VOL. XXXIV, No. 1
No. 133
Fe.riod
PUBLISHED BY
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The Theosophical Quarterly
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CONTENTS OF VOL. XXXIV, NO. 1
January, 1937
NOTES AND COMMENTS.
FRAGMENTS.
SEPTENARY MAN IN ANCIENT EGYPT.
AN IMPERIAL HEREDITY.
THEOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS.
THE ENGLISH WAY TO THE GOAL.
WITHOUT CENSOR, VIII.
REMARKS BY THE WAY...'
WHAT ARE THE THEOSOPHISTS? By H. P. Blavatsky (Reprint)
REVIEWS.
CORRESPONDENCE.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS.
IN MEMORIAM: Mrs. Graves.
second-class matter September 5. *923. at the Post Office at N
179.
Copyright, 1937. by The Theosophical Society
The
Theosophical Quarterly
VOLUME XXXIV
January, 1937— October, 1937
PUBLISHED BY
THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY
NEW YORK
Andover-Harvard
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a iiuvowr niCALi SULUIUTY
Uni^BmSlf 7r d u b, ' eCt ° f this S ° ciety is t0 form nucleus of a
niversal Brotherhood of Humanity, without distinction of race, creed sex
P SUbs ‘ diary ° biects are: The stud y of ancient and modern
religions, philosophy and sciences, and the demonstration of the importance
I ntt f ^ i 6 inVe f tigati0n of the "explained laws of nature and
the psychical powers latent in man.
The Theosophical Quarterly is the official organ of the original
Iheosophical Society founded in New York by H. P. Blavatsku
W. Q. Judge and others , in 1875.
We have no connection whatsoever with any other organization
calling itself Theosophical formerly headed by Mrs. Besanl nor
with similar bodies , the purposes and methods of which are whollu
foreign to our own. 9
Editors, The Theosophical Quarterly.
JANUARY, 1937
. T ! ie Thwsophtcal Society, as such, is not responsible Jor any opinion or declaration
in tins magazine, by whomsoever expressed, unless contained in an official document.
The One and the Many
F ROM time immemorial philosophers have meditated upon the problem
of the One and the Many. An intuition which is profound and sure,
.... , lmpresses u P on the mind the fundamental truth that the Universe is an
indivisible and partless unity; that the metagalaxy and the electron, the man
and the infusorian, are in essence one and the same thing; that all evidences of
difference and separateness in Nature are illusions, distortions of the single
Reality, the One which can be neither multiplied nor fractioned. However
another intuition, no less certain than the first, brings the conviction that the
most real thing in the Universe is the individual; that diversity and multi¬
plicity are the most patent facts in experience; that a world in which there
would be no distinction of persons could not conceivably exist.
It is no wonder that the human mind finds in this apparent contradiction
between two certitudes, a permanent source of irritation. The passion for
consistency may be, as Emerson suggested, a weakness of little minds- but
some of the largest minds which have left their imprint upon history have made
desperate efforts to explain how the world can be both indivisible and divisible,
both the One and the Many. The usual procedure has been to over-emphasiz^
one of the certitudes and to under-emphasize the other. Thus, in certain syM
terns—like that of Spinoza, for instance—the stress is laid upon the ultimate
unity of all substance and consciousness. On the other hand, the Monadoloey
of Leibniz represents the attitude of those who regard the production of indi¬
vidual entities as the only significant cosmic event.
The solution of the riddle can never be found by pure reason alone, for even
the purest reason can only draw inferences from the data of intuition and ex¬
perience. That is why the problem of the One and the Many is not merely a
technical metaphysical question, a subject for endless scholastic debates. Per¬
haps no final answer to it, in terms of human thought, ever will be found but
it i*ertain that our understanding of its implications is, at every instant, meas-
S
6
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
ured by our experience of the way in which the One and the Many are blended
and reconciled in our own selves.
It has been noted that Spinoza and Leibniz established their systems at the
opposite poles of philosophical thought. Madame Blavatsky makes the fol¬
lowing comment upon them:
Spinoza was a subjective , Leibniz an objective Pantheist, yet both were great philos¬
ophers in their intuitive perceptions. Now, if these two teachings were blended to¬
gether and each corrected by the other—and foremost of all the One Reality weeded
of its personality—there would remain as sum total a true spirit of esoteric philosophy
in them; the impersonal, attributeless, absolute divine essence which is no “Being”,
but the root of all being. Draw a deep line in your thought between that ever-incog-
nizable essence, and the, as invisible, yet comprehensible Presence ( Mulapraknti ), or
Shekinah, from beyond and through which vibrates the Sound of the Verbum y and from
which evolve the numberless hierarchies of intelligent Egos y of conscious as of semi¬
conscious, perceptive and apperceptive Beings, whose essence is spiritual Force, whose
substance is the Elements and whose Bodies (when needed) are the atoms —and our
doctrine is there {The Secret Doctrine , ed. 1888, I, 629).
Two Modes of Force
Whether a man be a “philosopher” or not, his knowledge of the Universe
and of his individual self is determined, therefore, by the degree to which he
personally embodies the essence of his being and of all being, which is “Spiritual
Force”. In this connection, it should be helpful to review briefly certain theo-
sophical postulates concerning the nature of “Spiritual Force”. For instance,
we can test, by observation and experiment, the proposition that there is in
Nature only this one Force which, however, exhibits two modes of existence
and action. In a certain sense, these modes may be illustrated by the centrif¬
ugal and centripetal forces of physics. Wherever there is a centre of substance,
some sort of equilibrium is established between the energies generated within
the centre, and the energies generated in the surrounding space. Some inter¬
action between the two sets of energies is inevitable, as the one current is directed
outward and the other presses inward towards the centre.
We quote from Transactions of the Blavatsky Lodge , pp. 127-134:
Though Newton’s proposition that every particle of matter has the property of at¬
traction for every other particle, is on the whole correct; and though Leibniz’s proposi¬
tion that every atom is a universe in itself, and acts through its own inherent force, is
also true; yet both are incomplete. For man is also an atom, possessing attraction and
repulsion, and is the Microcosm of the Macrocosm. But would it be also true to say
that because of the force and intelligence in him he moves independently of every other
human unit, or could act and move, unless there were a greater force and intelligence
than his own to allow him to live and move in that higher element of Force and Intel¬
ligence? . . . Besides the force acting in matter there is also a force acting on matter.
. . . All . . . differences in the objective world result only from the peculiarities of
differentiation of matter on which the one free force acts, helped in this by that portion
of its essence which we call imprisoned force, or material molecules. The worker within,
the inherent force, ever tends to unite with its parent essence without. . . . We are told
that it [a cycle of manifestation] begins when the imprisoned force and intelligence
inherent in every atom of differentiated as well as of homogeneous matter arrives at a
point when both become the slaves of a higher intelligent Force whose mission is to guide
NOTES AND COMMENTS
7
and shape it. It is the Force which we call the divine Free-Will, represented by the
Dhyani-Buddhas. When the centripetal and centrifugal forces of life and being are
subjected by the one nameless Force which brings order in disorder, and establishes
harmony in Chaos—then [the cycle of manifestation begins]. ... All growth depends
upon the indwelling force, because on this plane of ours it is this force alone which acts
consciously. The universal force cannot be regarded as a conscious force as we under¬
stand the word consciousness, because it would immediately become a personal god.
It is only that which is enclosed in form, a limitation of matter, which is conscious of
itself on this plane. This Free Force or Will, which is limitless and absolute, cannot
be said to act understanding^, but it is the one and sole immutable Law of Life and
Being. Fohat, therefore, is spoken of as the synthetic motor power of all the imprisoned
life-forces and the medium between the absolute and conditioned Force. It is a link,
just as Manas is the connecting link between the gross matter of the physical body and
the Divine Monad which animates it, but is powerless to act upon the former directly.
Vortices in the Waters of Space
It should be remarked that Madame Blavatsky enunciated this theory of
force at a time when the mechanistic scheme of classical physics still dominated
scientific thought. Ultimate reality was supposed to be condensed in a for¬
tuitous concourse of atoms in perpetual motion, and all states of matter and
mind were assumed to be effects of atomic collisions and combinations. In
other words, the real was identified with an infinitude of infinitesimal corpuscles,
the most limited entities of which the intellect could conceive.
The discovery of radio-activity and other developments have greatly altered
the orthodox scientific view of physical nature. Matter and radiation are now
generally regarded as different phases of the same “substance”. Atoms are
no longer compared to unbreakable billiard balls. In the microcosm imagined
by the ultra-modern physicist, the atoms are like galaxies of tiny stars emitting
and receiving waves of energy. But also they are indistinguishable from these
waves. The “atom within the atom”, the electron, in one aspect, seems to be
a tiny particle, but its electrical properties are most simply explained on the
assumption that it actually “takes up the whole of space”. It is impossible to
say where it begins and where it ends.
Isolated bodies do not exist in Nature. There are vortices or eddies in the
“waters of space”. But a vortex is inseparable from its medium. It is part of
something larger than itself. Lord Dundreary’s bird which flocked by itself
is no more impossible than an entity set apart from the Universe. The eddy
and the ocean are in essence one and indivisible.
So it is in the human kingdom. Man, like the electron, has a dual nature.
“The soul is buried in the body, as in a tomb”, said Pythagoras. From one
point of view, the human being seems to be nothing but a limited personal self
enclosed in a physical vehicle, localized in space and insulated in a small cycle
of time. But this limitation is neither more nor less real than the eddy in the
ocean. In itself it is, as the sages of East and West have always taught, a maya ,
a mirage, a phantasm, an illusion. The real man , again like the electron, “takes
up th^whole of space”. Such is the necessary deduction from the theosophical
axiorn^at the essence of man is “spiritual Force”. His personal self and his
8
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
bodily form have meaning and value, in so far as they embody and make self-
conscious this “higher intelligent Force . . . which we call the divine Free-
Will”. As we read in the Bhagavad Gita, “These finite bodies are said to belong
to Him, the Eternal, the indestructible, unprovable Spirit, who is in the body.”
The Semblance of a Second Nature
“The One Self is all things and yet is no thing”, says Plotinus. “It is just
because no entity exists separately within it, that all entities can issue from
it. As it is itself perfect and acquires nothing and has no need nor desire, it
has—so to speak—overflowed. This overflowing or emanation has produced
the semblance of a ‘second nature’.” The great mystic proceeds to identify
this “second nature” with the noetic principle, the highest attainable state of
individual consciousness. But though there is this steady stream of spiritual
Force from above, there must be, as Madame Blavatsky indicates in the passage
just quoted’, a conscious response from below. The “indwelling Force” purify¬
ing the personal nature, makes possible the transformation of the human ego
into “a semblance of the second nature”. This alchemical refinement is de¬
scribed as the specific task delegated to manas, the “self-consciousness”, the
“synthetic motor power of all the imprisoned life-forces” in man, the assem¬
blage of all the magical potencies of reason, imagination, aspiration, will.
The Love of Truth
“There is no Religion higher than Truth.” The Pythagoreans defined their
objective as “the knowledge of the things which are”. Certainly they did not
mean that only savants and professors are fitted to enter the kingdom of heaven.
They pointed to the fact that the proper food of the soul is truth, which may be
assimilated more simply by children or peasants than by many so-called phil¬
osophers. The lover of truth delights in the right use of reason, but he does not
love truth with the intellect alone. The intellect only mirrors the truths which
we have lived and enacted and made part of ourselves. Therefore, the love of
truth transforms the whole nature of man. It is the complete expression of the
manas, “the connecting link between ... the physical body and the Divine
Monad”.
An age may be judged by its attitude towards truth. Modern man, for ex¬
ample, does not doubt that the major conclusions of physics concerning matter
and energy are sound. He respects the principles of mechanics, the “laws of
nature”, tested by repeated observation of the actions and reactions of material
bodies. However, outside the domain of “gross matter”, he tends to act and
think as if there were no principles. The modem mind is fascinated by “rela¬
tivity”: by the truism that the appearance which the world wears is always
relative to the point of view of the observer. Let the observer change his posi¬
tion, it is argued, and truth will change with it. It is then easy to pass on to
the assumption that man can make or unmake truth to suit his appetites and
prejudices. Anyone who would apply such a doctrine in his relations with
physical nature, would be classified as a lunatic. Why should we assume that
NOTES AND COMMENTS
9
there are not moral and spiritual laws to which we must conform in order to
survive, as we must conform to the laws of matter? The presence of immutable
principles upon all the planes of Nature is not disproved by the fact that our
view of those principles is constantly varying. Chicago is west of New York
and east of San Francisco, but that is no reason for denying that Chicago exists.
Spiritual Realism
At the recent Harvard tercentenary of arts and sciences, Professor Etienne
Gilson of the University of Paris made a powerful appeal for the revival of
“spiritual realism”, that is to say, of the mediaeval conception of a universal
truth independent of the human will, but open to exploration by the human
reason.
In the conviction that there is nothing in the world above universal truth lies the
very root of intellectual and social liberty. Our only hope is therefore in a widely spread
revival of the Greek and mediaeval principle, that truth, morality, social justice and
beauty are necessary and universal in their own right. Should philosophers, scientists,
artists make up their minds to teach it and, if necessary, to preach it in time and out of
time, it would become known again that there is a spiritual order of realities whose
absolute right is to judge even the State, and eventually to free us from its oppression.
... I am alluding to the deeply rooted mediaeval conviction that though the various
expressions of truth unavoidably bear the marks of their local origins, truth itself, both
in speculation and in the practical order, is not true for a certain civilization, nor for a
certain nation, but belongs to humanity as a whole. In short, truth is universal in its
own right. . . . Coupled with their belief in the universal character of religious faith,
there was in those [mediaeval] scholars an equally strong belief in the universal character
of rational truth. This part, at least, of their ideal could be fruitfully upheld and, if
need be, revived in our own days. The problem of religious unity essentially belongs
to the theologians, but the problem of philosophical unity is in itself an essential philo¬
sophical problem, and unless philosophers tackle it, somebody else will solve it for them,
probably against them. . . . The sad fact is that after losing our common faith, our
common philosophy and our common art, we are in great danger of losing even our
common science and of exchanging it for State-controlled dogmas. Such a development
was to be expected. A good many years ago, the French philosopher Jules Lachelier
made the casual remark that the only conceivable form of democracy was theocracy
and, he added, that very kind of theocracy which William Penn had once established
in the forests of Pennsylvania. Despite its paradoxical appearance, that statement was
fundamentally sound, in this at least, that as soon as men refuse to be ruled directly
by God, they condemn themselves to be ruled directly by man; and if they decline to
receive from God the leading principles of their moral and social conduct, they are
bound to accept them from the king or from the State or from their race or from their
own social class. ... It is a natural temptation for everyone of us to coin a truth of
his own, made after his own image and likeness, so that its contemplation may give us
at the same time the selfish pleasure of self-contemplation. We have so often thought,
and written, and taught our students, that the discovery of truth is a personal affair,
that we have come either to think, or to make them believe, that truth itself is a per¬
sonal affair. Yet the most commonplace truth is infinitely better than a whole system of
the most original errors. Now is, perhaps, the time to remind ourselves and to teach
others the old Greek principle that unity is better than multiplicity. Not uniformity,
which is the mere lack of diversity, but unity; that is to say the rational ordering of a
manifoi^reality. Do we believe that truth is one? Are we convinced that truth con¬
sists in^iding out an order where there is one, as in nature, and to put it where there
IO
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
is none, or not enough of it, as in moral, social and political life? . . . What is the proper
use of reason? Mediaeval philosophers would answer that it consists in using it accord¬
ing to its own nature, which is to judge things as they are. Every sound rationalism
is at the same time a realism. In spite of their many differences, all varieties of [mis¬
called] idealism agree precisely in this, that things are what the human mind says them
to be. Mediaeval realism, on the contrary, always stood firm on the Greek platform,
that the human mind is right, when it conforms to reality.
A Link Between Man and the Cosmos
It is comparatively painless for anyone to seek and discover facts which are
objective and physical. Doubtless the exploration of the external world implies
hard work and courage and patience. The veritable man of science sacrifices
time, comfort, sometimes life itself, to attain his goal. But he is not obliged to
experiment upon himself, to practice introspection, to dissect his own states of
consciousness, to observe his lower nature in all its hideousness without up¬
setting his mental balance, to create in himself a real soul without losing his
sense of identity. The knowledge of the scientist enables him to predict and
direct the processes of physical nature; but his science gives him no control over
human passions. For better or for worse, he can transform the visible aspect
of the earth. He does not undertake the far more difficult and dangerous task
of transforming his own ego into the “semblance of a second nature’'.
Though physical science, like every expression of truth, forges a link between
man and the cosmos, this junction is not secure. Few would doubt that the
primum mobile of scientific discovery and invention has been a deep and abiding
love of truth. But the magnitude of their achievements on the physical plane
has tempted men of science to miscalculate their value to man. The truths
which they have revealed and applied are an infinitesimal fraction of the total
of the knowable in the Universe. We know so very little, for instance, about the
powers and attributes of consciousness, about the subjective aspect of Nature.
One is even obliged to assume that we know less about the potentialities of
human nature than our “pre-scientific” ancestors. A savage may understand
better how to adapt his behaviour to the exigencies of moral and spiritual laws,
than the victim of civilization whose inner life is a vast anarchy, dominated by
a succession of desppts, as first one emotion and then another dominates his will
and imagination. Our control of the external world, far from creating an en¬
during connection between the physical body and the Divine Monad, has
actually served to weaken the link already existing, by multiplying the occa¬
sions for self-indulgence and by intensifying the illusion of our self-sufficiency.
The Subordination of Reason to Desire
As Professor Gilson points out, the natural r 61 e of reason is to judge things
as they are. But though this is “natural”, experience testifies that, more often
than not, reason acts “unnaturally”. The overwhelming majority of mankind
persistently use reason to justify their prejudices and vanities, to “judge”
things as they are not. The trouble with most people, remarked Josh Billings,
is not that they don’t know anything, but that they know so many things that
NOTES AND COMMENTS
aren’t so. As an Indian philosopher might comment, the unregenerate manas
is the slave of may a and avidya , of illusion and unwisdom.
As the least self-examination shows, reason in practice is subordinate to
desire. We think what we want to think. Theosophy explains mental activity
as an interaction between the spiritual and animal “souls” in man. Thus there
are two modes of manas , the higher gravitating towards buddhi , the pole of
aspiration and love of truth, the lower gravitating towards kama } the pole of
egotism and selfish desire.
We ought to think what is true, but we are at liberty to think what is false.
We can obey or defy the dictates of truth, the laws of Divine Nature to which
in essence we belong. Our salvation or damnation depends upon our willing¬
ness or refusal to unite the “indwelling force” of our personal selves with the
free and universal force of the Logos, the Self which “is all things and yet is no
thing”, and which, according to Theosophy, has been personified and made
incarnate in the Avatars as “The Way, the Truth, and the Life”.
The Undermining of Character
“As soon as men refuse to be ruled directly by God, they condemn themselves
to be ruled directly by man.” In terms of the theosophical interpretation of
history, man must choose whether he would be governed by “God-instructed
men”, by Adept Kings, or by creatures like himself, which is to say, by a steadily
deteriorating line of politicians. The choice which he has made explains the
diseases which afflict the modern state. Their name is legion,—communism,
fascism, racism, totalitarianism, collectivism, etc., etc. But the germs which
cause various symptoms in various lands, all belong to the same family. The
art of the demagogue is not of recent date. The successful politician knows
how to flatter the self-esteem of other men, and how to stimulate their envy and
cupidity. His task has been greatly facilitated by modem means of communi¬
cation, by the press, the radio and the movies. Alcibiades and Antony could
stampede a mob by shouting at them. To-day their successors can stampede
nations. Someone has suggested that unless the human race develops some sort
of immunity to the rapidly spreading virus of mass hypnosis, all hope for tl£
present civilization must be abandoned.
The demagogue, like the coster in The Pirates of Penzance , may “love to lie
a-basking in the sun” when he is off duty. Probably very few of his kind, unless
they be conscious acolytes of the Black Lodge, cherish the deliberate purpose
of undermining the characters of their victims. The point is that he wants to
get power and to keep it, and the easiest and quickest way to his end is to dis¬
cover the ruling passion, the presiding weakness, in the lives of his countrymen,
and to cultivate and increase it. One need only reflect upon the distinguishing
characteristics of the various dictatorships or semi-dictatorships which have
a^gared in the world since the Great War, to recognize with what instinctive
sffl the agitators in different countries have exploited the outstanding and
peculiar vices of each nation.
12 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
A Warning to Americans
It is not a pleasant exercise for an American to consider the vices which
are the easiest to exploit within the boundaries of the United States. Never¬
theless, it is a duty which no American who has any pride in his heritage should
neglect. Fortunately there are some who are not utterly blind to what has been
happening. We cite some passages from “Thoughts Current”, in The Atlantic
Monthly (September, 1936), by Dr. Ernest M. Hopkins, President of Dartmouth
College. Dr. Hopkins is frankly a critic of the New Deal, but his remarks have
a general significance because of his clear comprehension of the factors which
are distorting and softening the qualities, formerly regarded as specifically
American.
One of the most sapient aphorisms of which I know is that it takes a tragic amount
of time on the part of the wise to correct the mistakes of the merely good. The mis¬
fortunes of the present day may easily become catastrophes if the process is continued
of dissipating our inheritances of courage, initiative, fortitude, and aspiration. Under
the impulses of these qualities, a struggling people organized the government and over¬
came great difficulties to set up the principle that every man is entitled to an equal
opportunity. To argue that the ideal has not been fully attained is not to demonstrate
that it has not been more fully attained in America than anywhere else in the world.
... I would not be understood as arguing that society must not assume responsibility
for its natural dependents, or that concern should not be felt for, and necessary help
offered to, its underprivileged members. Neither would I attach blame to the Adminis¬
tration for the gradual disappearance of qualities of resourcefulness among an increas¬
ing number of our population in recent years, for which the sordid materialism of public
thought in the past has been responsible. What I would assert is that, under the New
Deal, dependency is being encouraged to the point where it is rapidly and needlessly
increasing, that the least desirable tendencies of a materialistic age are being accentu¬
ated rather than diminished, and that by the exclusiveness of solicitude for the incapable
at the expense of the capable, we are inducing a deterioration in our national character
to a point little short of self-destruction. Particularly, I resent the extent to which the
New Deal has felt obliged to go, in soliciting support for its programme by reiteration
to the public, and particularly to youth, of the misfortunes to which they are pictured
as being subject. We are being made a people sorrowing in self-pity for ourselves. If
enough people tell a man that he looks ill, he begins to feel his own unhappy symptoms.
The influence of suggestion is one of the most powerful forces in the world, and one of
the greatest misfortunes of the present day is the effect upon our people of having had
sympathy forced upon them for conditions, the correction of which demanded but the
exercise of due measures of intelligence and courage. The foundations of American
society were laid by men who endured economic want and physical hardships, that
they might gain access to opportunities few in number and inconsiderable in importance
as compared with those which to-day lie close at hand for all of us. There was no thought
in their minds that the conditions of life ought to be anything but a challenge, or that
the rewards of life could be possessed except through valiant effort. They accepted the
conditions and went their ways without dismay and without complaint, with definite¬
ness of purpose and with high aspiration. Thus, from recognition of the fact that life
must be a struggle for men to profit most from it, arose a great people.
The Youth Movement
The Saturday Evening Post (November 7, 1936) published “The Youth Docu¬
ment”, by Mr. Garet Garrett. It provides confirmation at a crucial point of
NOTES AND COMMENTS
3
the argument that the American people are in danger of becoming a race of
moral idiots. Mr. Garrett has made a detailed study of the so-called “youth
movement” in this country. He recalls the time when he was young and had
to make his way without the help of social workers or politicians. He does not
deny the tribulations which the youth of his generation had to face and over¬
come; but he refuses to admit that a way to any kind of success can be found
without pain and trouble. Then he points to the multitudinous agencies which
are dedicated to the purpose of caring for the young people of this country, of
making life easy and comfortable for them, and which are continually explain¬
ing how sorry everybody is for them and how sorry they ought to be for them¬
selves. He examined a copy of a bill introduced in the United States Senate
to provide vocational training and employment between the ages of sixteen and
twenty-five, and read an account of the public hearings before the Committee
on Education and Labour.
Those who appeared to bear witness for the Act [Mr. Garrett calculates the cost as
“hardly less than $3,000,000,000 a year”] were members of youth bodies, social-service
workers, representatives of union labor, Communists, and educators. . . . The editor
of the Student Advocate told the senators that if they really wished to know how to re¬
store peace and quiet in the schools and universities, . . . the way to do it was to “legis¬
late poverty out of existence.” . . . The National High-School Secretary of the Ameri¬
can Student Union asked the senators to consider how crucial a thing the matter of
clothes or money for some recreation might be, and that hundreds of thousands of youths
were feeling inferior for want of these things, adding: “In terms of social maladjust¬
ment, we are going to pay a heavy toll in later life for this.” . . . Among other letters
placed in the record was one from a student, . . . saying she had lost her benefits from
the National Youth Administration because her marks averaged only C, asking what
C’s had to do with it, and ending: “In November when I vote, I will favour those candi¬
dates who have done most to further the betterment of my conditions.” Lillian Rob¬
bins, head worker at the Hamilton House Settlement, said: “These boys need cigarettes,
hair cuts, razor blades, that no relief budget includes. And they don’t ask too much
when they want a quarter for the movie and, perhaps, even another one for the girl
friend.” The head worker at Madison House Settlement said: “A despairing youth,
bitter and disillusioned, seeks aid from its elected representatives. As one who has for
the past two years made somewhat of a study of youth’s vocational problems, I can
say that aside from youth not having cigarette and movie money, the most vexing prob¬
lem is that of answering the query, What can I do?”
As Mr. Garrett says, the first misfortune of contemporary youth “was to
have been bom at a time when the stem-parent principle, having failed in thq|
home, was failing also in government”. His conclusion is that there is no solu¬
tion to a general youth problem, because there is in reality no such problem.
Every young person has a separate problem which sooner or later must be solved
on its own merits. Fortunately some of the boys and girls who are coming to
maturity, do clearly understand this fact. They are bravely trying to take their
places as individuals in the world, and are resisting the attempts to herd them
into one more social caste whose only function is to hold up the government.
4 ^ Immunity to Mass Hypnosis
In America, therefore, as elsewhere, the lower nature of the multitude is
14
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
being subjected to a powerful, if incoherent, movement of collective suggestion
or mass hypnosis. It appears that in America, at least at the present time,
the most successful method of demoralizing the citizen is to make him feel more
and more pity for himself.
How can this tendency towards social and national mania be checked?
Where can one discover some counter-irritant which will distract our attention
from ourselves and our troubles and give us immunity to mass hypnosis? Surely
the solution is near at hand. It is not to be sought in politics or in propaganda
or in public works. The individual must find it for himself, within himself,
using the powers of the manas which are inherent in him, and potentially, as
has so often been said, link the individual soul with the Universal Soul. But
first of all it is necessary to cultivate the faith that real knowledge exists and is
attainable; that on all planes of being there are ruling principles of action which
are immutable and everlasting. Let us keep “relativity'’ in its place.
Therefore, let the individual seek to solve his own problem, whatever it may
be, seeking the truth, the principle, by obedience to which it can alone be solved.
As other individuals follow the same rule of conduct, he will learn of their ex¬
istence and will join his forces to theirs. Thus a real nucleus of collective aspira¬
tion may be formed, a group amalgamated not by mass hypnosis but by devotion
to a common ideal. We believe that in this way and no other, civilizations are
bom. It is the opposite of the way of regimentation and social planning.
The Evocation of God-Instructed Men
It has been said that a group of determined and loyal souls can generate the
power to evoke a “God-instructed man”, a representative of truth and wisdom,
to guide and govern them. Such would seem to be the normal operation of
the Supreme Principle in which the One and the Many are made concordant.
The “imprisoned force and intelligence inherent in every atom” cannot act
without some response from the “one nameless Force . . . which we call the
divine Free Will”. Too often the only response of which our acts are worthy
is some catastrophe which shocks or pulverizes our personal natures. We shall
be wise to believe that the unpleasant occurrences which the Apocalypse de¬
picts are not all necessarily symbolical; that they may quite literally denote
some of the methods by which the Guardians of the Good Law correct and
instruct and regenerate the wayward souls of men. But we shall be wise to
believe also that genuine aspiration and service of truth meet a thousand-fold
response from those same Guardians.
According to Theosophy the real man can have only one enduring purpose, to
which all the accidents and incidents of his physical existence are subordinate,_
to arrive at the point in evolution where he becomes “the semblance of a second
nature”, where he constitutes himself a link between the One and the Many,
between the impersonal and the personal self, between the Masters and the
“lost generation” of their children in the world.
FRAGMENTS
W E feel no scorn for the farmer-boy who, having laboured and saved,
leaves his plough and goes to college, thence to the law school, and
makes for himself a career in a world far beyond that to which he
was bom. Why such contempt and condemnation for one who, also having
toiled and sacrificed, sets his soul where “it has pastured with the stars upon
the meadow-lands of space”?
The less gifted farmer-boy’s brother, who derides his junior’s ambition, is
not an object of our admiration, but of our pity. Yet those who decry the quest
of the mystic, hold, surely, a no less invidious position. Lacking all real com¬
prehension of what is sought in each case, they stand equally condemned for
ignorance and narrow-mindedness. Reduced to its basic facts, the conscious¬
ness of this type of intellectual worldling parallels that of the toiler of the fields.
One works with his hands and the other with his brains, but both are limited
to the earth beneath their feet; and it is an inner sense of inferiority, and the
envy springing from that in a diminutive nature, which explains the attitude of
each of them, and its bitterness.
It is time that these things were more widely understood. True, if the farmer-
boy leave an old mother in loneliness and want, the right-minded will reverse
their original sympathetic verdict; and, in the case of the mystic, with a swifter
justice. But so jealously does spiritual life guard its sanctuary, that, whiW
the farmer-boy in such case may succeed, in spite of his selfishness, the mystw
has closed the door of possible attainment with his own hand, nor can he hope
again to open it, until, humbly and in deep repentance, he returns and pays
the debts he has dishonoured. For, at his initial step, he has violated the no¬
bility he seeks, and he is hurled back by the very Law he has invoked.
0 my friends, my brothers, you who can only half believe, too dazzled, per¬
haps, by the glory that calls you, not daring to trust yourselves to it, and fear¬
ing its implications where the denizens of the Shadow cluster on its rim of
i5
i6
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
Light,—give yourselves, nevertheless, to the faith you can recognize even while
you do not possess it; confide in the vision you see, even if it only shine in the
eyes of another; plunge into that ocean of radiance, even though in the act it
appear as annihilation, for there the Everlasting Arms will surround and sup¬
port you. Peter, too, walked on the waves of Galilee at the Master’s bidding,
until his faith failed him; when a Hand bore him up, and a tender reproof—
O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?
You also, my brothers as well, bound in your prejudices and self-imposed
limitations, with your pharisaical wisdoms and superiorities, thankful you are
not as these others (well you may be, we say, though for far other reasons);
half-scientists, quarter-philosophers, tenth-metaphysicians, overgrown children,
playing with knowledge; yet with a pathetic sincerity that belies the empiricism
you cherish,—you, also, my brothers, awake, for a judgment is coming, a judg¬
ment on all you have built with such labour. Your “time” has ended, another
has dawned. Do not sink with the ruin that must be when illusions are shat¬
tered and old errors crumble. The Powers that destroy will in mercy destroy,—
not the bolshevik madness that is Love’s perversion while the sign of its presence;
for how is there shadow without light to reveal it? and you built the obstruction
now casting that shadow.
See at last the false from the true; step into the light, and work with the
force that will blast your creation. So perchance you may save the fruit of
your labour by its transformation. 0 my brothers, give ear: Mene, mene,
Tekel, Upharsin. Cav6 .
SEPTENARY MAN IN ANCIENT
EGYPT
0 Thou Who hringest joy to them that labour , Who succourest them that are
discouraged , Osiris of the Mystic Forms , fill our hearts , fill Thou our hearts .—
Pyramid Texts.
I have come to give light in darkness , which is made light and bright by Me .—
Book of the Dead.
F AITH in the existence of “another world”, an invisible world lying all
about us, is one of the most ancient of beliefs, and closely connected with
it is the deep-rooted conviction that man’s perishable physical body is
merely the outer husk, or the vehicle for the immortal Self within. “The visible
is ever present in the invisible, and the invisible in the visible”, is very ancient
Wisdom indeed; a celestial assurance which is our heirloom from an incalculable
past; a belief which the Lodge has never allowed to disappear entirely from the
hearts of men. Always there have been the “few”—servants of the Lodge—who
have sounded again and yet again these notes of the primitive harmony; Great
Souls who have kept its reverberations still ringing in the world. As The Secret
Doctrine tells us, it is one of the essential truths of occult philosophy: “It
indicates the existence of things imperceptible to our physical senses which are
of far greater importance, more real and more permanent, than those that
appeal to these senses themselves.” In every one of the earliest religions that
we know, in that of ancient Egypt perhaps more than in any other, we meet
with these twin beliefs in more or less definite form, and side by side with them is
a third: that to live at all, in any true sense, man must perpetually “ascend”,
that life must be an unremitting “climb”. This idea of spiritual existence by
upward progress of the soul, is presented to us in endless allegory under which we
soon begin to recognize ancient and familiar alchemical formulae for soul trans¬
formation, these generally being found in fragments of the ritual. All are
obviously of immemorial usage, Egyptian “magic”, as we understand it to-da*
being largely built upon them. The Secret Doctrine gives us a hint of their vast
antiquity by saying that “Alchemy had its birthplace in Atlantis during the
Fourth Race, and had only its renaissance in Egypt.” The true secrets of
alchemical metamorphism belonged, of course, to the Mysteries, but the
Mysteries must be lived, they cannot be imparted to the mind or interpreted by
the intellect. Therefore the many Chapters in the Book of the Dead , dealing with
these supernatural changes, are mostly incomprehensible to us. The central,
guiding thought is, in general, this: while the gods are ever brooding over him,
man must himself struggle upward from his lower nature where he now dwells,
upw» the “world of light”, his true home where all is “pure gold”. It was
*
i8
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
individual effort that was needed, and the transforming fire of alchemy was the
fervour of his own aspiration—a fire which must never be allowed to grow cold
or to be extinguished. In the Pyramid Texts, whole sections are given to emphasis
upon this religious duty, such, for example, as “The Chapter of those who raise
themselves up”, where, describing the resolute soul, it is written: “He ascends,
he lifts himself to the sky.” This sacred fire had also its outward expression,
for the broad rays of the sun, streaming earthward, were regarded as the fiery
pathway up which the soul must pass “as a flame before the wind to the ends of
the sky”—the mortal must be transfigured into the immortal; it was ascending
states of consciousness which mattered. “I raise myself up, I renew myself, and
I grow young again”, we read in the Book of the Dead. “I am Fire, the Son of
Fire”, cries in ecstasy the soul which has attained.
It has been said more than once, that the Egyptian was the first among the
early people definitely known to us, to whom the conception of becoming was a
reality; that the very heart of his creed was belief in transformation, and in
ancient Egypt this symbolical pathway up which man must climb to the “place
of the gods” was called a “ladder” which, rung by rung, must be scaled. More¬
over, these rungs are often spoken of as parts of himself , parts of his physical
body (eyes, nose, mouth and so on), and this idea can only be comprehensible to
us if these members are taken to signify his many principles. Thus it was
victorious moral and spiritual ascent which was implied, until complete victory
(the topmost rung or highest principle) had been reached. But not every soul
making the attempt, was successful—we read of those unfortunate ones who lost
their footing and fell when only half way up, and we are irresistibly reminded
of what we are told in Light on the Path , about “the perilous ladder which leads
to the path of life”.
No student of Theosophy will be surprised when discovering that, in ancient
Egypt, man was looked upon as composite; in fact he was definitely accounted
septenary, and we cannot understand the Egyptian belief in immortality, or the
relation between man and the gods, until we learn the full nature of man himself
as the Egyptians conceived it. As a matter of fact, this manifold and con¬
glomerate nature, hidden as it was by man’s single, outer appearance, was
very much the same as that of which we read in The Secret Doctrine and other
theosophical literature—only the names are different, and they sound strange
to us now. Each name had, of course, its definite connotation and its own
interpretative hieroglyph or group of hieroglyphs, giving the special definition
of the principle in question, descriptive of the idea back of the name. There are
several complications when endeavouring to make a fixed list of the human and
divine principles, this being largely due to the fact that during the thousands of
years through which Egypt passed, there were many introductions of new names
as of new ideas, which somewhat obscured the original conceptions—though
these were never really changed. “The Egyptian priests had forgotten much ,
they altered nothing ’, as Madame Blavatsky tells us. The following list may
therefore be suggested.
First there was the khat or physical body, the recognized vehicle in this visible
SEPTENARY MAN IN ANCIENT EGYPT
19
world for all the others, and represented by a group of hieroglyphs and the sign
of a man walking vigorously.
Then the kaybet or “shadow”, which played a very important part in all
ancient beliefs. Obviously the kaybet stood for the Linga Sarira, and the sign for
it was descriptive: a curious device like a small tent—something which cast a
protective shade; and the kaybet was so integral a part of man’s life on earth
that it was felt to be necessary, in the ritual, to sound a warning note for the
benefit of the deceased, cautioning him to be careful that the “Eater of the
Shadow” in the after-death state, did not put an end to the possibility of further
existence either on earth or in the “Fields of Yarn”—Paradise.
Sekhem was force—evidently Kama. The hieroglyphic sign was a particular
form of sceptre. Sekhem (Kama) was therefore looked upon as the ruling power
in the life of the average man. The literal translation of the word is “to have
the mastery over something”.
Ankh , the crux ansata (always the sign of Life) would represent Prana were
it not that it is used so much more in the universal sense (Jiva) that it is doubtful
if the Egyptian looked upon it as one of the component parts of septenary man.
The Universal Power, the One God, was behind all manifestation to the Egyptian.
In the case of Lower Manas there were two aspects—the Ba and the A b —
which it seems must be considered together as two parts of the one principle.
The Ba was essentially the more human part—the human soul able only with
difficulty to separate itself from life on earth, for it is shown as a small, human¬
headed bird with very appealing, tiny hands: the soul forced apart by death
from the body, but evidently reluctant to leave it, for it is often seen in papyri
and on stelae as a disconsolate and earth-bound little wanderer, clinging to the
mummy and evidently trying to re-enter and reanimate the dead body, though
sometimes also, the Ba’s less materialistic bias is represented as a free and happy
little creature, flitting about unhindered. The Ab (very familiar to us in the
famous Judgment Scene before Osiris) was known as the heart of the deceased,
and it may be considered as the will and intentions—the conscience , in fact. Or
it might be said that the Ba was the personification of Lower Manas, while the
Ab (more abstract) was the harvest resulting from the soul’s inner and outer
activities diming life. These two aspects undoubtedly represented the upward
and the downward tendencies of Lower Manas, and it is with the introduction
of the Osirian Judgment (which appears at this point) that the first suggestion
of duality shows itself.
It would be impossible to enter into all the intricacies of the great Judgment
Scene; volumes have been written about it, and it may be studied by anyone
wishing to do so—its symbolism, its significance, the religious ideas which it
portrays and all the rest. The Papyrus of Ani is one of the most celebrated in
this respect, and probably furnishes us with the best example that we have.
Suffice it to say that the human soul (the Ba and the Ab) of the man who has
just died and who is seeking “justification” for his deeds on earth, is conducted
by Anubis, “Opener of the Way”, before the Tribunal in the Hall of the “Two
Truttt^ or of “Double Justice”, the Hall where, after an indispensable ceremony,
20
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
the verdict either of redemption or of condemnation is pronounced. In the Hall
sits Osiris on his Throne, and behind him stand both Isis and Nephthis—again
duality. Also two lesser goddesses. In front of Osiris is a great balance—
scales composed of a long beam with two hanging pans in one of which the
heart (Ab) of the deceased is placed; in the other, the feather of Truth (Maat).
Anubis, holding the hand of the soul which is being brought to trial, stands at
the side of the scales where the heart is placed; at the other side stands Thoth
(Hermes), the Scribe of the gods, ready to enter the result of the trial on his
celestial tablets. Nearby crouches a strange and fearsome animal known as the
“Devourer” or the “Eater of the Dead”. This monster, with the head of a
crocodile, hind quarters of a hippopotamus and fore quarters of a lion with long,
sharp claws on its feet, turns its snout toward Osiris as though asking leave to
devour “him who comes from the earth”—the Lower Manas, that part of man
which is as yet “unjustified”. It would seem likely that this horrible creature is
intended to represent the Kama Rupa, eager to get complete and final possession
of the human soul. In the trial itself, the so-called “Negative Confession”
plays a prominent part, the deceased declaring himself guiltless of this, that or
the other sin. He appears in large measure to conduct his own defence, which
might seem to be an easy way out of his difficulties, but the heart (conscience)
must speak the truth when standing before Thoth who is Wisdom itself, and in
the sacred presence of Osiris. There is no chance of escape from the responsibil¬
ity for whatever sins have been committed. Then Anubis steps forward and tips
the scales to see what they will do. If they balance, the deceased is “justified”;
Osiris finds him Maa-kheru , “true of voice”; Thoth pronounces the magic words:
“His heart is Maat”, and the soul receives his heart back again: he is “glorified”
—fitted to pass on and again start the struggle upward from that point; while,
on the other hand, the “unjustified” dead are handed over to the “Devourer”,
which means complete annihilation—the final separation of the principles.
So we come to the dividing line (if we may so speak of it) in septenary man.
Having passed successfully through the Hall of Judgment, Lower Manas,
regenerated and purified, passes upward to blend with the immortal part of man’s
nature; it is at this point that true consciousness begins. The Ka evidently
belongs to the plane of Higher Manas, though there is a deep mystery connected
with it which has never been solved by Egyptologists, and which has caused much
speculation and confusion among them. The Ka has often been spoken of merely
as the “double” or “shadow”, suggesting the Linga S4rira. It is true that in
much of the funerary sculpture (tomb and temple bas reliefs) the soul of the
Pharaoh whose birth is being recorded, is shown with a strangely exact counter¬
part which has come into the world with him; a duplicate shape; an apparent
replica of the human body, so that the idea of the Linga S&rira—the astral
mould of man—is not without good reason. But at least in the early days,
when all religious beliefs were so sharply cut, it was the Pharaoh alone who was
represented with this “double”, besides which, the ritual, whence we generally
gather more information than we do from the sculpture, gives to the Ka a
significance, a power, which the theosophical conception of the Linga S&rira
SEPTENARY MAN IN ANCIENT EGYPT
would by no means warrant. The Ka was of supernatural origin—that is made
clear in all that is said of it. Moulded from the “deified substance” of the plane
to which it belonged, it had a life of its own, and it was only by attaining to the
sublime level of the Ka that man, consisting of the lower principles, could hope
to reach to divine life. The Ka was an individual entity, a kind of enduring
personality, and if a man lost his Ka (got separated from his Ka) he was counted
as dead. Speaking with more truth than he realized, Sayce writes: “Until
the person was bom, his Ka had no existence; while, on the other hand, it was
the Ka to which his existence was owed.” Give to this a spiritual interpretation,
and we have much light thrown on the meaning of the Ka. Once the Ka had
come into being, it was immortal; when the body died, the Ka continued to live
an independent existence, conscious and alive. The hieroglyphic sign for the
Ka was very significant: two upraised arms—upraised in adoration and worship.
While the Ka was composed of “deified substance”, the Akh was certainly
divine Intelligence—Buddhi; and perhaps even more than the Ka, was considered
to be a link between heaven and earth. It was represented by a tall crested
ibis, symbol of Thoth or divine Wisdom, and the word Akh itself meant “shin¬
ing”, “luminous”, “glorious”. It was the most distinctly spiritual of all the
principles of man save one, for the Akh, in its “robe of fire”, could mount to
heaven and become united with the gods. It was often to be seen on early
stelae carried within the aspiring arms of the Ka, as though together, blended,
these two principles could reach the final goal.
There remains something which was known as “the Abode of the gods”, an
all-inclusive principle which is given no specialized name. We are told little
that is definite about it, but it seems to have gathered together all the separate
principles, to have encompassed them, to have permeated them. It was, of
course, a state, not a place. It was Life. The object of man’s whole existence
had been to reach and dwell in this seventh principle—the place where dwelt
the gods; it was to this spiritual condition, this high state of consciousness that
he aspired; it was toward it that he had climbed the rough and perilous ladder
of Life; it was to it, his goal, that he had “ascended”.
Such seem to have been the divisions of septenary man, perhaps only dimly
apparent to the average student of Theosophy, certainly almost wholly dar^
and bewildering to most Egyptologists. It will hardly be supposed, howey
that the soul can have reached such a lofty state as this, without having pas
through many ascending grades of initiations. Needless to say that nowhere in
the ancient ritual now available to us. do we find any long and detailed accounts
of the greater initiation ceremonies—they would never be given to the world in
any such unveiled form. For one thing, they could be described only by those
who had passed through them, and this, of course, would never be done. No
one else would even dimly understand them. We have but the faintest glimpses
of them now, and even then, only in case we are on the alert to seize every hint
concerning them; we have echoes from time to time, but only if we are intently
filling. The ancient ritual brings them to our notice by almost undecipherable
alfl|ory, not otherwise. The soul must have become that which it seeks, before
22 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
it can comprehend or even recognize the pearl of great price when at last it is
found.
There is nothing, however, to prevent us of to-day from using such imagination
as we possess in endeavouring to decipher as much as we can of these most
ancient and obscure records of a past which reaches back almost beyond imagina¬
tion. We must realize, in the first place, that a description like the Osirian
Judgment Scene spoken of above, should be looked upon from two different
points of view: that it describes an after-death experience common to all
ordinary men—a lesser initiation that comes to every man who faces his own
soul at death; but that it also quite obviously points, though very guardedly, to
far higher ceremonies for those who can no longer be classed among the merely
average. All through the ritual of the Book of the Dead we come upon statements
which arrest our attention but which are, alas, too often beyond our grasp save
in a superficial way. Perhaps this is peculiarly so in the celebrated CXXVth
Chapter which is found complete in the Papyrus of Ani; or in such others as
“The Raising of the Akh”, or “Causing a Flame to Arise”, and so on indefinitely.
