HPB-SD(ed.1) v.2 p.3 sec.3 ch.B

The Secret Doctrine

The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy

by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

Verbatim first edition

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volume 2 Anthropogenesis, part 3 Science and the Secret Doctrine Contrasted, section 3 The Fossil Relics of Man and the Anthropoid Ape, chapter B. Western Evolutionism: The Comparative Anatomy of Man and the Anthropoid in No Way a Confirmation of Darwinism

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B. Western Evolutionism : The Comparative Anatomy of Man and the Anthropoid in No Way a Confirmation of Darwinism.

We are told that while every other heresy against modern science may be disregarded, this, our denial of the Darwinian theory as applied to Man, will be the one “ unpardonable ” sin. The Evolutionists stand firm as rock on the evidence of similarity of structure between the ape and the man. The anatomical evidence, it is urged, is quite overpowering in this case ; it is bone for bone, and muscle for muscle, even the brain conformation being very much the same.

Well, what of that ? All this was known before King Herod ; and the writers of the Ramayana, the poets who sang the prowess and valour of Hanuman, the monkey-God, “ whose feats were great and Wisdom never rivalled,” must have known as much about his anatomy and brain as does any Hæckel or Huxley in our modern day. Volumes upon volumes were written upon this similarity, in antiquity as in more modern times. Therefore, there is nothing new whatever given to the world or to philosophy, in such volumes as Mivart’s “ Man and Apes,” or Messrs. Fiske and Huxley’s defence of Darwinism. But what are those crucial proofs of man’s descent from a pithecoid ancestor ? If the Darwinian theory is not the true one — we are told — if man and ape do not descend from a common ancestor, then we are called upon to explain the reason of : —

(I.) The similarity of structure between the two ; the fact that the

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huxley calls the darwinists to order.

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higher animal world — man and beast — is physically of one type or pattern.

(II.) The presence of rudimentary organs in man, i.e., traces of former organs now atrophied by disuse. Some of these organs, it is asserted, could not have had any scope for employment, except for a semi-animal, semi-arboreal monster. Why, again, do we find in Man those “ rudimentary ” organs (as useless as its rudimentary wing is to the Apteryx of Australia), the vermiform appendix of the cœcum, the ear muscles, * the “ rudimentary tail ” (with which children are still sometimes born), etc., etc. ?

Such is the war cry ; and the cackle of the smaller fry among the Darwinians is louder, if possible, than even that of the scientific Evolutionists themselves !

Furthermore, the latter themselves — with their great leader Mr. Huxley, and such eminent zoologists as Mr. Romanes and others — while defending the Darwinian theory, are the first to confess the almost insuperable difficulties in the way of its final demonstration. And there are as great men of science as the above-named, who deny, most emphatically, the uncalled-for assumption, and loudly denounce the unwarrantable exaggerations on the question of this supposed similarity. It is sufficient to glance at the works of Broca, Gratiolet, of Owen, Pruner-Bey, and finally, at the last great work of de Quatrefages, “ Introduction à l’Etude des Races humaines, Questions générales,” to discover the fallacy of the Evolutionists. We may say more : the exaggerations concerning such similarity of structure between man and the anthropomorphous ape have become so glaring and absurd of late, that even Mr. Huxley found himself forced to protest against the too sanguine expectations. It was that great anatomist personally who called the “ smaller fry ” to order, by declaring in one of his articles that the differences in the structure of the human body and that of the highest anthropomorphous pithecoid, were not only far from being trifling and unimportant, but were, on the contrary, very great and suggestive : “ each of the bones of the gorilla has its own specific impress on it that distinguishes it from a similar human bone.” Among the existing creatures there is not one single intermediate form that could fill the gap between man and the ape. To ignore that gap, he added, “ was as uncalled-for as it was absurd.” †

* Professor Owen believes that these muscles — the attollens, retrahens, and attrahens aurem — were actively functioning in men of the Stone Age. This may or may not be the case. The question falls under the ordinary “ occult ” explanation, and involves no postulate of an “ animal progenitor ” to solve it.

