can also think. In
short, every particle of the so-called spirit, we can replace with an
equivalent of matter, and every particle of matter replace with spirit… Thus,
it is not the Cartesian division of all things into matter and spirit that can
ever be found philosophically exact; but only if we divide them into Will and manifestation, which form of division has naught to do with the
former, for it spiritualizes every thing: all that, which is in the first
instance real and objective – body and matter – it transforms into a
representation, and every manifestation into will”.
These views corroborate what we
have expressed about various names given to the same thing. The disputants are
battling about mere words. Call the phenomena force, energy, electricity and
magnetism, will or spirit-power, it will ever be the partial manifestation of
the soul, whether disembodied or
imprisoned for a while in its body – or a portion of that intelligent,
omnipotent and individual WILL, pervading all nature and known, through the
insufficiency of human language to express correctly psychological images – as
GOD.
The ideas of some of our
schoolmen about matter are, from the kabalistic standing-point, in many ways
erroneous. Hartmann calls their views “an
instinctual prejudice”. Furthermore, he demonstrates that no experimenter
can have anything to do with matter properly termed, but only with the forces
into which he divides it. The visible effects of matter is nothing but the
aggregation of atomic forces, to express which the word matter is used: outside of that, for science matter is but a word
void of sense. Notwithstanding many an honest confession on the part of our
specialists – physicists, physiologists and chemists – that they know nothing
whatever of matter, they deify it.
Every new phenomenon which they find themselves unable to explain, is
triturated, compound into incense, and burned on the altar of the goddess who
patronizes modern scientists.
No one can better treat his
subject than does Schopenhauer in his Parerga.
In this work, he discusses at length animal magnetism, clairvoyance,
sympathetic cures, seership, magic, omens, ghost-seeing, and other spiritual
matters. “All this manifestations” he says, “are branches of one and the same
tree, and furnish us with irrefutable proofs of the existence of the chain of
beings, which is based on a quite a different order of things than that in
nature, which has its foundation laws of space, time and adaptability. This
other order is far deeper, for it is original and the direct one; in its
presence, the common laws of nature, which are simply formal, are unavailing;
therefore, under its immediate action, neither time nor space can separate any
longer the individuals; and the separation impendent of these forms presents no
more insurmountable barriers for the intercourse of thoughts and the immediate
action of the will. In this manner, changes may be wrought by quite a different
course than the course of physical causality, i.e. through an action of the
manifestation of the will exhibited in a peculiar way, and outside individual
himself. Therefore, the peculiar character of all the aforesaid manifestations
is the visio in distante et actio in
distante (vision and action at a distance) in its relation to time, as well
as in relation to space. Such an action at a distance is just what constitutes
the fundamental character of what is called magical.
For such is the immediate action of our will, an action liberated from the
causal conditions of physical action, viz. contact”.
“Besides that” continues
Schopenhauer, “these manifestations present to us a substantial and perfectly
logical contradiction to materialism, and even to naturalism, because in light
of such manifestations, that order of things in nature, which both these
philosophies seek to present as absolute, and the only genuine, appears before
us - on contrary - purely phenomenal and superficial, and containing at the
bottom of it, a substance of things a
parte and perfectly independent of its own laws. That is why these
manifestations – at least from a purely philosophical point of view – among all
the facts which are presented to us in the domain of experiment, are beyond any
comparison, the most important. Therefore, it is a duty of every scientist to
acquaint himself with them.”
…
(“ISIS UNVEILED: A master-Key to
the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY” by H. P. BLAVATSKY,
corresponding secretary of the Theosophical Society; New York – J.W. Bouton / London
– Bernard Quaritch, 1877)
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