One can hardly open the Book of the Dead without coming upon some striking
phrase (among the, to us, many meaningless phrases) which seems to spring
from the page as something at least semi-comprehensible. To choose at random
among many: “My soul shall not be fettered to my body at the gate of death. I
shall enter in peace and I shall come forth in peace.” Yet most Egyptologists
declare that there is no evidence that the Egyptians believed in Reincarnation!
Or, evidently affirmed by a soul who has reached the point where he no longer
lives in time, but consciously lives in Eternity: “lam yesterday and to-morrow,
and I have gained the power to be born a second time.” But it is not only in the
Book of the Dead that we are conscious of the buried occult treasure, for there are
other, perhaps less well known works, and we have to try to do our own inter¬
preting, to the best of our poor abilities. In the Book of the Two Ways and the
Book of the Gates (the titles so reminiscent of the Voice of the Silence as to make
us eager to search for points of comparison) we are told of the fiery portals through
which the candidate for initiation must pass; of the sea of fire which must be
crossed, and of huge caverns (reminding us of the long subterranean passages
where, according to tradition, initiations were held)—passages or caverns where
lurked the terrible Apophis, “symbol of human passions” as The Secret Doctrine
tells us. These ordeals are of such a varied nature, and they are so manifold,
that we wonder how the candidate ever emerged alive. But we must read this
ritual for ourselves and make our own discoveries and deductions, piecing
together the fragments (a sentence here and a paragraph there), until the whole
becomes a little more intelligible to us.
For the clearest descriptive references that we can find concerning ancient
Egyptian initiations, their solemnity and severity, we must, as usual, turn to
The Secret Doctrine or to Isis Unveiled. Here Madame Blavatsky tells us (also
in fragments) of the initiations which took place within the Great Pyramid,
which, we are assured, was built for that very purpose. If we look up every
reference both to initiations and to Initiates, we shall find, as a result, an immense
SEPTENARY MAN IN ANCIENT EGYPT
23
amount of information, though, of course, so scattered as to require much
patience when endeavouring to make any kind of sequence. The hints we
have of the ceremonies are, however, graphic in the extreme, even though brief.
We are awed as we read. Among others, there is a beautiful description of the
candidate who, up to this point having successfully passed through all trials, is
laid (while plunged in a deep trance) upon a couch constructed in the form of the
Egyptian Tau (a form of the Cross), this in its turn being placed in the “baptismal
font”—the Sarcophagus in the “King’s Chamber”—and left there for two days.
During the night of the approaching third day, the candidate is carried on this
cruciform couch to the entrance of a gallery where, at a certain hour, the beams
of the rising sun strike full upon his face—the “Mystic Birth” has taken place,
and he himself rises “deified” in a new and imperishable resurrection body.
There are not a few Egyptian bas reliefs which eloquently picture this dramatic
moment. A particularly fine example of Amenhotep III (XVIIIth Dynasty)
comes to mind. Horns and Thoth, the two Hierophants, stand beside him pour¬
ing the Water of Life—the Water of Purification—over him, so that the two
streams, forming a cross above his head, fall upon his shoulders and into the
palms of his hands, while they cry: “Awake! Thy sufferings are allayed.
Stand up! Thou art triumphant. . . . The Great God speaks to thee.”
After which it is said in comment: “He drinks the running Water of the Stream
of Life; he shines like a star in the sky.” And referring to the indissoluble union
between the soul and its Master, are added the words: “Thou shalt traverse
Eternity with joy, and with the praise of thy God who is in thee.”
Hetep-en-Neter.
He who hath vanquished in thy name, 0 Lord , hath vanquished indeed. Yea,
there is a light about him; yea, there is a strength about him; for he lives not by
his own life, but by the uncreate life from Above . And as a bright star emeram
in the evening sky, even so he shall shine forth from the Sacred Land upon We
shadows of the unregenerate .— Book of the Ancient Days.
AN IMPERIAL HEREDITY
BAR, Emperor of India from 1556 to 1605, and one of the great rulers
of the world, had an heredity worthy of his achievements. It included
both of the two great Asiatic conquerors. He was seventh in the direct
male line from Timurlane, and, through his great-grandmother, was descended
from Genghis Khan as well. Where the hierarchical principle has not been
broken down and castes confused by democracy, it often happens that many
of the qualities which a man has won by his own efforts in former lives, are
transmitted to him by Karma, as of right his, through the physical heredity
of his new birth. Strictly speaking, it is not powers but tendencies that are
transmitted by heredity, tendencies which make the acquisition of particular
powers easy or difficult. It is the task of each man, of each soul, to train his
new instrument himself in each new incarnation. But there are times when
Karma can choose, for one who has earned it, a birth in which the hereditary
tendencies, the family tradition of honour, and the noble example of immediate
ancestors, are all in harmony with the task of his soul. As the Bhagavad Gita
says: “Such a birth in this world is hard to attain”. It would seem that
Akbar attained it. He had the warrior qualities of his great ancestors. He had
also the chivalry, the generosity to a beaten foe, the love of beauty, of justice,
and the personal fearlessness that were so marked in his grandfather Babur,
and to a less extent, in his father Humayun.
All true religions are warrior religions, and he who seeks to know the truth
and, consciously or unconsciously, to do the will of the Lodge in the world, has
need of the warrior spirit. Akbar gave his life to the search for truth and to the
effort to achieve a noble ideal. As a boy, he pictured an India no longer torn
by internal dissensions, petty kingdom warring against petty kingdom, race
fighting race, the adherents of the religion dominant for the moment persecut¬
ing those who did not believe as they did; but, in place of all this, an India at
peace, united under one Emperor as Overlord, yet with each race free to develop
its own genius under its own rulers, each man free to worship as his conscience
dictated, according the same tolerance to others that he asked for himself.
This fundamental theosophical ideal, Akbar achieved in large measure. Pos¬
sessed at the beginning of his reign of only a comer of the Punjab, at his death
he ruled India from sea to sea, from Kabul on the north to the Deccan on the
south. Where he ruled, there was justice, peace and tolerance. In Europe at
this same time, there were the religious wars, the Spanish Inquisition, and
the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day.
Akbar was great not only as a conqueror and administrator, but also as a
patron of science, art and literature. It is to him that India owes the transla¬
tion into the popular tongue of many Sanskrit works including the Atharva
Veda, the Ramdyana, the Mahabharata with the Bhagavad Gita, and many
24
AN IMPERIAL HEREDITY
25
others. Akbar showed his sense of humour by setting one of the most narrow¬
minded and bigoted Mahometans at his court, to translating the Bhagavad
Gita.
But to students of Theosophy, Akbar is especially interesting because the
passion of his life was not power or conquest, or even the accomplishment of
his dream for India; his passion was the search for religious truth. He sought
it all his life and in many ways. One of his methods suggested a Theosophical
Society Branch meeting. It cannot be without significance that Madame
Blavatsky included Akbar in the Theosophical Glossary, where one will look
in vain for most of the great rulers of the world. She does not mention Rameses,
Alexander, Caesar or Napoleon. Of Akbar, she writes:
“Akbar. The great Mogul Emperor of India, the famous patron of religions,
arts and sciences, the most liberal of all the Mussulman sovereigns. There
has never been a more tolerant or enlightened ruler than the Emperor Akbar,
either in India or in any other Mahometan country.”
When a man, at the instance of a vision, accomplishes great good in the
world, we may be sure that behind him was the hand of the Lodge. When to
that vision are added mystical experiences and a passionate longing for the
truth, a longing as of a man seeking a treasure he has once had and lost, or of
an exile yearning for his home, we may wonder if it is not the memory of a
real connection with the Lodge that has been trying to break through to his
consciousness. “By their fruits.” Akbar accomplished great good. Perhaps
he was a ch£la who, before he incarnated, deliberately gave up the conscious¬
ness of his Lodge connection that he might do his work in the world. Perhaps
that consciousness was in some measure regained before his death. Perhaps,
on the other hand, the conscious agent of the Lodge was not Akbar, but one
who stood back of him, possibly unknown to history, yet guiding and inspiring
him.
Akbar’s heredity is interesting, not only for the light it throws on his quali¬
ties, but even more for the many splendid instances of courage, perseverance
and self-sacrifice to be found in the annals of his ancestors.* His grandfather,
Babur, “the lion”, is one of the most fascinating, recklessly courageous and
joyously romantic warrior princes in history. Babur began his career of con¬
quest when eleven years old, the accidental death of his father in a landslide
leaving him sovereign of the tiny kingdom of Ferghana, famed for the lovel^
beauty of its valleys and the speed and strength of its horses. Immediately on
hearing of the death of his father, Babur sprang to the saddle to take over the
defence of his kingdom from three invading armies. The sword he drew then
was seldom out of his hand throughout the rest of his life. He had been brought
up on stories of his great ancestor, Timurlane, and, as a boy, dreamed of re¬
capturing his capital, Samarcand, then one of the great cities of Asia, and
establishing himself there on Timurlane’s throne. There was no law of primo¬
geniture among the Mahometans, and most of the descendants of Timurlane
seem to have felt that they were by right entitled to any part of his vast empire
thd^fiey could take and hold. Before Babur was fifteen, he assembled an army
26
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
and took Samarcand, but could only hold it for a hundred days and then lost
it, at which, boy as he was, he confesses he “could not help crying a good deal”.
That mood did not last long. Two days after his defeat, he was challenging
one of his officers to a horse race.
Subsequently, mainly as a result of an acute illness at a critical moment,
Babur lost his own kingdom of Ferghana, and was for some years a fugitive,
hiding among the loyal shepherds of his wild native hills. He did not cry then.
They were an indomitable race, the house of Timur, ever wringing victory from
what seemed hopeless defeat. Learning that the Uzbek ruler of Samarcand
had left it on an expedition, Babur resolved on a bold stroke. With only two
hundred and forty men, he made a dash for the city, scaled the walls in a sur¬
prise attack at night, overpowered the garrison, and by boldness and rapidity
gave the citizens the impression that he was at the head of a large army. They
declared for him, and he maintained himself there against all attacks for nearly
a year. Then once more he had to fly, and became a homeless fugitive, often
in such dire poverty that even his servants had to leave him, not from disloyalty
but from absolute hunger. After several years of adventurous wandering, he
saw his chance, assembled a force, swooped down on Kabul, took it, and es¬
tablished himself as King. This was in 1504, when Babur, in spite of adventures
enough to fill a long life, was not yet twenty-three years old.
We cannot follow him through the vicissitudes of the next twenty-two years.
They were many. He escaped alone from a mutinous army bent on his death;
he was left in the face of a powerful insurrection with but five hundred loyal
troops, and only saved his kingdom by his speed of action, brilliant generalship
and personal intrepidity. He retook Samarcand, only to lose it for the third
time. Then he turned to India, took Delhi and established himself as Emperor
there—not without homesick longing for the cool hills and lovely vales of his
native Ferghana. Warrior as he was, he loved beauty passionately. “This
hardy soldier, this marvellous fighter, who swims every river he comes across
astonishes us by his singular sensibility. A man could win his heart by his love
of poetry as surely as by his swordsmanship. Was he flying from his enemies
in bitter weather with a handful of followers? He would compose a few coup¬
lets as he rode, and his spirit revived as by magic. But it was his intense delight
in the beauty of the world which made so large a part of his unquenchable
zest in life. Was ever such a lover of flowers? His first thought in a newly
acquired territory was to make a garden, himself superintending the dispo¬
sition of the beds and the leading of fresh runnels of water among them.” 1
His favorite poetry was that of the Sufi mystics.
As a soldier, Babur was absolutely fearless, almost to the point of reckless¬
ness, swift and resolute in decision and action, a strict disciplinarian, loyal to
his friends, generous and chivalrous to a beaten foe. It was in gratitude for
the courtesy and consideration with which she and her family had been treated,
that the widow of a fallen Rajput chieftain presented Babur’s son, Humayun,
with the famous Koh-i-Nur diamond. His chivalry was not always so requited.
• Akbar, Binyon, page 27.
AN IMPERIAL HEREDITY
27
After the conquest of Agra, Babur acted toward the widowed queen of his beaten
foe with the utmost respect, and, with princely generosity, assigned her a special
palace and revenues of $350,000 a year. In return, through bribing his cook,
she very nearly succeeded in an effort to poison him.
Together with the splendid qualities that Babur transmitted to his descend¬
ants, there was one that was to cost India dear, and that almost cost Babur
his empire,—a tendency to drink to excess. Babur was always master of him¬
self in a crisis, but that was not true of some of his descendants. His son
Humayun was reported to have been at times addicted to opium, which may
have accounted in part for the loss of his kingdom. Akbar fought and con¬
quered the family failing in himself, but it reappeared again in his sons and
grandsons, with tragic consequences. Babur himself yielded to it a few days
before the critical battle that was to decide whether Rajput or Moghul was
to be master of India. Weary of waiting for the Rajput army to attack, he
spent several days drinking in his tent. An Afghan astrologer took the oppor¬
tunity to go up and down throughout the army, assuring the superstitious soldiers
that the omens were most unpropitious, and that defeat was sure. A large
number of desertions followed and the morale of the entire army was shaken.
Babur aroused himself. He says in his Memoirs that he had always resolved
“one time or another, to make an effectual repentance”. He had a deep faith,
and he determined to deserve help from Heaven by renouncing his besetting
sin. As he himself records it:
I said to myself, “O, my soul
(Persian verse)
How long wilt thou continue to take pleasure in sin?
Repentance is not unpalatable—taste it.
(Turki verse)
How great has been thy defilement from sin!
How much pleasure thou didst take in despair!
How long hast thou been the slave of thy passions!
How much of thy life hast thou thrown away!
Since thou hast set out on a holy war,
Thou hast seen death before thine eyes for thy salvation.
He who resolves to sacrifice his life to save himself
Shall attain that exalted state which thou knowest.
Keep thyself far away from all forbidden enjoyments;
Cleanse thyself from all thy sins.”
Having withdrawn myself from such temptation, I vowed never more to drink wine.
Having sent for the gold and silver goblets and cups, with all the other utensils used f^
drinking parties, I directed them to he broken, and renounced the use of wine, purify!^
my mind. The fragments of the goblets and other utensils of gold and silver I directed
to be divided among the dervishes and the poor . 2
In connection with what Babur says of purifying his mind, it is worth noting
''that, soldier of fortune and occasional hard drinker though he was, he never
permitted the slightest approach to grossness in the conversation of those
about him.
* Memoirs of Babur, p. 354.
28
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
Thereafter, observing the universal discouragement and want of spirit in
his troops, Babur called an assembly of all his Amirs and officers and addressed
them:
Noblemen and soldiers! Every man that comes into the world is subject to dissolu¬
tion. When we are passed away and gone, God alone survives unchangeable.
Whoever comes to the feast of Life, must, before it is over, drink from the cup of Death.
He who arrives at the inn of Mortality must one day inevitably take his departure from
that house of sorrow—the world. How much better it is to die with honour than to live
with infamy!
With fame, even if I die, I am contented. Let fame be mine since my body is Death’s.
The Most High God has been propitious to us and has now placed us in such a crisis that
if we fall in the field, we die the death of martyrs; if we survive we rise victorious, the
avengers of the cause of God. Let us, then, with one accord, swear on God’s holy word,
that none of us will even think of turning his face from this warfare, nor desert from the
battle and slaughter that ensues, till his soul is separated from his body.
The spirit aroused in the army by this speech contributed much towards the
victory that followed.
The two armies met at Kanua a few days later, March 16th, 1527, in a battle
that ended all hope of Rajput supremacy in India. The reckless courage and
dash of the Rajput cavalry could not make up for their lack of fire-arms. Ba¬
bur’s artillery decimated their ranks and so reduced their numbers that at the
close of the day they could not stand against the charge of Moghul horsemen
led by Babur himself. 3 The rout that followed broke the power of the Rajput
confederacy and left Babur without a serious rival. One is tempted to wonder
what India would be to-day had the victory turned the other way, and Rajput
rule been established under the supremacy of the Sesodia Princes of Mewar.
The Sesodia are the oldest ruling family in the world, tracing their descent
from Rama himself, and with a marvellous record of heroism and chivalry
behind them. They still rule their ancient state, amazing visiting Englishmen
by their charm and “divine manners”.
Babur had a deep faith in God and a firm conviction of the efficacy of prayer
when accompanied by self-sacrifice. Three years after the victory of Kanua,
his eldest and deeply loved son, Humayun, was suddenly taken desperately
ill, with high fever and other symptoms that forced the royal physicians to
report that there was no hope for his life. Babur’s own health must have been
magnificent. Only a few weeks before, though not pressed for time, he had
ridden one hundred and sixty miles in two days, swimming the Ganges twice
on the way, just for the joy of living. On hearing the physicians’ report, he
instantly resolved to offer his own life in place of his son’s. The few among his
friends who knew of his purpose, urged him to offer the great Koh-i-Nur dia¬
mond instead, but he brushed them aside, saying: “Can any stone be weighed
against the life of my son? I will pay with my own.”
Going to his son’s bedside, he walked three times around the bed, prayed
with passionate intensity, and then, his face radiant with joy, cried to those
present: “I have borne it away. I have borne it away”.
1 Todd (Annals of Rajasthan, p. 356) says the Rajput defeat was due to the treachery of one of the Rajput
leaders.
AN IMPERIAL HEREDITY
29
Whatever modem materialism may say, the historic fact is indisputable
that Humayun’s illness took a marvellous turn for the better and that within
a few hours he was pronounced out of danger. As he regained his strength,
Babur sickened and, a few months later, died.
What a splendid addition that incident makes to the annals of heroism!
This fearless, chivalrous warrior, still in the prime of manhood, full of the zest
of living, a passionate lover of beauty, whether in nature, art or poetry, a lover,
too, of courage, of danger and adventure, with the sceptre of India in his hand,
its wealth and power at his feet, with everything to live for, deliberately giving
his life for the son he loved, and giving it with gladness and enthusiasm. His
own view of death, he had written in his diary some years before: “To die with
friends is a nuptial”.
The episode that led to his quoting that proverb is so characteristic that it
is worth repeating. Babur and his escort, while crossing a high mountain
pass, had been caught in a violent blizzard accompanied by extreme cold. Some
of the party discovered a small cave, capable of holding a few men, and took
shelter there from the terrible wind, begging the Emperor to join them. He
refused, for he never willingly let his men endure hardships that he did not
share, a fact that had much to do with the splendid discipline in his armies.
Subsequently he wrote in his diary:
I did not go into the cave because this was in my mind: some of my men in snow
and storm, I in the comfort of a warm house! the whole horde outside in misery, I
inside sleeping at ease; that would be far from a man’s act, quite another matter than
comradeship. What strong men stand, I will stand; for, as the Persian proverb says,
to die with friends is a nuptial . 4
Babur died before he had had time to consolidate his power, leaving a task
of great difficulty to his son. He further increased that difficulty by his dying
injunction to Humayun to take no drastic Action against his brothers, “even
though they deserve it”. Humayun, generous and loyal, carried out his prom¬
ise, to his great cost, as long as it was humanly possible. He had many of Ba¬
bur’s fine qualities, but lacked his energy and swift decision. We have already
noted the report that he was at times addicted to the use of opium. It must
have been only at times, for there were long periods in his life when he showed
the fortitude in adversity, the heroic courage, the refusal to accept defeats
final, that was so characteristic of his father. He had, too, his father’s chi^fv.
An instance of this, indicating his ability to understand and enter into the
Rajput chivalric customs—an ability which Akbar shared and which proved of
immense value to him—is worth narrating.
Babur’s chief antagonist at the battle of Kanua had been the Sesodia Prince,
Singram Sing, Ruler of Mewar, so that Humayun had little cause to love the
Sesodias. The great losses of the Rajputs at Kanua had seriously weakened
Mewar. It was invaded by the King of Gujarat, who, possessed of artillery
served by Portuguese artillerymen, had already conquered the neighbouring
state of M alwa, and hoped to add Mewar to his kingdom. Singram Sing had
^^'aRfant of India, Waley. p. 237.
30
THE0S0PHICAL QUARTERLY
died soon after the defeat of Kanua. His widow, Queen Kumavati, brave,
clear-sighted and resourceful, like so many of the Rajput women, determined
to appeal to the generosity of Humayun. He was the son of her husband's
great foe, but brave men respect each other. 6 There is an old custom in Rajput
chivalry under which any Rajputni, maiden, wife or widow, may, in time of
peril, send her bracelet to her chosen cavalier, who, if he accept it, thereupon
becomes her “bracelet-bound brother”, bound to go to her assistance or forfeit
his honour. No breath of scandal ever touches this relationship. The cavalier
neither expects nor receives any reward; he may not even see the object of his
chivalrous devotion, in whose aid he risks or perhaps gives his life. Yet no
honour was more coveted by the Rajput noble than that of the bracelet.
Kumavati sent her bracelet to Humayun, who received it with every mani¬
festation of pride in her trust, and returned word that henceforth he was
pledged to her service. Meanwhile the armies of Gujarat had closed around
Chitor, capital of Mewar. Humayun assembled an army and hastened to its
relief. Unfortunately, before he could reach it, the walls were breached by
the Gujarat artillery and the capture of the city the next day was seen to be
inevitable. Kumavati led thirteen thousand Rajput women in slow procession
into a vast vault filled with gunpowder, and set it alight; the few remaining
Rajput warriors threw open the gates and charged into the foe, to die, sword
in hand, to the last man. For the second time in its history, an invading army
entering Chitor, found it a silent city of the dead.
Humayun was too late to save Kumavati, his sister of the bracelet, but,
true to his pledge, he drove out the invaders and re-established Kumavati’s
young son on the throne of his fathers, where his descendants rule to this day.
It would be interesting to know the real origin of the custom of the bracelet.
The chivalric codes may well have been founded by the Lodge itself, to train
men in selfless devotion to an ideal. When a man has once gained the power of
such selfless devotion, it can then be turned and given to his Master, to whom
it belongs. Devotion to a woman is one of the powerful forces that move men,
and when purified of self and of all desire for any return, would be a step in
preparation for chSlaship. There were somewhat similar customs in Provence
when chivalry was at its height but, unfortunately, there they seem to have
degenerated rapidly. In Rajputana they remained pure.
Humayun’s position in India was greatly weakened by the disloyalty of
his brothers, so much so that, in 1540, ten years after his accession to the throne,
he was overwhelmingly defeated by the Pathan, Sher Shah, and, with only a
few faithful followers, had to flee northward to the desert, hotly pursued by
his enemies. For nearly a year he went from petty chieftain to petty chieftain,
sheltered for a time and then forced to resume his flight by threatened treachery
or by the approach of his enemies. His misfortune was not without its com¬
pensation, for early in this period he met Hamida, the noble-minded and beauti-
ful daughte r of a Persian teacher of religion. She was only fourteen and her
6 Rana Singram Sing,
of one leg. and counted
Vol. 1. p. 358).
Kumavati’s husband, had lost in battle at one time or another, one eye, one arm, the use
eighty sword or lance wounds in various parts of his body ( Annals of Rajasthan, Todd.
AN IMPERIAL HEREDITY
3i
parents had regarded her as still too young to veil her face. It probably seemed
an unimportant decision to them, but it affected the destiny of all India, for her
unveiled beauty enraptured Humayun. He asked for her hand. Hamida’s
father was at first strongly opposed to his lovely daughter’s marrying a land¬
less fugitive, but it was a case of love at first sight on both sides, and in a few
days they were married. From that time, Hamida, who was to be Akbar’s
mother, accompanied Humayun in his exile. It was a very happy marriage,
for Hamida’s nobility of character was as marked as her beauty. Two or
three months before the birth of Akbar, word was brought to Humayun, in the
middle of the night, of the approach of a hostile body of cavalry intent on his
capture. Hurriedly mounting Hamida and the few faithful adherents left him,
on such horses or camels as could be found, they fled toward the desert. The
pursuit was so hot that Humayun’s horse dropped dead from exhaustion. He
mounted a camel until one of his followers, taking his own mother’s horse,
gave it to the king, and, placing his mother upon the camel, ran himself there¬
after beside her on foot.
Humayun, mounted once more, sent the women of the party on ahead, and
turned back himself with all who were able to fight, so as to delay the pursuit.
In the darkness the two forces missed each other. In the morning, a group
of twenty of Humayun’s men fell in with a much larger body of the enemy.
They attacked with reckless courage and succeeded in killing the leader of the
pursuers. The rest fled. Humayun rejoined his party and continued across
the desert. The water holes they had counted on were dry, and for four days
they suffered terribly from thirst and intense heat. Some died and others went
mad. During all this period, Hamida said not a word of her own anguish,
but showed the utmost solicitude fpr the suffering of the other members of the
party. They finally reached Amercote where the Rajah received them with
all the courtesy due a sovereign. There, two or three months later, on Novem¬
ber 23rd, 1542, Hamida gave birth to Akbar. He was first named “The full
moon of religion”, Badru-d din, but this subsequently became Jalalu-d din
Muhammad Akbar, the name by which he is known to history,—Jalalu-d din
meaning, “The splendour of religion”.
It was customary for a ruler, on the birth of an heir, to distribute rich gifts
to his officers. Humayun had nothing to give, so he sent for a pod of musW
broke it and distributed a few seeds to each of his officers, saying: “This isWl
the present I can afford to make you on the birth of my son, whose fame will,
I trust, be one day expanded over the world, as the perfume of this musk now
fills this room.”
The vicissitudes of Humayun’s fortunes during the next twelve years sup¬
plied the growing Akbar with the same invaluable training through adversity,
constant peril and warfare, that fate had given to his father and his grandfather.
Humayun was alternately king and fugitive. He took and lost, and retook
and lost again, city after city. The child Akbar was twice captured by his
enemies. The first time, when Akbar was scarcely a year old, Humayun was
st^Jenly attacked by one of his brothers with a greatly superior force. With
32
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
only forty men, and so short of horses that he had to take Hamida behind
him on his own steed, Humayun just succeeded in escaping to the mountains.
Akbar was captured and sent to Kandahar, where his aunt took excellent care
of him, until, a year or so later, Humayun returned at the head of an army
and recovered both the city and his son. He was captured again a few years
afterwards when, during Humayun’s absence, the city of Kabul was seized
by Camran, another brother of Humayun, in a surprise attack. When
Humayun returned and laid siege to the city, Akbar was deliberately exposed
on the ramparts in the line of Humayun’s artillery fire. Needless to say, the
artillery fire was stopped, but the city was taken without its aid, and Akbar
was restored to his father.
In spite of his reverses, Humayun, with his father Babur’s indomitable re¬
fusal to accept defeat as final, found himself, after twelve years of fighting, in
a position to invade India in the hope of recovering the throne that had been
his father’s and his own. Akbar, though only twelve, was of the age at which
his grandfather had successfully defended his kingdom of Ferghana, and was
now an experienced warrior. The Pathans outnumbered the Moghuls by
more than four to one, but Humayun was fortunate in having a very able
general, Bairam Khan, whose skilful generalship, and the impetuous courage
of the boy Akbar, who, with Bairam, led the final charge of Moghul cavalry,
gained a decisive victory; whereupon Humayun re-entered Delhi in triumph
as Emperor.
He did not live to enjoy his triumph long. About six months after his victory,
in January, 1556, he started to descend the outside stairway from his tower
library, where he had been reading, for he was a cultured scholar as well as a
soldier. The call to prayer sounded and Humayun paused to pray. On rising,
he slipped on the marble steps and fell some twenty feet to the ground. He
died in a few days from his injuries, and Akbar, at only thirteen, came into his
inheritance.
J. F. B. Mitchell.
The law of nature is, Do the thing, and you shall have the power; but they who
do not the thing have not the power .— Emerson.
THEOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS
I T was a young friend, fresh from graduate studies in a big university, who
began it. “You Theosophists are as dogmatic as the Roman Catholics;
you swallow uncritically everything ever written by Blavatsky or Judge
or the Quarterly contributors, as if they were the only people in the world
who ever knew anything.”
The attack was so sudden and unexpected that his hearer gasped. Thrown
off his guard and unable for a moment to rally his scattered wits, he began a
feeble defence: . . . must not confuse individual opinions with official pro¬
nouncements . . . imperfect exponents of Theosophy like himself ... re¬
grets for occasions when, in the heat of argument, he had departed from his
ideal and had tried to force a point of view. . . .
But his foe was scornful of such subterfuges and advanced to the charge
with a final withering remark: “It isn’t you I’m talking about; it is the atti¬
tude of all the members of the Society. I despise that Quarterly.”
Well, well, this was getting interesting with a vengeance, and the victim,
upon whose head the storm had descended, began to pluck up courage and
crawl out from the debris. He had had the awful feeling that ignorance and
an undisciplined tongue might have misinterpreted and betrayed his Cause,
but now he found himself regarded as a worthy exemplar of an unworthy
Movement, saturated with its faults of dogmatism, tarred with the same brush,
fit only to be excluded from the society of the learned and cultured and
critical.
So the young man took himself off, evidently distressed that one whose
earlier years had given some small promise of individual accomplishment,
should have surrendered his birthright of free opinion to H.P.B., and weakly
accepted the dogmas of Theosophy.
The incident has its grimly amusing side, but behind its superficial humour
there stands a challenge, not to our self-justification, but to our understanding.
What lay back of this man’s explosion? He was no fool; on the contrary he
was outstanding in his keen intellect and his sincere, though often extreme,
expressions of opinions. Neither was he ignorant of theosophic teaching; he^
had, in fact, at one time spoken of joining the Society. Fearless, intuitive,
possessing a keen though mordant humour, a man of literary talent—what
had he found in the Quarterly and in other theosophical writings to incense
and antagonize him, and to lead to the criticism which he voiced?
If this were an isolated instance we might pass it off lightly as the explosion
of a muddled mind impatient with the seeming paradoxes and subtilties of
metaphysical Theosophy, but, far from being exceptional, it voices the opinion
of the greater part of the scholarly world toward Theosophy and The Theo-
soplucal Society. But the instance is not completely typical, and therein lies
33
34
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
its significance and value to us. In fact it rises from a much higher level than
the ordinary stupid, ignorant hostility with which we are so wearyingly famil¬
iar, and is a reaction with which every perfectionist system, whether Roman
Catholic monasticism or ethical Theosophy, must often deal.
For the moment, however, we shall overlook the emotional aspect of the
criticism levelled at us by our friend, though we are well aware that when
passion comes in at the door, reason flies out of the window. We shall assume
that it is the outcome of an unprejudiced analysis and a dispassionate study,
and shall examine the imputation that Theosophy is a dogmatic teaching. It
is an old charge and one which has, again and again, been dealt with in these
pages, but whose disproof seems to be a necessary cyclic phenomenon.
Dogma is defined by Webster as: A doctrine or body of doctrines of the¬
ology and religion formally stated and authoritatively proclaimed by a church
or sect, especially the Roman Catholic sect; while the Standard Dictionary
says: Doctrine asserted and adopted on authority as distinguished from that
which is the result of one’s reasoning or experience.
We must suppose that the amazing attitude toward truth implied in these
definitions is really held by intelligent people, inconceivable as it may be to us.
For we believe that it is through the method of science and not through dogma
that man attains knowledge, and the method of science is the method of
Theosophy.
Few scientists and fewer laymen concern themselves with basic principles,
and, in consequence, ignorance and confusion are widespread as to the char¬
acter of the scientific field, the scientific method, and the nature of scientific
truth. The scientific field can be quickly delimited: in practice it is the field
which can be contacted by the five senses, and the careful scientist suspends
judgment regarding everything which transcends this sort of exploration. The
scientific method is the method of research whereby, faced with a problem,
one previsions a possible solution, sets his senses, mind and will to the acqui¬
sition of data which conduce to establish or nullify his suspicion, and finally
formulates his conclusions into a generalization which may serve as a guide to
further research. Such is the process through which all scientific advance is
accomplished, whether it be a demonstration of the constitution of the sun’s
corona, or the structural formula of benzine. In every instance where the
problem takes the investigator outside the field of immediate sensuous con¬
tacts, and where delicately devised instruments must be employed to detect
what the grosser human senses fail to record immediately, the validity of the
explanation is largely proportional to the number of independent lines of evi¬
dence which converge toward a single point. Scientific truth, then, is never
absolute in the sense implied by the word “dogma”. All scientific knowledge
is tentative, and a hypothesis, a theory, and a law, differ only in the relative
amounts of evidential logic which may be marshalled in their support, and not
at all in kind. If we aver that “seeing is believing”, it is only because we are
seeing-animals, and rather naively prejudiced toward that particular form of
testimony. In strictness we ought rather to say: “I see it, therefore it is not
THEOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS
35
so.” Indeed, apart from all epistemological theories, we know that in very
truth, when put to the proof, we reject the testimony of the senses in favour
of reason and logic. Though the sun “rises and sets” in every language, and
though it “moves south in winter and north in summer”, our reason accepts
alternative explanations which directly counter the assertion of the senses to
the contrary. Yet this which we accept so easily—this “fact” of diurnal rota¬
tion or of annual revolution about the sun—involves no small amount of care¬
ful observation and difficult inductive reasoning. It is the logical outcome of
numerous lines of converging argument, and it most easily and satisfactorily
explains a certain set of physical phenomena. This, and no more, is what we
mean by a scientific explanation. The solution is provisional, correct so far as
it covers the known facts, but liable to be superseded to-morrow by an ex¬
planation given in terms of deeper knowledge. Indeed we are in the very
midst of a scientific revolution which calls in question much of the older phys¬
ics and reinterprets physical facts in terms of more recondite modes of exist¬
ence. The Newtonian laws still hold upon their own plane—the plane of 3-
space and time, from the study of whose seemingly invariable processes they
were formulated; but the newer principles, relating to a superior plane, reveal
more truly the nature of the laws themselves.
But does any man with the normal amount of brains accept as dogma, or
as “assertion on authority”, the statement that the earth circles the sun an-
ually? No! We repeat that the statement is a tentative solution of a certain
problem toward which the available lines of argument appear to converge.
The element of faith enters into the system of science as it enters into the
system of dogma. The scientist has complete faith in the integrity—the “in¬
fallibility” if we will—of the natural order: he believes that nature plays,
square. Moreover he has faith in his predecessors as honest men who, never¬
theless, were subject to errors of judgment and may have gone seriously awry
in their interpretations of nature. A biologist who discovers living organisms
in a supposedly sterile flask of culture media, will not generally jump to the
rash conclusion that he has disproved the work of Pasteur and Tyndall; rather
he will look for a crack in the glass, or a loose cotton plug. Yet, on the con¬
trary, there still remains the possibility that Pasteur and Tyndall were wrong,
and that under exceptional conditions spontaneous generation might occur^
Had Clerk-Maxwell’s impenetrable atom been accepted as “infallibly iu^
penetrable”, it would never have been smashed.
The dogmatist, on the other hand, gives his faith not only to the revelation
of truth through nature, but places it likewise and in the same supreme degree
in the human mediator who enunciates the truth. This attitude, so it seems
to science, is irrational and utterly unwarranted by historical experience.
Dogma has been overthrown time and time again and has been forced to re¬
treat before the advance of rational thought.
The tendency to dogmatize seems to be inherent in human beings, who like
to arrogate to themselves the attributes of the Absolute. Scientists are no
moreiree from the vice than are the theologians whom they often criticize so
36
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
severely, though they have less cloak for their sin. For, in theory, the scientist
repudiates dogma as a vice while the theologian extremist clings to it as a
virtue.
The method of science outlined above is the precise method of Theosophy
in those reaches at least which are accessible to ordinary powers. If this re¬
mark be attributed to the writer’s “dogmatism”, the possible critic can at
least give him the benefit of the doubt. He has been a member of The Theo-
sophical Society for nearly a quarter of a century; he has read most of its liter¬
ature; he is not wholly unfamiliar with its earlier expressions in history.
Speaking in the same critical sense with which he would review a work on
“Protoplasm” or “A History of Science”, he avers that any man who accuses
The Theosophical Society, whose organ is the Theosophical Quarterly, of
dogmatic teaching, is ignorant of the Society and its real teaching, is using
words loosely, or is either unconsciously or consciously dishonest. For many
years the writer, a teacher of science, has made but one distinction between
the two disciplines, and this distinction, a purely arbitrary and artificial one,
is too tenuous to be maintained in practice. Physical science, as its name im¬
plies, deals only with physical things, while Theosophy carries its investigations
outside the physical world. But the limitation of physical science which rests
upon unfortunate historical misconceptions, is neither rational nor tenable.
Modem research has been forced to overpass it, and, in so doing, has swept
aside the last small difference which separates science from that aspect of
Theosophy which is “the investigation of the unexplained laws of nature”.
The reservation should be noted. Theosophy is more than an extension of
science, just as life includes more than the activity of the intellect, and it may
be that in the realm of the “more” lies all that is of ultimate value to the race.
We have been told that Theosophy is an ancient system, and our own stud¬
ies of ancient writings have confirmed the fact; that its principles were, in the
first instance, wrested from nature by the severest sort of experimental meth¬
ods and often at the cost of the lives of the researchers. It is evident that they
were formulated with algebraic brevity and precision by minds of no mean
order of intelligence, and were given freely to younger students as guides to the
solution of this highly complex world-problem. Such students, with the same
quality of faith in their predecessors as young scientists have in Newton, Dar¬
win, Huxley, or in their immediate professor of chemistry, physics or biology,
discovered that the principles “worked”, and that within the area where one
could test them deductively, they explained the facts of the world and of man
better than any other known hypotheses. Thus generation after generation added
its contribution to the mighty structure reared by those who preceded them.
They came to know that the “head” of Theosophy cannot be separated from
its heart and its hand , and so, in good time, they came, perchance, to the
fulness of the stature of men. But all this is only the attainment of truth
through scientific research and the application of discovery to life with a kind
of unshrinking integrity.
As to the transcendental levels of experience to which Theosophy points,
THEOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS
37
and to whose reality we may be incapable as yet of offering either positive or
negative judgment, we shall be unworthy the name of scientists if we set aside
the positive testimony of so many honest men of the past, and try to make all
possible experience conform to the littleness of our own minds and hearts.
Dogma lies in denial as well as in affirmation, and in so far as men rashly deny
the possibility of sure experience in supersensuous regions, their agnosticism
counts not a feather’s weight in the face of logic and the mighty testimony of
history.
Thus far we have taken our critic’s imputation of dogma at its face value.
We have regarded it as an outcome of honest confusion which might be cleared
away by patient explanation. Yet we know very well that our well-inten¬
tioned effort will avail nothing. For in truth we are dealing, not with honest
confusion, but with an emotional and irrational prejudice which blinds the
mind, submerges the sense of justice, and leads to unconscious dishonesty.
To that far more serious aspect of the matter we shall now turn our attention.
The university trained man is exposed to an unfortunate environment which
tends to cultivate and enhance the very qualities which are most inimical to
sound judgment. For though widely proclaimed as the ideal of scholarship,
dispassionate investigation is more honoured in the breach than in the observ¬
ance. The virtues of sincerity and intellectual integrity are swept away on a
tide of unworthy emotions, so that academic criticisms become notoriously
and deplorably unfair, and provoke endless recriminations. The latest contri¬
bution to knowledge, all too often rushed into print to push its author and its
school into prominence, is scanned for its errors rather than its truths, and
though the hard-working editors of the learned journals do their best to keep
from their pages the most glaring instances of childishness and insolence,
which, allowed to stand, might well involve them in slander suits, their vigi¬
lance is not always sufficient to keep out sentences which reveal the temper of
the contributors. In private conversation, with the censor absent, the un¬
adorned wretchedness of the situation is revealed in its true colours. Scandal
and malicious gossip are rife among “intellectuals”, and one soon learns that
the fair-fronted college catalogue and the learned journal are veritable whited
sepulchres.
The effect of this tainted atmosphere on a man of mediocre abilities is
terly pernicious. He becomes a fawning hypocrite and time-server in his own
camp, and a cowardly assassin of decent people who differ from him. This is
the sort of jackal which hounded H.P.B. and which continues to snap at Theos¬
ophy. The Quarterly, for instance, challenges his vanity and that of his
masters on all the levels accessible to them. The theosophical metaphysics
suggests experience of a realm to which his kind pronounces entrance impos¬
sible; it holds up an absolute code of truth and right when he has returned a
verdict in favour of the more convenient doctrine of the relativity of stand¬
ards; it shows irritating evidence of insight into the weakness and illogicality
of^is position; it speaks unwelcome and homely truths which he regards as a
standing affront. Unable to meet the challenge honestly, he resorts to the
3»
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
contemptible subterfuges of his kind—dogmatic denial of facts, ridicule, ma¬
licious slander, hypocritical deprecation and charges of plagiarism. Yet in
these charges, though he little suspects it, he only exposes the shame of his own
nature and his incapacity either to appreciate or to understand that which
is true and noble. Blind to substance, he judges only by form, and sets the
counterfeiter and mountebank higher than the honest workman. How should
he be able to understand that the articles in the Quarterly are the offerings
of souls upon the altar. Simple or profound, springing from the shallows of
knowledge or from the depths of great experience, clothed in homespun speech
or in the sweet majesty of royal English prose, their quality removes them
from his ken. They threaten the very foundations of his existence and he fears
and hates them as the criminal fears and hates the secular law.
The men and women who write for the Quarterly make no claim to high
scholarship or stylistic graces, yet we venture to say that writing neither for
display nor profit nor fame, but only with an earnest desire to set forth fit¬
tingly the beauty of that fragment of truth which they have perceived, their
work will still live when the scholarly treatises and doctoral theses will have
crumbled to dust. Heaven and earth have different standards of values, and
immortal life is of the substance, not the form. The Scribes and Pharisees
were learned doctors in their day, but they were not asked to record the New
Testament.
Now our young friend who despises “that Quarterly” is not of this breed
of wasters and time-servers, for, paradoxical as it may appear, he is an excel¬
lent theosophist temporarily in difficulties through colliding with a principle
which Light on the Path puts in these words: “For these vices of the ordinary
man pass through a subtle transformation and reappear with changed aspect
in the heart of the disciple.” His eyes are wide open to the unhappy nature
of the university world. Saturated with the substance as well as the form of
the great masters of English literature, he dashes into battle prepared to strike
masterful blows for the glory of the faith which they upheld so valorously.
A creative and meteoric soul, his erratic passage deflates successfully a con¬
siderable number of academic windbags to the discomfiture of officialdom,
throws the social instruments out of adjustment, and leaves a long trail of
smouldering resentments in its wake.
Let us suppose that our gay young blade—this flail in the hands of the Lord
—runs up against the Theosophical Quarterly. Insensibly he has been
losing his faith in the sincerity and spiritual integrity of his fellow men. He
finds that his friends, even, are tainted with dogmatism, and with the un¬
critical emotionalism of blind faith! Insensibly, too, he has been taking on
that subtle and dangerous opinion that “everybody is out of step but Jimmy”.
He alone is sincere; he alone remains true to the faith of Shelley, Carlyle, Rus-
kin, Emerson; he alone remains to carry the banner of a noble cause. Here is
a magazine full of pious platitudes; a mutual admiration society; a self-satis¬
fied group of Pharisees sentimentalizing about an insignificant Russian woman
proved by a reputable scientific commission to have been a charlatan. Credu-
THEOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS
39
lity! Cant! Superstition! Out upon them! He sharpens his lance and tilts
wildly at the new dragon. All of which may be very good for him. Better a
knight with a lance and a hobby, bound on a false quest, than a fat burgher
rolling down Fifth Avenue in an expensive car. The knight is going to have a
sorry spill in a rocky place. He does no harm to Theosophy and the jolt he
gets will be salutary. He may even see stars, while the burgher will probably
die in bed in the luxury of a private hospital under the soft ministrations of
church and science.
Someday, when maturity has brought a truer sense of values, he will come
to see that all he had dreamed of the good, the true and the beautiful, all that
he had once thought to find among those who regard themselves as the guard¬
ians of civilization and culture, was there before him for the taking, but, like
many another young Parsifal, he had cast upon it a psychic veil woven of his
boy’s prejudices, vanity, misunderstanding, resentment, rashness, presump¬
tion, and had then turned in wrath upon the creature of his own fashioning.
Theoretically, he knows that the self which breaks out on lower levels in
vulgar and shameful forms, is not exorcised and rendered inoffensive through
devotion to literary and humanistic studies. But theory is not knowledge,
and faced with the devil of vanity tricked out in the blue robes of the angels,
he has seen fit to repudiate the real, and to choose the dearer way of blatancy
and self-assertion rather than the better way of silence and self-sacrifice. He
has his reward in the applause of the hypocritical crew for whom he has un¬
consciously been an instrument, and who promptly abandon him when the
tide of opinion turns against him. It is a bitter lesson which many a young
theosophist has had to learn.
We have gone far afield to study a subtle manifestation of vanity—not to
show our own superior virtue by contrast, but in order that we may deal ob¬
jectively with a personal problem which our own wretched and cowardly shrink¬
ing so often prevents us from investigating honestly. We have seen that the
magnificent qualities of spiritual insight, courage, intelligence and honesty
cannot save a man from becoming a fool and a traitor so long as he permits
the devil of vanity to hold the central citadel of his life. His very virtues are
made the instruments of his undoing, and like artillery captured by an enemy,
are turned against his friends.
Vanity, the vile snake of self! The very word comes from the Latin vanus,^
which means empty, void. The dictionary tells us to compare vacant, vanish^p
vaunt. The word means: having no real substance or importance, idle, worth¬
less. unsatisfying. Other connotations revolve about a secondary meaning:
proud of petty things or of trifling attainments, having a high opinion of one’s
own appearance or accomplishment with slight reason. Hence, in its primary
meaning, the word expresses the authentic nature of the lower self. Man
literally is made of vanity, of voidness and emptiness; his personality is only
a reflection of the true Individuality of the Soul; it possesses neither true exist¬
ence nor independent life. Yet an image in a mirror is a something, and, in
accord with the secondary meaning of the word, we may, if we choose, look
40
THE0S0PHICAL QUARTERLY
upon the lower nature as a reality, though one of trifling importance when set
against the majesty of the Real Self.