† Quoted in the Review of the “ Introduction à l’Etude des Races Humaines,” by de Quatrefages. We have not Mr. Huxley’s work at hand to quote from. Or to cite another good authority : — “ We find one of the most man-like apes (gibbon), in the

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Finally, the absurdity of such an unnatural descent of man is so palpable in the face of all the proofs and evidence of the skull of the pithecoid as compared to that of man, that even de Quatrefages resorted unconsciously to our esoteric theory by saying that it is rather the apes that can claim descent from man than vice versâ. As proven by Gratiolet, with regard to the cavities of the brain of the anthropoids, in which species that organ develops in an inverse ratio to what would be the case were the corresponding organs in man really the product of the development of the said organs in the apes — the size of the human skull and its brain, as well as the cavities, increase with the individual development of man. His intellect develops and increases with age, while his facial bones and jaws diminish and straighten, thus being more and more spiritualized : whereas with the ape it is the reverse. In its youth the anthropoid is far more intelligent and good-natured, while with age it becomes duller ; and, as its skull recedes and seems to diminish as it grows, its facial bones and jaws develop, the brain being finally crushed, and thrown entirely back, to make with every day more room for the animal type. The organ of thought — the brain —  recedes and diminishes, entirely conquered and replaced by that of the wild beast — the jaw apparatus.

Thus, as wittily remarked in the French work, a gorilla would have a perfect right to address an Evolutionist, claiming its right of descent from himself. It would say to him, “ We, anthropoid apes, form a retrogressive departure from the human type, and therefore our development and evolution are expressed by a transition from a human-like to an animal-like structure of organism ; but in what way could you, men, descend from us — how can you form a continuation of our genus ? For, to make this possible, your organization would have to differ still more than ours does from the human structure, it would have to approach still closer to that of the beast than ours does ; and in such a case justice demands that you should give up to us your place in nature. You are lower than we are, once that you insist on tracing your genealogy from our kind ; for the structure of our organization and its development are such that we are unable to generate forms of a higher organization than our own.”

This is where the Occult Sciences agree entirely with de Quatre-

tertiary period, and this species is still in the same low grade, and side by side with it at the end of the Ice-period, man is found in the same high grade as to-day, the ape not having approximated more nearly to the man, and modern man not having become further removed from the ape than the first (fossil) man. . . these facts contradict a theory of constant progressive development.” (Pfaff.) When, according to Vogt, the average Australian brain = 99.35 cub. inches ; that of the gorilla 30.51 cub. in., and that of the chimpanzee only 25.45, the giant gap to be bridged by the advocate of “ Natural ” Selection becomes apparent.

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fages. Owing to the very type of his development man cannot descend from either an ape or an ancestor common to both, but shows his origin from a type far superior to himself. And this type is the “ Heavenly man ” — the Dhyan Chohans, or the Pitris so-called, as shown in the first Part of this volume. On the other hand, the pithecoids, the orang-outang, the gorilla, and the chimpanzee can, and, as the Occult Sciences teach, do, descend from the animalized Fourth human Root-Race, being the product of man and an extinct species of mammal —  whose remote ancestors were themselves the product of Lemurian bestiality — which lived in the Miocene age. The ancestry of this semi-human monster is explained in the Stanzas as originating in the sin of the “ Mind-less ” races of the middle Third Race period.

When it is borne in mind that all forms which now people the earth, are so many variations on basic types originally thrown off by the Man of the Third and Fourth Round, such an evolutionist argument as that insisting on the “ unity of structural plan ” characterising all vertebrates, loses its edge. The basic types referred to were very few in number in comparison with the multitude of organisms to which they ultimately gave rise ; but a general unity of type has, nevertheless, been preserved throughout the ages. The economy of Nature does not sanction the co-existence of several utterly opposed “ ground plans ” of organic evolution on one planet. Once, however, that the general drift of the occult explanation is formulated, inference as to detail may well be left to the intuitive reader.

Similarly with the important question of the “ rudimentary ” organs discovered by anatomists in the human organism. Doubtless this line of argument, when wielded by Darwin and Hæckel against their European adversaries, proved of great weight. Anthropologists, who ventured to dispute the derivation of man from an animal ancestry, were sorely puzzled how to deal with the presence of gill-clefts, with the “ tail ” problem, and so on. Here again Occultism comes to our assistance with the necessary data.

