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vol. title: vol. period: pages in vol.: A short blue pencil stroke appears beside the end of the Erratum. The writer has not been identified. |
< Theosophic Teachings. (continued from page 14-131) >
Light. December 23, 1882.
“C. C. M.” accuses me of not being a good Platonist. Well, I deeply cherish my Plato. But I do not know that I am bound to accept the theory of ideas precisely as he left it; great minds have worked and built upon it since. Perhaps I may playfully retort that the scholastic realism of “C. C. M.” interests and astonishes me as much as it would interest and astonish me to meet a Mastodon, or a Deinotherium sauntering along Pall Mall! Still, I do not understand why “C. C. M.” accuses me of not holding the Universal to be the true noumenon or self, when this is the very basis of my contention against the doctrine of Elementaries and conditional immortality! Nevertheless, my belief in the Universal does not make me deny the reality of the Particular, as is the case with my opponent and his friends. As I have said, it is the vice of Oriental philosophy to abstract these elements from one another, and try to force them asunder, hanging them up apart. They are in and by one another; they are correlative, and are only apart for the abstracting thought of some thinker. A horse is a horse only by virtue of universal relations in the thought of thinkers, but there is no abstract horse apart from such thinkers, and apart from particular horses.
These speculations are ingenious, like those of Lord Lytton, Mr. Percy Greg, and the author of “Erewhon.” But have they a more solid foundation? Does the memory of the Adepts really cover all this ground? Faith the most omnivorous may scarcely prove equal to the digestion of that. This will seem to us a very scaling of Heaven by new builders of Babel. But the gods are jealous of the too curious arrogance of profane intellect, and know how to confound it. Christ told us less, but what He told commends itself to the pure and lowly. “Lead, kindly Light”—“One step enough for me.” “Canst thou by searching find out God?” God, who hath ordained bounds to the sea, hath said also to the human mind, “Here shall thy proud waves be stayed!”
All the credit of the Universal is pledged to the preservation and redemption of this Particular. Nor is there any impersonal abstract principle apart from concrete thinkers. “C. C. M.” affirms that an individual is a synthesis of modes, but not the principle, or agent of such synthesis. That, he affirms, is the Universal. It is the Universal, certainly, for none is alone, all in solidarity—but not an abstract Universal; for if it were, it could never synthesise any modes at all, being itself empty of all content. Hegel has been ludicrously misunderstood to affirm that Being=Not-Being is the Principle, the sufficient Cause of all. He never said anything so absurd. That is only the phenomenal commencement in time of a particular life-process. But the Hegelian Principle of all is the concrete, fully developed Spirit, the an-und-für-sich. The Principle of individual selves is the Idea or Essence of those individual selves immanent in the Universal. If there were no such essential Idea, or Essence immanent in the Universal, what would determine to such special individual syntheses at all? It would remain abstract, and would itself be just—nothing at all. Even Plato might have taught “C. C. M.” that there are noumena within noumena. The ultimate truth of my being is, no doubt, God, Spirit, Nous in Christ, the Son, the Logos. But how and why does God differentiate Himself into you and me? Only, I conceive, because you and I are eternally and essentially in Him. It is, therefore, indeed you and I, in and through Him, who thus manifest ourselves in phenomenal time and space conditions. This is the truth in the doctrine of free will (absurd as the notion of its consisting in indifference is) and personal responsibility.
We do feel that we ourselves do in some sense originate action. “C. C. M.” makes us mere machines. There are, therefore, noumena, substantial[1] selves, within noumena, substantial selves. The general is no adequate cause for the special, while it is perfectly arbitrary to admit the reality of the general, and deny that of the special. Moreover, as the psychic Ego is more differentiated than the animal, the animal than the amœba, or plastidule, so is the spiritual Ego more differentiated than the psychic, and this, though it is also more universal. If you ascend the scale I believe the same holds true. The Christ, therefore, the Logos, (though truly a common nature), is to me no abstract Principle (which is a mere creation of imagination; a monster without consistent coherency of being; can only exist in and by the synthetic unity of conscious, differentiating personality as a universal concept of such), but is the most highly personal of Persons, and, therefore, includes and substantiates all others, as we include and substantiate many individuals in and under us. Here are the true “universals,” inorbing Monads, or personalities, rich in universal principles and ideas; but principles and ideas can have no independent being; they involve living, concrete minds to think, imagine, and will them. We only know the reality of the absolute Ego in ourselves and others; but if it has no reality there, we cannot know that it has anywhere, while, as I have argued against Spinoza (in the British Quarterly), if all the Modes of existence are unreal and impermanent, then the Substance is equally so; for it is in and by the modes, as they are in and by it. But even German philosophy is defective, as I believe, in its non-recognition of the eternal reality of the Particular as involved in the Universal; the mode indeed, passes, yet the mode is in its passing. And we only need to see more intuitionally clearly to perceive it; the passing is incident to our time-vision. “C. C. M.” admits that the Ego can never be in pure subjectivity, without object—though he thinks particular selves as objects of reflection may be successively produced and annihilated, the one spirit alone remaining the same. But they being produced from and by the subject as the manifestation of its own inmost nature, in order that it may know itself and become a subject (which it is not without object), this cannot be true. The phenomenal selves pass, but are in their passing, and in the eternal Divine intuition they do not pass.