Why should we endow this mirror image with our sense of self-identification;
why do we pose to ourselves; why do we overvalue its trifling attainments and
read into it falsely the attributes of a god? Perhaps because it is truly the
blurred image of the Father, and, showing all its Father’s Glory in relative
expression, must needs also reflect the quality of His Absoluteness and His
Beauty. In the Scriptures we read that after the work of Creation was com¬
plete, God looked upon it—looked upon His Own Image in the waves of space
—and “saw that it was good”. So likewise man, the little god, looks upon
the works of his personal hand or heart or brain and finds them very, very
good. In the fact itself there is no sin. The revelation of the Oversoul
through man should indeed be a revelation of worth and beauty. Sin comes
into the world when the Creator is forgotten amid the glamorous delights of
the creation, and evil arises when the shadow endowed with delegated con¬
sciousness repudiates the Power which created it and seeks life in the things
of emptiness and voidness. With evil, only the gods in their wisdom can deal,
but so long as the soul lives and hears the voice of conscience, it is our duty
to stand by. The older student of Theosophy, taught by his own bitter experi¬
ence, and struggling still in the coil of his own sins, comes to view with deep
sympathy and understanding the troubles of his younger comrade, yes, even
to the angry repudiation of Theosophy itself. Yet, aware of the issue at stake,
he must stand ready to throw the weight of his assistance on the side of the
angels. To speak plainly is sometimes to risk all on a single cast of the dice.
For as his words probe to the citadel of vanity and pride, and pierce the scaly
coils of the old serpent, he must expect to witness the hiss of resentment and
the darting fang. He will be accused of dogmatism, lack of sympathy, theo-
sophical Pharisaism, “a cold, intangible hardness”, and other variants of the
same theme.
There was once a man of great intellectual endowments who asked for guid¬
ance in the spiritual life, and who was accorded the wonder of access to Mas¬
ters themselves. He was treated with a marvellous tenderness and understand¬
ing, given a protection which extended even to the frustration of a plot against
his life. Yet that man turned against the Masters, betrayed those who were
his associates in a great Cause, and started a chain of causation whose evil
results have stained the soil of India with blood. Why? Because, though
at heart a kindly man, his pride of intellect would brook no slightest opposi¬
tion to his opinions. In certain letters which have been published one can
trace the slow disintegration of his character. First a slight pique and annoy¬
ance that his plans for dominating his friends and “ruling occult Tibet” are
gently set aside, next a touch of jealousy that another is preferred to himself,
then irony and cheap sarcasm, suspicion, lying, dishonourable acts, mounting
to bitter hatred and betrayal, till finally we read the terrible words: “under
the influence of the Brothers of the Shadow”.
So, to a friend who despises “that Quarterly”, we are bound at the least
THEOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS
4i
to protest against an evident misunderstanding. But if more be demanded of
us—and real friendship does demand more of us—we are sometimes compelled
to utter truths which no man likes to speak to another, and which no man
as man, ought ever to speak to another—truths which cut like a lash and make
the blood rise in the cheeks. Such is the demand which honest friendship and
loyalty to our Cause make upon us, though, God knows, we should be pros¬
trated in deep humility before the altar when we speak them.
In our better moments we glimpse something of the sorry tragedy and hate¬
fulness and devastating weariness of it all. We cling so fiercely to the scare¬
crow rags of our superior virtues, our scholarly accomplishments, our technical
skills, our worldly positions. We pay out our lives to feed a bloated pretender
on the throne. Can we not be honest enough to admit that our long service
to this tawdry thing has brought us only the reward of dust and ashes? Some
day we shall find strength to hurl from its place this incarnate insult to the
Warrior Soul. When we have put away this unclean thing, we may be ad¬
mitted to the company of clean men, finding clean work to do, work of beauty
and truth and creative joy that shall stand eternally built into the very ma¬
sonry of the Soul.
R.
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp. Or what's a Heaven for ?— Robert
Browning.
To become earth is the creed of a moth;
Be a conqueror of earth; that alone is worthy of a man.
Thou art soft as a rose. Become hard as a stone,
That thou mayst be the foundation of the wall of the garden!
Build thy clay into a Man,
Build thy Man into a World!
If thou art unfit to be either a wall or a door,
Some one else will make bricks of thine earth .— Muhammad Iqbal.
THE ENGLISH WAY TO THE GOAL
He highest climbs who most loves .— Richard Rolle of Hampole.
Love may reach to God in this life , but knowledge never .— The Divine Cloud.
I N previous numbers of the Quarterly, the Spanish and the Sufi mystics
have been quoted at length as showing a profound understanding of what
Love is and to what it leads. Both of these groups, by the heights to
which they attained, are a frequent reminder of the statement that Manas
stretches up to Mahat,—in much the same way that a bird, soaring at an un¬
believable height, makes clearer our realization of the infinity that stretches
beyond. If we regard the Spanish and the Sufi mystics as on the mountain
top, penetrating with clear vision far into the blue above, then the mystics of
England stand on the slopes, led on by faith in a future attainment,—the
faith of intuition and insight, not the faith of mere hearsay. The two groups
are different, much as a Gothic cathedral, with its grace and lightness and
soaring aspiration, differs from one of the early English parish churches with
its massive strength and stability and rugged simplicity. It has been said
that the Spaniard is the man of passion, and the Englishman the man of ac¬
tion. Certainly the passionate Love which the Spanish mystics attained,
lifted them “on the wrings of passion and desire” totally out of themselves, to
union with a universal Force which they recognized as reality—the Reality—
and life thereafter lay for them in making themselves at one with that, in
attaining a more and more permanent realization of it . 1 For the early English
group, the approach was a different one. Someone has said that their uni¬
verse was the human heart. If they were, on occasion, lifted above their usual
level, to them it was a vision; they did not (so far as one may generalize from
the records still available) see it as a new life, a new realm in which to live
thereafter. Action, for them, followed another course.
Fourteenth century England saw a time of flowering in spiritual endeavour.
Men embraced poverty and deprivation and became hermits, in the convic¬
tion that “great is the hermit’s life if it be greatly done”. Women (and occa¬
sionally men) were walled up for life in little cells as anchorites, and the story
of their inner achievement is told in such records as those of Juliana of Nor¬
wich and Margery Kempe of Lynn . 2 Of this general period, Richard Rolle of
Hampole, both for the force of his personality and for the influence he exerted,
is perhaps the most representative of one aspect of the English way to the
goal. There is nothing metaphysical, nothing speculative, and little that is
analytical in his point of view. He has simple, practical common sense and
1 As was said by Alfonso XIII, King of Spain, during a visit to the Vatican: "Our mystics spoke from the
lips of men the words of angels’’ (Ignatius Loyola, by Robert Harvey).
J For Margery Kempe, see inter alia. The Cell of Self-Knowledge. edited with an Introduction by Edmund G
Gardner.
42
THE ENGLISH WAY TO THE GOAL
43
sanity; his feet are firmly on the ground. Where many of the Latin mystics
have been compelled deliberately to cramp their experience into conformity
with Church doctrine, Rolle’s whole experience and that of his contemporaries
seems to have been well within the bounds of strict orthodoxy. The extreme
of this is found in Juliana of Norwich, whose revelations were so narrowly
interpreted by her mind, in conformity with her habitual meditation, as to
make them almost meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the imagery and
terminology of her own particular faith. It is quite possible that she herself
realized her lack of a broader comprehension, for she tells of pondering her
“shewings” in her heart for fifteen years and more, always with the longing
to know their real meaning, and finally to her spiritual understanding there
came the answer: “Wouldst thou learn thy Lord’s meaning in this thing?
Learn it well: Love was His meaning. Who shewed it thee? Love. What
shewed He thee? Love. Wherefore shewed it He? For Love. Hold thee
therein and thou shalt learn and know more in the same.” For the most part
this group seems to have had no conception of a steady upward growth from
finite to infinite, except in the light of the orthodox teaching that earth life is
a time of preparation; death a gateway; heaven a place where all is changed
and all is possible.
But that Love was their means of attaining, whether in the present or in a
future life, each of them realized. Among mystics the world over, there seems
alwp^ys to be this intuitive recognition that Love is the central fact of existence,
the well-spring from which life itself is drawn. In each case the truth 6i it
comes to them as a message from the Unseen, unique in its form of expression
—a part of the whisper of the Genius of which The Song of Life tells. Walter
Hilton in his Scale of Perfection , one of the well-known works of this period,
writes: ‘‘What is a man but his thoughts and his loves?” The Love of the
Real, however, he sees as a gift, the greatest of all gifts—greater than the gift
of prophecy or of working miracles or of great knowledge—for it is God him¬
self. He makes a further statement which one little expects to find in the
thought of that early century, one of those statements occasionally met with
which were intended by their author only in a limited sense, but which, inter¬
preted with a trifle more latitude, carry one of the golden truths of Theosoj^iy.
It is the Christian Master, of course, whose name Hilton uses, but the stipwit
of Theosophy would include other Masters also in the declaration that the
Master is love, the Master is grace, the Master is God. Even the first stir¬
rings of ‘‘grace” in the soul are the Master, but he is then ‘‘very grossly and
rudely felt”. Then, as the soul advances, it is the same Master and none other
that is felt—more spiritually and nearer to his Divinity. That Presence should
be known by experience rather than by any writing about it, ‘‘for it is the life
and the love, the might and the light, the joy and the rest of a chosen soul”.
He sleeps in our heart as He did in the ship on the lake with his disciples. It
is for us to waken him—‘‘nevertheless, I believe thou sleepest oftener to Him
Man He doth to thee; for He calleth thee full oft with His sweet, secret voice”.
To Juliana of Norwich, the meaning of Love came somewhat differently:
44
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
she saw in one of her revelations a little thing the size of a hazel nut in the
palm of her hand, and was told that it was the universe—all that is. And
“I marvelled how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen
to naught for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: ‘It last-
eth, and ever shall last for that God loveth it.’ And so All-thing hath the Be¬
ing by the love of God.” In The Divine Cloud , another book of this period
and one of extraordinary penetration and wisdom, the unknown author, re¬
ferring to Love, uses the phrase, ‘‘a sudden stirring, and, as it were, an un¬
advised and speedy springing up unto God, even as a spark fleeth fmn the coal".
Rolle saw it in his simple, direct way: ‘‘No rational soul can be without love;
love is the foot of the soul by which it is taken to heaven or hell.” And he
did the thing indicated, with characteristic energy. Love of the highest, he
knew, must be made paramount; all that hindered it must be abandoned.
Stable thy thought in His love, and keep out of thee all sins; cast away sloth; bear
thee manfully in goodness, be debonair and meek to all men; let nothing bring thee to
rage or envy, clothe thy soul fair, make therein a throne of love to God’s Son, and make
thy will as eager to receive Him as gladly as thou wouldst be at the coming of a thing
thou Iovedst most of all things ... for His joy is that thou be fair and lovesome in His eyes.
A passage from a book by Dean Inge 3 suggests, perhaps, the keynote of the
English method. ‘‘It is most important that we should recognize the sacra¬
mental value of mere right action, even of the most commonplace kind. Not,
of course, that the action itself has this value; it is valuable because it is the
expression of our habitual view of things and events and men and ourselves.
Our habitual point of view is fatally incomplete unless it finds expression in
habitual action.” Rolle, with the simplicity of an earlier age, expressed it:
‘‘Not with going of feet are we turned to God, but with change of our desires
and manners”, and in his writings there are many passages showing how he
made application of this. Quoting at random: ‘‘While thou eatest or drink-
est, let not the memory of thy God that feeds thee pass from thy mind; but
praise God and glorify Him in every morsel, so that thy heart be more in God’s
praising than in thy food, that thy soul be not parted from God at any hour.”
‘‘Be our souls strong in taking hard labours for God.” ‘‘Many love God while
they are in ease, and in adversity they grumble, and fall in so much sorriness
that scarcely may any man comfort them. . . . That is a catiff loving that
any wealth of the world makes; but that loving is of much price, that no vio¬
lence of sorrow may do away.” Francis Quarles’s phrasing of a somewhat
similar idea will suggest itself to many:
.... draw near,
Shake hands with earth, and let your soul respect
Her joys no further than her joys reflect
Upon her Maker’s glory; if thou swim
In wealth, see Him in all; see all in Him.
Sinkst thou in want, and is thy small cruse spent?
See Him in want; enjoy Him in content.
* * * *
_ Heaven’s never deaf but when man’s heart is dumb.
* Studies of English Mystics.
THE ENGLISH WAY TO THE GOAL
45
“When that blessed Love is in a man’s heart”, wrote Rolle, “it will not
suffer him to be idle.” “Love cannot be lazy.” “It is shame if the sunbeam
find men idle in their bed.” “He that is slow in God’s service may not be
burning in love.” Sloth and losing of time were weaknesses which particu¬
larly disturbed Juliana of Norwich,—tempting her to despair, which she re¬
garded as equally a sin; and The Divine Cloud stresses at considerable length
the matter of the right keeping of time. “All the time that is given thee, it
shall be demanded how thou hast spent it, and it standeth thee in hand to
give a good account thereof.” This is followed by a rather unexpected sug¬
gestion as to the means of atoning for misspent time: “He [the Master], by
His Godhead is the maker and giver of times. He, by His manhood, is the
true keeper of time; and He, by His Godhead and manhood together, is the
true Judge and asker of account for the spending of time. Knit thyself there¬
fore to Him by love and faith.”
“Great love he shews”, wrote Rolle, “that never is irked to love, but ever
standing, sitting, going, or any other deed doing, is ever thinking on his love.”
“His refreshment is to think of Him.” “Where is love?” he asks. “Love is in
the heart and in the will of man, not in his hand or in his mouth, not in his
work, but in his soul. For many speak good and do good, and many love not
God.” And again, “What is love? And I answer: Love is a burning yearn¬
ing in God, with a wonderful delight and security. . . . Love is a life, coup¬
ling together the loving and the loved. For meekness makes us sweet to God;
purity joins us to God; love makes us one with God.” “Love is desire of the
heart, ay thinking on that that it loves; and when it has that it loves, then it
joys and nothing may make it sorry.” “Love is a virtue that is the Tightest
affection of man’s soul.”
Austerities, abstinence, discipline, Rolle welcomed, and with a vigour which
makes him for many people to-day almost synonymous with harshness and
vehemence, though it was only the reverse side, so to speak, of the force and
impetuosity of the great love that was in the making. He never mistook aus¬
terities for holiness, merely holding that if “discreetly” used, they can help
us to become holy. They have their work, just as pain and suffering have,
for “in the heart where tears spring, there will the fire of the Holy Ghost be
kindled”. Referring to the earlier stages of the way, Rolle wrote one passage
which is doubtless spiritual autobiography. In his case, of course, it was the
Master Christ whom he found, but in each creed, the world over, there is rec¬
ord of a similar experience,—the fact that the Master stands waiting aUMjch
turn of the road.
I ran about by poverty and I found Jesu poor-born into the world, laid in a crib,
wrapped in swaddling clothes. I took the road of suffering and I found Jesu weary by
the wayside, tortured with hunger, thirst and cold, filled with reproof and blame. I sat
by myself, fleeing the vanity of the world, and I found Jesu fasting in the desert and
praying on the mountain-top alone. I ran by pain and penance, and I found Jesu, bound,
scourged, given gall to drink, nailed to the cross, hanging on the cross, and dying on the
cross.
46
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
As his love gained in depth and force, it took the form of a burning fire, as
“thou may fele thi fynger bym, if thou putt it in the fyre. But that fyre if it
be hot, is so delightable and wonderful that I cannot tell it.” While expecting
the fulfilment of his love only after death, he found during earth life an
abounding joy in the simple and stupendous fact of loving,—burning as the
seraphim in high heaven, as he expressed it, his mind walking among the an¬
gels to Christ his Beloved.
This delight which he has tasted in loving Jesu passes all knowledge and feeling. Truly
I cannot tell a little point of this joy, for who can tell an unknown heat? Who lay bare
an infinite sweetness? Certainly if I would speak of this joy unable to be told, it seems
to me as if I should empty the sea by drops, and pour it all in a little hole of the earth.
One is reminded of those lines from Richard Crashaw, a century or so later.
Aetemall love! What ’tis to love thee well,
None, but himselfe, who feelse it, none can tell.
But oh, what to be lov’d of thee as well,
None, not himselfe, who feeles it, none can tell.
Joy and mirth and merriment are the terms Rolle uses most continually as
describing his spiritual state as he advanced into the higher degrees of con¬
templation,—also heat, sweetness and song. He tells of hearing, as he read or
performed his devotional exercises, a marvellous accompaniment both “above
me” and “within me”. It was not song in the ordinary sense of the word,
just as his rhirth and merriment were not of the usual kind. In the old Eng¬
lish of Rolle’s time (1290-1349), “merry” meant “sweet”; “mirth” meant
“pleasantness”. Worldly mirth was one of the things which he declared killed
Love. Likewise his “song” was prevented if he sang with other people. Both
song and mirth were of the soul, and the music that he heard he believed to be
that of the angelic choir. From what he writes it would seem that the over¬
whelming joy of Love took tangible form —audibly for him, just as for many
others it has done so visibly. “Love sounds the Music of the Spheres”, wrote
the Sufi poet. Rolle expresses it: “Of the feast of heaven, sounds in his heart
a sweet note that makes him break out into voice of joying, for the wonderful
softness of mirth and song in his soul, ... for in his thought he is taken in
to the melody of angels praising God.” “The memory of Jesus is as melody
of music at a feast.” “When thou speakest to Him and sayst ‘Jhesu’, through
custom, it shall be in thy ear joy, in thy mouth honey, and in thy heart
melody.”
The force and power of his inner experience, the completeness with which
every element of his strong nature was hurled into it, are again best indi¬
cated by his own really splendid characterization:
O merry love, strong, ravishing, burning, voluntary, stalwart, inextinguishable, that
brings all my soul to Thy service, and suffers it to think of nothing but Thee. Thou
challengest for Thyself all that we live; all that we savour; all that we are.
Implicit in that is a test of true virility which few, even among strong men,
could meet—and it leads one quickly upward to its source, linking itself with
THE ENGLISH WAY TO THE GOAL
47
those words of a Master in the Gita , “I am manhood in men”. What an
offering to be able to make to the high gods, and what a refutation to those
who regard all religious states as signs of a weak, anemic and rather fantastic
temperament!
No discussion of the English Way would be complete without mention of
what might be termed the complementary method outlined in The Divine
Cloud (also published under the title, The Cloud of Unknowing). The identity
of its author is still a mystery. His aim is the guidance and direction of other
seekers for Truth,—of men and women who were, one would judge, far ad¬
vanced on the path before coming to him, because his method, like that of
Shankara Acharya, would be both useless and dangerous without the previous
acquirement of the “four qualifications” as explained by Shankara in the open¬
ing section of his Crest Jewel of Wisdom. Even then, as Shankara explained
also, the method would be misunderstood without the help of an experienced
spiritual director,—of one “who is full of intelligence, illuminated, skilled in
knowledge and wisdom . . . fitted to teach the wisdom of the divine Self”.
Naturally the author of The Divine Cloud did not express himself with the
scientific thoroughness of Shankara, but in his prologue (to quote Evelyn
Underhill’s most valuable Introduction to her edition of the same book, called
by her The Cloud of Unknowing 4 ) we find the warning ‘‘that it shall on no
account be lent, given, or read to other men: who could not understand, and
might misunderstand in a dangerous sense, its peculiar message”.
Instead of seeking Light and Life and Love in the commonplace outer act,
the pupil of The Divine Cloud is instructed to turn wholly within, and to en¬
deavour to break completely with all that is external. All that is required of
the beginner is to know that he is, which knowing, even the beasts possess.
He is to give no thought to his defects or his qualities—quite the contrary.
Everything regarding himself, his life and the world of creatures, is to be put
beneath him, wrapped in a ‘‘cloud of forgetting”. Then:
Lift thyself up as thou art, unto thy gracious God, without any curious considerations
of the qualities that belong to thee, or to thy God. Knit thyself, by fervent desire of
love in grace and spirit, to the precious being of God in Himself. And though thy wanton
wandering wits find no satisfaction in this manner of doing, yet quit it not. . . . There
is nothing a man can do, bodily or ghostly [spiritually], that can bring him nearer to
God, or remove him further from the world, than this naked feeling and offering up of a
man’s blind being can do.
This, the author calls praying—in the silence of pure spirit (a form of
which has a special appeal for certain temperaments), as contrasted with the
pronouncing of words. As already suggested, neither is any thought to be
given to the qualities of God. Just the simple word is, is all that we need
dwell on as expressing His everlastingness and His infinitude.
Offer therefore, all that thou art, as thou art, unto Him, as He is, who is the blissful
being, both of Himself and of thee. By doing this thou shalt effectually, and in a won¬
derful manner, worship God with Himself. For that which thou art thou hast from Him,
and He it is.
• Published by John M. Watkins, London, 1912.
4 8
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
It is almost startling to find, in mediaeval England, anything so strongly
suggestive of the system of indrawal and transfer of self-identification which
is the central feature of the Vedanta,—startling, that is, until one remembers
that Christianity had come originally to England, not from Rome, but through
a line of teachers descending directly from John the Beloved Disciple; and
until one remembers, further, that the tradition of the Christian Neo-platon-
ists, and their Eastern influence, embodied in the Mystica Thcologia of Diony¬
sius the Areopagite, had been brought within the reach of all educated men
in western Europe when John Scotus Erigena translated the Mystica into
Latin in the 9th century. Then, to quote again from Miss Underhill:
About the middle of the 14th century, England—at that time in the height of her
great mystical period—led the way with the first translation into the vernacular of the
Areopagite’s work. In Dionisc Hid Divirxite , a version of the Mystica Thcologia , this
spiritual treasure-house was first made accessible to those outside the professionally
religious class.
This long-ago connection between East and West is referred to in a delight¬
ful series of articles on an earlier group of English mystics, in the Quarter¬
lies of 1914 and thereabouts. In them a writer on the subject is quoted as
saying that the echoes of the Areopagite’s treatises are heard in every mystical
writer since their appearance. It is evident, however, that The Divine Cloud
is not a mere echo, and that its author, obviously a man of great spirituality,
had done as the “certain wise man” of the Upanishads , who “pierced the open¬
ings inward” and discovered the Way by actual experience. There are high
spiritual levels, Theosophy teaches, which are the reservoir of all fundamental
truths, and he who can lift himself sufficiently near may draw down what he
can. As The Secret Doctrine expresses it: “He who is strong in the Yoga can
introduce at will his Alaya by means of meditation into the true nature of
Existence.”
The Eastern method, it will be remembered, makes a point of withdrawing
the sense of I-am-I, the sense of self-identification, from one after another
of the powers and attributes and vestures of Self, “as the pith is drawn from
the reed”. In The Divine Cloud , not withdrawal, but positive attack seems to
be the means recommended—by sheer force of will compelling the mind to
push downward into the “cloud of forgetting”, every thought that presents
itself. Even the familiar forms and subjects of meditation recommended by
the Church (no matter how lofty, up to the attributes of God himself), would
inevitably, the author taught, lead the mind from one thought to another,
and therefore downward, away from God and nearer to self. “Everything
that thou thinkest upon, is above thee for the time, and between thee and thy
God: in so much that thou art so much the farther from God, or nearer to
Him, as there are more or fewer things in thy mind besides God.” The dis¬
ciple must learn to live “above himself”. As an aid, he is advised to make
use of some word to keep before him the ideal. First directing the aspiration,
the intention upward,—
Have this intention, lapped up, folden in one word, and that of one syllable, for so it
THE ENGLISH WAY TO THE GOAL
49
is better than two—as for example this word ‘God’, or else this word ‘Love*. . . . And
fasten this word in thine heart, in such sort that it do never depart from thence, whatso¬
ever befall. This word shall be thy shield and spear, whithersoever thou go or ride, both
in peace and war. With this word thou shalt beat at that cloud and darkness, that is
above thee. With this word thou shalt smite down all manner of thoughts, that press
to molest thee, and keep them under the cloud of forgetting.
It was a century or so earlier, in the time of Francis of Assisi, that the spe¬
cial devotion to the Holy Name had been started on the continent. Rolle em¬
phasizes frequently the power that lies in the use of the name of Jesus. Walter
Hilton, in The Scale of Perfection , cautions against thinking that power lies in
the name itself, painted or written or spoken or held in imagination, urging
that one’s whole thought turn to the Being, the Person whom the name sym¬
bolizes—it is He we must keep in mind, “that is all goodness, endless wisdom,
love and sweetness, thy joy, thy glory, and thy everlasting bliss, thy God,
thy Lord, and thy salvation”. The practice must have been fairly wide¬
spread for the warning to have been warranted, so there is nothing singular in
the recommendation in The Divine Cloud; yet one is reminded immediately of
the similar use among mystics of the Far East, of the name of Rama and other
deities, also among Mohammedan mystics of the name of Allah—one account
telling of its incessant repetition for seven years, until “at last every atom of
me began to cry aloud, ‘Allah! Allah! Allah!’ ”
To return to The Divine Cloud: the aspirant, in the course of his progress,
comes to realize that even the “naked sense of his own being” is an impedi¬
ment, a “lump” of all that is undesirable, continually obtruding itself between
him and his goal. His next work is to eliminate that sense of being, and to
lose it, so far as is possible in this life, in union with pure Being. As the Sufi
poet expressed it:
All that is not One must ever
Suffer with the Wound of Absence;
And whoever in Love’s City
Enters, finds but Room for One,
And but in oneness Union.
He must not w'ish to have no being, continues the western author, “for th
were a devilish madness and despite against God. But him listeth right ;
to be, and he yieldeth very hearty thanks to God for the worthiness and gift
of his being; though indeed he desire without ceasing that he might lack the
witting and feeling of his being.”
Beyond that point, what happens is no longer the disciple’s concern: “Let
the thing itself do with thee; let it lead wheresoever it listeth; let it be the
worker, and thou be but the sufferer; do thou but only look on, and let.
it alone; meddle thou not with it, as though thou wouldst help it, lest perad-
venture thou marre all. Be thou but the tree and let it be the carpenter.”
It is in the response from the other side then, that the subsequent fulfilment
1 ^,—one of the miracles of Love.
uod is evermore ready to work this work in every soul that is disposed thereunto, and
WITHOUT CENSOR
VIII.
N O one thing made it more clear that the Germans had at last cracked,
than the tone of the letters which were taken from German dead and
from German prisoners. Both letters written home and never sent,
and those which had been received from family and friends at home, told the
same story. Through them all there ran a note of dissatisfaction, of discourage¬
ment and criticism. The writers were war-weary, and wanted things to be
over as soon as possible, no matter how it all came out; while the descriptions
of privation and suffering within Germany itself, and of all that their families
were enduring, made it easy to see why the morale of the German troops had
broken. For the first time, to us, the end of the War was in sight; the ultimate
result was now certain, although it was not humanly possible to tell how long
it would be before the final denouement. For these reasons there was an ela¬
tion at First Corps Headquarters, even greater than that inspired by the daily
successes of our troops and their splendid performance, although the com¬
mendation which we were receiving from the French at that time made us
proud and relieved. We began to speculate as to future American operations,
and as to where they would take place. Of one thing we were sure. If the
enemy had cracked here, where we were, they had cracked elsewhere as well.
From now on, we knew for a certainty, they would be given no respite. It
would be one Allied offensive after another, in which we should have our part;
and time was to bear us out in our prognostications.
By the end of the fourth day after my arrival at Headquarters First Army
Corps, near Epieds, the fighting had moved away from us, further to the north
and toward the Vesle River, and Major General Liggett was impatient to
follow it up, and to move his First Corps Headquarters forward. His constant
aim was to keep his Corps Post of Command immediately behind his divisions,
and as close to them as possible. But a modem corps headquarters cannot be
moved forward in battle until a place has been prepared in which it can function
properly. A good deal of space is required for the tactical sections of the staff
alone, and these sections must all be close together, for obvious reasons. Com¬
municating wires, too, must be laid a little way underground, often under
heavy shell fire, both forward to the headquarters of the divisions in line, and
back to army headquarters, before a corps headquarters is ready to function
as it must. So General Liggett was forced to wait, while advance parties sur¬
veyed the ground and cleared away wreckage in order to provide the space
required, and while the Signal Battalion was engaged in laying the necessary
wires.
At the start of the American participation in the Second Battle of the Marne,
the French had been distrustful of the ability of our higher staff command,
52
WITHOUT CENSOR
53
and quite naturally, as the Americans were totally untried and inexperienced
in this respect, and our general officers had never before had an opportunity,
either in this War or in their previous experience at home, of doing more than
work out higher staff problems in theory and on paper. The able way, how¬
ever, in which Major General Liggett had handled the operations of our First
Army Corps from the very start of its participation in the fighting, had done
much to relieve this feeling of the French, and to increase their confidence in
the ability of the Americans in respect to staff work. Early in the proceedings,
the exigencies of the situation had necessitated a change of axis, of direction,
of the First Corps attack, always a difficult operation; the First Corps, attack¬
ing first toward the east, had turned, until it was driving almost due north,
and this change of axis had been effected with great skill. Town after town
and village after village had been liberated by our advance, and the progress
in the attack of our two Army Corps, then comprising the Sixth French Army,
had enabled the Tenth French Army on our left and the Fifth French Army
on our right to advance. General Liggett’s Field Orders at that time were
models of brevity and clearness. I remember particularly his constant insist¬
ence that, except in an actual attack itself, the front lines should be lightly
held, with the concentration immediately behind them, and that machine guns
and strong resistance points should never be attacked directly but always by
envelopment. It is easy to see how extremely wise and effective both of those
provisions were, eliminating as they did much futile loss of life, while at the
same time producing highly satisfactory results. His Field Orders were dated
according to the French system, in which the hours of the day were numbered
from one to twenty-four, in order to avoid any possible confusion as to the time
of their issue and of the operations ordered in them. They contained the usual
five paragraphs, outlining in sequence his estimate of the military situation,
the disposition of the enemy forces, the positions of our troops, the mission
which was to be accomplished, and his orders as to how it was to be carried
out. He believed in giving a subordinate commander his head, and in not
holding him down with voluminous and detailed instructions. I can remember
one Field Order, the concluding paragraph of which simply said,—“You will
pursue boldly and without delay”; plenty of room, there, for individual ini¬
tiative and for adaptation to local conditions.
On the morning of August 5th the First Corps Headquarters moved to F&r^
en-Tardenois, where space had been prepared in a little group of houses on the
extreme north-west edge of what remained of the town; these particular houses
had escaped shell-fire and were intact. But F&re-en-Tardenois itself was a
complete example of what artillery demolition fire can do, as hardly a house in
the town had a roof left, and most of them were completely demolished. The
work of removing and of burying the dead had not been completed, and the
place was filled with the unforgettable stench of decaying human flesh. Fortu¬
nately, it soon began to rain, which cleared and freshened the air until this
work had been completed. We were under frequent shell-fire, particularly at
nigl^and it was then, too, that the Boche planes, whenever the sky was clear.
50
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
doth what in him lieth and hath so done of long time before. . . . 1 hen will He sometimes
peradventure send out a beam of His ghostly light, that shall pierce this cloud of un¬
knowing, between thee and Him, and shew thee somewhat of his secrets, which is not
lawful, nor possible, for man to speak. Then shalt thou feel thine affections inflamed
with the fire of His love, far more than I can or may tell thee at this time, for of that
work, that belongeth to God only, I dare not take upon me to speak with my blabbering
and fleshly tongue. And indeed, to speak shortly, though I durst do it, I would not.
In that he would not, the world is the loser, for where other books of spirit¬
ual guidance show sagacity and insight and understanding of human nature,
this one adds certain qualities which suggest firsthand experience of a high
order. For his silence, another reason is made plain in his advice to his pupils.
He would have the aspirant avoid all fancies and imaginings and counterfeit
experiences, and admonishes him to conceal deep in his heart all spiritual stir¬
rings or longings, endeavouring to hide them even from God himself. They
will of course, he adds, be known to God in any case, despite the efforts made,
but the very struggle to conceal them will help to bring one “out of the gross¬
ness of bodily feeling into the purity and depth of ghostly [spiritual] feeling”.
His object is to create strong men, able to forge ahead with no indication of
response from the other side. If spiritual experiences come, welcome them,
but “lean not too much on them, for fear of feebleness”. As W. Q. Judge says
in the Letters that have Helped me: “You are only carefully to note them, and
‘do not exhibit wonder nor form association’. ”
Some readers may be wondering what connection there is between Mediaeval
English monks and Theosophy. Certainly the monks themselves laid no
claim to inclusion in theosophical ranks, as their vigorous denunciation of
all outside their own faith made abundantly plain. Yet the connection is not
remote. In certain of the early ages, monasticism served as the framework
and supplied the guide posts along the Way, enabling men to reach the goal,
to discover the inner world, hy faith , without other help than the drawing
power from the other side. The Spanish mystics particularly (among thr,
most gifted in the Western world), rose to levels of consciousness where
highly occult faculties became operative, and achieved an interior transforma¬
tion of which they had little comprehension in their everyday minds. The
English mystics showed that, with no extraordinary gifts and in spite of nar¬
rowness of creed and personal limitations of various sorts, the separating wall
can be penetrated, the Divine fire be brought down, if the whole strength and
force and devotion of one’s being be thrown into the effort.
In the present era, framework and method are both of necessity different.
Madame Blavatsky gave her life to proving to an age of skepticism and un¬
faith that, in the words of Light on the Path , the whole world is animated and
lit, down to its most material shapes, by a world within it; that this inner
world is ruled by the law of love and brotherhood; that the beings who are at
home there (the efflorescence of the human race for ages past) are continually
striving to lift man from the living death which we call life; to awaken him
to consciousness of divine faculties enabling him to live (as The Divine Cloud
THE ENGLISH WAY TO THE GOAL
5i
phrased it) “above himself”. Madame Blavatsky gave to the West the knowl¬
edge by which man can become one with Divinity. A passage which she
quotes in The Secret Doctrine in a different connection, applies equally well to
the teachings which she brought: “They seem almost to open vistas through
infinity, to endow the human intellect with an existence and a vision exempt
from the limitations of time and space and finite causation, and to lift it up
toward a sublime apprehension of the Supreme Intelligence whose dwelling
place is Eternity.” In less known theosophical writings, H.P.B. gives the
rationale of the process achieved by the Spanish mystics. The English mystics
brought the possibility of it nearer to the average man. If, in our thought of
the subject, we can successfully separate the mystics and their inner experi¬
ence from all that savours of a special creed or church or religious bent, it is
clearly all a part of what the Middle Ages called the Great Work. According
to theosophical teaching, opportunity for inner life and growth and advance¬
ment exists for all men. With recognition of this fact, and co-operation, an
otherwise slow and painful journey may become transfigured, as all the mys¬
tics testify.
J. C.
A man sees very far when he does not put himself in front of himself .—
Chateaubriand.
WITHOUT CENSOR
VIII.
N O one thing made it more clear that the Germans had at last cracked,
than the tone of the letters which were taken from German dead and
from German prisoners. Both letters written home and never sent,
and those which had been received from family and friends at home, told the
same story. Through them all there ran a note of dissatisfaction, of discourage¬
ment and criticism. The writers were war-weary, and wanted things to be
over as soon as possible, no matter how it all came out; while the descriptions
of privation and suffering within Germany itself, and of all that their families
were enduring, made it easy to see why the morale of the German troops had
broken. For the first time, to us, the end of the War was in sight; the ultimate
result was now certain, although it was not humanly possible to tell how long
it would be before the final denouement. For these reasons there was an ela¬
tion at First Corps Headquarters, even greater than that inspired by the daily
successes of our troops and their splendid performance, although the com¬
mendation which we were receiving from the French at that time made us
proud and relieved. We began to speculate as to future American operations,
and as to where they would take place. Of one thing we were sure. If the
enemy had cracked here, where we were, they had cracked elsewhere as well.
From now on, we knew for a certainty, they would be given no respite. It
would be one Allied offensive after another, in which we should have our part;
and time was to bear us out in our prognostications.
By the end of the fourth day after my arrival at Headquarters First Army
Corps, near Epieds, the fighting had moved away from us, further to the north
and toward the Vesle River, and Major General Liggett was impatient to
follow it up, and to move his First Corps Headquarters forward. His constant
aim was to keep his Corps Post of Command immediately behind his divisions,
and as close to them as possible. But a modem corps headquarters cannot be
moved forward in battle until a place has been prepared in which it can function
properly. A good deal of space is required for the tactical sections of the staff
alone, and these sections must all be close together, for obvious reasons. Com¬
municating wires, too, must be laid a little way underground, often under
heavy shell fire, both forward to the headquarters of the divisions in line, and
back to army headquarters, before a corps headquarters is ready to function
as it must. So General Liggett was forced to wait, while advance parties sur¬
veyed the ground and cleared away wreckage in order to provide the space
required, and while the Signal Battalion was engaged in laying the necessary
wires.
At the start of the American participation in the Second Battle of the Marne,
the French had been distrustful of the ability of our higher staff command,
52
WITHOUT CENSOR
53
and quite naturally, as the Americans were totally untried and inexperienced
in this respect, and our general officers had never before had an opportunity,
either in this War or in their previous experience at home, of doing more than
work out higher staff problems in theory and on paper. The able way, how¬
ever, in which Major General Liggett had handled the operations of our First
Army Corps from the very start of its participation in the fighting, had done
much to relieve this feeling of the French, and to increase their confidence in
the ability of the Americans in respect to staff work. Early in the proceedings,
the exigencies of the situation had necessitated a change of axis, of direction,
of the First Corps attack, always a difficult operation; the First Corps, attack¬
ing first toward the east, had turned, until it was driving almost due north,
and this change of axis had been effected with great skill. Town after town
and village after village had been liberated by our advance, and the progress
in the attack of our two Army Corps, then comprising the Sixth French Army,
had enabled the Tenth French Army on our left and the Fifth French Army
on our right to advance. General Liggett’s Field Orders at that time were
models of brevity and clearness. I remember particularly his constant insist¬
ence that, except in an actual attack itself, the front lines should be lightly
held, with the concentration immediately behind them, and that machine guns
and strong resistance points should never be attacked directly but always by
envelopment. It is easy to see how extremely wise and effective both of those
provisions were, eliminating as they did much futile loss of life, while at the
same time producing highly satisfactory results. His Field Orders were dated
according to the French system, in which the hours of the day were numbered
from one to twenty-four, in order to avoid any possible confusion as to the time
of their issue and of the operations ordered in them. They contained the usual
five paragraphs, outlining in sequence his estimate of the military situation*
the disposition of the enemy forces, the positions of our troops, the mission
which was to be accomplished, and his orders as to how it was to be carried
out. He believed in giving a subordinate commander his head, and in not
holding him down with voluminous and detailed instructions. I can remember
one Field Order, the concluding paragraph of which simply said,—“You will
pursue boldly and without delay”; plenty of room, there, for individual ini¬
tiative and for adaptation to local conditions.
On the morning of August 5th the First Corps Headquarters moved to Fer^
en-Tardenois, where space had been prepared in a little group of houses on the
extreme north-west edge of what remained of the town; these particular houses
had escaped shell-fire and were intact. But F&re-en-Tardenois itself was a
complete example of what artillery demolition fire can do, as hardly a house in
the town had a roof left, and most of them were completely demolished. The
work of removing and of burying the dead had not been completed, and the
place was filled with the unforgettable stench of decaying human flesh. Fortu¬
nately, it soon began to rain, which cleared and freshened the air until this
work had been completed. We were under frequent shell-fire, particularly at
nigl^and it was then, too, that the Boche planes, whenever the sky was clear,
54
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
also took a hand in the proceedings, and flew over us dropping bombs. Corps
Headquarters, however, was soon functioning as if it had been there for days,
and my work as liaison officer proceeded much as before. Our mess was in a
stable across the road from the Headquarters itself, and the wide doorway
faced towards the lines and the anchored observation balloons which fringed
our front, and from which any unusual circulation behind the German lines
was reported,—our artillery fire being directed accordingly. One day at
luncheon I saw a balloon shot down by a Boche plane, which fired into the bag.
The observer jumped at once in his parachute, and the Boche, turning quickly,
came at him again, trying to machine-gun him as he swung there helpless,
settling slowly back to earth. His progress was sufficiently rapid, however, to
prevent the Boche from carrying out his purpose, as the plane was forced to
fly too low to manoeuvre, and the observer escaped, and landed safely a couple
of fields away. We continued our luncheon while we watched this, not because
we were callous and hard-hearted, but because we had our own work to do,
and our job was to get fed and back to it just as soon as we possibly could.
I was billeted, with another officer, in a little two-story house about a quarter
of a mile from Corps Headquarters. The roof had been entirely shot away
so that the top story was open to the sky, but there was a ceiling over the lower
floor, and although it looked like a very precarious shelter, we thought that
it would protect us from the rain and the elements after we had done some
amateur propping up at what appeared to be its weakest points. We lived in
this place, ostensibly together, for a week, in the back room on the ground
floor, although, as a matter of fact, we were never in our quarters except to
sleep, and then not often at the same time. The Boche had committed his
usual wanton acts of destruction in that little house. Curtains and bed cover¬
ings had been tom to shreds; pictures had been bayoneted on the walls; bureau
drawers had been dumped on the floor and their contents trampled on and
destroyed; the furniture had been smashed and broken, and much of it had
been thrown out of the rear windows and lay in the yard. The same conditions
prevailed in most of the houses in the town which was still partly standing.
But the destmction was usually complete. Towards the end of my stay there,
I saw two French women, peasants, slowly walking down our street. How
they got there, I cannot imagine, as no civilian population whatever was left
in the town. Probably they had been in hiding somewhere near by, and, drawn
by that love of home which is so strong in the French heart, they had begged
a ride on some Army truck, and had come back to what had once been familiar
surroundings, to see what was left. But there was not a single landmark they
could recognize. They walked down that street slowly, hesitatingly, as if they
were in a dream. Finally they stopped in front of a mass of rubble and plaster
.and stones, the remains of what had once been a house, and gazed at it silently.
Then I saw them counting, slowly, beginning at the end of the street, and
•checking one another. I saw them stop, after a little, and look at each other,
•speechless for a moment; then they clung together, weeping, rocking to and
fro with choking, heart-rending sobs. There was nothing left.
WITHOUT CENSOR
55
I slept on the floor of our billet, wrapped in blanket and overcoat, subject
to the enemy interruptions which made night hideous. Some light housekeep¬
ing had to be done, for, although a striker had been assigned to me, he had
various other duties as well, and did not often show up, and never when he
was wanted. I utilized what spare moments I had, therefore, before turning
in, in washing my own clothes, in my rubber tub, with highly-scented French
soap, which was all that I had. I remember, one evening, that I had com¬
pleted this chore, and was out in the rear hanging my wash to dry on a line
which I had rigged up, when a shell burst in a back-yard three or four houses
away from us. I dove for our back-door just in time, and stayed in from then
on, leaving my wash to dry upon the ground, in spite of the urgings of my
room-mate, who did not wash at all where it did not show, and who had been
enjoying the proceedings, and was hoping for a repetition of the performance if
he could only get me out into the yard again. Sleeping was largely a matter of
becoming accustomed to the noise and the confusion. I could see, as I lay on
my back waiting for sleep, the flash against the sky of the guns of the German
battery which was firing on us. Its four guns would fire in succession. I would
hear the shell from number one burst down in the town. Number two would
explode nearer, to the left; impossible to tell exactly how near, however, and
it was always a ticklish moment until number three had arrived, as it might
prove to be right on us. If, however, it was past us, and to the right, it was
perfectly safe, as far as that particular German battery was concerned, to turn
over and to go to sleep, for, during the rest of the night that battery, fired
with methodical accuracy and with that unbelievable German stupidity, in
ceaseless repetition, would continue to drop shells in exactly the same places
and to register at exactly the same intervals.
An unpleasant occurrence marked my stay in that billet. A young Lieuten¬
ant, attached to First Corps Headquarters, had taken up his quarters in the
front room. One night, as I lay there about to go to sleep, I heard him come
in, and then I heard a match struck. Then there was a pause as he lighted a
candle, and a line of light appeared under the door between the rooms. It
was strictly against all orders to show a light at night. There were Boche
planes right over us at that very moment, probably searching out the where¬
abouts of Corps Headquarters, and if that shaft of candle-light, then falling
from our front window on to the roadway, had been seen from the air, the vi¬
cinity would have been bombed for the rest of the night, with a fair chance
that Corps Headquarters would have been obliterated. I rose, and, openu^H
the door, asked him why he was showing a light. He replied that he had bom
ordered up to the lines on some mission of reconnaissance, and that he was
getting his things together. I told him to put out the light, and to assemble
his possessions in the dark. The light was extinguished, and I went back and
lay down again. After a short interval, the line of light again appeared under
the door. Thoroughly angry this time, I again went into his room, put out
the light myself, and asked him if he was not accustomed to obey an order
when he received one. He replied that he had not understood that I was giving
56
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
him an order. I told him to understand that I had given him one, and to under¬
stand further that I would report the occurrence to G-3 in the morning (three
separate charges and specifications under the Articles of War were warranted),
and in the meanwhile to get out of there as fast as he could, and I waited to
see him go. In the morning I dictated a statement covering the whole pro¬
ceeding to one of the senior officers of G-3, signed it, and answered verbally
various questions in regard to it. I was disturbed, for I was afraid that the
whole thing would be put down to an ordinary quarrel, or that the Lieutenant
would attempt to lie his way out, and then it would be a question of his word
against mine. However, I heard nothing more about the occurrence, until the
very morning of my departure, when I was in the Chief of Staff’s room, report¬
ing myself out, and saying good-bye to General Craig. As I was about to leave,
the General turned to the Colonel who was Chief of G-3, and without looking
at me, as if it were merely some piece of business which he had forgotten, in¬
quired incidentally whether Lieutenant Blank had gone. The Colonel replied
that he had been sent to the Seventy-seventh Division, and had been assigned
to the 302d Ammunition Train, my old unit. It was General Craig’s way of
telling me that I had been right, and that he had supported my action. There
was no time to try that kind of officer by a General Court Martial in the
surroundings in which we found ourselves; the only thing to do was to get rid
of him.