The fact is that, as previously stated, the human type is the repertory of all potential organic forms, and the central point from which these latter radiate. In this postulate we find a true “ Evolution ” or “ unfolding ” — a sense which cannot be said to belong to the mechanical theory of natural selection. Criticising Darwin’s inference from “ rudiments,” an able writer remarks : “ Why is it not just as probably a true hypothesis to suppose that Man was created with the rudimentary sketches in his organization, and that they became useful appendages in the lower animals into which man degenerated, as to suppose that these parts existed in full development in the lower animals out of which man was generated ? ” (“ Creation or Evolution ? ” Geo. T. Curtis, p. 76.)

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Read for “ into which Man degenerated,” “ the prototypes which man shed in the course of his astral developments,” and an aspect of the true esoteric solution is before us. But a wider generalization is now to be formulated.

So far as our present Fourth Round terrestrial period is concerned, the mammalian fauna are alone to be regarded as traceable to prototypes shed by Man. The amphibia, birds, reptiles, fishes, etc., are the resultants of the Third Round, astral fossil forms stored up in the auric envelope of the Earth and projected into physical objectivity subsequent to the deposition of the first Laurentian rocks. “ Evolution ” has to deal with the progressive modifications, which palæontology shows to have affected the lo wer animal and vegetable kingdoms in the course of geological time. It does not, and from the nature of things cannot, touch on the subject of the pre-physical types which served as the basis for future differentiation. Tabulate the general laws controlling the development of physical organisms it certainly may, and to a certain extent it has acquitted itself ably of the task.

To return to the immediate subject of discussion. The mammalia, whose first traces are discovered in the marsupials of the Triassic rocks of the Secondary Period, were evolved from purely astral progenitors contemporary with the Second Race. They are thus post-Human, and, consequently, it is easy to account for the general resemblance between their embryonic stages and those of Man, who necessarily embraces in himself and epitomizes in his development the features of the group he originated. This explanation disposes of a portion of the Darwinist brief. “ But how to account for the presence of the gill-clefts in the human fœtus, which represent the stage through which the branchiæ of the fish are developed ; * for the pulsating vessel corresponding to the heart of the lower fishes, which constitutes the fœtal heart ; for the entire analogy presented by the segmentation of the human ovum, the formation of the blastoderm, and the appearance of the ‘ gastrula ’ stage, with corresponding stages in lower vertebrate life and even among the sponges ; for the various types of lower animal life which the form of the future child shadows forth in the cycle of its growth ? ” “ How comes it to pass that stages in the life of fishes, whose ancestors swam ” — æons before the epoch of the First Root-Race,

* “ At this period,” writes Darwin, “ the arteries run in arch-like branches, as if to carry the blood to branchiæ which are not present in the higher vertebrata, though the slits on the side of the neck still remain, marking their former (?) position.”

It is noteworthy that, though gill-clefts are absolutely useless to all but amphibia and fishes, etc., their appearance is regularly noted in the fœtal development of vertebrates. Even children are occasionally born with an opening in the neck corresponding to one of the clefts.

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— “ in the seas of the Silurian period, as well as stages in that of the later amphibian, reptilian fauna, are mirrored in the ‘ epitomized history ’ of human fœtal development ? ”

This plausible objection is met by the reply that the Third Round terrestrial animal forms were just as much referable to types thrown off by Third Round man, as that new importation into our planet’s area — the mammalian stock — is to the Fourth Round Humanity of the Second Root-race. The process of human fœtal growth epitomizes not only the general characteristics of the Fourth, but of the Third Round terrestrial life. The diapason of type is run through in brief. Occultists are thus at no loss to “ account for ” the birth of children with an actual caudal appendage, or for the fact that the tail in the human fætus is, at one period, double the length of the nascent legs. The potentiality of every organ useful to animal life is locked up in Man — the microcosm of the Macrocosm — and abnormal conditions may not unfrequently result in the strange phenomena which Darwinists regard as “ reversion to ancestral features.” * Reversion, indeed, but scarcely in the sense contemplated by our present-day empiricists !

* Those who with Hæckel regard the gill-clefts with their attendant phenomena as illustrative of an active function in our amphibian and piscine ancestors (Vide his XII. and XIII. stages), ought to explain why the “ Vegetable with leaflets ” (Lefèvre) represented in fœtal growth, does not appear in his 22 stages through which the monera have passed in their ascent to Man. Hæckel does not postulate a vegetable ancestor. The embryological argument is thus a two-edged sword and here cuts its possessor.