< Theosophical Utterances (continued from page 11-121) >
they are all satisfied that he is some intelligence altogether separate from the medium.
The only passably valid argument against their experience that we know of is, that in dreams the characters exhibit intense individuality, at variance with the ideas of the dreamer; yet if all dreams are of purely physiological origin, and if they can be intensified into a certain class of manifestations, the intensity of apparent individuality is no evidence of the existence of anyone apart from the dreamer. But the physical phenomena of Spiritualism, such, for instance, as the very scientific tying and untying of the ropes around a sleeping medium, indicate that a most determined and, under the circumstances, terrible power apart from himself, is actually at work.
We have never said that Koot Hoomi or John King is “no embodied human being at all,” and should he glad to know who or what he is. Our only argument has been that Koot Hoomi and John King appear to be of the same fraternity, and that all the evidence before the public tends to show, and with unexpected strength too, that Madame Blavatsky is neither more nor less than a strong physical medium. The onus of proving a difference rests with those who assert its reality.
Hindoos, some of them not veracious, with the soles of their feet tucked under their armpits, and absorbed in holy contemplation of the Absolute, and of the ends of their noses, pass into a state of bodily stupor, and far be it from us to say in what part of the globe their mental activity may possibly then be. While one-half the globe is in sunshine the other is in darkness: who knows where, if anywhere, the mental activity of half the human race may be, while their bodies are asleep? In Spiritualism we have a tangled mass of phenomena it will take centuries to unravel. Those of spontaneous death-bed apparitions and of haunted houses, seem to be ascribable to no cause but the existence after the dissolution of the body, of the spirits of the dead. Some few of the phenomena of mediumship appear to be due to the same cause; but as to the rest, the region is unexplored, and few, if any, are in a position to dogmatise thereupon. If Madame Blavatsky’s “Brothers” or “Todas” (see The Spiritualist of April 19th, 1878.) have anything to do with the matter, the only knowledge of the fact the world possesses is from her statements, and this it became our duty to the public to point out. The manifestations in her presence seem to be those of strong physical mediumship; some of them do not resemble the narrow range of phenomena now ordinarily obtainable in London, but some years ago when Mrs. Guppy was in full power, curious open air manifestations wore common enough in her presence in her garden at Holloway.
Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott have done much in India to disseminate knowledge about Spiritualism, and have boon issuing an excellent psychological journal, The Theosophist, in Bombay. There is no desire on our part to indulge in captious detraction of their utterances or their labours, but the assertion that men exist in the Himalayas who can produce psychological manifestations in any part of the world, is too large to gain acceptance without its foundations being examined. Do those men live in the land, where the Boojum and the Snark loam at will, and where the Jubjub sings its lonely song to the Lady Moon?
Of the Fundamental Conditions of Transcendentalism
It has been already shown on some good authority that the separative method of the first philosophy was not openly declared by these who employed it. The obsolete class of philosophers and theologians who appear to have been at homo with the vital processes attendant thereon, were obscure and exclusive in their treatment of these; while authoritatively adopting, handling, and dogmatising freely, as it were from a kindred ground of recognition amongst themselves, they do not practically deliver this ground or appear to wish to make their own adoption of it intelligible to the world at large. Hence, the imputation of mysticism has attached to many great names, to some of the greatest in philosophy as well as to more modern metaphysicians, theologians, theosophists, hermetists, kabalists, and the exponents whoso allusions are incomprehensible on the plane of ordinary intelligence. To single out instances would be to derogate from the fact, since every name of celebrity before the time of Lord Bacon should be included more or less. From Aristotle backwards and forwards throughout the middle ages tip to Leibnitz and Schelling, who had faith in the pretension, a vein of transcendental positivism has persisted over, above and beneath the range of abstract metaphysic for which ordinary experience does not account.
To account for rationally or make plausible the pretension of genuine philosophy, its objective claim or esse percipi as well as the new whole of perceptivity before adverted to, has to be surmised—the existence of a superior recreated and absolutely correlated whole should be demonstrable—the one part is not indeed probable without the other, any more than would the perception of this life be valid apart from the external nature to which it belongs. But this natural sensibility and sensible nature are said, by those who have experimentally transcended them to be a frustration of truth; not an imperfect development only, but the diametric contradiction of a perfect law.* Neither was the natural life proposed to be advanced by the old philosophers in any other way apparently than by conditionating towards a principial renewal rough scientific analyses, and successive fermentations of the living spirit within itself. And those records which remain from the Greeks are noteworthy chiefly, since full instructions do not appear, as showing how operative and essential those means were ought to be, which were once employed to clear a way to the sacramental threshold and relegate the heroic impulse towards a promotive discovery of its root.
The little original information that remains concerning those disciplines, sacrifices, thenegie rites, initiations, mysteries, whatever they were or were not, has been so often quoted over as to need no repetition for those whom a these things interest; nothing adequately accounting for the esteen in which they were held dasheen transmitted or has been generally understood from what is transmitted. The externals are even left to conjecture, while concerning the stringent method which was thence said to introduce wisdom and prove divine relations transitively, little remains available beyond the witness, wherein all agree with the ultimate declaration of Psellus, that the means employed were effectual, not only in bringing about a scientific relation with the universal objects of religious faith, but occasionally also in procuring assimilation to them.† Plato, indeed, holds that we may apprehend the ungenerated essence partibly by reason or intellect, but then this intellect is nous, a reason that has to be awakened, raised from the dead, recreated, nourished and fortified for the efficient apprehension referred to. The mass of mankind, says Pindar, and the declaration echoes throughout antiquity, are blind of soul.‡ As are the eyes of bats to the light of day, so is the intellect of our souls to such things as are naturally the most splendid of all. § These are Aristotle’s words: and the intellect here referred to is the innermost principle or core of human life, by the vertex of which it aspires, binding the demonstrations of our lower reason by that very evidence which is said to be blind in respect of its own proof—blind with respect to that noumenal, recreative and recreated light of life which he signalises as the most splendid of all.