I had heard that the Seventy-seventh Division was in the rear of the Corps
area, and that it was coming up to relieve one of the divisions in line. It was
only just two weeks since I had left the Division at Baccarat, but it seemed
like months, for I had been so busy and so much had happened in the interval.
In the meanwhile, the Division had been moving, and its presence near-by
was verified by the arrival daily at First Corps Headquarters of various mem¬
bers of the Division Staff, and of reconnoitering parties from the units which
were about to go into line. My former Colonel appeared on the scene one
day in our familiar old Dodge car, accompanied by the new Adjutant and the
Supply Officer, in quest of maps of the front, and I was able to get for him
all of these that he required, and also to furnish him with other information
which he wanted. A night or two later I saw my old Division march through
F&re-en-Tardenois to go into line on an active front for the first time. I stood
by the side of the road, in the shadow of a building, and watched them go by.
I was able to recognize, even in the dark, some of the officers whom I knew, by
the way they walked and carried themselves. The platoons marched with
long intervals between, in order to minimize the effects of a bursting shell.
There was not a sound, except for the shuffling of feet in the road, the creaking
of equipment, and an occasional grunt as some soldier shifted the position of
the pack on his shoulders. This was the last glimpse which I had of the Seventy-
seventh Division during the War, for, while it was on the left flank of the First
Army line, in the Argonne Forest, during the Meuse-Argonne operation, my
duties at that time never allowed me to get anywhere near the area of
its operations.
WITHOUT CENSOR
57
By this time the Boche was digging in beyond the Vesle, and there were evi¬
dences of a reversion to stationary warfare. The First Corps Sector was about
to be taken over by the Third American Corps, which had been fighting on
our right, and First Corps Headquarters were about to be withdrawn. My
relations with First Corps Headquarters had been so thoroughly pleasant, and
always increasingly so, and my work there had been of such absorbing interest,
that it was with the greatest regret that I received a telegram over the Signal
Corps wire on the morning of August 12th, ordering me to report back at once
to First Army Headquarters at La Fertd-sous-Jouarre. I had been with First
Corps Headquarters just under two weeks, but it seemed like very much longer
than that. It was a great privilege to have played even such a minor part in
the first operations of one of the large tactical units of our Army. But an
order is an order, and I said my farewells, and left F&re-en-Tardenois within
an hour after I had received the telegram. I shall never forget that drive
down the old Chateau-Thierry Salient, back to La Fertd-sous-Jouarre. Every¬
thing had been keyed to such a high pitch at the front, one had been living
at such a high level of effort, that the sensation was that of coming down-hill,
although the road was, for the most part, perfectly level. There was a feeling
of leaving reality and of coming back to unreality; of sinking down again, and
of leaving behind something which one did not want to leave.
For, there, one had been conscious of living in a rarefied atmosphere, of
being lifted up, of functioning with an extraordinary alertness and awareness.
One’s powers seemed capable of an indefinite expansion, of a sustained activity
and efficiency in higher reaches of effort. It was not excitement alone that
made this possible; it was not the sense of danger, nor the absorbing interest
in all that was taking place, nor the realization of the importance of the events
in which one was participating, although without question each one of these
factors played its part. Rather was it a sure knowledge that, in the midst of all
the noise and turmoil and confusion and activity, unseen forces were guiding
and directing, in this War which was their War. It was as if warriors were
present whom one did not see. The spiritual world not only seemed close by,
at hand, but one felt in a certain sense actually within the borders of a different
world, living in reality, surveying with a surprising sort of detachment tte
whirl of daily events, at the same time that one played a conscious and ac#^
part in them. It was not something which one did oneself. It had nothing
whatever to do with one’s own qualifications, or lack of them, except in so far
as desire and motive may have helped to bring it about. It just happened.
One was gathered up, as it were, into a new world and functioned there. It
was quite simple. Later on in the summer, when I received letters from a
friend in the Movement, things which he said in them took on an added signifi¬
cance in the light of this experience. “Do not forget your Companions. France
is full of them, known and unknown. Do not forget either that no matter
what happens, there is no such thing as separation for those who know Him,—
» nk is in consciousness as well as in life. . . . Where you are must be thick
angels. Not easy to feel them, I imagine, except at certain times and
58
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
places. The terrific outer activity; the noise; the reaction of strained nerves,—
must make it difficult to feel, to see. But they surely are there. And all the
old Saints of France must be leaning half way out of heaven to bless and cheer
and sanctify. It is not far to lean, not there. To love that land is to love Him:
He has so completely made it His own.”
It was easy to love that land. The very next day came an opportunity to
see a part of it that was new to me, and, therefore, full of new beauty. For
when I arrived at La Fert6-sous-Jouarre, I found that Headquarters First
Army had packed up and moved, to a destination unknown. Only a few staff
officers were left, one of whom, a Colonel, instructed me to report to him at
the former Headquarters building early the next morning, and informed me
that I was to proceed overland with him by motor, under sealed orders, which
were not to be opened until we were en route. I went back to the same billet
which I had occupied two weeks before, and asked the old man who lived there
to take me in again for the night. Not only did he make no difficulty about it,
but the enthusiasm with which I was welcomed, as an old friend, bore striking
witness to the success of the American effort in the interval and to its effect
upon the French. Upon the occasion of my former visit, I had been received
somewhat grudgingly and had been given a tiny room in an outbuilding in the
rear. This time, however, my temporary host insisted upon giving me his
formal guest room on the second floor, most attractively furnished with what
appeared to be some really old pieces, and it was only with the greatest dif¬
ficulty and tact that I was able to prevent him from opening a bottle of wine,
in order that we might drink together to the continued success of the united
French and American armies. I spent most of that evening in an estaminet
in the town, in the company of an officer whom I knew and whom I met there
entirely by chance, so afraid was I that, if I returned to my temporary home
before the old man had gone to bed, the attack would be renewed. Early the
next morning, August 13th, we departed in a Staff car, six of us in all, and
when we were once well on our way, the Colonel in charge informed us that
our destination was Neufch&teau, whither the rest of First Army Headquarters
had already preceded us. This news was immensely interesting and stimulat¬
ing, for it could mean only one thing, and that was, that the First American
Army was about to undertake its first independent operation as a tactical unit,
and that, in view of where we were bound, this operation could be nothing else
than the reduction of the St. Mihiel salient. The animated discussion which
ensued upon the receipt of this news, however, did not prevent me from drink¬
ing in the beauty of that French country side; my humble rank made it a matter
of necessity that I should play a heavy thinking part in the milieu in which
I found myself, so I listened, asked an occasional question, and concentrated
upon the country through which we were passing. Our route lay well back
of the front. We saw no troops at all, until well on in the afternoon. It was a
peace-time France through which we passed, with no signs of the devastation
of war. Through little towns we went, drowsy in the hot summer sun; past
a succession of those way-side Calvaries and Crucifixes which one sees all over
WITHOUT CENSOR
59
France, which are such perpetual and welcome reminders. Through land
under cultivation, shimmering in the heat, where the sight of women and chil¬
dren working in the fields brought a momentary tightening of the heart and a
realization that, beneath the smiling surface, stem forces were at work.
Through forets and bois we went, cool and dark, and out again into open, roll¬
ing lands. Over it all brooded what I liked to think of as the permanent spirit
of France. Wars might come and end, might bring their changes and sorrows,
but would bring no change in this quiet and holy stillness, in this beauty which
had its power to assuage all sorrow and to convey a recompense. It brought
home to me something which my friend in New York had said in one of his
recent letters. He had been writing of his affection for “those hills and valleys
which seem to be so saturated with the Master’s benediction and love”, and
had said that one was drawn to “the very soil of the place, because the soil
seems to radiate an atmosphere which, so far as I know, is unique, and which
is certainly full of the mystery and of the appeal of the divine kingdom”.
But this charming and inspiring interlude was all too short. We reached
Troyes in time for a late luncheon, and then went on again, passing through
Chaumont, the site of American General Headquarters, and reaching Neufch&teau
early in the evening. Headquarters First Army was in the Chateau on the
hill, and there, after having settled myself in a billet in a street just below, -I
reported the next morning. It did not take long to discover that our surmise
had been correct, and that the senior officers of the Staff, under the eye of
General Pershing who motored over constantly from Chaumont, were hard at
work on the plans for the St. Mihiel operation. At that stage of the proceed¬
ings, however, there was nothing whatever for most of the junior officers to do.
At least, there was nothing as far as I was concerned. Every morning I re¬
ported, and every morning I was told that I was not needed that day. I set¬
tled down, therefore, to a week of rest, caught up on sleep and on letters home,
and spent much time with my strictly limited portable library. For social
diversions and for meals, there was always the Officer’s Club, a very good one;
Neufch&teau was so far from the front that, superficially, life there was rather
more like that in Bordeaux than the kind of thing which one might expect with
an important American operation imminent. After two or three days, ty*
inactivity began to pall. But that was always the way in the Army. Cro
seemed to spend far more time in preparing for something, or in waiting for
something, than one did in the actual doing of the thing itself when the time
came. The part of wisdom was to take advantage of a rest period when it hap¬
pened to come, and to use it constructively; there was always plenty to medi¬
tate about, in every sense of the word.
This week spent in Neufch&teau, however, brought one experience that was
never to be forgotten. I knew, of course, that Domr^my was only a few kilo¬
metres away, and I longed to go there, but I had no means of transportation,
and, after debating the matter for some time, I came to the conclusion that I
omhl not to make a personal request for the use of military transport, es-
peSally as it was constantly in use. I had given up all hope of going there,
6o
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
and was resigned, when one day, out of a clear sky, a captain on the Staff
told me that his colonel had offered him the use of a car for that morning, as
it was not going to be needed, and he asked me if I would like to motor over
to Domr^my with him. Nothing can ever persuade me that there was any ele¬
ment of the accidental about this. The high gods had intervened. Moreover,
I should not have cared to make that little pilgrimage with any chance acquaint¬
ance, but it so happened that this captain was a man whom I particularly
liked. It was a Sunday, and when we reached Domr^my we found a service
going on in the village church, and we stepped inside and stood in the rear, to
listen. The village priest was preaching, with fire and vigour, and had reached
in his discourse the point of violent denunciation of the Boche and of all his
ways; his sentiments were so sound, and he expressed himself with such em¬
phasis and such freedom, that I could have listened indefinitely with delight.
When, after leaving, we walked a little way down the street, and, turning,
faced the home of the Maid, I had a sense of instantaneous recognition. I had
never seen that house before, not in this life. I had never even seen a picture
of that house, to my knowledge. But when I looked, at the grey and ancient
stones, at the tall tree which overshadowed it, I knew that I had been there
before. There was not the vestige of a doubt about it. My companion must
have wondered why I hesitated so long at the gate, for it was a moment or
two before I could recollect myself and go in. I was to have a similar feeling
again more than once in succeeding weeks, in that same part of France, within
a radius of a score or so of miles from that very spot. The atmosphere again
and again seemed reminiscent and familiar; I felt at home, although I had
never been there knowingly before. Time and time again I wondered, as this
feeling recurred, whether I ought not to trust it implicitly. For it would not
have been beyond the bounds of belief, it would not have been in the least
strange, had I served in armed forces in that same country in the far and dis¬
tant past; it was entirely possible that, in the inscrutable working of Karma,
I was again being involved, in some small way, in the movement of armies
over familiar ground; I was back there, perhaps, to redeem some earlier mis¬
take, I was being given an opportunity and another chance.
Although we had fondly imagined that the American plans for the reduction
of the St. Mihiel salient were still a profound secret, we were due for a rude
awakening. We had inspected the church on the hill above Domr^my, where
I had been interested in the murals, which were full of life and of some real
feeling, and we were about to depart, when we met the priest in charge just
outside the door, and entered into conversation with him. After some pre¬
liminary remarks, he asked me when the American operation was to start. I
assumed my blankest look, and inquired to what operation he referred. He
replied, that it was the one to come at St. Mihiel to which he had reference,
and that all the countryside was looking forward with eagerness to our suc¬
cess. I looked puzzled, and told him that I knew nothing of any such plans,
that I was only passing through Domrdmy, but that I had seen no American
troop movements of any size or importance (they had not yet started) near
WITHOUT CENSOR
61
the front, and that I felt sure that what he had heard was merely one of those
unfounded rumours that get around, and that it would be well not to put cre¬
dence in it, in order that his flock might not be disappointed. He smiled, a
polite, enigmatic and disbelieving smile, and after further courteous inter¬
change, we left him. He saw through me completely. I had merely confirmed
what he had heard. Our very presence there, in a staff car, meant that more
American officers were arriving. As a matter of fact, the knowledge in regard
to our future operations was pretty general. Later on, a colonel on the First
Army Staff told me that about this same time he had been in a theatre in Paris,
and had heard our prospective St. Mihiel operation discussed by two midinettes
who were sitting behind him. This advance information of the general public
was probably not due to any lack of secrecy or care on the part of the Ameri¬
cans, but was undoubtedly arrived at in large measure by a process of deduc¬
tion. The Americans had made good at the Marne, they were ready now for
an independent effort of their own in a large way, and that section of the line
in the vicinity of St. Mihiel had always been universally recognized as the
probable future theatre of American operations. Added to this was the well-
known fact that, from the military point of view, as will be seen later, the reduc¬
tion of the St. Mihiel salient, menacing as it did on the flank any Allied opera¬
tion in the terrain immediately to the west and north, was an absolute strategic
necessity.
On the morning of August 20th, when I reported as usual at First Army
Headquarters, I was admitted to the Chief of Staff’s office. General Drum
outlined to me to some extent the plans for the St. Mihiel operation, and told
me that the First American Army Corps was to take part. He said that the
First Corps had been moving from the Vesle during the past week, and that
its Headquarters was now at Saizerais, a little town northeast of Toul. He
told me that General Craig, the Chief of Staff, had asked to have me back
again with them for the St. Mihiel operation, and that, while he had intended
to send me anyway, he was glad to have received this request. He then handed
me the following letter,—
Headquarters First Army
American Expeditionary Forces, France,
Office of G-3
August 20, 1918.
From: A. C. of S., G-3, 1st Army.
lo: Captain-, Liaison Officer, Hq. 1st Army.
Subject: Orders.
1. You will proceed to the Headquarters, 1st Corps, reporting upon ar¬
rival to the Commanding General for duty as liaison officer, 1st Army.
2. Your duties will consist of keeping these headquarters constantly
informed of the progress of operations of the 1st Corps and of all matters
of interest to these headquarters.
By command of General Pershing:
R. McCleave,
Colonel, General Staff,
G-3.
62
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
General Drum told me that, as I could see from this letter, my duties would
be identically the same as they had been previously north of the Marne, and
that I should feel the advantage of the experience which I had gained there,
and of my friendly relations with the First Corps Staff. He told me to go that
afternoon, and to ask for the necessary transportation, and to say that it was
at his order; he shook hands, and I saluted and departed. Packing did not
take long in the Army; after a quick and early lunch, I loaded myself and my
belongings on a Ford car, and started off, proceeding by way of Toul, which
was full of American troops. I arrived at Saizerais, which was really only a
village, about the middle of the afternoon, but was unable to discover any
signs whatever of First Corps Headquarters, the only troops in evidence being
some elements of an American division which had just been relieved, and which
were on their way back to the rear of the Sector. As I was walking down the
principal street, very much puzzled as to what to do next, I suddenly came
face to face with General Craig, who had just arrived in a staff car. He told
me that they could not possibly get into the place before the next day, and
that I had better go away and spend the night somewhere, and return the
following morning. I must have looked nonplussed, for he laughed, and said
that there was a town called Liverdun just below, where I could find a place
to sleep. Accordingly, I started off again in my Ford, with nothing to do for
the next eighteen hours, in search of a place to do it in, and greatly cheered
by my friendly little encounter with‘the General.
Liverdun was situated on the top of a high hill overlooking the Moselle; in
some places the drop was sheer down to the river itself. The town was literally
crammed full of American troops. I went at once to the Billeting Officer, a
greatly harassed individual, who seemed to have so much on his mind that
he was unable to focus his attention on me at all until I had actually forced
my orders into his hand, at the same time standing over him, and explaining
to him with some heat that I simply must have a billet for the night. He told
me, with somewhat unnecessary emphasis, that he could not get another officer
into that town with a shoe horn, but relented slightly, after he had blown off
steam, and suggested that I should go to the Mairie and see what I could do;
he said that the school-room there was large and airy, and that, as far as he
knew, it was unoccupied. No man can make bricks without straw. It was
easy to see that he was at his wits’ end, and others were crowding into his little
office on the same mission as myself. So, making a virtue of necessity, I climbed
back into the Ford, and, after some difficulty, we found the Mairie. Leaving
my conveyance at the door, I entered, and, seeing no one, I made a personal
reconnaissance of the situation. The school-room was all that had been claimed
for it, and the floor was clean although, being of stone, it was not so desirable
for sleeping purposes as it might have been. Before finally settling myself,
however, I decided to investigate further, and started up the stairs. At the
top I met a French woman and two small children, who were all three survey¬
ing my advent with surprised interest. Full of apologies for my intrusion, I
explained my predicament, and asked if I might be permitted to pass the night
WITHOUT CENSOR
63
downstairs. The response was immediate and whole-hearted. Certainly! But
she could do better for me than that. Look, here was a bed-room upstairs
which was unoccupied. It would give them much pleasure if I would make
use of it. It seemed too good to be true. I accepted the invitation with great
thankfulness. My military chauffeur, if the driver of a Ford can be dignified
by that name, carried up to my room what few personal possessions I needed
for the night, and I sent him off to shift for himself, with strict injunctions not
to let my belongings out of his sight for a moment, and to sleep on the back
seat of the car; I knew that he would find no difficulty in subsisting himself
for two meals in a town so full of troops. With true hospitality, I was invited
to have supper with the family, but with the utmost tact possible I declined,
on the ground that I had immediate duties to perform which would not permit
me to remain for the moment. It was impossible to tell how low the supply
of food might be in a French family, close up to the front. Once they had
taken you in, all that they had was yours. I simply did not dare to risk it, on
account of the children. As I walked up the street, I met an officer whom I
had known for years in New York. Together we invaded a likely looking
French domicile, and without great difficulty, and for a consideration which
more than replaced what we consumed, we persuaded the good woman of the
house and her two grown daughters to cook some supper for us.
It was dark when we had finished, and we were just settling down for a talk
and a smoke, when the alerte sounded. It was a clear night, and the Boche
planes had been sighted, on their way to shower their usual unwelcome atten¬
tions upon Nancy and Toul, and it was perfectly certain that they would let
go some bombs en route on any town as large as Liverdun. I thought with
satisfaction of the Mairie, a building with thick stone walls and solidly built,
and decided to get home before the party started. The town was full of hurry¬
ing forms, making for shelter. I ran down the street, and when I reached the
Mairie, I found, huddled together just inside the door, a score of white-faced
and panting children, not one of whom was over fifteen years of age; some of
them were so small, that they had to be helped by the older ones; some were
so young that they must have been doing this same thing, taking refuge from
an enemy which made war on women and children, every clear night for prac¬
tically all of their lives. It made one see red. I thought of my kind Frencl^
woman and of her two children, and wondered what they were doing,
started up the stairs to see. The building was in complete darkness. As 1
neared the top of the stairs, I met them. She had in her arms the little girl,
who was sound asleep; in one hand she held a lighted candle, and with the
other she grasped the hand of her little boy, who was so heavy with sleep that
he could hardly stand upright. It was still only a couple of minutes since
the alerte had first sounded. I asked where she was going, and she said to
the cellar. I took the candle from her, and the little boy, and, all together,
we made our way down two flights of stairs. There, in the middle of the cellar,
was an enormous stone furnace, with walls two feet thick. She opened the
dootof the furnace, disclosing a heap of straw covered with a blanket, and in
6 4
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
there she laid her little girl, still sound asleep; the boy crawled in through the
opening and lay down beside her, and was oblivious to his surroundings in no
time at all. It was a most wonderful abri. Outside, the drop was sheer down
to the Moselle, so that any bomb would explode far below. Only a direct hit
would do any damage. The mother told me that she had spent every clear
night in that cellar for four years. She said, however, that there were certain
advantages; usually many of the neighbours came in, and it was very sociable;
perhaps they would come later, and I had better remain there. I thought,
however, of that cool and home-like room upstairs, overlooking an inner walled
garden, and I decided to take a chance, although I assured her that I would
return if it got too thick above later on. As a matter of fact, that particular
raid was not a bad one. Several bombs were dropped, a few on the fringes
of the town, but most of them landed in adjoining fields, and the rest of the
night was quiet.
In the morning the little family, in spite of all that I could say, insisted upon
giving me petit dtjeuner ,—coffee without sugar or milk, bread without butter,
and fruit. It was impossible to refuse. The small boy sat at the table with me,
and acted as host with perfect courtesy. He showed me photographs of his
father, who was brancardier with the Armies, and who had been given the
Croix de Guerre, and of whom he was obviously immensely proud. Soon the
time came for departure. I asked Madame if she would have the goodness
to tell me the extent to which I was indebted to her for the accommodation
which I had received; her kindness I felt that I could never repay. She refused
absolutely to hear of any payment whatever. No, the Americans had come to
help and to aid France, and any little thing that one could do for them was
as nothing. I finally succeeded in circumventing her, by persuading her to
allow me to make gifts to each of the children, with which they might buy
some little souvenirs of my visit. Delighted, they then both insisted that
they should make me gifts in return. They disappeared into the garden for a
space, but soon returned, the boy with a paper bag full of mirabelles and the
little girl with her arms full of flowers, which she proceeded to arrange in a
bouquet. They accompanied me to the steps, where the Ford was awaiting
me, the driver looking none the worse for having roughed it a bit for the night,
and, as I drove away, all three, framed in the doorway, were waving hands and
handkerchiefs, and were calling after me all sorts of warm-hearted good wishes.
{To be continued)
Centurion.
The true secret of cheerfulness lies in forgetting yourself and your personal interests.
—Palau.
REMARKS BY THE WAY
R EFERRING to the death of King George of England in last April’s
Quarterly, we concluded with these words:
For the example which he and Queen Mary set in their own home, as man and wife,
as father and mother, it would be impossible to be too grateful. They hated immorality
and vulgarity. One can only hope that the Queen will continue to exert the same in¬
fluence, unimpeded [not italicized originally].
Everyone must wish that the new King will leave as fine a record behind him. 1 o use
an old-time expression: may he grow in grace as in wisdom and dignity, and live to be
blest by his people as his father was before him.
We chose our words with care, realizing that it would require something of a
miracle if our prayer for Edward VIII were to be answered. His private record
was terribly against him, as was widely known in America after his visit some
years ago to Long Island and to the “fast set” there, when he left a trail behind
him which disgusted right-thinking Americans, and fully prepared the public
for the climax just passed. In brief, by placing his personal pleasure above his
duty to his country, to the Throne, to his mother—and to the ordinary decen¬
cies, he proved himself unfit and unworthy to be a King. His claim had always
been that his private life was his own affair. No one’s private life is his own
affair, and the greater a man’s position, the greater is his responsibility for the
example he sets and for the contagion of his behaviour. This is true not of
Kings only. Not so many years ago, first one and then another President of the
United States Steel Corporation was forced to resign his office for “private”
conduct deemed unbecoming in a man of that standing, with a public, though
purely commercial, responsibility. Mere membership in a Church, in a Society,
imposes a corporate obligation, super- or extra-personal. Under that head alone,
no man is fit to be a King whose conduct and whose claims present the opposite
point of view.
The measure of a man’s rights, whether as King or commoner, is the measure
of his self-surrender. That is fundamental. If my position entitles me to re¬
spect, and my behaviour makes respect impossible,—I do more than degrade
myself: I degrade my position. And Edward VIII degraded his position. He
dragged the monarchical principle,in the mud. He wanted to marry a womdfc
already twice divorced, with both husbands living, whose last divorce wasV
shock to those who have clung to the belief that the Courts of England could
not be swayed by “influence” (a verbatim report of the case was published
here); and he wanted to do this, on some basis or other, while still remaining
King. When told that this was impossible, he abandoned his duty for the sake
of a transitory whim. More than a whim it cannot be. We prefer to say noth¬
ing of the woman. She is forty. We leave it to our readers to decide what she
would have done if she had really loved him. That, for the moment, she has
great influence over him, is obvious. How would a good woman, if she loved
66
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
him, have exercised her influence? La Dame anx Camillas answered that ques¬
tion long ago; so, in principle, did the old play, David Garrick.
As for him, he has proved himself heartless. In the long run, sons always
treat their wives as they treated their mothers. He has nearly broken his
mother’s heart, devoted to him—a good mother, a good woman. He will never
break his wife’s heart (if she becomes his wife): that is self-evident. But he will
turn this way and that, as the impulse seizes him,—as he has turned from one
to another for many years past,—even their names known to everyone. The
exact nature of his relations with these women, is unimportant. They were, in
any case, passing infatuations.
We are outspoken for more reasons than one. Great principles are involved,
and it would be impossible to make these clear without explicit statement of
some of the facts. But another and equally important reason is that sentiment
is still being manufactured in his favour on the basis of this nasty scandal being
“a great love” which it was unkind, if not a crime, to balk. And this is revolt¬
ing, because love is a divine reality—in this world, a divine possibility—an ideal
to be held sacred and inviolate by all of us; if not known, then at least believed
in. A “great love”! That man and that woman, their pasts written on their
faces, their recent conduct an infallible indication of their natures! Self-seeking
in any form is the antithesis of love.
Sentimentality is always dangerous, as it leads men (not to speak of women)
to shut their eyes to any fact which does not accord with their emotional sym¬
pathies. We cannot reach such people directly (they certainly do not read the
Quarterly!), but we should like to ask what they would think of a professional
soldier who, in the midst of war, resigned his commission because he was “in
love” with some woman and was not allowed to keep her with him at the front.
Such a man would be a traitor to his country, and a disgrace to himself, and to
the woman,—to any woman. Yet Edward accepted his King’s commission on
the death of his father, and a King is on active service for life, at every minute
of the day and night.
The woman announced that she was “willing”, “if such action would solve
the problem, to withdraw”—which left the situation exactly where it was,
except that it should further have revealed her character and purpose, even to
the most stupid onlooker. But the underlying fact is that the outcome, in all
but form, was settled from the moment the King informed Mr. Baldwin “of his
intention to marry Mrs. Simpson whenever she should be free” (the Prime
Minister’s words in the House of Commons). That was the end, as well as the
beginning, where Edward, as King, was concerned. Once his decision became
known—and there was no concealing it—he lost the respect of everyone who
puts duty first in his own life; he had made such an exhibition of himself that
it would have taken years to live it down, even if, during those years, his be¬
haviour had been exemplary,—almost impossible in his case, because his habits
are set. And meanwhile the Throne would have been occupied by a man of
whom a widely-known American author, H. L. Mencken, at the height of the
crisis could write in these terms:
REMARKS BY THE WAY
67
The natural sympathy which all of us poor fools have for one another should not be
allowed to obscure the fact that, in the comedy now sinking so miserably into farce, his
Britannic Majesty has acted very badly. The conflict in that comedy has not been
between a romantic hero on the one hand and a cruel ogre on the other, but one between
a silly middle-aged boy and a pedagogue trying to recall him to his duty. . . . [The
British people] find themselves confronted by a jazz baby—wilful, petulant, irrespon¬
sible and preposterous. It is almost as if he had been caught robbing a hen-roost or
joining a circus. . . . The people of the United States would have been quite as shocked
if their President had revealed himself in the same character, and proposed to launch
into the same folly.
That the man thus indicted could be “charming” and “tactful” when he
wanted to be, has no bearing on the issue. The woman he wants to marry can
be charming and tactful when she wants to be, for all we know to the contrary;
but that would not affect her record, would have no bearing on her moral stan¬
dards, would not be sufficient to make her welcome in the homes of self-respecting
people. We know nothing against her but that which all the world now knows,
or ought to know,—which is more than enough; and by this time all the world
knows or ought to know, enough of the man who was Edward VIII.
His farewell address, instead of putting him in a less unfavourable light, more
than justified the comment of The New York Times in a moderate and measured
editorial (December 12th): “There was no glorious, even if losing, fight for a
high principle. Personal and selfish interests were put above public duty.”
However, let us be thankful that, out of this deplorable affair, the peoples
and the family which he dishonoured have come through unscathed, as all the
world recognizes, not without admiration. They were loyal to the Rightness
they perceived; they were steadfast; they faced their trouble with quiet
courage.
Our deepest and most respectful sympathy goes out to Queen Mary. Every¬
one in America would join in that.
May God bless, strengthen and sustain the new King and Queen. Long
may they reign. Everyone in America would join in that too.
* * *
*
The foundations of national glory are set in the homes of the people , and they will
only remain unshaken while the family life of our race and nation is strong , simple ,
and pure. — King George V.
We prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good and evil
which gradually determines character .— George Eliot.
WHAT ARE THE THE0S0PH1STS?
A RE they what they claim to be—students of natural law, of ancient and
AA modern philosophy, and even of exact science? Are they Deists, Atheists,
Socialists, Materialists, or Idealists; or are they but a schism of modem
Spiritualism—mere visionaries? Are they entitled to any consideration, as
capable of discussing philosophy and promoting real science; or should they be
treated with the compassionate toleration which one gives to “harmless enthusi¬
asts”? The Theosophical Society has been variously charged with a belief in
“miracles”, and “miracle-working”; with a secret political object—like the
Carbonari; with being spies of an autocratic Czar; with preaching socialistic
and nihilistic doctrines; and, mirabile dictu, with having a covert understand¬
ing with the French Jesuits, to disrupt modem Spiritualism for a pecuniary
consideration! With equal violence they have been denounced as dreamers,
by the American Positivists; as fetish-worshippers, by some of the New York
press; as revivalists of “mouldy superstitions”, by the Spiritualists; as infidel
emissaries of Satan, by the Christian Church; as the very types of “ gobe -
mouche ”, by Professor W. B. Carpenter, F.R.S.; and, finally, and most ab¬
surdly, some Hindu opponents, with a view to lessening their influence, have
flatly charged them with the employment of demons to perform certain phe¬
nomena. Out of all this pother of opinions one fact stands conspicuous—the
Society, its members, and their views, are deemed of enough importance to be
discussed and denounced: Men slander only those whom they hate—or fear.
But, if the Society has had its enemies and traducers, it has also had its
friends and advocates. For every word of censure, there has been a word of
praise. Beginning with a party of about a dozen earnest men and women, a
month later its numbers had so increased as to necessitate the hiring of a public
hall for its meetings; within two years, it had working branches in European
countries. Still later, it found itself in alliance with the Indian Arya Samaj,
1 In our October, 1936. issue, we reprinted an article by Madame H. P. Blavatsky, which appeared originally
in the last number of the magazine she then edited.—the last number before her death, and the last in fact, be¬
cause, although in name it was continued, in spirit it expired. The article we now reprint, also written by H.P.B.,
appeared in tne first number of the first volume of Tht Theosophist, dated October. 1879,—the first magazine she
edited. It was her initial declaration of principles when she began her public work in India. Efforts to continue
a magazine under the same name, after she had retired from its editorship, produced a rattle as of dead men’s
bones,—and her bones were not among them.— Editors.
68
WHAT ARE THE THEOSOPHISTS?
69
headed by the learned Pandit Day&nund Saraswati Swami, and the Ceylonese
Buddhists, under the erudite H. Sumangala, High Priest of Adam’s Peak and
President of the Widyodaya College, Colombo.
He who would seriously attempt to fathom the psychological sciences, must
come to the sacred land of ancient Aryavarta. None is older than she in eso¬
teric wisdom and civilization, however fallen may be her poor shadow—modem
India. Holding this country, as we do, for the fruitful hot-bed whence pro¬
ceeded all subsequent philosophical systems, to this source of all psychology
and philosophy a portion of our Society has come to learn its ancient wisdom
and ask for the impartation of its weird secrets. Philology has made too much
progress to require at this late day a demonstration of this fact of the primo-
genitive nationality of Arydvart. The unproved and prejudiced hypothesis of
modern chronology is not worthy of a moment’s thought, and it will vanish in
time like so many other unproved hypotheses. The line of philosophical he¬
redity, from Kapila through Epicurus to James Mill; from Patdnjali through
Plotinus to Jacob Bohme, can be traced like the course of a river through a
landscape. One of the objects of the Society’s organization was to examine
the too transcendent views of the Spiritualists in regard to the powers of dis¬
embodied spirits; and, having told them what, in our opinion at least, a portion
of their phenomena are not , it will become incumbent upon us now to show
what they are. So apparent is it that it is in the East, and especially in India,
that the key to the alleged “supernatural” phenomena of the Spiritualists
must be sought, that it has recently been conceded in the Allahabad Pioneer
(August nth, 1879), an Anglo-Indian daily journal which has not the reputa¬
tion of saying what it does not mean. Blaming the men of science who, “in¬
tent upon physical discovery, for some generations have been too prone to
neglect super-physical investigation”, it mentions “the new wave of doubt”
(Spiritualism) which has “latterly disturbed this conviction”. To a large
number of persons, including many of high culture and intelligence, it adds:
“The supernatural has again asserted itself as a fit subject of inquiry and re¬
search. And there are plausible hypotheses in favour of the idea that among
the ‘sages’ of the East . . . there may be found in a higher degree than among the
more modernized inhabitants of the West, traces of those personal peculiarities
whatever they may be, which are required as a condition precedent to
occurrence of supernatural phenomena.” And then, unaware that the cause
he pleads is one of the chief aims and objects of our Society, the editorial writer
remarks that it is “the only direction in which, it seems to us, the efforts of
the Theosophists in India might possibly be useful. The leading members of
the Theosophical Society in India are known to be very advanced students of
occult phenomena, already, and we cannot but hope that their professions of
interest in Oriental philosophy . . . may cover a reserved intention of carry¬
ing out explorations of the kind we indicate.”
While, as observed, one of our objects, it yet is but one of many; the most
i^krtant of which is to revive the work of Ammonius Saccas, and make various
nations remember that they are the children “of one mother”. As to the tran-
70
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
scendental side of ancient Theosophy, it is also high time that the Theosophical
Society should explain. With how much, then, of this nature-searching, God¬
seeking science of the ancient Aryan and Greek mystics, and of the powers of
modem spiritual mediumship, does the Society agree? Our answer is: with it
all. But if asked what it believes in, the reply will be: “as a body —Nothing.”
The Society, as a body, has no creed, as creeds are but the shells around spiritual
knowledge; and Theosophy in its fruition is spiritual knowledge itself—the
very essence of philosophical and theistic enquiry. Visible representative of
Universal Theosophy, it can no more be sectarian than a Geographical Society,
which represents universal geographical exploration without caring whether
the explorers be of one creed or another. The religion of the Society is an
algebraical equation, in which so long as the sign = of equality is not omitted,
each member is allowed to substitute quantities of his own, which better accord
with climatic and other exigencies of his native land, with the idiosyncrasies of
his people, or even with his own. Having no accepted creed, our Society is
very ready to give and take, to learn and teach, by practical experimentation,
as opposed to mere passive and credulous acceptance of enforced dogma. It is
willing to accept every result claimed by any of the foregoing schools or systems,
that can be logically and experimentally demonstrated. Conversely, it can take
nothing on mere faith, no matter by whom the demand may be made.
But, when we come to consider ourselves individually, it is quite another
thing. The Society’s members represent the most varied nationalities and
races, and were born and educated in the most dissimilar creeds and social
conditions. Some of them believe in one thing, others in another. Some in¬
cline toward the ancient magic , or secret wisdom that was taught in the sanc¬
tuaries, which was the very opposite of supernaturalism or diabolism; others
in modem spiritualism, or intercourse with the spirits of the dead; still others
in mesmerism or animal magnetism or only in an occult dynamic force in na¬
ture. A certain number have scarcely yet acquired any definite belief, but are
in a state of attentive expectancy; and there are even those who call them¬
selves materialists, in a certain sense. Of atheists and bigoted sectarians of
any religion, there are none in the Society; for the very fact of a man’s joining
it proves that he is in search of the final truth as to the ultimate essence of
things. If there be such a thing as a speculative atheist, which philosophers
may deny, he would have to reject both cause and effect, whether in this world
of matter, or in that of spirit. There may be members who, like the poet
Shelley, have let their imagination soar from cause to prior cause ad infinitum ,
as each in its turn became logically transformed into a result necessitating a
prior cause, until they have thinned the Eternal into a mere mist. But even
they are not atheists in the speculative sense, whether they identify the ma¬
terial forces of the universe with the functions with which the theists endow
their God, or otherwise; for once that they cannot free themselves from the
conception of the abstract ideal of power, cause, necessity, and effect, they
can be considered as atheists only in respect to a personal God, and not to the
Universal Soul of the Pantheist. On the other hand, the bigoted sectarian,
WHAT ARE THE THEOSOPHISTS?
7i
fenced in, as he is, with a creed upon every paling of which is written the warn¬
ing “No Thoroughfare”, can neither come out of his enclosure to join the Theo-
sophical Society, nor, if he could, has it room for one whose very religion for¬
bids examination. The very root idea of the Society is free and fearless
investigation.
As a body, the Theosophical Society holds that all original thinkers and
investigators of the hidden side of nature, whether materialists—those who
find matter “the promise and potency of all terrestrial life”—or spiritualists,
that is, those who discover in spirit the source of all energy and of matter as
well, were and are, properly, Theosophists. For to be one, one need not neces¬
sarily recognize the existence of any special God or a deity. One need but
worship the spirit of living nature, and try to identify oneself with it. To
revere that Presence , the invisible Cause, which is yet ever manifesting itself
in its incessant results; the intangible, omnipotent, and omnipresent Proteus:
indivisible in its Essence, and eluding form, yet appearing under all and every
form; who is here and there and everywhere and nowhere; is All and Nothing;
ubiquitous yet one; the Essence filling, binding, bounding, containing every¬
thing; contained in all. It will, we think, be seen now, that whether classed as
Theists, Pantheists or Atheists, such men are all near kinsmen to the rest. Be
what he may, once a student abandons the old and trodden highway of routine,
and enters upon the solitary path of independent thought—Godward—he is a
Theosophist; an original thinker, a seeker after the eternal truth with “an
inspiration of his own” to solve the universal problems.
With every man that is earnestly searching in his own way after a knowledge
of the Divine Principle, of man’s relations to it, and nature’s manifestations of
it, Theosophy is allied. It is likewise the ally of honest science, as distinguished
from much that passes for exact , physical science, so long as the latter does not
poach on the domains of psychology and metaphysics.
And it is also the ally of every honest religion—to wit: a religion willing to
be judged by the same tests as it applies to the others. Those books, which
contain the most self-evident truths, are to it inspired (not revealed). But all
books it regards, on account of the human element contained in them, as in¬
ferior to the Book of Nature; to read which and comprehend it correctly, the
innate powers of the soul must be highly developed. Ideal laws can be per¬
ceived by the intuitive faculty alone; they are beyond the domain of argument
and dialectics, and no one can understand or rightly appreciate them tliro^A
the explanations of another mind, even though this mind be claiming a direct
revelation. And, as this Society, which allows the widest sweep in the realms
of the pure ideal, is no less firm in the sphere of facts, its deference to modern
science and its just representatives is sincere. Despite all their lack of a higher
spiritual intuition, the world’s debt to the representatives of modern physical
science is immense; hence, the Society endorses heartily the noble and indig¬
nant protest of that gifted and eloquent preacher, the Rev. O. B. Frothingham,
against those who try to undervalue the services of our great naturalists.
“Talk of Science as being irreligious, atheistic”, he exclaimed in a recent lecture,
72
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
delivered at New York,—“Science is creating a new idea of God. It is due
to Science that we have any conception at all of a living God. If we do not
become atheists one of these days under the maddening effect of Protestantism,
it will be due to Science, because it is disabusing us of hideous illusions that
tease and embarrass us, and putting us in the way of knowing how to reason
about the things we see. ...”
And it is also due to the unremitting labours of such Orientalists as Sir W.
Jones, Max Muller, Bumouf, Colebrooke, Haug, St. Hilaire, and so many
others, that the Society, as a body, feels equal respect and veneration for Vedic,
Buddhist, Zoroastrian, and other old religions of the world; and a like brotherly
feeling towards its Hindu, Sinhalese, Parsi, Jain, Hebrew, and Christian mem¬
bers as individual students of “self”, of nature, and of the divine in nature.
Born in the United States of America, the Society was constituted on the
model of its Mother Land. The latter, omitting the name of God from its
constitution lest it should afford a pretext one day to make a state religion,
gives absolute equality to all religions in its laws. All support and each is in
turn protected by the State. The Society, modelled upon this constitution,
may fairly be termed a “Republic of Conscience”.
We have now, we think, made clear why our members, as individuals, are
free to stay outside or inside any creed they please, provided they do not pre¬
tend that none but themselves shall enjoy the privilege of conscience, and try
to force their opinions upon the others. In this respect the Rules of the Society
are very strict. It tries to act upon the wisdom of the old Buddhistic axiom,
“Honour thine own faith, and do not slander that of others”; echoed back in
our present century in the “Declaration of Principles” of the Brahmo Samaj,
which so nobly states that : “no sect shall be vilified, ridiculed, or hated”. In
Section VI of the Revised Rules of the Theosophical Society, recently adopted
in General Council, at Bombay, is this mandate: “It is not lawful for any
officer of the Parent Society to express, by word or act, any hostility to or
preference for, any one section (sectarian division, or group, within the Society)
more than another. All must be regarded and treated as equally the objects
of the Society’s solicitude and exertions. All have an equal right to have the
essential features of their religious belief laid before the tribunal of an im¬
partial world.” In their individual capacity, members may, when attacked,
occasionally break this Rule; but, nevertheless, as officers they are restrained,
and the Rule is strictly enforced during the meetings. For, above all human
sects stands Theosophy in its abstract sense; Theosophy which is too wide for
any of them to contain but which easily contains them all.
In conclusion, we may state that, broader and far more universal in its views
than any existing mere scientific Society, it has, plus science, its belief in every
possibility, and determined will to penetrate into those unknown spiritual
regions which exact science pretends that its votaries have no business to ex¬
plore. And it has one quality more than any religion in that it makes no dif¬
ference between Gentile, Jew, or Christian. It is in this spirit that the Society
has been established upon the footing of a Universal Brotherhood.
WHAT ARE THE THEOSOPHISTS?
73
Unconcerned about politics; hostile to the insane dreams of Socialism and of
Communism , which it abhors—as both are but disguised conspiracies of brutal
force and sluggishness against honest labour;- the Society cares but little about
the outward human management of the material world. The whole of its
aspirations are directed towards the occult truths of the visible and invisible
worlds. Whether the physical man be under the rule of an empire or a republic,
concerns only the man of matter. His body may be enslaved; as to his Soul,
he has the right to give to his rulers the proud answer of Socrates to his Judges:
they have no sway over the inner man.
Such is, then, the Theosophical Society, and such its principles, its multi¬
farious aims, and its objects. Need we wonder at the past misconceptions of
the general public, and the easy hold the enemy has been able to find to lower
it in the public estimation? The true student has ever been a recluse, a man
of silence and meditation. With the busy world his habits and tastes have so
little in common that, while he is studying, his enemies and slanderers have
undisturbed opportunities. But time cures all and lies are but ephemerce.
Truth alone is eternal.
About a few of the Fellows of the Society who have made scientific discov¬
eries, and some others to whom the psychologist and the biologist are indebted
for the new light thrown upon the darker problems of the inner man, we will
speak later on. Our object now was but to prove to the reader that Theos¬
ophy is neither “a new-fangled doctrine”, a political cabal, nor one of those
societies of enthusiasts which are born to-day but to die to-morrow. That
not all of its members can think alike, is proved by the Society having organ¬
ized into two great Divisions—the Eastern and the Western—the former being
divided into numerous sections, according to races and religious views. One
man’s thought, infinitely various as are its manifestations, is not all-embrac¬
ing. Denied ubiquity, it must necessarily speculate in one direction; and,
once transcending the boundaries of exact human knowledge, it has to err and
wander, for the ramifications of the one Central and Absolute Truth are in¬
finite. Hence, we occasionally find even the greatest philosophers losing them¬
selves in the labyrinths of speculations, thereby provoking the criticism of
posterity. But as all work for one and the same object, namely, the disen-
thrallment of human thought, the elimination of superstitions, and the dis¬
covery of truth, all are equally welcome. The attainment of these objects, ak
agree, can best be secured by convincing the reason and warming the entil«
siasm of the generation of fresh young minds, that are just ripening into ma¬
turity, and making ready to take the place of their prejudiced and conservative
fathers. And, as each—the great ones as well as small—have trodden the
royal road to knowledge, we listen to all, and take both small and great into
our. fellowship. For no honest searcher comes back empty-handed, and even
he who has enjoyed the least share of popular favour can lay at least his mite
upon the one altar of Truth.
1 These italics are ours. Not within The Theosophical Society, but outside its ranks, are self-styled Theos-
ophists who write of Soviet Russia as if it were a Star of Hope for mankind, and who, in England especially,
attempt to reconcile the principles of Theosophy with political tenets which H.P.B. condemned as "insane dreams .
Such people choose to forget, presumably, that in India, while she was still suspected of being a Russian spy.
H.P.B. published her magazine. The Theosophist, with a deep mourning border when Alexander II was murdered
b^he Nihilists in 1881. They forget, or may not know, that although she became a citizen of the United States,
sl^^fcnained passionately loyal to the Russian Czardom to the day of her death.— Editors.
The Dhammapada, translated from the Pali, with an Essay on Buddha and the
Occident , by Irving Babbitt; Oxford University Press, 1936; price, S2.00.
