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vol. title: vol. period: 1882 pages in vol.: 174 |
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Light.
December 16, 1882.
THEOSOPHIC TEACHINGS.
By the Hon. Roden Noel.
“C. C. M.’s” answer is most interesting and ingenious. If I am allowed, I will just say a few final words to explain why it does not satisfy me, fearing the readers of “Light” may be beguiled from their simplicity by “C. C. M.’s” very plausible arguments.
First, let me observe that I am not aware Hinton held the view about organisms, which “C. C. M.” rightly attributes to me, and in which he acquiesces. I am anxious that great and good man, from whom I have learned so much, should not be charged with the burden of ideas which I believe he might have repudiated.
However, this by the way. “C. C. M.” says that if the lower forms of life (the cells of which our organism is made up) can combine for the purpose of animal life, of which they are individually unconscious, they can also combine to represent human intelligence and its phenomena. But (I answer) they cannot so combine, even for the purpose of life, except when dominated by the organism of which they form integral parts. Their place and function is defined for them by the Whole, by the Idea of the complex organism. (See, for proof of this, H. Stirling’s “Concerning Protoplasm,” in answer to Professor Huxley.) Can they combine to “represent” animal life and its functions, when deserted by the dominant principle of the particular life, which now compels them to act as they do, and be what they are? If so, then we may be prepared to entertain the further, and, I fancy, still more unproveable, proposition of “C. C. M.” And what is to compel the ethereal body to this individual combination? I should certainly expect that its disintegration would be simultaneous with the withdrawal from its constituents of the very Principle of Integration, though, of course, both processes might be gradual. Then “C. C. M.” says, “The Ego is incessantly labouring at the construction of an organism, whereby its voluntary activity may be exchanged for a spontaneous one. All education and training have this for their aim.” All this part of his article seems to me very instructive and important. But what is the end of this process? Is it not that the voluntary activity may be disengaged for ever higher and higher aims? The lower, automatically purposive life is subordinate and auxiliary to these, serves them for a basis. But can it be cut away from the voluntary, conscious energy of the person, who has constructed it in the manner so well explained by “C. C. M.,” and yet remain what it has been and is in connection with and subordination to him? And what will he do without it? How shall I play a difficult piece of music, or attend to the solution of a difficult problem, when the automatic facility for grasping and using the elements of the science is taken away from me? And how comprehend such automatic facility for wielding them, except in subordination to the conscious will of the person who acquired it, and now wants it for use in making further conquests? I do not understand this Oriental passion for mutilation—for cutting a man up into little separate bits. Dr. Lynn, the illusionist, does it, and always makes me feel so uncomfortable! It appears particularly strange to maintain that our habits may be severed from ourselves, and go on existing apart from us! Of course, “C. C. M.” could not maintain this, unless he placed all these habits in a body, which he thinks will continue after we have left it. But though physical habits may exist in the complex notion we name a body, mental and spiritual habits do not. You must not confound the neurosis with the accompanying psychosis. Voluntary energy doubtless modifies the body (and possibly as many more as you like to imagine)—but this body was created rather by involuntary than voluntary energy; and will does another thing on parallel lines with this process of modification—it modifies the character, the mental and spiritual life. And it is quite true that all this comes back to us as from outside. Remember, however, that hereditary character, temperament, circumstance, food, climate, education, planetary influence, constitution of body, does so equally—comes from outside. But I do not conceive it probable that we can ever get rid of all this—at least of the essence, inner meaning, moulding power of all this; that it can cease to be an integral part of us; it may go into the region of the “unconscious,” whence the body, and indeed the mind, originally came; but that is only a relative unconsciousness. All our personal life arises from the apparently unconscious. But that, I apprehend, must be the supra-conscious self, in solidarity with all selves, from which our present fragmentary consciousness is for a while partially dissociated. The essence of what has once belonged to us (soul and body) must be always ours, though that may be modified and transformed by a new direction of personal energy, the resultant being transfigured. Organism, says “C. C. M.,” is the basis of spontaneity; if in this he includes subjective organism, non-material organism of thought and feeling, that may be true. But then, how get rid of it? How shuffle off our thoughts and feelings, that we have wrought into the very substance of our own selves? Whatever “shell” we may shuffle off, it will contain, if apart from us, no trace of our thoughts and feelings, which demand a thinker and feeler. The products of what physiologists call retrograde metamorphosis, contain none, nor can any ethereal “shell,” if there be such a thing, contain any more. But, as when the spirit ceases to animate the vital frame, we know the corpse returns to the inferior sphere of chemical affinity, so must the ethereal frame be unindividualised if the spirit ceased to mould and inhabit it. In fact, however, the true Body and Soul must always follow, and express, and be auxiliary to the Spirit, being, indeed, the self-expression thereof.