I agree with “C. C. M.” as to the Kosmic Ego forming the animal into the psychic man; but this seems inconsistent with his assertion that there is only one noumenon, the Spirit. The true mundane Ego is a noumenon mediating between the individual Ego, and the Solar Ego, and so on. Probably there are spiritual hierarchies downward from the Father-Spirit, in whom is the Logos, and upward from the amœba. But the Father and the Son are in all as Holy Spirit operating their destiny and development under time-conditions, according to the eternal idea of each, which is in God.
I would add that I think I was perhaps unfair in my “Buddhism” paper in saying that “Karma” mischievously involves an equivoke about the individual future life. Probably it is a beneficent one, for men will anticipate future life for themselves, and this may provide them with a doctrinal excuse for doing so. But Burnouf, St. Hilaire, Rhys Davids, Childers, Monier Williams, Spence Hardy, Max Müller, are, I think, virtually agreed about the cardinal principles of Buddhism. I must confess I cannot reconcile Occultism with Buddhism, notwithstanding the profession of the founders of the Theosophical Society that they are Buddhist. Of course the system has undergone astonishing developments among various races and at different times, till it is hardly recognisable. In some of these it is very like Christianity; the Buddhas are living mediators and saviours—or the Bodhisatwas are. It is, indeed, difficult, in view of the wonderful personal holiness and ethical glory of the practical teaching of Gautama, not to recognise in him a Divine Incarnation, though not so full as that of our Lord, whose wisdom and insight appear greater. Thus in Buddhist teaching there is no Father, no personal love, at the foundation of all, and no personal living Saviour (yet indeed the Karma of the Buddha provides something approaching to this) as example, and energising life in men. We need to look out of ourselves, in order to the development of the highest that belongs to us, even though that be the very truth and essence of our own selves.
Erratum.—In the postcript of my article of last week, for “unity of our organism” read “units of our organism.”—R. N.
Light. December 23, 1882.
EPES SARGENT AND THE SPIRIT BODY.
It is generous of “C. C. M.” to defend Mr. Epes Sargent from my very mild strictures, for no two writers can be more opposed than “C. C. M.” and the latter as regards their general view of Spiritualism. I find myself in much more agreement with him (and with “M.A. Oxon,” an equally able writer) than my friend, “C. C. M.,” can possibly find himself. On page 163 of “Proof Palpable,” he says, with reference to a materialised form, “Here was a proof palpable—but of what? Surely of immortal spirit—what can it be but an intelligence and a will! And this intelligence proclaims itself a Spirit! And this will proves the claim by causing an animated body in human shape to vanish and re-appear. If such a power does not answer the full signification which men in all ages have attached to the word spirit, as representative of the life of a man after the dissolution of his earth body, I am at a loss to know what further evidence can be given under the present limitations of our human faculties.” Now, this is good old-fashioned Spiritualism, and as far as possible from the “shell” theory of such apparitions. Would the writer have admitted that a man can be pulverised—a grain of him flying this way, and another grain of him flying that!
But my strictures concerned “Proof Palpable,” not any other book. A thoughtful writer may, and must, change and develope his views as time goes on. Therefore I proceed to justify my remark by one or two quotations from the book I referred to. “The question whether this Spirit is not a higher, subtler, and unknown form or grade of matter is distinct, and perfectly legitimate” . . . “the marvels of memory, in which faculty impressions inhere and persist, which are inexplicable under the theory of materialism, involving a constant flux and removal of the organs of thought. Only the existence of a spiritual body can account for these things” (italics mine). Page 154. “Among the truths to which Swedenborg, in company with all great seers, bears witness is that of the spirit body. He tells us that thought implies a thinking substance, as much as sight or hearing implies a seeing and hearing substance, that it is as absurd to contemplate thought as something independent of the substance of the<... continues on page 14-135 >
Editor's notes
- ↑ The damaged letters in “substantial” and “The” have been restored from Light, December 23, 1882, p. 576 (PDF page 4).
- ↑ Epes Sargent and the Spirit Body. by Noel, Roden (signed as Roden Noel), Light, Vol. II, No. 103. Below this pasted clipping, a surviving line from the underlying letter “Spirit Mesmerism” by Peter Lee reads: “38, Church Stile, Rochdale.”
Sources
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Light, v. 2, No. 103, December 23, 1882, pp. 575–576, 578