The late Irving Babbitt was an uncompromising champion of the so-called
classical tradition. He believed that man achieves his destiny by the exercise
of an inflexible will, by the rigid control of mind and body, by the restraint
of emotion and desire. In an admirable book, Rousseau and Romanticism , he
pointed to the dangers which threaten the modem Occident, because its domi¬
nant philosophy of life disregards these ancient virtues. Self-discipline is in¬
compatible with self-expression, in the contemporary sense of this term. Pro¬
fessor Babbitt loathed the “romantic movement” which in its modem form
began with the Renaissance and which has been primarily responsible, as he
thought, for three of the outstanding characteristics of modern civilization,—
materialistic rationalism, utilitarianism, and sentimentality.
Professor Babbitt seems to have become interested in Gautama Buddha
because that great religious teacher can indeed be regarded as a supreme ex¬
ponent of the classical tradition at its best. The Dhammapada , one of the
clearest and simplest of scriptures, lays special emphasis on the need for con¬
stant vigilance and wakefulness. Its central theme is the power of right will
and right thought to transform the mortal into the immortal. Professor Bab¬
bitt turned to the Buddha, with almost religious ardour, as the living proof
of the doctrine that only he who “has forsaken and utterly eradicated all the
appetites” of the personal man, can become veritably human, “the noble,
the hero, the great seer, the conqueror, the impassible, the sinless, the
awakened”.
The “Essay on Buddha and the Occident” may be read with profit by every
serious student of Buddhism. It really illumines certain aspects of the Indian
Master’s life and teaching. Professor Babbitt understood his subject better
than many Buddhists. He even noted a factor which Mr. Charles Johnston
often stressed,—that the Buddha’s sayings reveal an exquisite sense of humour.
A few citations will illustrate Professor Babbitt’s point of view.
[ I he Buddha] does not hope, like Rousseau and the sentimentalists, to unify life in
terms of feeling; nor again, after the fashion of philosophers like Hegel, to unify it in
terms of intellect. The unification that Buddha seeks is to be achieved by the exercise
of a certain quality of will that says No to the outgoing desires with a view to the substi¬
tution of the more permanent for the less permanent among these desires, and finally
74
REVIEWS
75
to the escape from impermanence altogether. His assertion of this quality of will is
positive and empirical to the last degree. . . . The Western student is likely to be re¬
pelled by Nirvana, but is almost invariably attracted by the prominence Buddha gives
to love or compassion. Buddhist love can, however, like Nirvana, be understood only
in connection with the special form of activity which is put forth in meditation. It
does not well forth spontaneously from the natural man but is, like Christian charity,
the supernatural virtue par excellence. The current confusion on this point is perhaps
the most striking outcome of the sentimentalism of the eighteenth century, and of the
emotional romanticism of the nineteenth century that prolonged it. This confusion
may be defined psychologically as a tendency to substitute for a superrational concen¬
tration of will, a subrational expansion of feeling. How many persons, for example,
exalt the “love" of St. Francis who, in their total outlook on life, are almost inconceiv¬
ably remote from the humility, chastity and poverty from which, in the eyes of St.
Francis himself, that love was inseparable! ... In general, a collateral benefit of any
comprehension one may achieve of Buddha, is that it will help one to a better under¬
standing of Christ. One will be less likely to confound him with the humanitarian
phantom that has for several generations past tended to usurp his place. . . . Every¬
thing will be found to hinge finally on the idea of meditation. This idea has suffered a
steady decline in the Occident, along with the transcendent view of life in general, in
the passage from the mediaeval to the modern period. Yet it is not certain that religion
itself can survive unless men retain some sense of the wisdom that may, according to
Dante, be won by sitting in quiet recollection.
In truth, every real religion is a “religion of the will”. The current supposi¬
tion that Christianity is a form of sentimental humanitarianism is far more
blasphemous, in the reviewer’s opinion, than many types of “atheism”. This
basic fact Professor Babbitt recognized and enunciated as clearly as possible.
However, there are other attested spiritual facts which he did not perceive.
He did not comprehend, for example, that devils as well as angels can medi¬
tate; that the black magician uses the will to suppress the “outgoing desires”
and to direct the movements of the mind. It is said that the difference between
the Bright and Dark Powers, between white and black magic, is a difference
of motive. The black magician kills out all sentiments save one,—the love
of self; but the Masters have not suppressed the “outgoing desires” on the
spiritual plane. Professor Babbitt rightly distinguished between a divine
compassion for all creatures, and the subrational pity (so often a mode of self-
pity) which anyone may feel in the presence of another’s pain or distress. But
the Masters’ compassion and love are their most “immediate states of cofl
sciousness”. If it were not so, as both the Buddha and the Christ have testified
no power in heaven or earth could induce them to incarnate in the world of un¬
regenerate humanity.
We believe that Professor Babbitt did not rightly discern at this point be¬
tween the immortal and the mortal. This may explain his complete failure to
understand the ecstasies of the Neoplatonists and the raptures of Christian
saints. He confused Bhakti Yoga with maudlin emotion. The “extravagant
theosophy” of Mahayana Buddhism seemed to him nothing but a perversion
of the original Buddhist tradition. He did not recognize the essential differ¬
ence between Lao-Tze and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The reader of this ex-
cdfcnt treatise will be wise to refrain from accepting too readily Professor
76 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
Babbitt’s very unsatisfactory identification of pantheistic mysticism with
“primitivistic revery”.
There is another important factor which, like almost all writers on religious
origins, Professor Babbitt overlooked. The Buddha and the Christ brought a
message which had a meaning for all men. But, as has been stated, their spe¬
cific mission was not to found a Church, but an Order of Disciples. When
interpreting the discipline they taught, the need of the individual and his
stage of development, must always be considered. V.S.
Contendings of the Apostles , translated from the Ethiopic manuscripts in the
British Museum, by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge; Oxford University Press, 1935;
price, $4.25.
The book is an abridgment in a handy, one-volume form, of the much larger
work by the same translator, published at the close of the last century. It
tells of the life and work of each of the twelve Apostles (Matthias being chosen
to replace Judas Iscariot) and of Paul, from the time they started on their
preaching mission, to the martyr-death which each eventually suffered. In
manuscript form it dates only from mediaeval times, but many of the stories
originated close to the time of Christ, some being similar in style and subject
matter to the biblical narrative, with the same convincing quality; others being
written by young disciples eager to paint in heightened colour the miraculous
power of their particular teacher, while still others have the characteristic
exaggerations of legend. Whether fabulous or not, the stories leave one with
a sense of having been with real people, of having had a view of the Apostles
as their close associates knew them, and of the stupendous difficulties they
surmounted.
Of that early group, Paul alone stands out as a man of unusual greatness,
and stories centring about his name all show his admirable resourcefulness,
tremendous force and great valour. In one story suggestive of his own state¬
ment that he became all things to all men, he is shown approaching a great
and beautiful pagan city, and meeting Peter and Andrew who are coming
sadly away because the gates are locked and strangers are not only forbidden
to enter but are stoned at sight—lest some of those sorcerers, the followers of
the Nazarene, may gain access and corrupt the people. “And when St. Paul
heard these words from them, his mind woke up like a lion that roareth to
rend prey.” Continuing alone toward the city, he meets two men who tell
him that their trade is the making of sacerdotal robes, and that they are on
their way to sell to priests in the temple of Artemis, within the walls. Quick
to seize his opportunity, Paul says he has come “out of a temple”, he is a priest,
robes are iust what he is seeking, and he will buy what they have. In this
new garb, he has no difficulty in passing the keepers of the gates—is escorted
in with honour, in fact. He goes straight to the authorities, startling and im¬
pressing them by announcing that he is from the temple of the king and has
been sent with a message from the gods. He then prophesies the coming of
REVIEWS
77
two followers of the Galilean, and when told that they had already come that
morning but had been driven away with stones, he shows great anger and
urges that soldiers be sent immediately to bring them in under arrest. Like
wildfire, the rumour spreads through the city that a messenger from the gods
has arrived, and a multitude gathers. The scene is highly dramatic—the
vast temple with its expectant throng; Paul in his pagan regalia, placed on a
throne of honour; and “seated in a low place at his feet”, a council of magis¬
trates and governors. Before them the soldiers suddenly appear, dragging
Peter and Andrew in chains. The latter gaze in amazement at Paul, appar¬
ently gone over to the enemy and himself bringing accusation against them
and conducting their cross examination. With great sternness, Paul compels
them to “confess” who they are, whence they come, and exactly what are the
beliefs with which they are disturbing the nations. He plays his part superbly,
and through that day and the next, they are “made” to tell the Gospel story
and to work miracles—in a word, given just the opportunity they coveted to
reach the people of the city. At length, Paul pronounces their sentence: they
are required to raise from the dead a young nobleman who has just died oppor¬
tunely. If they fail, they are to die by fire, but if they succeed, the city will
cease from its worship of idols (such has been the effect of the trial on the popu¬
lace), and turn to the God of the Christians.
There are many points one would like to touch on—as for instance, a letter
from Dionysius the Areopagite to Timothy saying, “I was not present at Peter’s
death for I had gone away with Paul my master”—and telling with heartfelt
grief and lamentation of the deaths of both these revered leaders of their work.
At that period, celibacy was apparently a sine qua non of embracing the faith,
and the emphasis both on that and on the violent adverse reaction it aroused
among non-believers is one of the most insistent features of every story, making
disagreeable reading at one or two points. But for the most part the stories
are of absorbing interest. There is one beautiful legend, in which Andrew
and his two disciples find, by the seashore, a ship which is manned, although
they do not know it, by angels, and of which the Lord JeSus himself is captain.
The conversation during the voyage, full of courtesy and gentle humour, gives
a rare picture of the Master Christ as his close followers doubtless knew hiu|
during earth life. He questions his passengers at some length regarding t nlm
mission and beliefs, and Andrew gravely assures him that if he will sell his
ship and give the price to the poor and needy, and remain with them, he (the
Lord) will be enabled to do the great works they are doing. At the end of the
voyage, the Master continues with them into circumstances where his very
presence requires miraculous power, and Andrew suddenly turns on him with,
“ ‘Tell me, O Man, whence comest thou? Whom and what dost Thou worship?
And what is Thy faith which hath brought Thee to do these wonderful things?’
And our Lord Jesus smiled at Andrew, and said unto him, ‘Why are your hearts
thus covered over? Lift up your eyes, and know Me’; and thereupon our Lord
a^eared unto them in the form in which they used to know Him.”
Shortly after the Resurrection, the Apostles met to draw lots, determining
7«
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
in which country each should do his missionary work. Each of them in his
own way then showed his utter weakness, facing with fear and dread that
going forth into the unknown, that certainty of ignominy and death. It is a
significant scene, because by contrast it makes all the more unmistakable the
true source of the strength and power and magnificent courage which was
poured into the work through these same men, subsequently. They quickly
learned that the Master was, as he had promised, nearer than hands and feet;
that they could call upon him in every need with the certainty of his instant
response—sometimes only spiritually, but very often visibly, to them and to
some of those about them. In reliance on him they could draw on his power,
whether to work miracles or (greatest of all miracles, perhaps) to fill their own
weak natures with the invincible courage that could sweep all obstacles before
it. For many readers of the Quarterly, this constitutes the chief value of the
book, perhaps—the impression it conveys of the Christian Master, living and
vital and powerful, watching over his work and incessantly guiding and re¬
inforcing it. J.C.
Speak to the Earth: Wanderings and Reflections among Elephants and Moun¬
tains , by Vivienne de Watteville; Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, New
York, 1935; price, $3.00.
“Speak to the Earth and it shall teach thee”, is written in the Book of Job.
Good conversation depends upon the interchange of ideas, not upon the ability
of one protagonist to carry on an endless monologue. The earth replies to him
who questions her with sympathy, and Miss de Watteville is one of those in¬
telligent and inquiring souls who have something worth while to ask and who
listen to earth’s profound answer. She is evidently a very extraordinary person.
She combines heroic intrepidity with a wide culture and great feminine charm,
and her adventures are not only interesting and exciting in themselves, but it is
her reaction to them which delights the reader.
The biographical notice on the dust-cover of the book tells us that she was
brought up by her father in the forests of Norway and taught the lore of the
woods. Later, she went with him on an expedition to East Africa to collect
skins of wild animals for the Berne Museum. On this safari her father was
killed by a lion. Some years after, she was filled with a longing to return to
Africa, this time not to kill the animals, but to know them better and to enter
into the mystical life and consciousness of Nature. She went out to Nairobi
and obtained permission to camp and photograph in the Masai Game Pre¬
serve. The first part of her book is a description of her experiences there,
with only the native boys and bearers, photographing and observing the ani¬
mals; the second part gives an account of her camp on Mt. Kenya and her
ascent of the peaks.
The game preserve is full of birds and animals, elephants, rhinoceroses,
antelopes and man-eating lions. One of the most delightful episodes in the
book is Miss de Watteville’s contest of roaring with the lions.
REVIEWS
79
After dinner that evening, I took up an empty petrol tin (used for heating the bath
water) and practised roaring into it . . . when, to my amazement, two lions actually
grunted in answer. I grunted hack and again they answered, coming nearer and nearer
till just beyond the embers they suddenly broke out into a tremendous roar. Next to
my puny effort it was magnificent and deafening, and I roared again with all my lungs
to encourage them. Then they roared in concert till the air thrilled and shook with
vibrations, and the glorious waves of sound rippled out into the night and were held to
the last echo in the amphitheatre of the rocks. . . . Lions in the wild state roar only
after they have fed, never when they are hunting and I could detect no anger in them.
I believed that they roared in perfectly friendly contest one against the other, glorying
in the sound for its own sake. Their attitude towards me was one of good-humoured
amusement, and with that kindly superiority of the pro, they were showing me how it
really should be done.
There is a lovely passage in which the authoress describes her realization
that, no matter how much she loved the animals, they would never trust her
until she had transformed herself.
And while I sat and watched the elephants now peacefully feeding in the glad sun¬
shine, and pondered the folly of my quest, something that I had read years ago came
into my head. It was the theory (it came, I think, in a book on theosophy) that animals
can see auras. I had thought little about it at the time, but now it threw a light on my
darkness bright as a revelation. Achievement depended on no external miracle or magic.
It was much simpler than that, so simple, in fact, that I had overlooked it. The means
had been put into my own hands, for—taking the theory of auras as a working hypothesis
it was I myself who must become something different. ... I saw now, that I had
approached my goal from the wrong angle and that I was altogether unworthy of it.
New vistas opened before me, and I suddenly understood that my desire for friendship
with the animals committed me to something far greater and deeper than itself. Yet
the two things were so inseparable that it was only by pursuing the greater that I could
encompass the less. . . . And this power of the spirit was not something one could
have, but something one might become. There were no half measures. To come into
close spiritual harmony with all Nature (and mankind) demanded the supreme sacrifice
contained in the five words: Leave all and follow Me. The saints alone have found
the way; or perhaps many have fleetingly beheld it, but only a handful of rare
and chosen natures have had the hardihood and courage, the faith, and, above all, the
reckless and immeasurable love to follow it. To these the perfect communion with
Nature came naturally.
Later, when Miss de Watteville was camping on the slopes of Mt. Kenya,
a terrific forest fire broke out, and only by the most strenuous efforts could^^fc
she and her few black boys save their lives and a little clearing. In this oasi^^r
were gathered many little creatures, birds, mice, chamelions and deer to which
she gave food and water.
Going back to civilization after so many adventures, physical and spiritual,
she writes:
It seemed to me that, as when you march all day in the heat and the dust and have
your reward in the brief beauty of the sunset that transmutes the very dust itself, so
this quest of solitude—which may sometimes be a lonely ordeal—is rewarded a thousand¬
fold by its rare and fleeting visions. For a little moment all is simplicity; the mists roll
up, revealing the peaks serene and strong before you.
It was those visions that I wanted above all else in the world to bring back and to
8 o
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
share; for at the root of all our lives is a great and terrifying loneliness, from which first
or last there is no escape.
Yet by going out to meet it halfway, one discovers that its terrors are illusory. Soli¬
tude is an ally, there is nothing to fear, for truly “Nature never did betray the heart
that loved her.” . . . Nature may be a cruel contradiction—life for ever warring
against life—but her ultimate message is the friendship of God. Secure in that friend¬
ship we cannot be afraid. Life is the glorious experiment, and Death the great ad¬
venture, when the mists shall at last lift long enough for us to see clearly.
St.C. LaD.
Modern Alchemy , by Dorothy M. Fisk; D. Appleton-Century Company,
London and New York, 1936; price, Si.75.
Alchemy may be defined as the art of transmuting the elements. Less than a
century ago it was classified among the exploded superstitions of the dark
ages. To-day, as Miss Fisk points out, transmutation is an established fact.
One fundamental supposition of the mediaeval alchemists has become a work¬
ing hypothesis of modem chemistry and physics. It is now assumed as a matter
of course that the ninety-two elements of the periodic system are modes or
variations of a common “substance”. However much their respective atoms
differ in mass or structure or complexity, the chemist does not doubt that
they contain the same basic components. The specific quality of an element
is defined by the number and arrangement of these basic components of its
atoms. Transmutation becomes, therefore, theoretically possible in the meas¬
ure that the number and arrangement of protons, electrons, etc. within an atom
can be changed. The discovery of radio-activity proved that such a transfor¬
mation is continuously occurring in nature; and in recent years the process
has been successfully imitated in the laboratory. Experiment has actually
reached the point where new elements, unknown in any natural state, have
been produced.
Miss Fisk traces the history of this modem alchemy with admirable clarity
and simplicity and with a minimum of mathematical digression. In many
respects, it is the most readable popularization of subatomic physics which
has come to our attention. The student of Theosophy finds an added interest
in the chapter on ancient and mediaeval alchemy. She is exceptionally fair to
the professors of the Divine Art. For example, she writes:
We may point to the ancient alchemist gloating optimistically over his few grains of
yellow metal. Of what use was he? Was his effort justified? The briefest survey of
his achievements yields an unqualified assent. He evolved the science of chemistry,
he was the founder of medicine, the forerunner of the physicist.
Miss Fisk suggests that alchemy originated in Egypt as a form of metallurgy,
and was in particular concerned with “the colouring and plating of metals,
the dyeing of cloth, the production of alloys and imitation precious stones,
and the doubling of gold . She does not consider the possibility that the
philosopher's stone and the elixir of life may, indeed, be realities in Nature,
and that base metals may have been actually converted into gold by methods
beyond the ken of the modern scientist. The modern scientist bombards the
REVIEWS
81
hearts of atoms with rays and corpuscles. But what does he know of the ra¬
diant energy which may be released and directed by the trained imagination
and will?
Miss Fisk seems to be unaware of the evidence that ancient alchemy was. in
its superior aspect, a psychological science. What was the real concern of
Paracelsus, for instance? Was it chemistry or medicine, or was it the truly
divine art of co-operating with Divine Nature in the formation of an immortal
soul? In the higher forms of alchemy, the unregenerate personality of man was
symbolized by the “base metal” which can be transmuted into “gold”, that i$,
into the form and substance of the perfect man, the image and likeness of God.
S.L.
Emerson Today , by Bliss Perry, Professor of English Literature, Emeritus,
Harvard University; Princeton University Press; price, $2.00.
The contents of this volume were originally delivered as lectures at Princeton
University, during 1931. As might be expected from a book with that academic
pedigree, it is scholarly, moderate and urbane in its point of view, and it has
“a dash” of culture. Unfortunately, it resembles too closely the hundreds of
oil paintings annually displayed at our national salons L Until the admission a
few years ago of modernist daubers, a visitor at the salons could always count
upon seeing a craftsmanlike exhibit. The painters had learned to draw, colour,
and compose; they were conscientious and by no means freakish. But when a
humble visitor had thus enumerated the many excellencies of the canvases,
with disappointment he was compelled to acknowledge that the painters them¬
selves usually had nothing to say. No inspiration breathed from that expanse
of picture-covered walls; no vitality pulsed there. There was workmanship of
which one need not be ashamed, there was good taste, usually, as also an atmos¬
phere of refinement; but the creative impulse had had no part in the conception
of those varied scenes. So with this volume. For all its good qualities, it has
nothing to say; it has no contagion to communicate to any new generation
that knows not Emerson.
As the title suggests, the volume is a revaluation. A revaluation of Emerson
was made by Matthew Arnold in the past century, forty years after his youth¬
ful fervour over the new literary star upon the American horizon, forty year&i
after leaving Balliol College “and that sweet city with her dreaming spires*-!,^
forty years after “the great town’s harsh, heart-wearying roar” had drowned
the tinkle of Oxford sheep bells; Thyrsis (Clough) had died, and Arnold him¬
self, turning from shepherd’s life, had become a man of the world. But he
was the son of Arnold of Rugby, and so virile was that father’s example—of
militant righteousness—and so vital the seed that father sowed, that the world,
disappointment, and death could not quench the light that had been trans¬
mitted to pupils and son. No one at Oxford ever did read Emerson much,
writes Professor Perry, save Arnold, Clough, and their “set” (p. 115); which
is to say that, prepared by the intense vitality of Dr. Arnold’s character, his
pupi^and son took their next step in becoming ardent admirers of Emerson;
82
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
others, not so prepared, continued life as clods, unmindful of the American
sage. Emerson’s voice had set vibrating the eternal strings stretched upon
Matthew Arnold’s instrument, and though the town’s harsh roar did drown
tinkling sheep bells, against the majestic tones of eternal silence it could not
prevail—those forty, and more, noisy years were lost as indistinguishable
moments and motes. The lofty sentences of the American “man of soul and
genius” had fixed themselves in Arnold’s memory. When he came, at 60, to
revalue the friend of his 20th year, it was not with “disillusioned” eyes that he
looked back upon the hero of early days; on the contrary, he reinforced the
fervour of youth with the conviction of age sitting serene and detached in its
judicial chair.
The generation of to-day comes to the reading of Emerson—if it come—un¬
prepared by the earnest, domestic environment of seventy-five years ago.
Lacking such preparation, present-day readers may find Emerson particularly
difficult. No better introduction to Emerson is as yet to be had than Arnold’s
essay. The publishers of Emerson, if they were men of educative aims, would
certainly incorporate that essay as a preface to Emerson’s writings. For Arnold
had some definite things to say, and he said them with conviction, with moving
eloquence, with lyrical charm. C.
Ancient Life in Mexico and Central America , by Edgar L. Hewett; The Bobbs-
Merrill Company, New York, 1936; price, $4.00.
Dr. Edgar Hewett is President of the Schools of American Research of the
Archaeological Institute of America, and Professor of Archaeology in the Uni¬
versities of New Mexico and of Southern California. His book is the most
interesting of the many which have appeared in recent years on the subject of
life in Mexico and Central America, ^nd is distinguished by its elevated point
of view,—its “culture”. Culture is precisely what Dr. Hewett would wish to
be distinguished for. He is one of the very few modem archaeologists who
understand what it means, and it is of the culture, the accumulated inner
attainments of the American Indian that he writes. He opens his book by saying:
We have in ancient culture-centres of America—the Southwest, Mexico, Central
America, Peru—an aboriginal people of numerous languages and general similarity in
culture type and somatic character, surviving from what must seem to them in retro¬
spect a Golden Age. They are so non-mechanically minded as to be considered a “back¬
ward race” by their masters. They actually possess as mature a culture of the esthetic-
religious type as the world has produced, and, though stunned by the impact of a ruthless
and barbaric conqueror, the European, they are holding on in the face of appalling dis¬
aster, stolidly keeping alive their sacred fires from which the soul of a race may be re¬
kindled; unconsciously living the heroic life. . . . Finally, let it always be kept in mind
that in writing on ancient America the objective is not history of civilization y but culture
history; that what is aimed at here is an interpretation of the Indian race, not in terms
of European civilization , but in terms of Indian culture.
Dr. Hewett points out that in the Americas the archaeologist has a magnif¬
icent field for study, because there exist not only monuments, but Indians
CORRESPONDENCE
83
from whom he may learn to understand the ancient life. He deplores the
“laboratory” and “Museum” type of science.
We have in America too many pyramided errors that writers of our mechanically-
minded race have erected by reading into ancient phenomena scientific and mechanical
achievements unthinkable to the mystically-minded Indian. What disillusionment if
we could call up the spirits of ancient Indian priests and get some real information! . . .
A generation has been wasted on unworkable nomenclatures, and the subject has been
messed up with new cultures for every change of diet or habitat: Corn complex, Salmon
culture, Basket Makers, Pit House people, Slab House people, Fumarole people! Why
not in recent American history the Baked Bean culture, the Pot Likker people, the
Great American Pie culture, the Sod House people, the Frame Shack people, the Tin
Lizzie age?
Dr. Hewett describes the state of mind of the “Dirt” archaeologist (and it
is his own state of mind) in terms with which all true students of history must
sympathize.
He . . . has the patience of Job derived from contemplation of the long procession
of the ages, has boundless faith in and admiration for his remote ancestors, and believes
that man learns mainly by experience. . . . He has little use for the forward-looking
person who does not know his past. He believes that the true progressive is one who
knows what has and has not worked in human experience, and is guided thereby. He
views every “new deal” with a critical eye, for history has been largely a succession of
new deals. That is what gives the archaeologist so much to do. Russia, Italy, Germany,
China, are all getting new deals at the present time. Archaeologists look forward eagerly
to their future opportunities there. The American Indian got a new deal when Columbus
landed on these shores.
Of course, all was not sweetness and light when Columbus and Cortez reached
the Americas. The Incas, whether with high talk of ideals or with unadorned
force, had regimented the Peruvians into the “totalitarian” state of ants.
The Mayas were decimated by civil war and pestilence, and the Aztecs were
given over to black magic and bloody superstitions. However, the solution of
these problems might have come from within, in accordance with the racial
genius, had the Indians been left to settle them unconquered. We cannot
quote all of Dr. Hewett’s interesting comments, but it can easily be seen that
he has much of value to contribute to what many writers make a very dusty,
subject. St.C. LaD.
CORRESPONDENCE
To the Editors of the Theosophical Quarterly:
In Notes and Comments (July, 1936) reference was made to M. Jean Cou-
trot’s De Quoi Vivre. M. Coutrot kindly expressed his interest in what was
said there, but raised the objection that I had completely misrepresented his
thought. He also enclosed a pamphlet entitled Des Dangers du Dogmatisme ,
the author of which, M. Roger du Teil, states that my failure to understand
M. C^Ltrot is due to dogmatism.
A eyeful study of M. Coutrot’s book obliges me to conclude that I did not
treat him fairly, and I request this opportunity to make such amende honor -
8 4
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
able as is necessary. First, however, it is necessary to make clear that dog¬
matism is not involved in the issue. A student of Theosophy does not conceive
himself to be the “sole custodian of the truth”, as M. du Teil affirms. The
theosophical conception of Nature is, at first, merely a working hypothesis,
and can be nothing more for the individual until and unless he proves it by
experience and observation to be true. Its only claim to respect and attention
is its reasonableness. It is logical, coherent and consistent; and it is in accord
with what we have already experienced and observed.
De Quoi Vivre is a very remarkable work, covering an enormous field and
revealing an immense and varied curiosity and erudition. With many of M.
Coutrot’s conclusions one can agree without qualification. For example, his
exposure of the fallacies of Marxian dialectics is so complete that only the fanat¬
ical socialist could fail to be impressed. In general, M. Coutrot seems to be at
his best in the economic field, where he states with admirable clarity the causes
of the conflict between capital and labour. The great need, as he specifies, is
for intelligent co-ordination, and he proposes a “co-ordinated economy, not a
directed economy” (p. 213, seq.). In other words, his argument is that the
representatives of each industry should act on their own responsibility to
harmonize production and distribution, and that such control should not be
left primarily to the State. Furthermore, M. Coutrot points out that tech¬
nological improvements do not necessarily reduce the total of employment.
On the contrary, in spite of the “technocrats” and their friends, employment
should normally increase as production increases, because each technological
advance implies a greater demand for raw and fabricated materials and a de¬
velopment of new “services” and distributive agencies.
As was stated in Notes and Comments , M. Coutrot distinguishes two proc¬
esses in human history, the additive and the non-additive , the former being
represented by the action of reason which accumulates its discoveries from
generation to generation, the latter by the activity of the emotional nature,
with its constant oscillations between sensibilities with opposite polarities,
such as pleasure and pain, zest and fatigue, elation and depression, etc., etc.
He is a devotee of what one might call the religion of the reason, and in my
opinion becomes too enthusiastic on this theme. It is quite meaningless to
attribute to reason a “pre-excellence among the human faculties”. As M.
Coutrot admits, reason can only act upon the data provided by intuition.
It is at least as important to cultivate the power of intuition as to refine the
processes of logic. What is of supreme moment is that man should develop
as a complete being; that all his potentialities of reason, imagination, percep¬
tion, will, desire, love should be actualized in their purest and most concordant
forms.
In my previous reference to M. Coutrot’s philosophy I unintentionally mis¬
represented his attitude towards the “undulatory aspect of the Universe”. I
exaggerated his own exaggerated admiration for the reason as a thing-in-itself.
He does not pretend, as I fear I suggested, that the non-additive factors of
human nature can or ought to be suppressed. On the contrary, he adopts
CORRESPONDENCE
85
the hypothesis that there must always be alternating sensibilities in conscious¬
ness; that our creative powers depend upon “irrational” elements for their
birth and exfoliation; that pain is as necessary to growth as joy; that reason
cannot stand alone. He speaks of the need of “safeguarding the indetermina¬
tion of the future”, by taking every measure to keep the “creative sensibility”
intact, and he criticizes the sterility of much so-called social planning which
takes no cognizance of the unconceived powers latent in the human being. I
hope that M. Coutrot will accept my apology for having mis-stated his posi¬
tion on this point.
However, at this point also, M. Coutrot and the present writer must part
company. By all means, let us try to foresee and to control the impact of
cyclic law upon our consciousness. But what is to be the nature and purpose
of this control? Which is our motive, to adapt ourselves to Nature or to adapt
Nature to the whims of our own self-will? In a chapter on “A Mysticism of the
Future”, M. Coutrot virtually asserts that the human species “in fieri” should
be elevated as an object of worship to the position formerly occupied by the
Universal and Eternal Divinity. Although he recognizes that “the individual
alone has a concrete existence”, the whole trend of his thought is towards the
immolation of the individual to the abstraction of a species, Homo Sapiens.
Individuals have value, as it were, in so far as they are the building-blocks of
the species.
Therefore, I believe that I was not unjust when I selected M. Coutrot’s
work as an example of a certain irreverence towards Nature. M. Coutrot
refers to man on several occasions as “a fragment of Nature”. Why assume,
then, that the part is greater than the whole? He speaks of lelan , sans dontc
aveugle , qui nous a port 6 jusqu’oii nous sommes (p. 262). How does he know
that the creative force in greater Nature is blind, and what does he mean by
“blind”? He asks: “What God can we invoke other than that which is
being made in ourselves and by ourselves, under the aegis of Minerva [i.e.
of reason]?” (p. 281). But why does he overlook the transcendent aspect of
the universal natura naturans which overshadows both the human and the non¬
human? Doubtless man is free to create himself, but M. Coutrot approxi¬
mates the dangerous assumption that man is free to create himself in any
image which may casually please his fancy. Nature sets the limits and the
laws in obedience to which man and all creatures realize the forms proper to^
them. This is not a dogma but a deduction from observation and experience
The human species, as it is evolving upon this planet, is an extraordina^
production of Nature. But have, we the right to suppose, like certain astron¬
omers, that terrestrial man is the only entity of his kind in the Universe, or to
predicate that there are no superhuman kingdoms in the whole of space? The
most perfect of human beings, those like the Christ and the Buddha, who
have most completely expressed and synthesized the potentialities of the hu¬
man species, have been precisely those who have revealed the possibility that
at the climax of his “self-creation” man becomes something more than man.
Author of “Notes and Comments” (July, 1936).
Question No. 398. — Why is inspiration spoken of as coming from without? I thought it came
from within.
Answer. —It is often helpful to go back to the original meanings of words. In the Latin,
the word was inspirare , in- in, plus spirare , to breathe; to breathe into or upon. What is it
that breathes upon us? The Holy Spirit, in Christian terms; the force and power and reality
of the spiritual world. Why does it breathe upon us? Because we have greatly desired that
it should, because we have asked and prayed that it should, because we have reached out and
have wanted it enough; because, too. we have tried to prepare ourselves, to make ourselves
worthy and fit for that in-breathing. It comes to us from without, but it cannot come at all
until we are ready within, through our own effort, to receive it. C.R.A.
Answer. —Granting that the inspiration be spiritual, what is the difference between
“within” and “without”? T.
Answer. —Inspiration comes when spirit speaks to spirit. We should seek it in the depths
of our own souls, for through the soul we are in touch with the spiritual world and with the
great beings who dwell there. They may speak directly to the soul, so that what they say
wells up from the deepest and innermost part of ourselves. Or it may be our own souls that
speak and inspire us. But surely inspiration also comes from without. There is a wealth of
inspiration in the theosophical books of all ages, in the records of heroic actions, in nobility
of character, in nature, in music, in a thousand ways and places. Everything, to exist at all,
must contain something of the spirit, and is thus a door to the whole spiritual world, the source
of inspiration. We should seek inspiration wherever we go, whatever we do. J.F.B.M.
Answer. —Inspiration is a divine gift, an external influence directly exerted by Spirit upon
the soul of man,—external in the sense that it is outside the present field of personal con¬
sciousness. Between this external influence and aspiration—man’s inner spiritual response—
there are reciprocal emanations. In one of the Fragments it is said, “All loving, unselfish
thought expended, returns as inspiration,—inspiration to higher and better work”. . . . Also,
perhaps, it might be helpful to consider the matter in terms of a Jacob’s ladder, with, instead
of angels ascending and descending, aspiration ascending and returning as inspiration.
G.M.W.K.
Answer. —Almost everyone must have been occasionally inspired by the words and deeds
of another; by some book, or a lovely scene. The word “inspire” means “breathe into”, sug¬
gesting the induction of some new element into one’s consciousness, whether from inner or
outer planes. C.M.S.
Answer. —Theosophy regards man as an emanation of the Divine. As Light on the Path
says: “Within you is the light of the world—the only light that cdn be shed upon the Path”.
But man has created barriers—“the gates and windows of his soul are blurred, and blinded
and darkened, and no knowledge can come to him”, until he removes the barriers which he
himself has created.
86
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
87
Genuine inspiration comes from above, from the Master at the head of our Ray. Theosophy
teaches that we are open to divine influences, through our hearts, our minds, our souls; that
“there is no bar or wall where man the effect ceases and God the cause begins”. The real
world and those who dwell in it are constantly striving to attract man’s attention to real
things. But even a Master is powerless to influence an individual, as such, until that indi¬
vidual turns his attention towards the real world. Most people are animated mainly by the
promptings of “elementals”, such as vanity, ambition, self-love, self-indulgence, etc., which
dominate the personality. They are seeking inspiration to do their will and to obtain what
they want for their own selfish purposes. Inspiration from the real world reinforces the divine
will for mankind. We must induce it by setting up the proper conditions for its reception, and
then it comes to us as a free gift. It never fails to be given to those who seek it.
G.H.M.
Question No. 399 .—It has been said that “aspiration returns as inspiration". How are we
to carry this out?
Answer. —“As a man thinks, so he is.” In response to the promptings of the soul, we
must turn our attention toward the life of the soul and away from the concerns and demands
of the personality. If this attitude is maintained and a current started towards the real world,
a return current is induced. First, the imagination must be used to create a mould,—a definite,
concrete picture of our ideal. Then the Master helps us to fill this mould as we bring the will
into play by bending all our energies toward the fulfilment of our ideal. G.H.M.
Answer— Aspiration will return as inspiration when aspiration has been put into action,
when, so far as we are able, we live up to, or at least toward, that to which we aspire.
J.F.B.M.
Question No. 400. —Should we live ut> to our own conception of right and wrong, or to another's
conception of what is right or wrong for us?
Answer— Our understanding of the art and science of life is limited and fragmentary.
Therefore, while trying to do the best we know how, we should be anxious continually to
readjust our ideas, and to raise our standards. Often it is our lower natures that resent the
standards others hold up for our consideration; self-will hates to be interfered with.
C.M.S
Answer —We should live up to the highest conception of right and wrong, of which for the
time being we are capable. But are we going to remain satisfied with our present conception,
are we going to assume that it is the highest possible for us? There can be no finality about
our view of right and wrong, for, as we grow in inner ways, as we reach out for fuller under¬
standing and for more intelligent obedience, our whole ideal is raised.
Help in right seeing, in right discrimination, comes from the spiritual world, if we will only
ask for it, and then listen. But if we go about asking everyone whom we happen to meet whal (
we ought to do about this thing or that—we all know those who do so—our last state will be
worse than our first. Perhaps, however, we are so fortunate as to have some friend whom we
revere and respect, and who is far in advance of us in all ways of inner perception and attain¬
ment. We cannot ask such a friend what we ought to do; we should be reminded that “the
duty of another is full of danger”. But we may be told, if we ask, what principle is involved,
and so be enabled to decide for ourselves what is right and what is wrong, through the higher
conception which we have thus been enabled to grasp. C.R.A.
Answer. —We should never, in any circumstances, do what we believe to be wrong, no
matter what others may say or do. It would be wise, however, to realize that as yet we can
see only a small part of our own ideal, our Master’s vision of what he wishes us to become
and do; and we should welcome more light from any source. Others can often show us some
88 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
aspect that we had not seen for ourselves, but which, when pointed out, we instantly recognize
as truly our ideal. We ought also to realize that all of us are blind at some spot, where some
one else, perhaps more experienced than we, sees clearly, and we should act on his vision until,
v obedience to it, our own power of discrimination has developed to the point where we see
or ourselves that it is right. It is only by living the life that one can know the doctrine. There
are many times when the only way to gain a deeper knowledge of our Master’s vision for us,
is to live by faith, in advance of our present perception of it. J.F.B.M.
Answer.— We should never stoop to the adoption of lower standards than our own, or do
an> t nng which we ourselves know to be wrong. In order to learn self-reliance we should use
e\ er> means in our power to sharpen our perception of the good and evil within our own
natures. A pre-requisite is absolute honesty with ourselves in testing our motives, our reac-
tions and their causes. It is easier for most people to see the faults of others than their own,
w 1 e in many cases self-love prevents recognition, admiration, and emulation of superior
qualities in others. An honest, determined effort to seek the Truth, wherever it may be found,
U1 * t , US ° U ^ r . u ^ our own self-admiration and complacency, and lead us to adopt
another s standard of right and wrong when we find our own faulty or incomplete.
G.H.M.
NOTICE
™ e J ef L U ' ar ‘he New York Branch of The Theosophical Society are held on
temate Saturday evenings, at 64 Washington Mews, which runs from the east side of Fifth
ftnZ 6 ; T m ( et r Eighth Street and Was hinston Square, North. No. 64 is the first
&££%£££ the " 0rth Side 0f the MeWS - The «"* «* Ha-Mst
During the present Quarter, there will be meetings on,—
January 9th and 23rd
February 6th and 20th
March 6th and 20th.
are^nNewYbrk em vfs r t ^ ** t0 attend these "Stings whenever they
N Y rk Vls,tors wh ° may be interested in Theosophy are always welcome.
IN MEMORIAM.
ALICE GRAVES
An old and valued member of The Theosophical Society-
Secretary of the Norfolk Branch, England.
Died, 4th November, 1936
*
>
STANDARD BOOKS
Blavatsky, H. P. Isis Unveiled, Vols. I AND „
key to theosophy CoMmTB te one book .
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The Theosophical Society and Thwsophy W ° rld: ^ ol Theosophy)
VOL. XXXIV, No. 2
APRIL, 1937
Founded by B. P. Blavatsky at Dew York In 1875
HE Society does not pretend to be able to establish
at once a universal brotherhood among men, but
JL only strives to create the nucleus of such a body.
Many of its members believe that an acquaintance
with the world's religions and philosophies will
reveal* as the common and fundamental principle
underlying these* that “spiritual identity of all Souls with the
Oversoul 99 which is the basis of true brotherhood; and many
of them also believe that an appreciation of the finer forces
of nature and man will still further emphasize the same idea.
The organization is wholly unsectarian, with no creed*
dogma* nor personal authority to enforce or impose * neither
is it to be held responsible for the opinions of its members*
who are expected to accord to the beliefs of others that
tolerance which they desire for their own.
The following proclamation was adopted at the Conven¬
tion of the Society* held at Boston* Apri£ 1895 :
“The Theosophical Society in America by its delegatesand
members in Convention assembled* does hereby proclaim
fraternal good will and kindly feeling toward all students of
Theosophy and members of Theosophical Societies where ver
and however situated* It further proclaims and avers its
hearty sympathy and association with such persons and
organizations in all theosophical matters except those of
government and administration* and invites their cor¬
respondence and co-operation.
“ To all men and women of whatever caste*creed, race, or
religious belief, who aim at the fosteringof peace* gentleness*
and unselfish regard one for another* and the acquisition of
such knowledge of men and nature as shall tend to the eleva¬
tion and advancement of the human race, tt sends most friendly
Sheeting and freely proffers its services.
*** hand ? with aU religions and religious bodies whose
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CONTENTS OF VOL. XXXIV, NO. 2
April, 1937
NOTES AND COMMENTS. PAGE
FRAGMENTS. 91
THEOSOPHY AND DEMOCRACY.. I0 °
ESOTERIC DISCIPLESHIP. 102
REMARKS BY THE WAY. 115
WITHOUT CENSOR, IX.’ ’ ’ ’ ’' .. 121
EDUCATION THROUGH THE ARTS IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS lit
ON THE SCREEN OF TIME GHOULS... 136
THE BEATRICE OF DANTE (Reprint) . 142
REVIEWS. . 154
CORRESPONDENCE. . 165
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS. . 171
T.S. ACTIVITIES; Notices . 1 ^ 4
. 176
Ac,of& J " 8 ^” d « , “ ma “" September s. IM 3 . .t the Pott Office .1 New York. N. Y„ under 1
Copyright. 1937, by The Theosophical Society
1 1 »\
THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY
The principal aim and object of this Society is to form the nucleus of a
Universal Brotherhood of Humanity, without distinction of race, creed, sex
caste or colour. The subsidiary objects are: The study of ancient and modern
e igions, philosophies and sciences, and the demonstration of the importance
of such study; and the investigation of the unexplained laws of nature and
the psychical powers latent in man.
The Theosophical Quarterly is the official organ of the original
1 heosophical Society founded in New York by II. P. Blavatsky
W. Q. Judge and others, in 1875 .
We have no connection whatsoever with any other organization
calling itself Theosophical, formerly headed by Mrs. Besant, nor
with similar bodies, the purposes and methods of which are wholly
foreign to our own.
Editors, The Theosophical Quarterly.
A
APRIL, 1937
The Theosophical Society , as such , is not responsible for any opinion or declaration
m this magazine , by whomsoever expressed , unless contained in an official document.
Desire, Function, Organism
ACCORDING to Lamarck’s famous axiom, “Desire precedes function,
h\ and function precedes organism”. In other words, a living* organ is an
expression, in terms of substance , of a physiological activity; and a physi¬
ological activity is an expression, in terms of force , of a state of consciousness.
As Theosophy postulates, consciousness, force and substance are three insep¬
arable aspects of the One Reality. A state of consciousness tends, by the law
of its being, to seek expression, formulation, embodiment; this desire cannot be
dissociated from the energy which enables it to express itself, or from the matter
with which it clothes itself in concrete and explicit form.
Lamarck’s axiom explains why the giraffe has a long neck, why the tiger has
claws, why fish swim in the sea and birds fly in the air. It also suggests a reason
why man does not go on all-fours, like his mammalian brethren. However, it is
not fashionable to-day in biological circles to take Lamarck seriously. Con¬
temporary professors of the science of life more often seem to assume that the
opposite of his axiom is true, that organism precedes function, and function
precedes desire.
It is evident that after an organ has been formed, its structure cannot be
modified without affecting its function, and a disorder in function is reflected
as a disorder in consciousness. The experience of illness and fever indicates h mr
organism may be said to precede function, and function to precede desire. B^f
a diseased organ engenders confusion in the mind, what is the ultimate cause of
disease? The student of Theosophy can conceive of only one conclusive answer,
—that disease, like health, is a production of Karma. To translate this idea
into Lamarckian terminology, a corruption of desire precedes a corruption of
function, and a corruption of function precedes a corruption of organism. Doc¬
tors of medicine would be wise to test this hypothesis, that every physical ail¬
ment is caused originally by a spiritual ailment, by a lesion in consciousness;
that a disease represents the effort of the soul to purge itself of poison, the body
-
92
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
serving for this purpose as a channel or drain-pipe. As for disease germs: it
has been suggested that they are the product, not the cause, of morbid condi¬
tions. In any case they can flourish only in unhealthy and “predisposed”
blood.
Molecular Decadence
Biologists have speculated on the possibility that some diseases at least may
be caused by the misbehaviour of certain molecules of the cell-nucleus which
normally reproduce and sustain life in the tissues. These molecules, the so-
called genes, are of course hypothetical entities. Like protons and electrons,
they are images in the scientific mind, nor is there the slightest possibility that
the scientific eye will ever see them objectively. The gene was invented to
explain the vagaries of heredity in fruit-flies. The utmost that can be said in
favour of its real existence is that every activity of the living cell is ultimately con¬
trolled by invisible agents. If we so choose, we may call those agents genes, but
that does not mean that they are actually physical molecules. Their alleged
functions suggest to a student of Theosophy that their constitution might be
more adequately described as astral.
However, whether the gene be a tiny particle of physical matter or a centre
of vital force, biologists have discovered an apparent connection between the
disintegration of a cell-nucleus, and the formation of the filterable viruses which
are the apparent cause of infantile paralysis, influenza, yellow fever, and other
painful and destructive diseases. The filterable virus is as invisible as the gene,
and must not be confused with the bacteria which can be observed through the
microscope. What it is in its proper nature, we do not know. The current
theory is that, like the gene, it is a very complex molecule of living or semi¬
living matter.