“C. C. M.” speaks of the inner body as if it were vital and conscious, but not involving what I mean by personality, the transcendent unity of the Ego. He admits that the “phenomena of force we call matter, are presentations to us of a real life and consciousness behind.” But does he see that, if so, they are all necessarily personal, that is, involve the transcendent unity of one or many Egos to constitute them? Out of thought nothing is—but does “C. C. M.” see that out of thinkers, no thought is? Because apart from thinkers, no differentiation and discrimination is possible. He speaks of a “disintegrating memory” in shells, with no rememberer behind it—and this to me seems a self-contradiction. “C. C. M.,” refers twice to Hinton, as holding Nature to be conscious. Now where Hinton’s thought seems deficient is just in his scanty recognition of the transcendent unity of the Ego or Person as the ultimate basis of all; he had not, perhaps, distinctly looked into that truth (and I am sorry to see that “M.A. (Oxon’s)” Imperator, in his otherwise valuable teachings, endorses some such, as it appears to me, loose thinking about the “impersonality” of God). But yet recollect what Hinton’s idea of Nature really was—the phenomenal manifestation to our limited perception of the Actual, which is no less than the spiritual attributes of God, and the higher Angels. Nature was no aggregate of semi-animate and semi-conscious hypostatized phenomena to Hinton, as it is to the Occultists, and to savage tribes.
Let us, however, look more closely at these Bodies, and the Habits associated with them. What are they? Now I will not dogmatize, being well aware how little we know; I can only state what appears to me most probable. These Bodies and Habits may be regarded, I think, under three main aspects, (1), as a collection of cells, with a lower form of consciousness inconceivable to us, but which, passing through the alembic of our modes of consciousness, modify it, and undergo perpetual modification from our changing energies, voluntary or other, once more re-acting in their turn upon us. Now it seems impossible that these, or any other lower organisms, should ever have been, or should ever be in future, uncontrolled by, insubordinate to, the higher organisms, in which they live, move, and have their being. Such a lusus naturæ, such a hiatus in the universal law, seems a gratuitously invented inconceivability. If it could be, then their release from this control would be the signal for their instantly becoming something perfectly different, an a priori expectation demonstrated to be true by our experience in the case of a corpse. But then observe: it is not they who thus change, any more than it is our bodies that corrupt; this is only apparently so. The Soul, as Aristotle maintained, is the Principle of Life; withdraw the Soul, and you withdraw the Principle of Life; but then the Principle of Life goes along with the Soul, which at once, by the necessity of the case, proceeds to form another Body, in accordance with its character and needs. Now the life being withdrawn from the chemical elements, they are free to seek their affinities; but if in the whole Body, then in its constituent cells. Must not in this event the true cell-bodies go with the true organism they compose, and their subjectivities follow the greater inorbing subjectivity of the man? In other words, you have the Ethereal-Soul-Body animated by the Soul, to the very existence of which is absolutely necessary its constituent soul-bodies, which were cells, and are now ethereal soul-bodies.
Hence we see the fallacy of “C. C. M.’s” plausible analogy—<... continues on page 14-122 >
Editor's notes
Sources
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Light, v. 2, No. 102, December 16, 1882, pp. 569-570