The blindness is as openly acknowledged now, but many believe that there is no such light; the bondage of our highest intellect is not only acknowledged but regarded as insurmountable. The illative aspiration extends, as it were a line without a mooring-post to draw or be drawn across. Our impulse being contrary, we have no transcendental foot-hold. The philosophic injunction is therefore to go through Lethe in order to be recognised and to lash on to the other side.
The defect of early philosophy, as it is now regarded, hangs about a baptism of this convertible, reactionary, and promotive kind, or the supposition of it which profoundly underruns the whole tradition. The influx of a new Initial is improbable under any conditions apart from the proof which, after all, is only exceptionally claimed; so that the objections that Sir William Hamilton, amongst others, has seen and carefully shown to be in the way of the attainment of transcendental truth are a stronghold of agnosticism in England at this day. And, although there is the plainest difference between a supposition of knowledges that are relatively absolute from present conditions and the absolute nonsense that is sometimes now set up but to be refuted—between identic concepts and intuitions as defined by Plato and Aristotle, and those arch-fictions which modern inexperience has attributed to the ancient mind—yet it may be partly better that no belief, comparatively speaking, should abide in the records of a higher experience than that indiscriminate credulity should prevail in an experimental form, introducing crude tests and destroying the natural integrity of minds not yet ripe for the ordeals involved in the evolution of it. For this, among other reasons, and because, as they assert, the natural understanding is not adapted to the sight of essential truth or voluntarily obedient to its first law when found, philosophers have warned, fenced off, and introduced this law and differential process under a various veil, such as is the body of nature before our eyes, unfolding and refolding with the same traditionary caution indicating everywhere, at the same time hiding the actual invention of Wisdom, so called, while declaring its results.
But to what purpose is such a tradition if it may be neither practically tested nor naturally understood. Ought not the encumbrance to be got rid of, as is actually being now done by those who have examined without deriving any faith in its validity at all, who find nothing in the elaborations of transcendentalism but Thought, which by a strange abuse of abstraction and dialectic, denudes itself of all its modes and attributes, for the sake of entering into the ineffable and incomprehensible unity, whence it pretends to have sprung, in order to confound itself by means of an unrealisable suicide with its proper principle, and through this with that of the whole existence? Too much time and pains seem to have been wasted on such enthusiasm already; it has been exposed as the source of every false religion, and of much questionable morality; it is in itself an excess—an excess of high and attractive aspirations, perhaps—still an excess; and all excess tends more or less to insanity. Mysticism has shewn itself moreover injurious in turning men aside from such duties as they owe to themselves and others, deadening the affections, bringing contempt on this life and worldly interests, which must surely have been given for some good end; externally regarded, it makes of a man an exile and an ascetic, bigoted, unhappy, cruel, inscrutable, odious. The attraction, on the other hand, if there be a departure truly, is out of sight; the experiment, practically speaking, is vain, if the transforming or transformed agent be of more value than the product.
But, and if otherwise, the resultant, that is as yet not visible, be the latent perfection, and supernatural heir of this humanity, if the exodus of the principle and its travail be but the prelude of a prosperous and permanent return, if the new tabernacle be built up and ready for translation, what matters if the old organism be ready to vanish away? Excess of any part docs tend to inco-ordination, whereas excess or reflex action by the Principle rather tends to flower and fruit. “I am desirous of rendering to you, as my judges,” y says Socrates, “the reason as it appears to me, why a man who has truly passed his life in the practice of philosophy should with great propriety be confident when about to die, and should possess good hopes of obtaining the greatest advantages after death.”¶
Emmanuel Kant has keenly analysed the natural conditions of human knowledge and meted out its limits. His service is none the less that ho has been more decided in the subversion of error,—in subverting, that is to say, the assumption of supernatural knowledge apart from supernatural faculties,—than in the establishment of truth. The result of his examination as Sir William Hamilton has shewn? was the abolition of the metaphysical sciences; of rational psychology, ontology, speculative theology, &c., as founded on mere petitiones principiorum. Existence was revealed to us only under specific modifications, and these were known only under the conditions of our faculties for knowledge: things-in-themselves, mind, matter, God; all in short that was nor particular, relative and phenomenal, as bearing no analogy to our faculties, was beyond the verge of our knowledge. Metaphysic was thus restricted, by his analysis, to the observation and analysis of the phenomena of present consciousness; and what was not explicitly or implicitly given in a fact of this normal consciousness, transcended the sphere of legitimate speculation. A knowledge of the unconditioned was impossible. A demonstration of the absolute from the relative was logically absurd.††
All this has since been enlarged upon, and the whole infirm claim of the natural mind to transcendental knowledges, strictly so-called, would be perhaps well got rid of, if agnosticism had not been pushed, as it has been, on to a positive ground, and rode rough-shod throng and over the traditions that wore originally provided to clothe and bear witness to the Divine breath which in certain directions is now consequently and in default of external faith to draw forth, recoding into itself.
* The Theaetetus of Plato and Proklus on the Timaeus, book III.
† Psellus de Oraculis.
‡ Nem. VII, 20.
§ Metaphysics, book II.
¶ The Phaedo of Plato—Taylor, vol. 4.
†† Art. II., No. 99, Edin. Rov.
Editor's notes
- ↑ Of the Fundamental Conditions of Transcendentalism by Noemon, London Spiritualist, No. 461, July 24, 1881, pp. 290-92
Sources
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London Spiritualist, No. 461, July 24, 1881, pp. 290-92