We quote from Harper s Magazine (February, 1937), “Where Life Begins”, by
George W. Grey.
Genes are the atoms of heredity. Nor is that all. Recent findings bring evidence of a
still more fundamental role. Experiments show that the injury of genes may be a very
serious catastrophe. The loss of certain genes means death. This suggests that the
gene’s function in the cell activities is not merely to control heredity but also to control
life. We know genes only as they operate in the closely correlated team-work of the
chromosomes. But suppose a gene should get separated from its fellows. Imagine one
of these living molecules adrift in the cell fluid, a wanderer, could it function independ¬
ently? If so, with what effect? Several years ago B. M. Duggar, of the University of
Wisconsin, speculated on this possibility. Dr. Duggar suggested that a lone gene might
be a destructive agent. He pointed to the filterable virus. Might not the virus be
simply a gene on the loose?
The Dual Action of the Life-Force
Students of Theosophy are familiar with the doctrine that the life-force,
prana , has a dual action on this plane; that it is the carrier of both bane and
blessing, and the cause of death as well as of life. A few citations from The
Secret Doctrine should make this clear. In addition, they indicate the key to
this mystery, pointing to the fundamental fact that physical life is a manifesta¬
tion of a conscious purpose which exists in Nature before any of its expressions
"\T O'T'T? O AMT^ PHA A A /TT? TvT'T'C
NOTES AND COMMENTS 93
come into being. As we read in the Rig Veda , “Desire first arose in It, which
was the primal germ of mind”. The duality of the life-force is, therefore, at¬
tributable to the duality of consciousness in its manifested condition. As the
“primal germ of mind” takes form under the impulsion of desire, it assumes
two aspects, showing forth the opposite poles or potencies of Nature, spirit and
matter, light and darkness, good and evil. Reflected upon the plane of physical
experience, these two contrasted potencies become agencies of organic creation
and destruction, the sources of life and death.
[Theosophists and occultists] recognize a distinct vital principle independent of the
organism — material, of course, as physical force cannot be divorced from matter , but of a
substance existing in a state unknown to Science. Life for them is something more than the
mere interaction of molecules and atoms. There is a vital principle without which no molec¬
ular combinations could ever have resulted in a living organism, least of all in the so-
called “inorganic” matter of our plane of consciousness. . . . From Gods to men y from
Worlds to atoms, from a star to a rushlight, from the Sun to the vital heat of the meanest
organic being—the world of Form and Existence is an immense chain, whose links are all
connected. The law of Analogy is the first key to the world-problem . . . {The Secret
Doctrine , ed. 1888, I, 603-604).
Science teaches us that the living as well as the dead organism of both man and animal
are swarming with bacteria of a hundred various kinds, that from without we are threat¬
ened with the invasion of microbes with every breath we draw, and from within by
leucomaines, aerobes, anaerobes, and what not. But Science never yet went so far as to
assert with the occult doctrine that our bodies, as well as those of animals, plants, and
stones, are themselves altogether built up of such beings; which, except larger species,
no microscope can detect. . . . The same infinitesimal, invisible lives compose the atoms
of the bodies of the mountain and the daisy, of man and the ant, of the elephant and of
the tree which shelters him from the sun. Each particle—whether you call it organic
or inorganic— is a life. Every atom and molecule in the Universe is both life-giving and
death-giving to that form, inasmuch as it builds by aggregation universes and the ephem¬
eral vehicles ready to receive the transmigrating soul, and as eternally destroys and
changes the forms and expels those souls from their temporary abodes. It creates and
kills; it is self-generating and self-destroying; it brings into being and annihilates, that
mystery of mysteries—the living body of man, animal, or plant, every second in time and
space; and it generates equally life and death, beauty and ugliness, good and bad, and
even the agreeable and disagreeable, the beneficent and maleficent sensations. It is that
mysterious Life, represented collectively by countless myriads of lives, that follows in
its own sporadic way, the hitherto incomprehensible law of Atavism; that copies family
resemblances as well as those it finds impressed in the aura of the generators of ejflro
future human being. . . . We are taught that every physiological change, in ad<|00n
to pathological phenomena; diseases—nay life itself—or rather the objective phenomena
of life produced by certain conditions and changes in the tissues of the body which allow
and force life to act in that body; that all this is due to those unseen Creators and
Destroyers that are called in such a loose and general way, microbes (I, 260-263).
As the second principle of the universal Soul and Vital Force in Nature, it [i. e. nervous
ether or animal vitality] is intelligently guided by the fifth principle thereof (I, 538, note).
This fifth principle is the “Manifesting Mind, whose essence, in its dual
nature, is the Cause of all terrestrial phenomena” (I, 604).
One may draw this conclusion, that as we think, so we are; that the quality
^jkour states of consciousness determines whether the life-force acts within us to
Build or to destroy, to create or to disintegrate.
94
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
The Virus of Vulgarity
A “gene on the loose” is a helpful conceit, for it suggests an entity that has
isolated itself from the whole to which it properly belongs. Its destiny sym¬
bolizes the fate of the human entity in whom selfish desire has virtually sup¬
pressed all aspiration towards union with a superior order of being. It illustrates
the degeneration of creative power into something toxic and noxious.
If we apply the law of analogy, it is apparent that the unregenerate human
personality corresponds to a “gene on the loose”. Whenever our field of con¬
sciousness is filled with private whims and fancies and concerns, whenever we
look towards no horizon beyond the range of self-interest and self-love, we
cease to sustain and to reproduce our real life. Thus our states of consciousness
can become viruses poisoning whatever they encounter. The whole body of a
civilization can be so infected by these human viruses that, for the sake of future
humanity, Nature removes it from existence by slow or rapid death.
Among the many toxic “molecules” which are corrupting the body of our
own civilization, not the least potent is the virus of vulgarity. Its deadly qual¬
ity is too often not clearly perceived. Vulgarity is by its very nature a process
of degradation, implying a progressive incapacity to recognize truth and beauty
and nobility, denoting an ever-increasing attachment to the false and ugly and
ignoble. In its extreme form, vulgarity is the affirmation that man exists merely
to satisfy his bodily appetites and to feed his vanity and self-esteem. If anyone
doubt this, let him reflect upon the more brutal expressions of the most de¬
veloped modem art, the art of advertising. Even the most casual observation
of the advertisements in the New York subway reveals the sordid futility of
states of consciousness which can only reflect images of physical comfort and
emotional excitement.
Machiavelli is the classic type of the cynic who has lost all faith in the better¬
ment of the human being, and who seeks to raise himself above others by ex¬
ploiting their vices and weaknesses. Such a person, if successful, might ulti¬
mately become a black magician, a veritable scourge of the race. Perhaps there
is some cause for satisfaction that our contemporary Machiavellis are so vulgar
themselves that they cannot separate themselves from the mass, no matter how
hard they try.
One of the New York newspapers recently carried a full-page advertisement
of a “success book”, entitled How to Win Friends and Influence People , which
has become a “best seller”. A brief excerpt reveals its tone and purpose.
Professor John Dewey, America’s most profound philosopher, says the deepest urge
in human nature is the “desire to be important”. Remember that phrase, “the desire to
be important”. It is a gnawing and unfaltering human hunger. It was this desire that
led the uneducated, poverty-stricken grocery clerk, Abraham Lincoln, to study law;
that inspired Dickens to write his immortal novels. It makes you want to wear the
latest styles, drive the latest car, and talk about your brilliant children. ... If people
are so hungry for a feeling of importance, imagine what miracles you and I can achieve
by giving them honest appreciation. The rare individual who honestly satisfies this
heart-hunger will hold people in the palm of his hand.
NOTES AND COMMENTS
95
It is feeble and trite. Nevertheless, it would be difficult to state more clearly
a thoroughly vulgar ideal, an ideal worthy of the “average man” beloved by
politicians. It should help one to realize that all self-seeking is essentially base
and crass; that the human personality separated from the soul, like the gene on
the loose, is a “microbe”. Incidentally, one notes, as an illustration of the
tendency to seek the lowest possible motive for every act, the typical assumption
of the modernistic philosopher that the greatest as well as the meanest of man¬
kind are equally incapable of generosity, since all alike can only be inspired by
the “desire to be important”. Such a notion properly belongs to the same order
of culture as the endorsements of soaps and cigarettes by members of the so-
called upper classes.
The Two Natures of Man
As has been suggested, the dual action of the life-force is intimately con¬
nected with the dual nature of “Manifesting Mind”. This is not, indeed, an
abstract or academic question, for it can be studied and analyzed by every man
who observes the behaviour of his own “manifesting mind”, and the effects of
his thoughts upon his bodily functions.
“Two souls, alas, dwell in my bosom”, cries Goethe’s Faust. No fact of ex¬
perience can be more self-evident than the division of consciousness which
characterizes human nature in its unredeemed condition. In a magnificent
passage Pascal points to the splendour and misery which co-exist in man, and
which continuously interact in the drama of his life . 1
We desire truth, and we find only uncertainty. We seek happiness, and we find only
misery and death. We are incapable of not wishing for truth and happiness, and we are
incapable of either certitude or happiness. This desire has been left us, in part to punish
us, in part to make us realize from whence we have fallen. . . . What a chimsera then is
man! What a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a subject of contradiction,
what a marvel! Judge of all things, witless worm; casket of truth, sewer of incertitude
and error; glory and refuse of the universe. . . . Know, then, prideful man, what a
paradox you are to yourself. Humble yourself, impotent reason; be silent, idiot nature;
learn that man infinitely surpasses man, and learn from your Master your true condi¬
tion, of which you are unaware. Listen to God!
Original Sin and the Fall of Man
What is the answer given by God to the riddle of the sphinx, the mystery of
the human entity, half animal and half divine? Pascal, speaking as a devout
Jansenist but also as a mystic, recalls the catastrophe of the original sin which
was the cause of man’s fall from his first perfection.
If man had never been corrupt, he would, in his innocence, enjoy with assurance J^th
truth and felicity; and if he had never been anything but corrupt, he would have ndffilea
of truth nor of beatitude. But, hapless men that we are, more wretched than if tnere
were no grandeur in our condition, we have an idea of happiness, and we cannot attain
to it; we feel an image of truth, and we possess only the lie; we are incapable of being
absolutely ignorant, and of knowing certainty, so manifest is it that we have been in a
degree of perfection from which we have unfortunately fallen. . . . These foundations,
solidly established on the inviolable authority of religion, teach us that there are two
1 The translation of the following excerpts from the Penstes and the My stir e de Jtsus, is by Mr. Morris Bishop,
the author of Pascal, the Life of Genius.
g6
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
equally constant truths of the faith: one, that man in the state of creation or of grace
has risen above all nature, has been rendered as if like unto God, participating in His
divinity; the other, that in the state of corruption and sin, he has fallen from that estate
and has been rendered like unto beasts.
What is the distinguishing mark, the brand, of the fallen man? He is “only
disguise, falsehood, and hypocrisy, both in himself and in regard to others.
. . . His life is but a perpetual illusion.” As a Buddhist would say, he is ob¬
sessed by the “heresy of separateness”. The creature loses consciousness of his
identity of essence with the Creator and conceives of himself as thinking, willing,
acting by his own independent and inalienable power. Thus, in the last analy¬
sis, all, or almost all, of our defilement is traced to vanity.
Vanity is so anchored in the heart of man, that a soldier, a soldier’s servant, a cook, a
porter, vaunts himself and would fain have his admirers; and the philosophers themselves
covet them; and those who write against vanity wish the fame of having written well;
and their readers wish the fame of having read them. I who write have perhaps that
desire; and perhaps those who will read this.
Redemption and Union
As self-centred ness marks the fallen man, so self-giving marks the man who
has been touched by grace and who has found the royal road to salvation. But
as Pascal insists, a return to the lost paradise would be impossible, if the Di¬
vinity had not become incarnate as Christ, the Perfect Man, setting an example
for the faithful, and, by the conquest of sin and mortality in his Person, making
it possible for his disciples to conquer in their turn. In union with the Divine
Master, the duality of human nature disappears, and man becomes a unified
being, a veritable individual soul. Nor is that union as far away as we fancy.
Pascal, meditating upon Gethsemane, heard the Master speak these words:
“Console thyself; thou wouldst not be seeking me, if thou hadst not already
found me.”
The Universal Theme of the Fall and the Redemption
No theologian has stated the fundamentals of the orthodox Christian dogma
more clearly and more beautifully than Pascal. But these fundamentals are
not peculiar to Christianity. All the world-religions develop variations upon
this basic theme of the fall of man through sin, and his redemption through
divine aid. In Buddhism, for example, the origin of suffering is linked with the
birth and growth of the illusion of the “personal idea”, the separate self, as the
end of suffering depends upon the birth and life of the Buddha both as an
Avatar, an incarnation of the Logos, and as the immortal being, the spark of
the Eternal, which is the essence of every man. The Mysteries of Egypt and
Greece, as even classical scholars are beginning to recognize, represented in
dramatic form the descent of the soul into Hades, the land of the shadow of
death, and the divine sacrifice which makes possible the re-ascent of the soul to
the abode of the Immortals. This Mystery tradition has exercised a profound
influence upon occidental thought through the medium of the Platonic phi¬
losophers; and it was repeated by Dante. The three phases of the epic of human
NOTES AND COMMENTS
97
existence—the Inferno, the Purgatorio, the Paradiso—were not discovered by
the great poet. They were known before the beginning of what we call history.
The universality of the doctrine indicates that it is in fact a basic tenet of
Theosophy, the Wisdom-Religion, the Logos Doctrine of the Great Lodge, the
prototype and source of the teachings of all the Masters and Sages who have
guided the evolution of the races of mankind. Therefore, it may be argued that
the real truth and depth of the Christian version of the fall and the redemption,
can only be understood in so far as this is interpreted in terms of Theosophy.
The Eternal War
The scope of the subject is so vast and its aspects so numerous and so varied,
that only a fragment of it can be considered here. The inquiring student is
invited to consult The Secret Doctrine , especially Volume II, which is almost
entirely devoted to this theme.
It is significant that Theosophy primarily conceives of the fall and the re¬
demption in terms of warfare. Also it presents human history as an integral
part of cosmic history. The victories and defeats of man are episodes in a war
which is co-extensive and co-etemal with the universe.
The “Fair’ is a universal allegory. It sets forth at one end of the ladder of Evolution
the “rebellion”, i. e. the action of differentiating intellection or consciousness on its
various planes, seeking union with matter; and at the other, the lower end, the rebellion
of matter against Spirit, or of action against spiritual inertia. ... In the original alle¬
gory it is matter—hence the more material angels—which was regarded as the con¬
queror of Spirit, or the Archangels who “fell” on this plane. “They of the flaming sword
(or animal passions) had put to flight the Spirits of Darkness.” Yet it is the latter who
fought for the supremacy of the conscious and divine spirituality on Earth and failed,
succumbing to the power of matter {The Secret Doctrine , II, 62).
It has been said that the first two chapters of Genesis give an accurate alle¬
gorical interpretation of the esoteric doctrine of creation. Even a cursory read¬
ing suggests that they preserve the record of the two great “rebellions”. First
there is the description of the triumphant penetration of the creative Spirit, the
divine consciousness and purpose, into chaos and matter, the zone of unwisdom
and unconsciousness. “And God saw everything that He had made, and, be¬
hold, it was very good.” Then follows the counter-attack of matter against the
spiritual power, the insurgence of man “formed of the dust of the groundJi
against the laws of Divine Nature, the expulsion from Paradise.
There is the universal and “impersonal” descent of spirit into matter which
has been described as a periodical necessity, a recurrent function of eternal
Nature. The potentialities latent in matter are thus quickened to life, finally
ripening into what would seem to be the quintessence of materiality, the “animal
soul”, kama } the complex of instincts and desires which constitutes man’s legacy
from the lower kingdoms of Nature. The fall of man may be said to occur,
when the “human soul”, manas , the ray of spiritual being which constitutes his
real identity, entering into contact with the “animal soul”, not only fails to
transmute it into a true image of the spiritual, but, on the contrary, is itself
cantured, enslaved, and vampirized by the animal. Thus is created what Ploti-
9 8
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
nus calls the suntheton , the lower personality, the self-conscious combination of
human and bestial powers, the monstrous phantasm of sinful man which
awakened the horror of Pascal.
The Army of the Spirit
It has been noted that Theosophy describes the whole of existence as an
incessant combat between spirit and matter, light and darkness, consciousness
and unconsciousness, force and inertia, good and evil. This combat does not
end with the rebellion of matter against spirit, with the fall of man, with the
“failure” of the “Archangels who fought for the supremacy of the conscious and
divine spirituality on Earth”. However, as the warfare continues, it changes
its form, becoming increasingly individual, interior and conscious. Doubtless,
all the kingdoms of Nature are constantly in a state of war, but man’s battles
must be fought on planes of consciousness where the mineral, the plant and the
animal can scarcely be said to exist. As it is the lower personality, the suntheton ,
which leads the attack against the human soul, so it is the human soul, the
“Higher Ego”, which must lead the counter-attack against the lower
personality.
Here again Theosophy confirms the testimony of the world-religions, but
broadens its significance. It is possible for us to win the fight, because it has
already been won by the great hierarchy of our predecessors. During every
cycle there have been “Gods” who have vanquished legions of “Titans”. “And
there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon;
and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their
place found any more in heaven.” At the one pole, there is the struggle between
the Gods and the Titans; at the other pole, there is the struggle between con¬
science and selfish desire in the heart of a child. But the child who obeys con¬
science is a comrade of the God; and the victory of the God makes lighter the
ordeal of the child.
According to Theosophy, the redemption of mortal man would be almost
inconceivable if the elect of mankind, the Masters of the Great Lodge, those
who by valiant effort have liberated their own souls, were not present in the
world to help stricken humanity. The supreme religious leaders, the Christ
and the Buddha and others who have incarnated and lived among men, have
given living proof that the spirit in man can subdue and transform his animal
nature. Thus one may think of the Masters as officers in the Army of the Spirit.
No man can enlist under their command without becoming in some degree the
recipient of their victorious power.
The Correspondence Between Racial and Individual Experience
Everything in the Universe follows analogy. “As above, so below”; Man is the mi¬
crocosm of the Universe. That which takes place on the spiritual plane repeats itself
on the Cosmic plane. Concretion follows the lines of abstraction; corresponding to the
highest must be the lowest; the material to the spiritual (The Secret Doctrine, I, 177).
It is the theosophical tradition that the fall of man was a racial catastrophe,
NOTES AND COMMENTS
99
an historical calamity, which gravely altered the course of human evolution.
The exact dates are not given, but one is led to assume that this most terrible
of tragedies occurred millions of years ago. Since that time, in cycle after cycle,
at appointed intervals, there have been incarnations of Avatars or Saviours, of
emissaries from the Great Lodge who have laboured to arrest the spiritual
decline of the various races.
But for the mystic, the fall and the redemption are individual as well as
racial experiences. Their stages and episodes are continuously enacted and re¬
enacted within himself. There, within his field of consciousness, spirit and
matter incessantly attack and counter-attack. There he is daily tempted to
re-commit the original sin. The divine sacrifice which can release his soul from
bondage, is not a remote event but an ever-present challenge and inspiration.
How could it be otherwise, if man be, indeed, the mirror of the Universe? We
can never begin to understand the mystery of man, unless we recognize that racial
and individual experience correspond to each other; that objective history and
subjective biography repeat the same processes and illustrate the same principles.
Modern Improvements and Real Progress
The doctrine of the dual nature of man, and of the struggle between spirit
and matter, is almost absent from the consciousness of modem man. The
Churches which preserved it in the West for nearly two thousand years, have
ceased to emphasize it, so great is their fear of unpopularity. Science in general
denies its truth. Through a tragic misunderstanding, the theory of organic
evolution has been interpreted to mean that man has only an animal ancestry;
that all his qualities are animal derivatives, more or less sublimated.
Students of Theosophy have been accused of blind indifference to the salu¬
tary possibilities of scientific progress. They have been very unjustly accused
of contempt for the power of the reason to improve the lot of man. It is not
understood that they do not lack respect for the reason. But they believe the
reason to be effective only when its operations are based upon sound intuition
and tested experience. The duality of unredeemed human nature has been
attested by the experience of uncounted centuries. No inventions of science,
no economic theory, no sociological dream, no legislation, can possibly cure the
suffering of humanity, as long as this duality lasts. Its persistence implies thd
active existence of vicious and futile desires, of psychic viruses. Truly, “Desii?
precedes function, and function precedes organism.” If mankind in its present
condition were transferred en masse to some paradise, that paradise would very
soon become a hell; for the desires of man as at present constituted could only
produce an organism adapted to life in some hell.
The student of Theosophy should be free from the modem delusions con¬
cerning progress. He should know from his own experience that real progress
depends solely upon the ability of individuals to discover the path to redemp¬
tion and union. True happiness is independent of modem improvements, of
physical and political and economic changes. It is the heritage of him who
figh^for the supremacy of the conscious and divine spirituality on Earth”.
FRAGMENTS
T HE new outpouring of life has come with the spring. From their hid¬
den depths, the forces of manifestation are brought forth to express
themselves in the beauty of leaf and flower and song. What must not
be the wonder of those depths, that their outermost appearance has such love¬
liness! Yet, if not rightly understood and used, this outflow will mean loss and
dissipation, since the desire for sensation has, in unregenerate nature, centrif¬
ugal force and not centripetal.
So Nature’s spring, which was intended as a picture of the inner life, and thus
to lure us more surely to its seeking, has been turned by the disobedient will of
man to his own destruction,—intent upon the reflection, he has lost, alas! all
knowledge of the Reality from which it came. God forgive us that we take his
choicest gifts to build a wall between ourselves and him.
“Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, I will get me to the moun¬
tain of myrrh, and to the hill of frankincense”, says the Spouse in the Canticle,
the disciple to his Master. Until the shadows of ignorance and blindness have
been dispersed by the radiance of the Sun of our souls, we shall dwell, in the
heights of our being, upon the remembrance of what our Lord has done for us,
who threw a bridge across the chasm of sin (himself that bridge), which makes
possible, even now, our passage to Eternal Life; for myrrh signifies remem¬
brance: and with the frankincense of prayer we shall commune with him, seek¬
ing the vision of his face, and the illumination of his will, that our poor, barren
heights may become a Mount of Transfiguration, where, though smitten to the
ground as the Apostles of old, we may yet behold the glory that is to be when
the times of struggle and tribulation shall have passed.
O that this spring-time might be an inner spring-time to our souls, that we
might fling wide open the prison doors behind which our true selves languish,
leading them forth into the fair garden which our hearts shall then have become,
“a fountain of gardens, a well of living waters”, radiant with the sunshine of
the Master’s presence, an Eden where the Lord God himself may walk in the
cool of the evening.
ioo
FRAGMENTS
IOI
Let us dwell upon the picture of what this could mean for us, how transformed
life would be, how the cares and trivialities would fall into their proper places
as the clay of our garden soil, or the fertilizers for our flowers,—all, all to be
used for ends of usefulness and beauty, and so the import of them growing, with
the plants they nourish, clearer, day by day.
What would it not mean to the Master to find our bleak hill-sides turned into
luxuriant bloom, places of refreshment where he could rest from his unremitting
toil? We reflect too seldom, I fear, that his spring-time waits on our choked
minds and stony, unproductive hearts. He gives the opportunity, the tools,
all needed equipment; he has provided the fullest reward of our labour; but we
shall find these on the Mountain of Myrrh and on the Hill of Frankincense;
and while we prefer to dwell in the Valley of Desolation we cannot lament our
empty hands and our unprofitable lives.
Easter for us was made possible, by the Easter won for us when, long past,
in Palestine, that day broke, and the shadows fled away; and Easter for him
will be—0 heart, what miracle to give him Easter!—when we, having likewise
passed the darkness of Calvary, by his grace, meet him in the dawn-lit Garden
which we have dug and planted.
What shall we care then for the tender flush in the sky, the whispering wind,
the fragrant dew, or yet the angelic presences:—Rabboni! Master!
Cav£.
THEOSOPHY AND DEMOCRACY
I T IS our custom, at the opening meeting of each season, to speak of the
Society itself, and of the principles upon which it was founded and which
have guided its conduct through the more than sixty years of its existence.
Our theme is to be the same to-night, but a question which has been sent us
makes it possible to set it forth against a contrasting background. The ques¬
tion is: Why is The Theosophical Society opposed to the ideas of Democracy?
The Society’s Freedom
This question renders its first service when we perceive that, as it stands, it
is not susceptible of an answer. The Theosophical Society, as such, can neither
oppose nor approve the ideas of Democracy; nor is there any member who has
the authority to speak for it in such matters. If we regard Democracy as a
form of government or social theory, we are estopped by the By-law that no
member may involve the Society in political disputes, nor promulgate any
doctrine as that advanced by the Society; while if—as sometimes appears—
Democracy be regarded as a kind of new religion, which modern enlightenment
has substituted for the superstitions of the past, then we are equally estopped
by the provision that every member has the right to believe or disbelieve in
any religious system or philosophy. The Society has “no creed, dogma, nor
personal authority” to impose, and its members “are expected to accord to
the beliefs of others that tolerance which they desire for their own”. The
question, as phrased, is based upon a false assumption, which contravenes
both the fundamental and essential freedom of the Society and the open plat¬
form which it has steadily maintained and which our constitution demands.
We must go behind the phrasing, therefore, before we can deal with it.
The Theosophic Attitude: The Reality Behind Words
This is the second service the question renders. It presents, in a trivial but
specific instance, a need which inheres in all human intercourse, and which our
study of Theosophy has so emphasized that in all our discussions we try con¬
sciously to meet it. It is the need to look through words and phrases and
symbols to their intent in their user’s mind, and to the reality to which they
point. The failure to do this, the naive and lazy habit of dealing with
words as though they were no more than the letters which spell them, fixed
and final for all men in the meaning they have (at the moment) for oneself,
accounts for the confusion, cross-purposes and superficiality of much ordinary
conversation and philosophic debate. Each man must, of necessity, look at
life and reality from his own angle of approach, and. must interpret what he
sees in term s of his own experience. His words are but the symbols of elements
1 From the headings of an opening address before the New York Branch of The Theosophical Society.
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THEOSOPHY AND DEMOCRACY
103
in that experience. They can be, for him, nothing else. They are sign-boards
that point back, through his memories, to things met in his past, in likeness or
contrast to which he seeks to explain his present concern. Only as we take
our stand sympathetically beside him, can we see as he sees; and only as we
bring to memory experiences that are akin to his, can his words mean to us
what they mean to him, and our talk be in the same tongue. The readiness
to put oneself in one’s fellow’s place, the search for sympathetic points of agree¬
ment as the basis on which all conversation must rest, the confidence that,
in every view honestly held, beneath all error, there must be some element of
truth, and that that truth is of moment to us—this is the typical theosophical
attitude that we endeavour always to maintain, and which we wish these meet¬
ings invariably to manifest.
Let us strive to look, therefore, beyond the phrasing of this question to the
questioner’s intent. Perhaps it was something like this: Why does the study of
Theosophy seem so often to lead to the rejection of the ideas of Democracy?
To make as good a case for the question as we can, would it not seem that
a body, whose first stated object is the formation of a nucleus of universal
brotherhood, without distinction of race or creed or caste, upon whose free
and open platform all members meet on a basis of equality, where all views
must be considered on their own merits, without regard to their source and
without the support of any other authority than that which inheres in truth,—
would it not seem that our Society should be of all organizations the most
democratic?
Perhaps, indeed, it is so; let us not too hastily prejudge the matter before
we have examined it. Perhaps the “ideas of Democracy”, which our presenta¬
tion of Theosophy is held to oppose, may be false ideas. We wish that the
questioner were here to make more clear just what ideas he means, for of late
years many have been given that name which would not have been so called
a generation ago. But our theme, after all, is not Democracy, but Theosophy
against a background of Democracy, and we must be content if we can outline
the central figure in broad strokes, even if we leave the background vague and
shadowy.
Democracy Looks Horizontally: Theosophy Looks Up
T he word “Democracy” is a compound of the two Greek words, demos ,
meaning the crowd or people in the mass, and kratos , power, or its exercise as
dominion or rule, so that the literal and primary meaning, as we all know, is
the condition of affairs when the ruling power is given over to the crowd or to
the mass of the people collectively. Generally speaking, its outlook is hori¬
zontal , confined to a single level, where, it is the convention to assume, one
finds oneself and all mankind. This has become the secondary meaning of the
word, the obliteration or ignoring of all differences between men, the con¬
sideration of oneself and all others as mere units in the mass. It negatives all
idea ofjin upward look, or the recognition of any authority inhering in a higher
order oTOeing than one’s own.
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THE0S0PHICAL QUARTERLY
“Brotherhood”, on the other hand, often regarded as the basis of Democracy,
necessitates for its comprehension just this upward look which Democracy
refuses. It is the bond between children of the same parents, and it is mean¬
ingless save as we look to those parents. It exists between those who recognize
the same superior authority. No man is a brother who is not first a son.
The two words Democracy and Brotherhood, therefore, actually imply
totally different directions of outlook, different standpoints and centres of
reference, and different motives and bonds of union. The word “Theosophy”,
even more than the word Brotherhood, emphasizes this difference. It, too, is
composed of two Greek words, Theou and sophia , divine wisdom, or the wisdom
of God. In the first epistle to the Corinthians, Paul uses the word as an attri¬
bute of Christ: “Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (I, 24). The
very name of our Society is thus an assertion of Divinity. It points to a power
and a wisdom which are more and greater than man’s, yet from which man can
draw, and where authority and dominion inhere. It is precisely because stu¬
dents of Theosophy have learned to look up to this transcendent, overshadow¬
ing Wisdom and Power, and to open themselves to its guidance and rule, seek¬
ing brotherhood through the realization of a common fatherhood, that they
cannot accept as satisfactory, or as having any real and solid substance, the
flat, two-dimensional concept of being, which sees only a single level of life
and would confine all power and authority to it.
Here we have the answer to our question. Our Society is, of necessity, pri¬
marily and persistently concerned with that vertical, spiritual dimension of
being to which its name and principal objects alike point, but to which Democ¬
racy (in its ordinary connotations) must, for self-preservation, as persistently
shut its eyes. Its “flat-land” philosophy can neither assimilate nor endure the
recognition of higher levels, and the Society’s unremitting effort to demonstrate
these, could scarcely escape being thought hostile. Yet there is no surer way
to the heart of the Theosophical Movement, in thought and feeling and work,
than to lay firm hold upon this fundamental principle,—that it involves always
a vertical dimension and action—a height and depth and solidity, an origin
and end, purposes, loyalties and obediences, potentialities and capacities,
which Democracy, looking only to a thin surface, wholly ignores or denies.
An Added Dimension
The added dimension which Theosophy thus imparts to our view of life and
of all things, is the key to its understanding and to the difference between it
and the materialistic, and literally superficial, thought of our age. The differ¬
ence is like looking up from a map, drawn on the flat surface of a sheet of paper,
to see the scene itself before one, in all its three-dimensional reality, with its
hills and valleys, its sunlight and the drifting shadows of clouds, its perspectives
and far horizons,—and everywhere the miracle of life. Theosophy includes
within itself all sciences and philosophies, but, while accepting all their positive
contributions to man’s knowledge, it sees them as no more than flat sections in
the solid substance of reality. It embraces, also, all religions; but not for the
THEOSOPHY AND DEMOCRACY
105
purpose of opposing them one to the other, or of trying to find their origins
in “nature worship”, or in the “taboos and superstitions” of savagery. Rather
does it show us how, looking through the different imagery and symbolism of
different times and races, we may see, in all, the same eternal truths of the
life of the soul and its relation to the overshadowing Spirit. It gives unity to
diversity, and in simplicity reveals depth within depth of meaning. Always it
gives more; it never makes less. It vitalizes, validates, makes real.
Democracy Made Valid: the Theosophic Method
These may seem sweeping statements, but they are easily tested. Let us, as
an example, see what Democracy becomes when we add to it the vertical dimen¬
sion it has rejected, but upon which Theosophy always insists. Let us look
up and see, brooding over mankind, Divine Wisdom—7 heousophia —the Truth,
than which “no religion is higher”. We may choose what image we will for it:
the Over Soul of Emerson, the One Mind into which all individual minds are
inlets; or think of it as the Logos of St. John; or as the Platonic Trinity of the
True, the Good, the Beautiful; or as that “True Sun”, of the Indian Gayatri,
“from Whom all proceed, to Whom all must return”; or as the Sun-disk, pic¬
tured in the glyphs of Tel-el Amarna, from which rays come down to man,
ending in hands that give and receive gifts. Let us assume that all men in
our Democracy look up to such a Father in the Heavens—as the seers and
sages of every race and age have looked—seeing there the author of their be¬
ing, and believing that those rays, which reach down to them, are rays of Truth
and Wisdom, bearing the authority of Truth. If then, any question were to
arise, affecting the whole group, and each man, putting all prejudice and self-
interest aside, were to strive honestly to make his mind an inlet of the Divine
Mind, his view would be that facet of the Truth whence his own ray of light
came to him. It would, of course, be no more than a fragmentary view, but it
would none the less be true; and because the Truth is one, when all these frag¬
mentary views were put together, none rejected but each in its own proper
place, they would make one whole,—the Father’s Truth and Will. Then, in¬
deed, the “voice of the people” could be the “Voice of God”; Democracy,
recognizing and subordinating itself to divine authority, would become, in
fact, a Brotherhood; and the method of Democracy would be the Theosophic
Method ,—the method through which, in the studies and discussions of our
Society, Truth is sought. ^
We need not point out how different is the actual democratic proceduM
and result. Not Pilate, but the multitude, condemned the Christian MastCT.
On his behalf, Pilate appealed to the people, and the “voice of the people”
“cried out the more exceedingly”, crucify him; release unto us Barabbas.
All teaching of religion has for long been prohibited in our public schools.
There is no thought of Divine Authority, as such, but only of human opinion.
Neither the Divine Will nor the wholeness of Truth is sought, but the clash of
opposing prejudices and the partisan dominance of a faction over the whole. A
people is like a nursery of children who can be united either from above or from
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THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
below; either in love and obedience to their parents, or in unanimous surrender
to the promptings of mischief; but who otherwise, left only to forces emanating
from their own plane, will bicker and quarrel, until the strongest bully among
them imposes his tyranny and silences their complaints. The unity, in which
diversity is reconciled, is never on the same plane as the diversity. The only
true basis of union is in a common loyalty to something beyond self: love of a
parent, or love of a Cause, put above self and in which self is lost. Men come
to realize it in common labour and suffering and self-giving, in war and in
sacrifice; never in self-seeking.
The Authority of Truth the Bulwark of Freedom
Professor Etienne Gilson of the University of Paris, speaking at the Harvard
tercentenary, emphasized the crying need of our time for the universalism and
absolutism that marked the Middle Ages, upholding “a spiritual order of re¬
alities whose absolute right it is to judge even the State, and eventually to free
us from its oppression”. He quoted the French philosopher Jules Lachelier,
as having remarked that “the only conceivable form of Democracy was Theoc¬
racy”, and, he added, ‘‘that very kind of Theocracy which William Penn
had once established in the forests of Pennsylvania”. ‘‘Despite its paradoxical
appearance”, Professor Gilson continued, ‘‘that statement was fundamentally
sound in this at least, that as soon as men refuse to be ruled directly by God,
they condemn themselves to be ruled directly by man; and if they decline to
receive from God the leading principles of their moral and social conduct,
they are bound to accept them from the king, or from the State, or from their
race, or from their own social class. . . . Against the encroachments of the
totalitarian State, our only conceivable protection, humanly speaking at least,
is in a powerful revival of the Mediaeval feeling for the universal character of
Truth”.
It is this universal and absolute character of Truth that Theosophy stresses.
In it, and in it alone, it recognizes an absolute and ultimate authority to which
it renders whole-souled, devoted loyalty and obedience, finding, in the measure
of man’s obedience to the behests of Truth, the measure of his freedom—of
mind and spirit, and even of the body. Our Society has ‘‘no authority to en¬
force or impose” precisely because all authority is in Truth itself—in the Divine
Wisdom which it would have all its members seek and serve.
Relativity and Reality
The Theosophical Method not only reconciles Theocracy and Democracy
(Theocracy, let it be understood, not priestcraft), it reconciles also relativity
and absolutism. It grants immediately that each man’s view can be but partial,
his outlook being relative to where he stands, so that what one man, at one
time, may see in one way, another man or another time may see quite differ¬
ently. This is the basic postulate of the theory of relativity, which, like all
half-truths, if left to stand alone, becomes the most misleading of falsehoods.
Untold harm has been done by the false inferences drawn from it in the realms
THEOSOPHY AND DEMOCRACY
107
of religion and ethics, as when it is argued that as different ages and peoples
have seen Goodness and Truth and Beauty in different guise, so that the moral
standards at one time and place have not been those of another, therefore
goodness and morality themselves are relative to man’s opinion, man-made,
without other reality or authority than that which man himself gives to them.
The exact opposite is the fact, and a fact which the Theosophic Method makes
clear. A man-made thing is like a picture thrown upon a screen. All those
who can see it at all, see the same thing, because it exists only on the surface
where it has been projected, without solid substance of its own. Whatever,
on the other hand, is existent in its own right, as part of the solid substance of
reality, will, by that very fact, of necessity show different sides or aspects of
itself when approached from different angles. Relativity of aspect, therefore,
is not a denial but an affirmation of absolutism of being, and this Theosophy
never lets its students forget. The Theosophic Method of welcoming all views
land rejecting none, makes this relation between the relative and the real start¬
lingly apparent. For though the wholeness of Truth can never be confined in
a single formula, nor be reflected in more than one aspect from a single mind,
yet when views from different angles are put together, as here in our meetings,
a synthesis is formed which is far richer than any one of them alone. The
method is like that of the stereoscope, whose lenses, permitting us to view
together the flat photographs taken from slightly different angles, give us the
same impression of depth and perspective that one has in looking at the original
itself.
Not the least of the advantages of this revelation of reality’s many-sidedness,
is that it forces us to recognize that however much we see, more is hid from us.
We never know what the shrubbery may conceal, nor what may lie beyond
the hill.
The Ethical Spirit
What we have said may serve also to make clear the nature of the Ethical
Spirit which emanates from and breathes through Theosophy. It is absolute,
impersonal, descending from above, as far beyond the reach of man to modify
to his wishes, as are the configurations of the stars. Like them, the ethical
law is something which man sees clearly only when he looks up, turning his
eyes away from the world and shutting out its glamour; not something to be
discovered in a sideways look to his interests or to his fellows. It has no kin¬
ship with expediency. It brooks no compromise. It is indifferent to your
assent or dissent. Unmoved, unalterable, calm and serene, it reveals itself as
itself, the Law of the Soul’s life. We disobey it at our peril; but it neif^r
threatens us nor promises us reward. It does not look to us at all, but looks
up, and is what it is in the same obedience to what is above it, that we, if we
would live, must render to it. It is not only Theousophia , Divine Wisdom, it is
Theoudunamis, Divine Power. It is “the Word”, which we must “make flesh”.
It is Truth.
But also it is Beauty; and though when we look to it through the storm-
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THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
clouds of our own crossed wills and denied desires, it seems to us stem and cruel
in its aloof imperatives, when we look, with single eye and heart, to it itself,
we see it as Beauty,—beauty that needs no other compulsion than its own
loveliness to make us follow it. Here, as always, the real can only be described
in paradox. Of the two opposites, both are true, both must be taken.
Uprightness in full Literalness
We cannot separate the ethical spirit of Theosophy from the religious life
to which it leads, and neither can be understood save as the consequence and
outgrowth of the vertical look and vertical movement which characterize
Theosophy. Through this motion, spirit and matter are knitted together, so
that matter embodies spirit, and spirit, incarnating in matter, animates,
quickens and transforms it. As our eyes open to this, the whole world becomes
transformed. A new heaven and a new earth are made. In everything, in the
humblest and simplest and most familiar, we see the life of the spirit, and
spiritual significance and values. “Uprightness” takes on a richer, literal
meaning as the alignment of the whole character to the vertical movement of
life; and to “uprise” has restored to it its connotations of rising from sleep and
resurrection from the dead.
Little by little, mind, heart and will all follow this vertical movement. The
student, always looking up to what is above him, his heart drawn by its beauty,
his mind held by its truth, his will obedient to its good, striving to serve and
embody it, grows little by little into its likeness; as “the mind is dyed the colour
of its thoughts”, the heart “united to what it loves”, the will “assimilated into
that upon which it feeds”.
It is here that those who have to stand up and speak the truth that is in
them, suffer the shame of knowing that all their faults cry out against that
truth to make it seem a lie. They perceive themselves, and know that all
must perceive them, “far off in the region of unlikeness”. And yet their truth
is the truth. Theosophy, loved and lived, has transformed and does trans¬
form them, daily working its miracle of quickening the dead and waking the
consciousness from its drugged dreams of self. We are different, and know
that we are different, because of Theosophy. Force and form and conscious¬
ness are three aspects of one thing. To change one is to change all; and when
we learn to look up and to open ourselves, even in the least degree, to the Divine
Wisdom and the Divine Power, even our outer form and the expression of our
face, change. Looking up, reaching up, loving up, we grow up.
The Theosophic Life
It is this “uprightness”, in the full, literal derivation of the word, this change
from the horizontal to the vertical in the direction of our interest, attention,
motives and the whole range of our activities, that marks the essential differ¬
ence between the theosophic life and the life of the man of the world. That
difference has far-reaching consequences,—too far-reaching to permit us to do
more than point to them. But before we attempt even that, it will be well
THEOSOPHY AND DEMOCRACY
109
to note that though the theosophic attitude and method may properly be re¬
garded as pertaining to and characteristic of The Theosophical Society as such,
the ethical spirit and religious life of Theosophy can be no part of the Society’s
outer procedure or organism, but must breathe through and animate it only
as they are incarnate in the lives of the individual members. Thus, in speak¬
ing of them, we are passing beyond the Society itself to the wider realm and
new world which Theosophy opens to its disciples, but which all members of
the Society are as free to reject as to accept.
If it be entered, then, as we have said, there is experienced a literal conver¬
sion, the whole life being turned about through a right angle into a direction
and dimension of which you have been scarcely conscious before. All being
is one, yet so marked is this change, that you seem to be denizens of two dis¬
tinct worlds, and your life and work and consciousness to be a linkage between
the two,—between the world of matter and of spirit, between the realized and
the potential, between the manifest actualities all about you, and the unmani¬
fest ideal, which nevertheless is only unmanifest here with us, while shining in
the heavens in its own light, and that light already penetrating to our dim
eyes. As we intend upon it, perception leads to reception and passes into
inspiration, and inspiration into action,—that we be not disobedient unto the
heavenly vision. From action comes clearer vision, and renewed and stronger
inspiration, better directed and more efficient acts.
Thus the wheel is set in motion of cyclic interchange from plane to plane.
Everything visible begins to tell us of the greater invisible that lies behind it
and which it, in part, foreshows. Every material thing is seen as the crystalli¬
zation of a spiritual thing, a vehicle of a spiritual gift. All becomes alive. In
the daily round of duty we perceive that the highest potencies may be served,
and our days become transformed,—as a task performed with one we love is
lit by love. In beautifying a room, Beauty itself may be served, and, with the
Beautiful, the True and the Good. To seek perfection in the smallest detail is
—or may be—to worship the Perfect and to strive to make it incarnate and
manifest on earth as it is in heaven.
We say it may be this, for there is a counterfeit of it which vanity and self¬
worship can put forth. At every point we must remember, as Mr. Judge used
to say, that “many a Blackie wears a blue coat”. Light on the Path tells us,
“it must be the Eternal that draws forth your strength and beauty, not desire
for growth”,—nor any thought of self. We must have perceived that there is
a better service open to us than that of self; and in that service of what is fafl
above self, self becomes insignificant. In its end, in the ch£laship to which the
theosophic life ultimately leads, self is lost, and all of life assumes that repre¬
sentative and ambassadorial capacity, inseparable from whole-souled devotion,
such as that to which St. Paul pointed when he wrote, “I live, yet not I but
Christ liveth in me”.
From its very outset, however, the theosophical life combines both the con¬
templative and the active sides of the religious life. They are shown to us as
two halves of one whole, as necessary to each other as the systole and diastole
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THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
of the heart, or the alternate inbreathing and outbreathing of the breath. But
the contemplative life comes first and must be the foundation of the active
life,—as thought must be the foundation of speech, right perception the basis
of right action, and as the servant must listen to his Lord’s commands before
he can obey them. It includes the love and service of one’s fellow man, but
that love and service are rooted in a love and service of something far above
one’s fellow man. To paraphrase the Upanishads, not for love of man is man
dear, but for love of the Supreme is man dear. Or, in Christian terms, it is
the service of his children for love of the Master. It was not without purpose
that in Christ’s teaching the love of God was put first, and love of one’s neigh¬
bour came second and as a derivative of the first. Love of God inevitably
flows down and expresses itself in love of one’s neighbour; but love of one’s
neighbour does not of necessity rise to love of God, for our neighbour, like our¬
selves, has two sides to his being. Therefore, when the order of these two
commandments is reversed, it is common for the love of God to be lost, and
humanitarianism degenerates into a mere worship of material comfort, which,
atrophying the spiritual nature, acts to the degradation and not to the en¬
nobling of mankind. This is to be seen on every side to-day. Like Democ¬
racy, its false sentimentalism is but a consequence of the materialism which
sees nothing in life or in man but the one flat level of his animal existence.
Theosophic Doctrines
From what was said of the absolute freedom of the Society, it should be
wholly clear that those doctrines which characterize Theosophy as a philosophic
system are no more forced upon our members than the doctrines of Christianity
or Buddhism or of any other of the great religions. The theosophic doctrines
are, moreover, in no way original with the Society. Each and all of them may
be found elsewhere, though not always in a form so easily recognizable. It is
through the Society, however, that a knowledge of them has been spread in
the western world, for in the early days of our Movement they could find scant
hearing in Europe or America. Yet to one who himself believes in them, it
seems inevitable that the majority of our members, having had the opportunity
to study them, should have come to believe in them too; and, above all, that
anyone who has entered into the theosophic life, must almost of necessity have
come to think in such, or similar, terms. But whether that be so or not, it is
easy to see how natural and logical the vertical orientation of life makes these
theosophical doctrines appear; and there is the old saying that he who lives
the life shall know the doctrine.
