Blavatsky H.P. - Editors Note to The Theosophists: Difference between revisions

But we have, perhaps, said enough to meet the somewhat imperfect suggestion in Mr. Gerald Massey’s article to the {{Page aside|385}}effect that elementals may perhaps be the spirits of animals or of “missing links” belonging to a former epoch of the world’s history. The notion that in some immaterial shape—one may use an absurd expression to set forth an absurd conjecture—the spirits of any living creature can lead a perpetual existence as the stereotyped duplicates of the transitory material forms they inhabited while passing through the earthly stage of their pilgrimage, is to reckon entirely without the very doctrine which Mr. Massey so kindly offers for the consideration of Eastern philosophers. No more than any given material form is destined to infinite perpetuation, can the finer organisms which constitute the higher principles of living creatures be doomed to unchangeability. What has become of the particles of matter which composed the physical bodies of “man’s predecessors on the earth”? They have long ago been ground over in the laboratory of Nature, and have entered into the composition of other forms. And the idea or design of the earlier forms has risen into superior idea or design which has impressed itself on later forms. So also, though the analogy may give us no more than a cloudy conception of the course of events, it is manifest that the higher principles, once united with the earlier forms must have developed in their turn also. Along what infinite spirals of gradual ascent the spiritual evolution has been accomplished, we will not stop now to consider. Enough to point out the direction in which thought should proceed, and some few considerations which may operate to check European thinkers from too readily regarding the realms of spirit as a mere phantasmagorial cemetery, where the shades of the Earth’s buried inhabitants doze for ever in an aimless trance.<ref>{{HPB-CW-comment|[Consult in connection with this article, ''The Letters of H.P. Blavatsky to A.P. Sinnett'', Letter CXCVIII, p. 364, where a precipitated message from Master M. may be found. —''Compiler''.]}}</ref>