Blavatsky H.P. - Footnotes to Cosmogony and Anthropology: Difference between revisions

We may be doubtful whether our Brother Cahagnet means by his “Mother Thoughts” the spiritual transcendental essences which Aristotle calls privations and Plato calls forms, species improperly understood and known as ideas; those eternal, immutable essences removed altogether {{Page aside|62}}from the sphere of sense, and cognizable more by intuition than reason. But whether or not he means that substance of which the world is but the shadow and which gives the latter the little of partial ''reality'' it possesses, his definition of the abstract Deity is undoubtedly that of the Vedantins, who define Parabrahm, ''absolute'' Intelligence and Force Itself, and hence devoid of either intelligence or force. In such a case his “Mother Thoughts” would under another name take the place of ''Îśvara'', as defined by the modern school of Benares Vedantins, though we doubt that Mr. Cahagnet has the remotest idea of the existence, let alone the philosophy, of Vedantism.

This idea besides being the basic principle of the modern Law of Evolution which all the Hindu, Buddhist, and European Theosophists accept in its fundamental teaching, is that of the Heraclitan doctrine in regard to the phenomenal world, that of the “perpetual flow of all things.”

We do not feel quite sure whether the author adheres to the Aryan doctrine of the negation of the reality of matter, which was also that of Plato, but it does seem as if this conception of the Deity reminds one of the Platonic doctrines of the Cosmos being but “the shadow of The Shadow”; and of the deity of the Eleatics, whose Absolute was not a mere abstraction, a creature of pure fancy, but the totality of the objective universe as discerned by the soul, which itself, as compared with the body, is but a subtler species of matter.