The Doctrine of Correspondences: As Above So Below
Were it not that the universe is somehow all of one piece, understanding
of it would be impossible. The doctrine of correspondences, or analogy, which
the student of Theosophy learns to use as a guide in his thinking, is, in fact, a
necessity in any theory of knowledge that would permit the human conscious¬
ness to reflect the greater life of which it is a part. It is implicit in all science,
and exemplified in such modern hypotheses as represent the atom as a solar
THEOSOPHY AND DEMOCRACY
hi
system in miniature. It is set forth succinctly in the phrase that man is the
microcosm of the Macrocosm, but with equal clearness in the statement in the
Book of Genesis that God created man in his own image. This is not a dark
saying for anyone who has learned to look up to the Divine Wisdom, and who
strives to open himself to the transforming action of the Divine Power. He
has learned to see all life as an incarnation of Spirit, and he perceives that in
himself and in all about him, life attains its purpose just so far as that incarna¬
tion is complete, and the outer vehicle made a perfect expression and mani¬
festation of its own spiritual ray and divine model,—just so far, in other words,
as it verifies and fulfils the law, “as above so below”. This law places in our
hands a key to the understanding of mysteries otherwise wholly beyond our
ken, a key which we can use. Do we puzzle over the relation of spirit to matter,
or of the inner world of consciousness to the outer world of objects and of acts?
What is that relation in ourselves? How does thought pass into speech and
act? How, from the world of the potential, is the actual brought forth?
As the spark, stroked from a cat’s fur, is the same in essence as the lightning flash
that illumines the heavens, so, in the little, we may read the secret of the great.
Reincarnation and Karma
Or let us consider the doctrines of Reincarnation and Karma. They do but
extend over death, the same laws of cause and effect, and of cyclic alternation
between opposing phases, that we observe everywhere in life. Everywhere
there is such alternation as that of death and life. Why then should we think
of death alone as final, not to be followed again by life? There is a time of
sowing and a time of reaping, but from the reaping comes the seed for a new
sowing. Winter and summer; day and night; waking and sleeping; inbreathing
and outbreaking; the unuttered thought finding expression in speech and act,
and returning again to silent contemplation. Everywhere there is this inter¬
change between the inner and the outer, this cyclic passage from the world
beyond our senses to the visible world of material form and manifestation.
Everywhere, once we have learned to look up, we perceive incarnation and
reincarnation—of our thought, our purpose, our ideal, ourselves. And this is
true because neither thought, nor purpose, nor ideal, nor self, nor anything
that is, is ever wholly incarnate. Always there is more than that which, in
any moment, is revealed. Each new day finds us a new man, different from
the old in the further assimilation of experience, yet one with the old. We
sink to sleep at night, the senses folded, nor is there any going forth of conscious¬
ness to manifest itself in act; and in the morning wake, to take up again ke
unfinished task, to enter again the environment and relationships we Iwe
ourselves created through the past. We should never think to limit the law of
cause and effect to a single day. Nor should we speak of the “accident” of
waking in the same room in which we went to sleep. It is quite clear to us
that the morning greetings we receive from those about us are not uncoloured
by the intercourse we had with them the day before. Do men gather grapes of
thorns, or figs of thistles? Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap.
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THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
Few of those who quarrel with the doctrine of reincarnation—still fewer of
the many more who ignore it—have ever squarely faced the difficulties and
contradictions that are immediately involved in its denial. Yet it is those
very contradictions which account for much of the delusion, rebellion and
bitterness of our times. Taught by Democracy to reject the vertical dimen¬
sion of life, and to look only to a material standard of values—their views,
and their thought of themselves, confined to the short span of a single life—
men see only injustice in the inequalities of birth and fortune, and therefore
strive to tear down, in hate and envy, all above them. In so doing they are
but trying to realize in fact the dead level of equality that has been taught
them as democratic theory and their inherent right. No more false and sub¬
versive doctrine could be preached, yet we hear it promulgated to-day from
positions of highest trust.
It is fortunate that such a levelling can never be made, for it would be sub¬
versive of far more than civilization and personal freedom. Accomplished, it
would mean death, for life, as we have seen, is always a cyclic passage from
one level to another. In the name of human justice—wholly misunderstood,
travestied, made blind where its sight should be keenest—it would, could it be
produced, strangle in its inception every movement of Divine Justice, and of
Divine Mercy as well.
The twin doctrines of Karma and Reincarnation make wholly impossible
any thought of uniformity as desirable. The infinite diversity of life—of con¬
sciousness, of form, of powers and capacities, of opportunities and limitations,
of strength and weakness and knowledge and ignorance—all these things speak
to us of the untrammelled freedom of life to fit the outer environment to each
need, however momentary, of the evolving soul. The student of Karma sees
the whole outer world of manifestation—of circumstances and relationships,
of success and failure and happenings of all kinds—as a magic mirror, which
reflects back to the soul that which emanates from it and which it itself is.
And the magic of this great mirror is this: that these reflected rays, coming
back to the soul, are for ever acting to further the soul’s progress in its
evolutionary path, or to press it back to the right way, when it wanders
from it. Thus they both reveal deficiencies and make them good, give
warning of a disturbed balance and restore it. We make mistakes, and
from them come pain that we must bear and consequences that we must
accept and face. But as these are studied, it is seen that in the right use
of the consequences is the corrective needed by the nature that made the
mistake. At every moment, in every relationship, perfect justice and perfect
mercy are attained to the measure that the outer environment and hap¬
penings are plastic and mobile, free to rise and fall from any level, uncon¬
fined to any uniformity, but always exactly fitting the inner needs of the
evolving soul.
Would it be a merit in a hat and dress shop, if it kept but one size and style
of hat and dress, which all men and women and children were forced to wear,
without regard to the size and shape of their heads, their height or weight or
THEOSOPHY AND DEMOCRACY
113
age? No more would it be a merit in the world, which provides the vesture
of souls, were all human lots to be the same.
The effect of the doctrine of Reincarnation is no less than that of Karma
in altering our attitude to our personal fate, and not only in reconciling us to
it, but in leading us to enter into it fully and completely. As we look about us,
we see on every side, men trying to escape from their lives, seeking distraction,
to “kill time”, to find substitute activities for what are properly their own.
That is not to what Theosophy leads. Enabling us to see a life-time as but a
day, preceded and to be followed by others, till the whole gamut of “weather”
and the seasons is complete, it causes us to try to learn to the full, from each,
the lesson its special features provide. No man would wish all his days to be
soft with ease, his powers never called forth to their utmost limit, his endur¬
ance and his manhood never proved. There is that in the spirit which seeks
and welcomes difficulty, danger, struggle and hardship. There is a time for
labour and a time for rest, for pleasure, and for pain. These times are not in
our own hands, and we live wisely and well not by shunning either, nor by
trying to take either out of its appointed season, nor by seeking to blend the
two into one drab neutral tone, but by meeting each manfully and using it to
the full as we come to it. As Light on the Path shows us, the disciple does not
expect or seek, as does the man of the world, an easier, better lot for himself
than for others. His resolve is to use all lots for the attainment of his purpose.
Servants of an Enduring Purpose
There is another factor that operates here. To make our own the ethical
spirit of Theosophy, is to cease to live for self or for motives that are limited, or
even affected, by death. Instead, in looking to Divine Wisdom, the True, the
Good, the Beautiful, we become the servants of eternal purposes, using the
infinite variety of life’s changing means, all to the one unchanging end. In
this we are reaching toward inner maturity. The unity of our purpose imparts
a like unity to the diversity of our days. Long views become possible, knitting
days and months and years together. We see past, present and future, our
past lives and all that are to come, all in their relation to the one purpose that
runs through them,—what each contributes to it, how the accomplishment in
each becomes the starting point for the next. This liberates us from the dominion
of fate and of the present. We no longer lose our identity in the changfl^f
parts we are called upon to play. We no longer take our colour, or thought of
ourselves, from our circumstances—as though the self were different because,
for the moment, it is rich or poor in worldly goods—but pass through all circum¬
stances ourselves, true to what we are within ourselves, whether our outer
r61e be that of slave or king. No work, no lot, is ever thereafter beneath the
disciple, for he has reached the point where he is able to do all as it should be
done, whole-heartedly, because of that to which it leads; but, because of that
to which it leads, detached and unaffected by it.
Masters: the Brotherhood of the Great of Soul
nally, as at once the polar opposite of Democracy and its perfect fulfil-
114 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
ment, Theosophy leads us to the recognition of the great Lodge of Elder Brothers
of mankind.
When we have learned to look up, in the new dimension of being which
Theosophy has opened to us, we find “no bar or wall” to stop our gaze, “where
man, the effect, ceases and God, the cause, begins”. As the infinite immensity
of the heavens is not dark but filled with light, whose rays stream unbroken
from the furthest stars even to ourselves, so the void which men imagine be¬
tween themselves and the Supreme, is not void but filled with a descending
hierarchy of spiritual life. Call the great beings who embody that life what
you will—Planetary Spirits, Dhyan Chohans or Lords of Light, Avatars or
Mahatmas; or Thrones and Principalities and Powers, Messiahs or Archangels
or Prophets,—they are there, and it is through them, down that great Jacob’s
ladder, that life and light and spiritual consciousness come to us. We do not
stand in the van of evolution, advancing without chart or plan into the un¬
known. As there was no beginning to being, so there is no “van” to evolution.
Life, emanating from the Godhead, returns again to it, the serpent swallowing
its tail, in endless procession of cycles. Before us are our Elder Brothers. The
ideal toward which we strive, perceiving it gleaming for us far ahead, has been
embodied, even as we desire to embody it; and it is from its embodiment in our
great predecessors that it shines for us and draws us.
This is the truth of the spirit, the celestial mechanism of being; but it is
far more than that. It is concrete, personal reality,—as we become aware
when we ourselves, through the theosophic ethics and the theosophic life, be¬
come consciously concerned with the things of the spirit and its incarnation.
Do we imagine that the great souls of the past, the saints and seers and sages,
who have attained to Divine Wisdom and embodied it, giving their hearts and
lives to the aiding of mankind,—do we imagine that they have been snuffed
out by death, or that their purposes have changed because of death? They
still live, still labour for mankind, still link it to its greater destiny, still look
up to their “Father in the Heavens”, and for love of Him still serve those whom
He has given them. They are not abstractions, not ghosts, “whether in the
body or out of the body”. They are living men, to be known, by those who
are ready, as men,—as friend and teacher and Master. They have been met in
Paris and London and New York, as well as in the deserts of Egypt, the Alps,
or the inaccessible fastnesses of the Great Lodge in the Himalayas. “Knowl¬
edge exists and is obtainable”. Man is neither fatherless nor friendless, and
when the ch£la is ready, he finds his Master waiting for him.
It is to that great Lodge of Masters, of “just men made perfect”, that our
Society owes its origin and its knowledge of Theosophy; and wherever we may
be in the great sweep of evolution, be we young souls or old, ignorant or learned,
rich or poor in things of the world or of the spirit, it is to that living Brother¬
hood of our Elder Brothers that the theosophic attitude and method, the theo¬
sophic spirit and the theosophic life, all act to draw us.
Henry Bedinger Mitchell.
ESOTERIC DISCIPLESHIP
I T is difficult to write on the occult side of life without placing temptation
in the way of a certain type of unprepared reader. To toy with such ex¬
pressions, for instance, as spiritual growth and progress, is dangerous,
for they tend towards self-glorification. This warning is particularly addressed
to those who have allowed themselves to become dazzled by the glamorous
psychism which so many confuse with spiritual insight. Psychic faculties come
as a blessing only when they fulfil a spiritual need. As the consummation of an
unlawful ambition, they are pure temptation,—temptation that has not been
resisted. It is well, however, to remember that temptation can be a man’s
greatest spiritual need, for it presents the opportunity of resistance, and re¬
sisted temptation becomes a mighty blessing. It is an occult maxim that no
man is ever tempted beyond the strength of his will to resist, if he chooses so to
exercise that will. Hence a man’s surest protection is a strong and powerful
purpose to find and to do the will of God. Such a purpose is neither will nor
desire, but is a soul-hunger bom out of spiritual evolution, and has become as
essential an attribute of some men as weight is of iron. It cannot and does not
keep a man from stumbling off the path into the morass of self, but it does not
leave him there, for always it points steadily away towards God. Without
such an unbending purpose, man had better leave psychism strictly alone, and
give his attention instead to that other and more practical side of occultism
known as “metaphysical” or abstract thought.
Like psychism, abstract thought develops its own peculiar temptations which
he will do well to heed but which are, generally, of a more natural and whole¬
some order than are those of psychism. Unlike psychism, it develops, not
spiritual illumination itself, but the capacity to receive such illumination. The
fact that the more widely known schools of “metaphysical” thought possess
little spiritual insight, does not alter the more significant fact that they con¬
tinually bring individuals face to face with the “Dweller on the threshold”. It
is not capacity, however, but only the steadfast purpose towards God which
enables the wayfarer to pass that unholy beast and enter into the light of spirit¬
ual illumination. The struggling soul is forced to choose between the right-
and the left-hand turns of the path. In one direction lies that manifested love
which is oneness with God the Father and with man the brother, and in tl^
other direction lies separation—self—selfishness. At the very point of dema^
cation, ready to lead him one way or the other, stands his conception of the
“I am” consciousness, the divine man as opposed to the mortal. Has he, with¬
out realizing it, sought to expand his ego to the proportions of God-Almighty,
or has he, in true humility, attempted to surrender his mortal limitations and
1 The author of this article is not a member of The Theosophicat Society. His approach to Theosophy and his
terminology being somewhat different from our own. we believe his restatement of truths so often expressed in our
pages, will prove of interest to our readers.— Editors.
IT 5
n6
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
allow himself to be absorbed into, to become one with, God the Father? In
the beginning the point of difference is very subtile, very dim—so dim in fact
that the spiritual babe can only judge surely by the fruit of the tree.
What are some of the fruits of error? Always they manifest as some more or
less subtle form of self or separation. Many “metaphysicians”, for instance,
seek in the name of expediency or truth or love, to use Cosmic Law to gain for
themselves health or wealth or power; do in short seek to exploit God for their
own personal benefit. It is not by thinking of himself that mortal man can
approach the Father, but by forgetting himself. He must lose his life if he would
save it, and this must be done spontaneously, without mortal contriving. Even
as he condemns “mortal mind”, he fails to perceive that he uses that same mor¬
tal mind in the effort to demonstrate Cosmic Law. Divine mind could not seek
such demonstration, since it is already a spontaneous and continuous demon¬
stration of such law. “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God (spiritual conscious¬
ness) and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.”
He perceives the illusionary nature of evil, but he fails to discern clearly the
cause behind it; fails to realize that mortality is the unforgivable sin. Just so
long as he continues to nurse that utterly false sense of separation—that Satanic
lie—just so long will its offspring “self” continue to be the beast that bars the
way to God. Though he may use his affirmations to drug into submission one
erroneous little effect after another, they will continually spring forth anew so
long as he fails to destroy that which breeds them.
It is important, however, to remind oneself that error is only the reverse side
of truth. The blacker it seems, the more glorious is the truth it camouflages.
Multitudes of people have turned towards the painful awakening which lies to
the left. Each of these many souls perhaps cherishes or will cherish this expe¬
rience as his greatest blessing. Who but the “Prodigal Son” can best appre¬
ciate the Father from whom he has been so painfully separated? Man first
conceives the possibility of the true, then believes it and at the last perceives
it. This true perception, however, comes only through that great and vibrant
experience which initiates the disciple into the very fringe of the White Broth¬
erhood itself. If, then, you are still a prodigal son, be not dismayed, for it is
your glorious destiny to experience this awakening.
How can a sound civilization spring from the loins of a people who are con¬
stantly ready to sell that civilization to the highest bidder? Let us take the
liquor interests, for example. Have they not bid in the finest we have both in
art and technical resources, and prostituted them to the spread of the drink
habit? In particular, one well done advertisement pictures a wholesome-
appearing group of young people drinking beer, with a campus scene for a
background. The tragic thing about this picture is not the beer, but the sinister
hypocrisy or psychic dynamite which seeks to enter the back way of our con¬
sciousness and surround this drink with a halo of good taste and respectability.
The expert who planned this advertisement thinks of it as the fine art of
ESOTERIC DISCIPLESHIP
117
suggestion. In reality it is twin to the dark arts of the Middle Ages. We our¬
selves commonly call it propaganda, and in the Orient it is known as black
magic. In truth this advertisement is but a single isolated example of that
great volume of publicity which has worked to make our people mental slaves.
If you think this indictment is too melodramatic, meditate a moment on the
self-evident dishonesty of the advertisement and consider how typical it is of
the insidious influences which permeate society through and through. Influen¬
tial schools exist solely to turn out exponents of this art of suggestion. Every
corporation has its corps of men trained to get possession of the other man s
mind, not to help him, but to exploit him. Little wonder then that every great
faith has set its face dead against this kind of magic.
Why do we as a people fall victims so easily to such propaganda? It is be¬
cause we are already enslaved; are already the victims of the less obvious side
of this very same thing. Out of past propaganda have arisen our varied
systems of thought. It has moulded our social structure, with its accumulation
of precedents and habits, into its present form. Propaganda for us has, in truth,
become the world, and this world has exploited us with the hard grip of authority.
To surrender our souls to this authority—this mortality—is to give up our
spiritual identity; to number ourselves among the dead. When the world begins
to smother us; when we feel ourselves slipping, we sometimes seek to escape
through religion, and all too often we find there only another authority mas¬
querading as the truth that sets one free. Of course we cannot escape the world
by substituting one form of authority for another. We must substitute the truth
for the world, and we can find the truth only by seeking for God the Father in
the inmost recess of our own soul, as the Master bade us do two thousand or
more years ago.
If you will do this, if you will only try to do this, you will discover a very
wonderful thing. You will find that the world on which you have relied is false
and artificial; is in short a colossal lie. You will actually perceive this as you
perceive the rising sun. You will perceive that the world is identical with the
idea of separation—the Satanic lie. You will perceive that every discord which
erects a wall between man and man is a manifestation of this sense of separation,
of which the personal self is the concrete embodiment. 2 Most wonderful of all,
you will discover that in escaping the world, you have fulfilled the law; have
become subject to the only genuine authority there is,—the reality of your
oneness with God the Father.
Harmonious things unite us in an unbreakable bond. The common love of
beauty, for instance, which draws a crowd to an art exhibit, cannot be jj|£-
solved by a material cause as could the mere co-operation of a labour union.
The labour union symbolizes that type of brotherhood which is a union of
selfish, or in any case material interests. The other symbolizes that spiritual
brotherhood in which separation disappears. It has been pointed out that
though a cup of sea water is individual to itself, it is in its essential attributes
j The duality of the universe in its manifestation is so evident, with good and evil as an outstanding ‘‘pair of
opposites", that it is all the more necessary to emphasize the underlying, invisible Unity.— Editors.
n8
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
not separate from the ocean, or from another cup of sea water. All, for instance,
have the same specific gravity and the same chemical content. Separation is
the road towards the annihilation of individuality. Every step on the path trod
by the Master breaks down a barrier. With shame we realize what a fool’s
paradise we proud and arrogant mortals have lived in, for we cannot escape
the fact of our own being. Even as we erect our walls of personal superiority,
we are dependent on the appreciation of our fellows in which to reflect our ego;
else we smother. We perceive that Divine love must ever carry within itself
the element of sacrifice; that God the Father, being all in all, cannot receive
but must give; can only pour his life into the myriads of forms that make up
this objective world; that this sacrifice of the infinite to the finite is Divine love
in action. All the pain of sacrifice belongs to the limited or mortal. For the
limited to further limit or sacrifice itself for others, seems like death, and it
resists desperately. It is not until we open our soul to the infinite life of the
Father that we transform the pain of sacrifice into joy.
Having perceived that worldly authority is indeed a false god, we no longer
identify true teaching with it. Instead, with a profound sense of safety, we
recline in the arms of love, knowing that the Father could never trust the
spiritual welfare of one of his children to the mortal mercy of another; that no
orthodox or intellectual interpretation has the spiritual right to lay the hand
of authority upon us, save to show us the spurious nature of authority itself. 3
Jesus had no “beliefs”. His strength did not lie in a group of convictions,
but in his actual perceptions. He knew. Having submerged his humanity in a
divine individuality, he perceived all things with the same finality with which
we selfishly perceive the things affecting our own persons. However, no soul
can appropriate the truth for another. Perceiving this, Jesus informed his
disciples it was expedient that he go away in order that the Holy Ghost (truth)
might come and lead them into all truth. Actually his dazzling and objective
presence stood between them and the full inward perception of the truth neces¬
sary to their complete unfoldment. Although he had spoken often of the truth,
Jesus had made little public effort to expound it. Instead, his whole ministry
had been one long, strong effort to lead people into a way of life that would
develop the spiritual grace to realize the Father for themselves.
^Nevertheless the conception of Master and disciple is a true conception,
although the sole purpose of the relationship is to help the pupil towards the
As the popular attitude toward religion has become increasingly sceptical, or increasingly indifferent, the recog¬
nition of worldly or external authority in religious matters has diminished proportionately. Instead, the authority
of science is accepted as wellmgh absolute. Hence, as people no longer worry about their souls but only about
their bodies, the priest has been supplanted by the doctor, whose verdicts are regarded as final. Superstition has
merely transferred its allegiance.
It is not only in scientific matters, however, that people accept authority credulously. In America especially,
a lingering inferiority complex", the origin of which is easily traced, and which manifests itself at times as national
boastfulness, has resulted in an extravagant respect for the opinions of professional critics of art, music, and litera-
*ure. I he man who distrusts his own judgment of books, probably with reason, will join in praise of some much
advertized best seller which, in many cases, is both trashy and unclean, but which has been lauded to the skies
by reviewers, whose motives are not always untainted, and whose intellectual and moral background in any case,
is likely to be as shallow and uncultured as that of the man who accepts their opinions with respect. The same
is tan; in the domain of art and music: people are afraid of what others (their own children particularly) will
think <pf them, and are mortally afraid of not being "in the swim"; from which it follows that good and honest
souls, in spite of their better instincts, will admire some crazy statue or lunatic painting, and will "enjoy” the
worst of insults to their ears for no better reason than that "authorities" have proclaimed these psychic sloughings
as the latest revelation of the world s intelligentzia.
It is to be hoped that students of Theosophy are on their guard against this type of mass suggestion.— Editors.
ESOTERIC DISCIPLESHIP
119
same attainment as the Master’s. The spiritual humility of Jesus contained not
the slightest hint of servility. Rather it consisted of the clear perception that
the lowliest beggar along the wayside possessed the same franchise to live in
God’s universe as the noblest soul who walked the way; that each and every
one of us can stand face to face with the highest Archangel in heaven and de¬
clare our will to go direct to the Father for our truth. Piercing through the
disciple’s mask of personality, the Master perceives his actual spiritual condi¬
tion, and throws around him those circumstances most favourable to his un-
foldment. One might spend endless hours teaching the mechanics of swimming
to a small boy, or, if he be that kind of boy, one might throw him bodily into the
pool and he would immediately swim very well. In every faith those who have
attained have endured a soul-shattering experience somewhat analogous to this.
Beset by seemingly supernatural situations that seem to him unique, the dis¬
ciple is unable to turn to his fellows for help. Apparently deserted by his very
God, he does finally, in agony and desperation, turn inwards, and there in the
secret place of his own soul finds his saviour, the Christ, in whom we are all one.
Did not Jesus on the cross cry out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken
me”, and did not the Christ in his physical incarnation symbolize the evolution
of humanity?
In the world of religious organizations and denominations, and in the minds
of countless individuals, there are innumerable personifications and objective
conceptions of Jesus. There can be only one conception of Christ, however,
for if we perceive Christ at all, we perceive the truth which is enduring and
changeless. In the same way there can be only one true conception of man, of
the real man, created in God’s image. Our task is to perceive the real self of
our brother through the eyes of Christ; through the understanding of love.
There is only one such man. 4
It is an absolute fact that those who truly desire to do so, can perceive the
truth. But genuine desire is a spontaneous hunger of the soul, and cannot be
generated by human foresight. Many desire to perceive the truth as a means
to an end; the acquisition of health and wealth, for instance, or to gain virtue
or power, or out of plain curiosity. How many reach for the truth as a flower
reaches for the sunlight! Intellect can inform us that there is a threshold to be
crossed; can even carry us to that threshold; but only that earnest faith and
purpose, stressed by the Master, can carry us across and through the fearful
shadows of the unknown. Spiritual illumination always follows, never precedes
this experience. And whence comes so courageous a faith? It comes from the
absolute awareness that having put our hand to the plough, to look back
be retreat, away from God; and to the unfolding soul this would see
annihilation.
Evil is the manifested effect of the sense of separation, the spiritual lie. If
we could rise far enough above it, could view it from a sufficient distance, we
4 Compare the Avatamsaka-Sutra: "Child of Buddha, there is not even one living being that has not the wisdom
of the TathAgata. It is only because of their own vain thoughts and affections that all beings are not conscious
of this. ... I will teach them the holy Way;—I will make them forsake their foolish thoughts, and cause them to
see that the vast and deep intelligence which dwells within them is not different from the wisdom of the very
Buddha."— Editors.
120
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
should perceive its apparently destructive nature transformed through Divine
will into a constructive purpose. As the unforgivable sin and source of all lesser
errors, separation presents to man a marvellous opportunity—the chance to
escape its sway, the escaping being creation. How can a child realize its mother
until she has absented herself? How can we become sons of God until we have
walked through the darkness of separation? Goodness is more than innocence;
it is purity plus experience; it is Divine self-realization. Faith, hope, courage,
all those steps up which we lift ourselves towards Christ, are something more
than three lovely aspects of the human soul. They are a bright and shining
promise, our blessed assurance of that which is to come, for without fruition
they would be dead and meaningless things. They are the vine which in eternity
shall flower into perfect love and realization and into utter fearlessness.
The dauntless whistle of the small boy hurrying through the dark, is no less a
manifestation of God’s love in action than is the ascending prayer of the mar¬
tyred saint. We are each one of us a little child. Our affirmations of truth are
the spiritual whistles with which we bolster up our own hope, faith, and courage.
Yet these noble qualities of the human soul can, in themselves, only lead us to
the threshold of our destiny. “This mortal must put on immortality”, said the
great Apostle. We press onwards towards that Godlike transfiguration in which
faith, hope, and courage become their own absolutes: divine love, realization,
and fearlessness. Only in the peace of the Father can we finally rest, for the
peace of God is truth itself.
H.C.B.
I will ascend
Into my Father's room , and through the courts
Below , for ever seeking , I will pass ,
To brush the skirts of Inspiration
And touch the sleeves of Memory.
0 great and gracious Father , hear and condescend
To guard , to cherish , to enlighten me.
—The Prayer of the Emperor Ching (Confucius).
REMARKS BY THE WAY
T HERE would be no need to refer again to the abdication of Edward
VIII if that tragic event had not exposed a failure, in some quarters,
to understand an elementary principle of right and wrong. This failure,
or, rather, this example of moral blindness, found expression in severe criticism
by certain people in England and America of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s
broadcast Address of December 13th, 1936, dealing with “the change of
rulers in Britain and the Empire”. The Address was characterized as un¬
charitable, unchristian, and as the equivalent of “hitting a man when he’s
down”. Incidentally, we do not know in what sense the former King can be
considered as “down”. He was not kicked out; he left of his own accord, and
in spite of the protests and pleading of his family, his official advisers, and of
practically all his people.
However, to enable our readers to consider the matter intelligently, we
shall first cite the opening passages of the Archbishop’s Address,—the passages
that provoked criticism:
During the last ten days we have seen strange things. Very rarely in the long course
of its history has this nation passed through a week of such bewilderment, suspense and
anxiety. Within twenty-four hours one King went and another King came. Yet there
has been no confusion, no strife, no clash of parties. Truly, this has been wonderful
proof of the strength and stability of the throne. It has been even more striking proof
of the steadiness of the people of this country and those throughout the empire. It seems
as if a strong tide of instinct rather than seasoned thought, flowing deep beneath the
surface-eddies of excitement, has borne them through the rapids of the crisis.
It is right to be prQud of the way in which the nation has stood the test. Yet let there
be no boasting in our pride. Rather let it pass into humble reverent thankfulness for this
renewed token of the guidance of the nation’s life by an over-ruling providence and God.
What pathos, nay what tragedy, surrounds the central figure of these swiftly moving
scenes. On the eleventh day of December, 248 years ago, King James II fled from
Whitehall. By a strange coincidence, on the eleventh day of December, last week, King
Edward VIII, after speaking his last words to his people, left Windsor Castle, centre of
all the splendid traditions of his ancestors, and his throne, and went out an exile. In the
darkness he left these shores.
Seldom if ever has any British sovereign come to the throne with greater natural gifts
for his kingship. Seldom if ever has any sovereign been welcomed by more enthusiastic
loyalty. From God he had received a high and sacred trust. Yet by his own will he has
abdicated—he has surrendered that trust. With characteristic frankness he has told us
his motive. It was craving for private happiness.
Strange and sad it must be that for such a motive, however strongly it pressed upo*
his heart, he should have disappointed hopes so high and abandoned a trust so great.
Even more strange and sad is it that he should have sought his happiness in a manner
inconsistent with Christian principles of marriage, and within a social circle whose stand¬
ards and ways of life are alien to all the best instincts of his people. Let those who
belong in this circle know that to-day they stand rebuked by the judgment of the nation
which had loved King Edward.
I have shrunk from saying these words. But I have felt compelled for the sake of sin¬
cerity and truth to say them.
2 T
122
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
Next, after praising the former King’s earlier years of “eager service , the
Archbishop added: “It is remembrance of these things that wrings from our
heart the cry, ‘the pity of it, Oh, the pity of it!’ ”
He then spoke of Queen Mary in terms of great admiration and respect;
referred to Prime Minister Baldwin as “the other person who earned our grati¬
tude”; assured his listeners, on the strength of personal knowledge, “of many
years of friendship”, that the new King, George VI, has “high ideals of life
and duty, and will pursue them with quiet steadfastness of will” as his father
did before him; spoke of Queen Elizabeth’s grace and charm, “and her bright
and eager kindness of heart”, and then, recalling the nation to religion, prayed
that the Coronation, which will consecrate the King and his Kingship “to the
service of the most high God”, would be “accompanied by a new consecration
of his people to the same high service”, so that both King and people “acknowl¬
edge their allegiance to God, and dedicate themselves to seek first His kingdom
and His righteousness”.
Edward’s avowed motive for abdicating, as the speaker said, was the “crav¬
ing for private happiness” (words italicized by us in the quotation): preferring
his pleasure to his duty, he abandoned his duty. That abandonment of duty
inevitably compelled the Archbishop of Canterbury, “Primate of All Eng¬
land”, to perform his own, which was to leave no excuse for doubt as to the
moral principles involved, and to see to it that his “flock” was not left in igno¬
rance of the real issues.
Every member of the Church of England has been taught the Catechism,
and has learned that a part of his obligation to his Neighbour is “to do my
duty in that state of life unto which it shall please God to call me”. Open
defiance of that elementary principle compelled the Archbishop to say what
he thought about it, especially as the defiance came from a man who had been
“called” to be England’s King,—especially, too, as the Archbishop must realize
that half the woes of the world are due to the same cause: the abandonment
of duty, to parents, to wife or husband, to children, to associates, to country,
for the sake of some imagined gain or pleasure.
We hold no brief for the Archbishop, one way or the other; but we believe in
fair play, and feel bound to say that we greatly admired his Address, for its
directness, its courage, its charity, its good taste. It expressed exactly what
the circumstances demanded, and was, in our opinion, most timely.
How account for the criticism it aroused ?
In the first place there are those who adopt the attitude that all moral offences
should be ignored or condoned; that even when a man admits he has stolen
or murdered, it is uncharitable to call him a thief or a murderer. Some humani¬
tarians thus pervert the idea of Brotherhood. But the humanitarian, who
attributes to man an origin entirely animal, necessarily finds it almost im¬
possible to recognize evil, no matter how obvious to others, and is logically
forced to condone the little that he recognizes,—except the evil of those who
both see it and refuse to condone it.
As to the so-called Christians who have upbraided the Archbishop for his
REMARKS BY THE WAY
123
unchristian behaviour on this occasion,—whatever their ideal, it certainly is
not Christ; for if ever there were a master of invective, denunciation, and
scorching irony, he was that master,—a Master whose infinite tenderness,
and whose love of all things godlike, can alone account for his unsparing con¬
demnation of evil and evil-doers. Those who claim to be his followers, and
who do not revere that splendour of his nature, take as their ideal, we fear,—
themselves.
The second explanation of these attacks on the truth-telling Archbishop,
compels us to be as frank in regard to English peculiarities as the Quarterly
invariably is when dealing with those nearer home. To be of service to others,
we must see, first ourselves as we are, and then must see others as they are,—
truly. So, while the world is full of praise, and with reason, for the superb
way in which the British Empire met, dominated, and came out all the stronger
for, its betrayal by Edward, it is our duty to speak of the emotional reaction
which followed the relief felt when he had finally removed himself, and when
the Duke of York had quietly stepped into his place as George VI.
This emotional reaction—fortunately it was not widespread—brought to
the surface the sentimentality which invariably affects, and at times controls,
English public opinion. It masqueraded on this occasion, as so often in the
past, in the guise of “good sportsmanship”. The rule of the ring, “Don’t hit
a fellow when he’s down”, applied regardless of common-sense and of justice,
led to the pro-German sentiment, and to the revulsion against France, which
caused England to shut her eyes to German re-armament, while she allowed
her own army, navy, and air force to sink into a state of “innocuous desue¬
tude”: This lasted for years. Friends of England in this country—the Quar¬
terly among them—groaned at her obstinate blindness. Not until Germany’s
reoccupation of the Rhineland in violation of the Versailles Treaty, and Italy’s
rape of Abyssinia, did England come to her senses. That is history.
The same streak of sentimentality threatened for a day or two, during the
first week of December, to mislead England as to the issue really involved in
their King’s desire to marry Mrs. Simpson. Thanks to the skill of Stanley
Baldwin, that danger was passed, and when Edward at last stepped down,
and his brother was on the throne, the whole nation breathed a sigh of intense
relief, not with wild rejoicing, as at the time of the Armistice, but almost
prayerfully, as though the Empire had survived some agonizing test of her
spirit,—as she had, for if sentimentality had won, it would have meant the
end of England.
Quickly, however, among the weaker, less steadfast element, came the reac¬
tion from this feeling of relief: pity for the man instead of pity for his soul.
Such people had not realized the enormity of his offence. They did not want
to realize it. They wanted the luxury of feeling “charitable”. So, when the
Archbishop spoke as he did, their sentimentality vented itself against him.
“From all evil and mischief; from sin; from the crafts and assaults of the
devil”, and especially from sentimentality, Good Lord , deliver us.
WITHOUT CENSOR
IX.
HE St. Mihiel salient lay between the Moselle and the Meuse, and was
roughly in the form of a triangle, with the points at Pont-^-Mousson,
St. Mihiel and Verdun. The western face of the salient ran along the
thickly wooded heights of the Meuse, while the southern face, following the
heights of the Meuse to the east, crossed the plain of the Woevre. Within the
salient were two commanding heights, Loupmont and Montsec, from which,
and from the heights of the Meuse, one can see the entire plain, with its forests,
lakes and swamps, and these three points constituted important observation
stations for the enemy. For almost four years the Germans had been in prac¬
tically undisputed possession of the St. Mihiel salient, save for several earlier
French attacks which had been repulsed. Since then, the Germans had held
the salient largely with second rate troops, but they had greatly strengthened
its natural defensive features by extended field fortifications, and by a network
of barbed wire entanglements which ran along the entire front. From the out¬
post system, with its concrete dug-outs and machine gun emplacements, run¬
ning back to the rear of the salient, were several defensive positions, the last of
which was the Hindenburg Line, which extended across the base of the salient
and formed the main defence. Back of the Hindenburg Line were other defence
points, and in the rear were the permanent fortifications of Metz and Thion-
ville. From the German point of view, these great field fortifications, within
the salient, protected Metz and the Briey Iron Basin, and were a constant
threat on the flank to any major operation which the French might project in
Lorraine. The salient had been more than a threat; it had greatly hampered
the French in the defence of Verdun. It would always have been a threat on
the flank to any Allied offensive, either to the east or to the west of the Meuse,
which might have had as its objective the cutting of the German railroad lines
of communication between Sedan and M£zi£res, the key of their whole system
of supply and of transport in the east. The reduction of the St. Mihiel salient
was, therefore, a strategic necessity, before further Allied offensive operations
could be started in that vicinity.
The original plan called for an attack in depth by the First American Army,
with full exploitation of whatever success was gained, the purpose being, once
the salient had been eliminated, to pierce if possible the main Hindenburg Line,
and to go as much further as circumstances and conditions might permit. A
still larger American offensive, however, on the Meuse-Argonne front was pro¬
jected, to follow immediately after the St. Mihiel operation, and it was de¬
sirable that this second offensive should start as soon as possible. Moreover,
the rainy season began usually about the middle of September; once it started,
the plain of the Woevre would become flooded, many of the roads would be
124
WITHOUT CENSOR
125
impassable, and military operations could only be conducted under great diffi¬
culties. In view of these factors, therefore, the original plan for the St. Mihiel
operation was modified, the time for its inception was advanced, and the objec¬
tive was limited to merely pinching out the salient itself and to rectifying the
line, thus clearing the way for the immediate larger operation which was pro¬
posed, and freeing the Paris-Nancy railroad and the roads north from St. Mihiel.
The main American attack was to be against the south face of the salient, where
there were fewer natural features to be overcome, while our secondary attack
was to be made simultaneously from the west, these two operations converging
upon a definite point within the salient itself. The element of surprise was
essential to the success of such an operation. The sector had been quiet for a
long time. For some days, however, before the operation started, there had
been more than the usual activity within the salient, and it was discovered from
prisoners and deserters that the enemy was moving his artillery out of the
area, and that apparently he was expecting an American attack. It seems
probable that the German High Command, while not aware of either the size
or the extent of the proposed American operation, had perfected their plans to
withdraw to the Hindenburg Line in the event of heavy pressure. It seems
equally probable that they were taken by surprise when our attack actually
started, and that they had not believed it to be imminent. They started to
withdraw as soon as our offensive developed, but it was then too late.
The concentration of our corps and divisions in preparation for the battle
devolved upon the First Army General Staff, and, because it was the first time
that Americans had been engaged in an operation of such magnitude, it was
carried out with great care. The troop movement was most complicated, as
many of the First Army units, arriving from the west via Bar-le-Duc, crossed
the line of march of other units proceeding northwards. This unavoidable
crossing of columns was eliminated by the issuance, by First Army Headquar¬
ters, of complete march tables for all units, which specified the roads to be
used, the halts, and the exact locations of all moving units at certain designated
hours. Troop movements on the roads were made only at night, and, in spite
of the activity, at no time did the general appearance of the First Army sector
change, nor were there signs of any increased circulation in our area; this may
well have accounted for the disbelief by the Germans, in spite of their general
uneasiness, that an attack in force was imminent. The moving troops bi^#
ouacked during the day in forests, or sheltered in billets, where they would be
unobserved, resuming their movement after dark, either by truck or by march¬
ing. The First Army Staff, in view of the inactive character of the St. Mihiel
front, had also an immense amount of other work to accomplish in a short time,
covering the installation of telephone and telegraph wires, the construction of
railroads, quartermaster supplies, hospitalization and evacuation of the wounded
to the rear, and the ammunition supply. In view of the fact that the Meuse-
Argonne operation was to start so soon after the completion of the attack at
SLMihiel, and that the First Army Staff was working at the same time on the
pflfcs for this second American offensive, actually issuing orders before the
126
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
attack started for the early withdrawal from St. Mihiel of certain corps and
divisions, and for their movement to this new front, it is easy to imagine the
terrific pressure and activity at First Army Headquarters.
When I again arrived at Saizerais on the morning of August 21st, after having
spent the previous night at Liverdun, I found that First Corps Headquarters
had moved in, and had assumed command on that day of the Eighty-second
and the Ninetieth American Divisions, which were already in line on that front,
receiving their sector training. Saizerais was about ten kilometers south of
Pont-^-Mousson. The First Corps had taken over about seventeen kilometers
of line, in a sector which, for a long time past, had been a quiet one. The gen¬
eral atmosphere of First Corps Headquarters was, therefore, far more peaceful
at the time of my arrival than had been the case when, at Epieds, north of the
Marne, I had first reported for duty in the middle of an active offensive. Saize¬
rais was a small village, with a civilian population consisting wholly of old men,
women and children, their main occupation being the cultivation of the fields
and the tilling of the soil. While the houses and buildings were in bad repair,
and while the whole appearance of the place bore mute testimony to the dis¬
integrating effects of four years of war, and to the continual upheaval and
confusion produced among the population by the constant presence during that
period, either in the village or in its vicinity, of troops on their way to or from
positions in the line, there was little actual destruction visible, in spite of the
close proximity to the Front. The French inhabitants seemed cheerful and
happy, and went about their daily duties in a regular and ordered way. The
same “gentlemen’s agreement” on both sides not to start anything, which had
obtained in the Vosges, had been in force here, so that for a long time past the
remaining civilians had been undisturbed. Nor did this peaceful atmosphere
and generally quiet appearance of things change for some days. At first our
troops, coming in for the offensive, were in the rear of the Corps Sector and
were not in evidence. As they neared the front area, they concealed themselves
in woods and forests in the daytime, until, as the First Corps Sector filled up
with troops, all available wooded tracts anywhere near the front lines were
permanently occupied by American units. It was at night that the activity
took place. Then, all the roads were full of marching columns and of convoys
of trucks and of trains, proceeding as rapidly as possible to the concealed posi¬
tions designated for them for the next day, and their advance took place without
a sign of a light of any kind and with a minimum of noise. The final disposi¬
tions were not made until just before the attack started; the artillery, heavily
camouflaged, went into position only a couple of days beforehand, while the
outposts and the forward lines continued to be held, up to the night of the
attack itself, by the same units which had been continuously in line, in order
to preclude the possibility of the Germans finding out, through prisoners cap¬
tured in trench raids, the presence on their front of new American divisions.
However, in spite of all our precautions and of this carefully preserved tranquil
outer appearance, the Germans, through some sixth military sense, became
increasingly restless as time went on. They did not resort to artillery bom-
WITHOUT CENSOR
127
bardment, for they did not want to start trouble for themselves in case their
apprehensions proved groundless, but they became quite active in their efforts
to take prisoners, and they made every effort to acquire fresh information from
the air, especially after dark, searching out the Corps Sector in an effort to
locate anything that looked like a major headquarters or a concentration of
troops, and to spot any night circulation in the area, dropping bombs wherever
they thought there might be an ammunition dump, and more than once proving
successful in this last effort.
First Corps Headquarters were located in some small houses and in several
corrugated iron shacks, all close together, on the extreme fringe of the village,
and were connected by our Signal Corps wires with the front and the rear. It
was only nine days since I had left the First Corps Staff at F&re-en-Tardenois.
But things move rapidly in war-time, and I was delighted to find myself once
more with this same group, so many members of which had done much, north
of the Marne, to help make my efforts there more effective. At Saizerais I found
the same atmosphere of general co-operation and of helpfulness, and everyone
was already hard at work. Any organization, whether in war or in peace, takes
its tone from those at its head, and the spirit at First Corps Headquarters was
a living testimony to the high character and ability, as well as to the personal
qualities, of both Major General Liggett and of Brigadier General Craig, his
Chief of Staff. Here, at Saizerais, I found new encouragement and help in the
person of General Liggett’s aide, whom I had known only slightly during my
previous tour of duty with this Staff, a man from civil life of about my own
age, who was proving himself exceedingly adaptable and able in an important
job. The extent to which, in war-time, a General’s aide may be of value de¬
pends entirely upon the man himself; there is no limit, and there was none in
this case. Altogether, I was looking forward with the keenest anticipation to «
all that was to take place during the next three weeks, and felt reasonably con¬
fident, in view of my congenial surroundings and of my experience with similar
duties such a short time before, that I might be of some real service.
For the moment, it was largely a question of troop movement, and with the
arrangements for this I had nothing to do personally, as it was all worked out
between the appropriate sections of the Staff at First Army and at the First
Corps. As the troops began to move up the Corps Sector, however, towards
the front lines, it became my duty independently to advise First Army Head¬
quarters of their positions, and to verify that they were on schedule, and to
convey at the same time any observations that seemed pertinent. Later, wh&m
the attack itself had actually started, I was to report constantly during the da^^
and as soon as received, all information which came in to G-3, the Operations
Section, covering the progress of the attacking divisions and the changes in the
situation, not only on the First Corps Front, but on the front of the Fourth
American Army Corps on the left.
For the first two nights at Saizerais, I slept on the floor in an old stable. I
then secured a billet in the tiny house of a Frenchman, aged about seventy-five,
but hale and hearty, who was sacristan of the village church, and with him I
128
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
remained for the rest of my stay. His hut, for it was little more, had no second
story, and contained only three rooms. He occupied the room in the front, on
the street; the middle room, which was without windows, was a combination
kitchen and living room, with a large fireplace; the room in the rear, the window
of which opened on the barn-yard, was mine. When I arrived, the old man took
me to my quarters, and explained that this had been his wife’s room; she had
died only a few months before, and he had left all her things just as they had
been on the day of her death, because, he felt, she would have wished it so.
He inquired whether he should remove any of them, in order that I might have
more room, but I hastily assured him that it would not be in the least necessary,
and that I would take the utmost care to see that nothing whatever was dis¬
turbed. What he said was quite true. On the walls were some obviously family
pictures. There, behind a curtain, were hanging her clothes and her dresses.
Some books, mainly devotional, were on a shelf, together with a few vases and
pieces of china. In a comer, on the wall, was a crucifix, with a prie-dieu below
it, and hanging on a nail between were the beads she had used for so many years.
From merely looking at that room and its contents, one could almost picture
the character of the life which its occupant had lived. Poverty and hard work
and days of toil had filled that life, but so had the love of things beautiful and
real, and it had been animated by religious devotion and by the ties of strong
family affections, and, I could not doubt as I saw the tears in the eyes of the
old man, it had been crowned by long years of mutual love and trust, of mutual
watchfulness and care.
I grew quite fond of my old man before I left him. I went to his church, as
he suggested, and prayed there, and I used his wife’s prie-dieu more than once
for my own devotions, and told him so, and he seemed glad. In the daytime,
he worked in the fields, in spite of his age, with his married daughters, whose
husbands were at the front. Sometimes, however, in the evenings, when I
reached “home” before he had retired, and when it was raining and chilly, we
would start a fire in the kitchen, and would talk together for a while. Fire¬
wood was very scarce in France during the War. My host, however, had
succeeded in securing possession of a thick beam of wood about ten feet long
(it was shorter before I left), and we obtained our results by sticking one end
of the beam into the fire-place and by starting a blaze under it until the beam
itself had caught. After that, it was plain sailing. All that we had to do to
keep the fire going was to push the beam forward from time to time; when we
had had enough, we pulled the beam out, and, in the interest of economy, kicked
out the blaze. My old man remembered perfectly when the Germans were in
France in 1870. I wish that I could recall some of his reminiscences. They are
gone now, I am afraid, after this long lapse of time. But I do remember that
he told me that the sale Boche of to-day was the same then; that frightful atroci¬
ties had been committed by the invaders in 1870, and that people had forgotten
those facts now, there being so few left who, like himself, could actually remember
what had taken place. His was an interesting and lovable character, but living
with him, I felt, was living pretty close to the soil. Immediately behind the
WITHOUT CENSOR
129
head of my bed, in the barn-yard, was the manure pile, the French peasant’s
patent of nobility (it was thought in the A. E. F. that a peasant’s wealth was
appraised in terms of the size of this landmark), which emitted at all hours of the
day and night a penetrating and stimulating aroma. The floor of my room was
three feet or so below the level of the barn-yard. Contrary to the custom in
rural France, I always left my window open. Returning in the middle of the
day upon one occasion, soon after my arrival there, to secure some papers which
I needed, I found a dozen chickens scuttling about the floor of my room. The
cow-shed was on the other side of the thin partition along which my bed was
placed, and the one cow was moored by a chain to a staple on the other side of this
wall. Ignorant of this, I went peacefully to sleep on my first night in residence,
but awoke shortly afterwards, considerably startled, and trying to remember
where I was and to imagine what was going on, for I could hear the clanking of
a chain and the sound of deep, heavy breathing almost in my ear. All that had
happened was, that the cow had become stiff from much lying down, and had
merely decided to ease herself by standing up for a while, all of which had in¬
volved much pulling at the staple, and what were apparently some deep-breath¬
ing exercises on her part.
Busy and absorbed as I was in the preparations for the minor part which I
expected to play in the reduction of the St. Mihiel salient, it had never occurred
to me that any change was at all likely to take place which would affect my
status. I was surprised and startled, therefore, in the middle of the afternoon of
September 2nd, to receive orders to report at once in person at Headquarters
First Army, which had recently moved from Neufch&teau to Ligny-en-Barrois,
from which town the St. Mihiel operation was to be conducted. I called up G-3
at First Army, and inquired from one of the junior officers there whether I was
being sent for merely to receive additional instructions, or whether I was to
come back to Headquarters permanently. Apparently he knew all about it,
for, while he was guarded in his remarks, he told me that I was leaving the
First Corps for good, and that General Drum had a new job for me at Army
Headquarters itself. I felt the same familiar, obstinate stiffening of resistance
which I always felt when my plans were unexpectedly changed for me, or when
I was prevented from doing something which I wanted very much to do; I had
set my heart upon being with the First Corps during this operation. However,
this time it did not take me as long as usual to overcome my feelings, possibly
because, in this instance, I had to move at once and to move quickly. I hurried
around, reported to the Chief of Staff my new instructions, obtained the neces¬
sary transportation, bade a hasty farewell to such officers as were about, and
packed my belongings. I remember that my washing was rescued from a
peasant woman, who was in the very act of pounding it against a stone in the
stream into which such drains as there were in the village all emptied, and that
it lay, a wet heap, on the floor of my car during that trip of something over
twenty miles. By the time I had started it was evening, and we drove with all
possible speed, for not only did I wish to reach Ligny in time to receive my new
instruJfcns that night, if possible, but I also wanted to arrive before darkness
i3o THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
fell. Driving at night in France in war-time, without lights, on crowded roads,
was no treat; it was usually done at full speed, on the crown of the road, on the
theory that the faster one is going when one strikes another vehicle, the better
chance one probably has. It was dark, however, before we had gone half way,
and I arrived in an entirely strange town in pitch blackness. The Military
Police directed me to Headquarters, where I found a message at G-3 to the
effect that I was to report to General Drum the first thing next morning. I
managed to secure a billet in the town; was received by a stout, elderly female
who did not seem at all glad to see me at that late hour; was given a room on
the very top of the house, the worst possible place in the event of an air raid,
and went supperless to bed.
On the following morning, September 3rd, General Drum told me that he
had sent for me because the First Army Message Centre had not been function¬
ing properly, and that he wanted me to take hold and to put it on an efficient
basis. He informed me that the officer formerly in command of the Message
Centre had been relieved, and that I was to take his place; that I would find
things in much confusion, but that it was imperative that everything should be
straightened out with a minimum of delay and that the Message Centre should
be so thoroughly reorganized that it would function without a hitch from then
on, as it constituted an essential element in the working of the entire First Army
Headquarters. He told me to assume command at once; to make a survey that
day of the situation as I found it, effecting at once any minor changes of organi¬
zation which I thought desirable, and to make a report to him again as early
as possible on the next day, this report to include any suggestions or recom¬
mendations which had occurred to me.
The First Army Message Centre, which at that time was included in G-3,
the Operations Section of the General Staff, was responsible for the speedy,
secret and accurate transmission of all Field Orders, Troop Movement Orders,
dispatches, official correspondence, and all communications connected with the
First Army. The Message Centre received such documents, reports and letters
not only from the General Staff of the First Army, but also from General Head¬
quarters American Expeditionary Forces, from French G. H. Q., and from the
Headquarters of the Armies on our right and on our left, and at once routed
these various communications to their proper destinations, delivering them to
the indicated Section of the General Staff within First Army Headquarters
itself by messenger, and transmitting them by motor-cycle courier whenever
they were addressed either to units operating under First Army command or to
other units and headquarters outside the First Army Area itself. In addition,
there was, of course, a constant flow of similar communications and reports from
the Army Corps and Divisions within the First Army, designated either for speci¬
fied Sections of the First Army Staff or for destinations outside the First Army
Area, and these also had to be immediately sorted out and delivered by what¬
ever method was appropriate. There was also a return flow of messages, dis¬
patches and reports from the First Army General Staff back to those higher
headquarters from which the First Army was receiving its orders, instructions
WITHOUT CENSOR
131
and information. At that time the personnel of the Message Centre, which was
later increased, consisted of another captain and of about a dozen other officers,
of whom two were French; of about thirty non-commissioned officers, field
clerks, interpreters and privates; and of about twenty-five motor vehicles,
including Ford cars, Ford trucks, motor-cycles and motor-cycle side-cars, with
the necessary chauffeur personnel to operate them.
The Message Centre was located in what had formerly been a small private
bank in Ligny-en-Barrois, and the long counter in the front was exceedingly
well adapted for the sorting and re-routing of the dispatches and documents
as they were received. The enlisted men used as messengers to other depart¬
ments of the Headquarters sat in a row on a bench opposite this counter. The
room in the rear, formerly used by the bank manager as his private sanctum,
I at once turned into a headquarters for myself, having there with me the three
officers under me who were highest in rank, as my second in command and
general assistants. It did not take very long to discover that General Drum
had put it mildly when he had said I should find things in much confusion.
Chaos reigned. Dispatches and communications which should have been
delivered forty-eight hours previously were still lying about. Others, which
had come in that day, were piled in heaps on the counter. There was no system
at all. As nearly as I could make out, the previous incumbent had been trying
to deliver dispatches direct to units moving on the road down to regiments, an
impossible thing to achieve. Without having asked for the march tables, which
would have enabled him to determine their approximate positions, he had
simply sent couriers out with general instructions to find the units, and in many
cases the dispatches had been brought back undelivered, while others had
banked up at the Message Centre in the meanwhile, resulting in further delay
all along the line. It took only a short period of investigation to reveal the fact
that I was up against the stiffest job in my military experience, and I knew very
well that, if the mess was not straightened out at once, I should be blamed per¬
sonally for the shortcomings of my predecessor. But of far more importance
than mere personal considerations was the fact that the jumping-off hour for
the St. Mihiel offensive was only nine days off. There was a time limit to the
actual work of reorganization. I felt that this work must be completed within
forty-eight hours. That would still allow a week before zero hour, and I thought
that, granted increasing efficiency and accelerating speed of transmission eacl^
day, it would not only be possible to catch up on back work, but also actuaUjr
to advance matters to the point at which all combat headquarters would have
received final orders, not at the last moment, but well ahead of time. I realized,
however, that if I were to follow my first impulse, and were to start to attend
to details myself, I should be lost. It was a case of allotting all details to sub¬
ordinates, and of retaining a proper perspective of the whole organization and
problem, keeping myself free to give the necessary impetus and to impart the
driving power needed at this point or the other. I worked hard all that day,
and until late that evening, with short stops for food, and by the time I felt
tre^to go to bed, leaving my second in command on the job for the night—the
132
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
Message Centre was open and functioning both day and night—I felt that I
had at least made a beginning at bringing order out of chaos.
Certain fundamentals were obviously wrong, however; that was clear. When,
as I had been directed, I made a report to General Drum on the following morn¬
ing as to the extent to which I had been able to make progress, I told him that
I thought it was going to prove impossible to continue to deliver orders and
dispatches to individual units as far down as regiments. I suggested that the
present system be adhered to in respect to all units just entering the First Army
Area, but that, once they had entered the area of the army corps under the
command of which they were to operate, the headquarters of that particular
army corps should from then on be held responsible for the transmission of all
orders and dispatches to the divisions and corps troops within its own sector.
I told General Drum, however, that, even if this system was adopted and even
if, as a result, I had a smaller volume of dispatches to handle than at present, it
did not seem to me, in view of the necessity for speed, and of the possibility of
unexpected and immediate demands for service, that the First Army Message
Centre had sufficient motor transport to function under pressure as he would
wish, and I asked for six more motor-cycles and the necessary chauffeur per¬
sonnel to drive them. General Drum listened to these suggestions without
comment, asked various questions, made certain observations and remarks,
and told me to come back to see him the following morning.
I spent another hectic twenty-four hours, during which it seemed to me that
some further progress in straightening things out and in speeding things up
was made. I found that my subordinates were, almost all of them, an able lot;
they had lacked direction and organization, and they were prepared to work to
the limit once they knew what it was that they had to do. The next day, when
I reported, General Drum handed me copies of two Army Orders which, he said,
had just been issued. One of them embodied the suggestion which I had made,
that, thereafter, the First Army Message Centre was to deliver dispatches
only to the headquarters of army corps, and that those headquarters were to be
responsible from that date for the further transmission to their own component
units. The second Order required certain specified divisions under First Army
command to send to the Message Centre First Army the additional motor trans¬
port and personnel for which I had asked. This immediate and whole-hearted
support took my breath away. I must have shown my relief and my pleasure,
for General Drum laughed, and told me to carry on as I was doing, and that if
there was anything at First Army Headquarters which I needed in the way of
information or to help me in my job, to ask for it, and to say that he had said
that I could have it, and to tell him about it afterwards.
Hard work is easy, when one’s superior affords co-operation and backing like
that, and when one is given one’s head. I went at things harder than ever,
greatly encouraged, but knowing , then, that things were going to work out,—
and they did, although that next week is still something of a nightmare in retro¬
spect. I secured a large map of the area of the First Army front, and pinned it
to the wall in the back room. Whenever an incoming courier gave us informa-
WITHOUT CENSOR
i 33
tion as to the temporary whereabouts of some unit which was moving in, a pin,
with a piece of paper indicating the name and number of the organization, the
date, and the hour, was stuck in at the corresponding point on the map. This
map was kept up to the minute from other sources of information as well, and
became a fairly accurate index of the moving troops. I really ran a sort of
Bureau of General Information in addition, as officers of all ranks, from generals
down, would drop in as they went through, or arrived at, Ligny-en-Barrois,
with all sorts of questions, and, in turn, I picked up a great deal of helpful infor¬
mation from these sources. General Drum made several visits of inspection;
he walked about, surveyed my dispositions and arrangements, asked questions,
but made no comments. I remember that, upon the occasion of his first visit,
I was using the telephone, and that I tried to rise and stand at attention, but
that he walked rapidly up to my improvised desk, put his hand on my shoulder
and pressed me back into my seat, and kept it there until I had finished, saying
then that he had not come to interrupt me in my duties. Absence of any com¬
ment on his part was enough for me; if things had not been going well, he would
have told me so on the spot.
Those few days were exceedingly hectic, but, little by little, we could see that
our efforts were bearing fruit and that results which we wanted were beginning to
appear; we breathed more freely, but drove ahead as hard as ever. The only
bright spots were meals. I was at the G-3 Mess, at which there was one other
captain and one major, the others all being colonels and lieutenant-colonels.
We juniors were somewhat oppressed at first by so much rank, and were in¬
clined to keep ourselves in the background, but our superiors would not stand
for any “speak when you are spoken to” attitude on our part, and quickly made
it clear by their geniality and humour that, during meals, we were all on a man
to man basis. The conversation at mess was exceedingly interesting; everyone
talked shop from start to finish, and cleared information, and I learned a great
deal at each meal that was of the greatest help to me in my duties, although,
through General Drum, I was receiving copies of all orders and memoranda as
they were issued in order that I might know all that was going on. At meals,
however, I often heard of decisions in advance, and was able to anticipate the
issue of the actual order in the arrangements which I made at the Message
Centre, and so to save time. The hard work for the staff at an army head¬
quarters in the field comes well in advance of the actual start of an attack. On
the last day, and as zero hour approaches, there is less and less to do. Finally
the point is reached at which everything possible has been done, until reports
from the attacking corps and divisions begin to come in. I was surprised when
this short let-down came, but it gave one a breathing spell, and now that it was
too late to retrieve any mistakes or omissions, I awaited with absorbed interest
the results of the next two or three days.
At this point, a brief account of the actual operation at St. Mihiel may be of
interes^^On August 30th the First American Army had taken command of
the tropin the Woevre, having in line, from right to left, the First American
Army Corps, the Fourth American Army Corps, the Second French Colonial
134
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
Corps, and the Fifth American Army Corps. The main attack was delivered
by our First and Fourth Corps on the southern face of the salient, our Fifth
Corps made the secondary attack against the western face, while the French
Corps made supporting advances on the flanks of our Corps and executed a
holding attack at the tip of the salient. The total strength of the First Amer¬
ican Army, including all corps and army troops as well as all combat units,
when the battle started, was about 550,000 Americans and 110,000 French
troops. Preceded by an artillery preparation which lasted for four hours, the
attack on the southern face started at 5 a.m. on the morning of September 12th,
and the secondary attack commenced three hours later, in a light rain and mist.
By afternoon our attacking troops on the southern face were beyond the objec¬
tives scheduled for them, and by nightfall they had reached at many points the
objectives allotted for the second day. Our progress on the western face was
not so rapid, but by the early morning of September 13th our Fifth Corps had
blocked the roads leading out of the salient on the west, and by dawn of the
13th, elements of our Fourth Corps had effected a junction at Vigneulles with
our Fifth Corps units, and the salient was closed. Our general advance was
continued on the 13th, and by the end of that day the final objectives set for
this operation had been attained. Further limited offensive operations were
continued by our First Army Corps, and, during the next three days, local
operations continued along the entire front and several enemy counter-attacks
were repulsed, while our troops consolidated their new positions for defensive
purposes, and preparations went forward for the withdrawal of divisions and of
corps troops for the Meuse-Argonne operation. In view of the disorder with
which the enemy was retreating, it is extremely likely that exploitation of our
success at this point would have resulted in further material progress. But the
operation had recovered about two hundred square miles of French territory,
and nearly 16,000 Germans had been captured as well as several hundred enemy
guns. All menace to the prosecution of the Meuse-Argonne offensive from this
source had been eliminated. Above all, the success of the St. Mihiel operation
had greatly cheered our Allies. They could depend upon us now, they felt, and
they were much encouraged, while the Boche was correspondingly depressed
and was increasingly apprehensive as to what further trouble this new American
Army might cause for him from then on.
The progress of our First Army Corps in this offensive had been of absorbing
interest to me personally, in view of what I had known of the advance plans
which had been made at those Headquarters up to the time of my de¬
parture, and of the fact that I had expected to be with them throughout this
operation. Major-General Liggett had handled the concentration before the
battle and the conduct of the Corps operations with great skill and vigour.
The First Corps had in line, from right to left, the Eighty-second, Ninetieth,
Fifth and Second American Divisions, with the Seventy-eighth American Divi¬
sion in reserve. The First Corps rested its right on Pont- 4 -Mousson. The
entire Army line pivoted on the Eighty-second Division on the extreme right;
this division, however, was only called upon to make a demonstration to the
WITHOUT CENSOR
i3S
east of the Moselle and to threaten the enemy position there. In the pre¬
liminary bombardment, 831 guns were used on the First Corps front. By noon
on September 12th the Second Division, on the left flank of the First Corps,
had taken the heights to the north of Thiaucourt. The Ninetieth Division and
the right of the Fifth Division were held up that day by a strong enemy force
in the Bois-le-Pr6tre; during the following night, however, the enemy withdrew,
and our units moved forward. On September 14th and 15th, the First Corps
had continued its progress, until the lines were stabilized, after a total advance
of ten kilometers on a front of twelve kilometers, during which many field pieces
and machine guns, together with engineer and ordnance depots, as well as about
5,000 prisoners, were captured. The positions attained became at once a very
direct threat to the German fortified area of Metz. The total strength of the
First American Army Corps at St. Mihiel, consisting as it did of 6,177 officers
and 168,120 men, was greater, as General Liggett has pointed out in one of his
books, than Meade’s and Lee’s combined forces at the Battle of the Wilderness
in our Civil War.
No account of the St. Mihiel operation, as far as I am concerned, would be
complete without the addition of those comments upon it which my friend in
the Movement in New York made in letters to me written immediately after¬
wards, and which follow:—“We are thanking Heaven that the American troops
have done so well, though, as-remarked the other day,—‘Considering that
America is at present the centre of His work, it would be strange if the deciding
factor were not to come from here.’. And they do carry more force than they
realize. It is not merely youth and vitality and freshness. And that is why
the tragedy would have been so appalling if America had not got in the War.”
“Splendid news from or of the First American Army. You can imagine how
glad we are, for so many different reasons. Someone once said that the Master
never has less than a score of major ends in view, when he acts. I can see at
least how the-is directly concerned, not only now, but in years to come.
America has much to learn from France, but America has one gift to make to
France, the setting of which is now being fashioned by American soldiers. We
have of course guessed for several weeks—it seems like months—that Foch’s
big blow would be delivered by the American Army in the Metz neighbourhood.
And I did not think he would wait for next year. He will surely keep things
moving, now he has started them.”
(To be continued)
Centurion.
EDUCATION THROUGH THE ARTS
IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS
HE Yoga Sutras define Dharana as the “binding of consciousness to a
certain region”, and regard it as the first of three successive steps in
meditation. As a subject for study in secondary schools, meditation
would be out of place, even in the hands of a qualified teacher; but its import¬
ance as a means to attaining discipleship, and the only means, leads a theos-
ophist who is engaged in the work of educating, to consider what faculties are
most concerned in this first step; what subjects among those prescribed, best
train these faculties; and how these subjects can be used as preliminary prepara¬
tion for a realization of the goal when aspiration for it awakens.
There are certain fine qualities of mind and character to whose cultivation
all good schools devote themselves. All courses in all departments contribute
to this, provided that the school sustains this ideal in its life and atmosphere,
and the individual teacher responds to this pressure, and is aware of the special
function of her subject and its use for these ends. The training of the mind
more naturally suggests itself as an important element in all branches of learn¬
ing, and most school subjects have this in view. The value of an active, well-
trained mind cannot be minimized, for articulate, clear thinking acts as check
and balance. Yet the “whole man” is concerned, and the mind goes only a
part of the way towards the preparatory steps we are contemplating. The im¬
portance of training the emotions, the heart and the imagination, is not so fully
understood, is therefore not so consciously sought; the means to this training
are not so well developed and practised; and the subjects which are recognized
as especially concerned with them must give them such delicate handling, and
approach them so indirectly, that the mind often usurps their place and they
actually receive very little attention.
It is generally said that the fine arts are the product of feeling and imagina¬
tion, and are the truest and most complete expression of the spirit of any age;
that the inner spirit impresses itself in most lasting and vital form on poetry,
music, painting, sculpture and architecture, and that any century when reason
was dominant did not create beauty. Attention to these subjects, wherever the
spirit that animates them is sincere and of high quality in whatever mood,
should be one very effective way of creating similar moods. Especially in the
formative years of the secondary school, when the feeling for beauty begins to
awaken, they should be used to the full for the formation of discriminating
standards of taste and the reaction of these standards on character. Observa¬
tion over a long period of years has brought convincing proof of the efficacy of
such teaching. Pupils move on into the wider opportunities of college or of life
with a keen perception, ready to respond to the finest thing within reach in
136
EDUCATION THROUGH THE ARTS IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS 137
music, painting, literature and drama. Their elders, therefore, parents and
teachers, cannot escape the immense responsibility of accepting for them no
substitutes for the best. When they learn to know and love the best in these
special fields of the imagination, with their life-enhancing power, vulgarity on
all planes will lose its appeal. The eye and the ear, their sensitiveness and
soundness, are the only medium we know for gathering impressions which fur¬
nish us with the material for all psychic 1 and higher psychic experience. Edu¬
cating them to differentiate among these forms of experience, must be supremely
worth time and effort.
All the arts are equally open to this use, though music, especially singing,
should perhaps come first. It is more completely immaterial, is more directly
the product of emotion, acts more directly to kindle a like feeling, and requires
no analysis to accomplish this. Singing, then, should form as large a part of a
course of study as time permits, and should make many informal connections.
It is as natural an impulse as speaking or walking, yet as a people we do not
sing, and do not often hear good singing except in concert and opera. As we are
confronted by an endless choice of songs, good, bad and indifferent, produced
in every period, it is all-important that the songs be chosen and directed by a
lover of music, whose taste has been formed by hearing much good music; who
is not deceived by the prestige of great names or a lack of any name, but who
feels sincerely fine and varied rhythmic patterns and interesting flow of melody.
Good music appeals to an innate faculty and arouses the best that is in us: true
feeling, sincerity and depth, courage, tenderness, humour, gaiety; not senti¬
mentality and personal, superficial excitement and emotional strain which are
expressed through cheap, insistent stresses and tiresome, shallow tunes. If good
fundamental musical training is provided, we may preserve an open mind toward
the modem musical forms. Such training develops a capacity for judgment that
will lead the young modern musician to select the good and original among the
new forms, though this must not claim too much of the scant time which the
secondary school, and especially the college preparatory school, can devote to
singing.
Folk-music provides ideal material for school singing. It is sometimes called
the “wild-flower” of music in its fresh artlessness, and like the wild-flower it
often has a formal beauty, which makes it excellent art and fundamentally
sound in developing good taste in music and a love of singing. It often competes
with that superlative interest in sports, and gives fine exercise to body as well as
spirit. Folk-songs are becoming more readily available through collections of
English folk-songs by Cecil Sharp, and French songs by Weckerlin. To read the
life of Cecil Sharp by A. H. Fox Strangeways is to make the acquaintance of an
artist and lover of his country, who endured for most of his life extreme ill-health
and every discomfort of hard, unremitting travel, so that he might gather and
preserve this heritage and true expression of his own people. He found thou-
sands of so ngs that had never been sung out of their native environment, and
1 “Psychic”: used here in its true sense of “relating to or connected with the soul or spirit”. Students of The¬
osophy frequently use the same word to signify the astral consciousness, or unreal world of fancy: so the passage
must not be misunderstood.— Editors.
138
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
had never been noted or written down, in many parts of England, and among
the mountain people of our southern states. By his integrity in noting and re¬
cording, he has performed an invaluable service; by his courtesy and under¬
standing he won the hearts of people of every sort, and brought back a hearten¬
ing belief in the unspoiled and endearing qualities and the grace of manner of
these mountain people. To make the acquaintance of a man like Cecil Sharp,
true musician and scholar, is one of the unsought privileges of adventure into
this interesting field of study. Among genuine folk-music are the lovely carols
which so enhance the spirit of Christmas singing. Especially the French carols
have, in both words and tunes, a direct, unsentimental expression of simple,
almost homely religious feeling. Perhaps the disciple with the Virgin and
Lazarus did reach the shores of Provence as the legends say, and some spiritual
deposit came to light here. There are also many beautiful songs composed
in the spirit of folk-song from Schubert’s time on, some suitable for group sing¬
ing, and some which should be heard again and again until they are stored in
memory.
The eye of the singing teacher should not pass too casually over the words
to which tunes are sung. They are often unpoetic, and lower the tone of a
charming tune. Again, there must be someone able to judge of the choice of
words, their rhythmic beauty, and their spirit and meaning, so that spirit,
words and melody may be harmoniously joined. How inevitably and naturally
the principle of the hierarchy appears in this constant need of guidance! The
intensive study of poetry as an end in itself, as well as for the light it sheds on
judgment of the words of a song, giving it real importance through recitals,
always results in a growth in taste, and almost always leads to the feeling among
those who recite that it will be an inexhaustible resource. It is really an exciting
experience to anyone interested in the education of the inner faculty of taste, to
see how the choice of poems improves as the years pass; to find a girl who is
searching for something that expresses her utmost reach, choose Hecuba’s lines
in The Trojan Women where she performs the funeral rites over the young child’s
body as it lies across her knees; or to hear from young lips “I wandered lonely as
a cloud”, or “Little lamb who made thee?” Walter de la Mare’s Come Hither is
easy reading for a lover of poetry, and such inviting reading in both choice of
poem and comment, that it can hardly fail to awaken the love if a lover shows
the way. Poetry instils a love of nature, appeals to our intuitive faculties.
“The poets are the truth-tellers. They cannot deceive.” The poetry that is
clearly inspired, and so is beyond a purely mental interpretation, is the first
intimation of mystic experience and points that way.
Drama, too, is a most fruitful occupation for youth, and requires nothing but
time and opportunity to encourage it. It would sweep all other work out of the
field if that were allowed. Good plays for high school age are quite difficult to
find. They may be gay and young, but must be really innocent, refreshing and
spirited in their humour. Great drama like Shakespeare has to be adapted and
shortened to hold the enthusiastic attention even of loving parents, but this can
be well done and is most rewarding, with really profound reactions in the char-
EDUCATION THROUGH THE ARTS IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS 139
acter and outlook of those who take part and in the young audience. Macbeth ,
Romeo and Juliet , As You Like It , and Winter's Tale are among the plays that
leave impressions and can be attempted as complete plays; excerpts from other
plays provide excellent memory work, and are often pure Lodge wisdom and
nothing less. A group of young students, against the advice though not the
prohibition of a timid faculty, presented Cyrano de Bergerac and later a wisely
adapted version of Peer Gynt. In their reactions these plays are not merely
romance. They evoke the power to grasp the elements of character in its re¬
sistance to the forces that prey upon the will. “To watch a character develop
from the first flashes of contact in .the actor’s mind to the final moment when the
character steps on the stage in full possession of the actor, whose personal self
looks on somewhere in the background, is to be present at a great mystery. No
wonder the ancient dramas were initiation ceremonies, if we can see it so, an
initiation into what Emerson calls ‘the empire of the real’.”
Many recent plays given in New York and very generally through the coun¬
try, have a significance that is definitely religious, or give a powerful and re¬
generating commentary on life. Among them are Thomas d Becket , Joan of
Arc , Ethan Frome and an increasing number of Shakespeare’s plays. Graduates
of secondary schools which have stimulated interest and taste in the higher
forms of the theatre art, may be left to themselves to seek entertainment in the
better class of plays, rather than in the demoralizing and trivial. Robert Ed¬
mond Jones expresses an ideal and hope for the new generation:
1 here are young people in this country who will really create for the theatre of their
time, who will bring something into existence that has never existed before. A few. Not
many. 1 he theatre will be fortunate if it can claim a half-dozen of them. But it is this
half-dozen to whom we look to lift our common experience into a higher region, a clearer
light. We do not want shrewdness, or craftiness, or adroitness from them. We have
enough of mechanism in the theatre and more than enough. Let them go beyond this:
let them give us the sense of the dramatic moment, the immortal moment.
1 hink of the moment. All that has ever been in this moment; all that will be in this
moment. Both are meeting in one living flame, in this unique instant of time. This is
drama; this is theatre—to be aware of the Now. But how is one to become aware?
someone may ask. I answer, listen to the poets. They can tell you. ... I will give
you an example from Hamlet:
• “O good Horatio,
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart
Absent thee from felicity awhile.”
Absent thee from felicity awhile. Here are some of the most beautiful words ever written
in the English language. But this is not all. The words are a plain record of fact. Ham¬
let, drawing his last breath as he spoke them, was not interested in phrase-making,
nor was Shakespeare. Hamlet did not think of an exquisite phrase at that moment.
He spoke out of a real vision of felicity, immortal. He saw the clear light, the happy
forms. He called it felicity. He did not invent; he did not create; he saw and reported.
. . . Poets know what they see is true. If it were not so they would have told you.
With such vision and leadership in the theatre, why should we not embody
in drama the wisdom and aspiration of our time, as Greek poets in the drama of
their daift?
i4o THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
Last and most difficult in relation to taste are painting, sculpture and archi¬
tecture ; yet they directly exact so much clear thinking that they ought to be as
fundamental in education as geometry and science; by a certain measured beauty
they appeal to the mind as well as to the imagination and the heart. The study
of the history of these arts is profitable but is not what is meant here. In the
beginning it is a handicap, for knowing about pictures before knowing them,
loads the mind with information before the eyes have learned to see, and clouds
aesthetic vision. Unfortunately there are very few average homes that contain
good art; the ideal school in supplying this lack must use tact and suggestion
rather than arbitrary pronouncements. Pictures gain much by hanging on well-
proportioned walls, for space-relations affect the emotions by reacting on the
nervous system in ways not very well understood. They are further enhanced
by a background pure in tone, not drab or dead even though there is no sharply
defined colour scheme. Appreciation also increases by changing their position
from time to time, so that the eyes may not become indifferent. From earliest
years children enjoy pictures. If pleasure in good pictures can be fostered
without dimming enthusiasm, a natural and wholesome growth in taste de¬
velops, from observing at first hand the contrast between the poor and the good;
the good and the very good; a natural growth, for when the best is continually
present in the surroundings, the choice eventually is right. The faculty of right
choice is innate, and needs only time and opportunity.
Paintings and reproductions are chosen from modern and earlier art periods,
by persons of judgment, for their beauty of significance, design and colour, and
with care for their suitability. Naturally, sentimental art, merely pretty faces
and scenes, superficial religious pictures, and all decadent forms of a spoiled and
perverted taste are barred. The work of artists in any period who precede a
too complete ease and fulness of expression, in general speaks the most power¬
fully to the imagination. Therefore the austere beauty of the Charioteer of
Delphi, and the Mourning Athena, becomes ultimately more moving than the
immediate satisfactions of the Venus of Melos; given time, Giotto will displace
Murillo and Andrea del Sarto; the paintings of men of genius before Raphael
induce a finer reaction than some of Raphael himself. Duccio and other Sien¬
nese painters are vastly more religious than modem religious painters, who are
often mawkish and shockingly superficial. A fascinating reality distinguishes
the Holbeins, and the early French and Flemish portraits of kings and
commoners.
One becomes aware of these contrasts in the past, and in the same way,
modem art is judged on its merits and in relation to its spirit and its own achieve¬
ments and discoveries. Recent water-colour paintings of the young American
Indians are far more stimulating, even to little children, than the modem
thoroughly realistic illustrations and sophisticated drawings, and they set the
children to drawing and painting too. The landscapes and figures of C 6 zanne
are as sound in their constructive beauty and truthfulness as Bach’s music. If
sensitiveness to fine colour is ever to be instilled in human beings, these early
years are the most impressionable and the most promising. Fortunately the
EDUCATION THROUGH THE ARTS IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS 141
inventiveness of our own times and the effort to achieve fine colour, texture
and cheapness in fabrics, should create a superior colour sense. One may see
signs of this already in clothes and pillows, hangings and wall-paper everywhere.
We may accept without need of proof, the theory that evolution to a higher
state of consciousness lies in part in a growing desire to see and hear the best,
and that every accretion, especially in this young generation, helps to drive out
satisfactions with inferior things, and so elevates the character, and creates the
habit of choosing wisely upon which the Upanishads lay such stress. Good art
is always sincere, is always simple, has always involved sacrifice, often poverty,
intense application and an inward spiritual fire. Making these contacts for
children by surrounding them with what is lasting in its beauty, beckoning
them up and on, must be worth the time of teachers who are theosophists and
especially dedicated to this service, but who, in point of honour, aside from good
teaching, the disciplines of academic studies and social life, must depend largely
on such means to establish standards in character, and on the contagion of their
aspiration to associate only with the best. For they may not use the name
Theosophy; are denied all forms of propaganda. They may not mention Karma;
talk too freely about consciousness; and only in rare cases speak of such subjects
as reincarnation, and only when the subject has been brought up first by some¬
one else, as in the sixth book of Vergil’s Aeneid , where the doctrine of the Logos
and reincarnation are quite fully treated. Then we may welcome the chance,
over and over with successive generations, to explain and enlarge on these sub¬
jects, and rejoice to find that the passing years make them more and more
eligible for legitimate teaching and more susceptible to complete elucidation.
The contagion by example of what one loves and believes in, and its power to
affect the character, of course rests absolutely on a basis of what one has assim¬
ilated so that it has become part of himself. No eye or ear is so quick to detect
a false note and patter as that of youth. Belief in these arts as a means to
spiritual growth, and the conscious though not obvious use to this end, must
come from a profound conviction that they do serve this end. There are many
openings to the lower w r orld, and so in those subjects sanctioned for education,
most closely related to spirit and most expressive of it, to care and care con¬
tinually for the best, is a form of “binding the consciousness to a certain region”
and should lead step by step to the ultimate goal of full understanding.
V.
ON THE SCREEN OF TIME
HE Lenten season had just begun when we next met. It was natural,
therefore, to discuss the benefits and evils of repentance. What is the
use of it? Is not “forward-looking”, creative imagination more profit¬
able? We appealed to the Ancient.
“How can you accomplish anything, spiritually, without it?” he countered.
“If I blunder to the injury of others, is my sincere regret, and my expression of
it, waste of time? Whenever we sin—which means, whenever we violate spirit¬
ual law in thought or act—we injure the Master whose child we are, as well as
injuring our fellows. That being the case, we are morally obligated to examine
ourselves that we may learn why we went astray, and how, so that we may
resolve not to commit the same fault again. Otherwise we go through life
learning nothing, and shall go out of it worse off than when we came into it,
because we shall have thrown away our Karmic (that is, God-given) oppor¬
tunities. A man could spend his life exploring the cities and nations of the
earth, and not gain a thing in any real sense. Gain is the increase we take with
us when we die, and the only increase we can take with us consists of an im¬
proved character, a stronger will, a greater devotion, a clearer consciousness of
our real self, of the real world and of the Lodge of Masters and of our own
Master.”
“But what is the use of wallowing in a conviction of sin?” someone asked.
“None whatever!” the Ancient agreed, smilingly. “There are, of course,
those who use what they call their repentance as a pretext for self-parade; there
are others who, without being guilty of that particular vulgarity, become so
wrapped in gloom, so self-centred, because of their sins, that their so-called
repentance does them more harm than good. In these cases the ‘repentance’
is simply an exhibition of the two poles of vanity; in the latter case, of wounded
vanity. Unless we use repentance as a spring-board to bounce us, as it were,
away from wrong to right, away from negativeness to positive and hopeful
effort, we shall have failed utterly to understand its meaning or its value; and
its value in the spiritual life is immense,—it is or should be one of our most
powerful aids, providing us with a stimulus, an incentive, for ever-increasing
effort.
“Is there one of us who, looking back at his life since he first heard of Theos¬
ophy—even at the past week—does not see that he has wasted his time and his
opportunities to a deplorable extent? To brood over this would be weakening
and foolish; but we are still alive; we still have to-day and perhaps to-morrow.
Let us then make up Jot lost time ,* let us work, meditate, pray, as we have never
done before; let us use our realization of failure as it should be used,—for
constructive ends.
“Consider your waste of mental and nervous energy, the lack of purpose and
ON THE SCREEN OF TIME
i 43
control of most of your daily thinking—that it is not thinking, but mere drift¬
ing, usually about yourself, or with T as centre and end. Consider how you
have squandered your emotions on trivialities, ‘what torments of grief you
endured from evils which never arrived’, instead of using your emotions as
generators of aspiration and of spiritual power. Then, from this realization—
and unless the realization be keen and full of remorse, it will not help you—
draw the determination to waste such wealth no more, but to control the direc¬
tion of a force which is strong enough to stop the beating of your heart, and
which is strong enough, also, to lift you to the gates of Paradise.
“What did the Prodigal Son do when he had returned to his Father? Did
he spend the rest of his days weeping and wailing in a corner? No! At first,
he was bowed to the earth, was moved to the depths of himself, by an over¬
whelming sense of his Father’s love and generosity; but then pulled himself
together, and resolved to make it his one remaining purpose in life to atone
for his past sins and selfishness. Day after day, and all day, he would seek
opportunities (let us hope with tact and discretion!) to serve his Father,—
what is more, to serve his older brother, who had not, as you will remember,
received him with open arms.
“Have not we too wasted our ‘goods’, our ‘substance’, with riotous living?
Not perhaps in a material sense, but, without any question, in an inner and
even more important sense: for, once more, what use have we made of our
minds, of our emotions, of our imaginations? Have we not wasted them; and
did we not derive every energy we possess, in essence , from our spiritual Father?
“A student of Theosophy who looks upon repentance as a relic of an out¬
worn creed, has failed to understand the A. B. C. of Occultism and of spiritual
progress.”
“Before we drop the subject”, interjected one of our editors, “may I please
suggest that we ought also to study the story of the Prodigal Son, of the Phari¬
see and Publican, and other parables, as the greatest works of art that have
come down to us from the past? Their brevity, their simplicity, their Greek
purity, fill me with increasing awe. They are vivid as nothing else in literature
is vivid; but they are more than perfect literature: they are music and sculpture
and architecture and painting, all in one. The Master created the thing—saw
it, heard it, as a living thing, compact in form and with infinite significance,
while he put it into words. We should try, as we read them, to see as he saw,
to feel as he felt. We shall fail in that, of course; but the effort in itself should
bring us nearer to the heart of their mystery. If there were no other evidence
of his divine greatness, the parables alone would prove that he was a Master
of the Great Lodge.”
“I, also”, said the Student, “should like to add a postscript, as it were, to the
Ancient’s remarks, although mine is intended merely to stress his statement
that the emotions are a far greater force, both constructively and destructively,
even on the material plane, than most people realize, while on inner planes
their power necessarily is a thousandfold more dynamic. Without any inter¬
vention of our will, the emotion of fear, or that of danger, leads to a physiologi-
144
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
cal revolution which profoundly affects every part of us; for the blood is hur¬
riedly driven from all our internal organs, except the heart, lungs and brain,
and dispatched to the muscles of our limbs and trunk; our stored-up reserves
of starch are hurriedly converted into soluble sugar, with which the blood
becomes charged; the blood itself becomes curiously modified, so that it more
readily clots; the heart beats more quickly and strongly, and all feeling of fatigue
disappears. Where is the drug, or where the surgeon’s tool, that can in a minute
effect such a miracle as this? But I cut out a review of a book by Dr. H. Rob¬
erts, entitled Euthanasia and other Aspects of Life and Death , published by
Constable, and have it in my pocket. It is from this that I get my information,
and will now read directly from what the author says:
The series of automatic and immediate adaptations is by no means purposeless. It is
exactly calculated to make efficient the essential self-preservation response to the fear-
provoking situation in the primitive environment in which this machinery developed.
Whether flight or fight were expedient, it is in the muscles that the blood would be
needed; and, for the work which they would be called upon to do, they would need all
the fuel they could get. The advantage of the increased coagulability of the blood in
case of physical injury is obvious.
All this takes place as a spontaneous consequence of an emotion. In the light of these
facts, he would be rash who would set narrow limits to the possibilities of faith or any
other emotion. The success of the old “charmers”, who often caused such crude ma¬
terial objects as warts to disappear in a night, is a standing challenge to unimaginative
“science”. At the same time, all experience goes to suggest that there are limits to the
capacity of the spontaneous and unconscious forces within us.
It is not a question of distinction between visible structural changes and what are
called functional disturbances. Nothing could be more visible than a wart; and those
causes which can cause a rush of blood to the face when we blush, or to the muscles
when we are afraid; which can increase the beat of the heart or cause it to stop; which
can lead to enlargement or atrophy of important glands; can obviously play a very im¬
portant part in the restoring of health and the healing of wounds.
“Translate that in terms of the psychic body, and see where you arrive!
Above all, as the Ancient suggested, remembering that our fears, and a sense of
danger, are impossible except as effects of an active imagination, let us try to
realize what wonders could be effected if we were to use our imaginations de¬
liberately, in order to arouse right instead of wrong or wasteful emotions: as he
said, they would indeed lift us to the very gates of Paradise.”
“We ought to be as careful of our imaginations as women used to be of their
honour”, commented the Philosopher; “for the imagination creates forms,
and a form, thus created, draws to itself that Kamic force which we describe as
an emotion or ‘feeling’, the intensity of which determines the life-cycle, long or
short, of the form. All of us carry around with us an astral picture gallery of
these living forms, which are vitalized further by every similar feeling we sub¬
sequently have, and which control to a large extent our after-death experience
and our future incarnation. Further, this collection of mental pictures strongly
affects the people with whom we come in contact, either for good or ill, so that
responsibility for our ‘mind-bom sons’ is far-reaching, both now and, Kar¬
mically, hereafter.
ON THE SCREEN OF TIME
MS
“I have avoided the use of the word ‘desire’, and have spoken, instead, of
‘feeling’, because horror, or that intense repulsion which is the opposite of
desire, will vitalize a mental picture almost as strongly as will attraction to it.
That is why we can be haunted for weeks, consciously, by some hideous sight,
or by some vile thing of which we have read,—while the effect of the vitalized
image will remain with us, perhaps unconsciously, for as long as we live, and
longer. This is why control of our imagination—of the content of our aura—
is of such immense importance. After an image has been created, much of the
mischief has been done; we must learn to inhibit the least movement of our
imagination, ab initio."
“This is interesting”, remarked one of our visitors. “I wish you would give
me some illustration of what you have just said.”
“Suppose”, was the reply, “that you are being driven in an automobile, and
that a taxi-cab, ‘against the lights’, comes whirling round a comer. If you will
watch your reactions closely (this illustration, by the way, is not original; it
was used at a New York Branch meeting), you will find that you feel the worst
of the nervous shock after the danger is over; then, perhaps, your heart will
almost stand still. Examining yourself still more closely, you will find that
your view of the on-rushing taxi was instantaneous; that your imagination
had no time in which to ‘get going’ until the taxi had just missed you, and you
had a free second in which to form a mental picture of what might have hap¬
pened. It is this mental picture that gives you the shock. Put it to the test.
You will undoubtedly have plenty of opportunities! The next time such a
thing happens, jump on your imagination and throttle it with your will, the
moment you see the taxi approaching; keep it stiff and cold for a minute or
two after the danger has passed. You will not feel any shock. Then, for ex¬
perimental purposes, relax your grip. Your imagination will give a sigh of re¬
lief, and in a flash you will feel what might have been, and the shock. That
merely illustrates, of course, why, in other and far more important respects,
we need to gain control over the incipient movements of our imagination.”
“Your psychic picture gallery”, the same visitor now objected, “sounds to
me like a cross between Mme. Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors and Sinbad’s
Old Man of the Sea. Is there no way of escape?”
“My picture gallery!” the Philosopher laughed. “You are not flattering;
because there is no need to assume that everybody’s picture gallery is full of
evil or horrible things; they may be full of very lovely and noble things: they
ought to be. And at the worst—to answer your question—there is a way of
escape; for if we have, figuratively speaking, painted pictures in the past which
are not what they ought to be, we can paint new pictures over the old,—and,
thank heaven, in that inner world the new pictures, if opposite in their nature
to the old, will not only obliterate but will disintegrate our earlier work.
“But all that I have said so far was intended to serve primarily as an intro¬
duction to my theme, which is, that so much of modern literature obtrudes
subjects, descriptions, incidents, which are grossly insulting to every woman
readeflfcmd which are revolting to every decent man,—matters of sex, handled
146
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
in a way that is coarse, and needlessly, wantonly brutal. Even perversions of
sex are flung in one’s face as if one lived on terms of intimacy with the most
degraded and degrading aspects of what these writers falsely pretend is human
nature. Time after time I have wanted to recommend some book to the readers
of the Quarterly, having found that it contained much of interest or of value,
and then have remembered some vile passage, or several of them, which I had
resented bitterly, which had turned me completely against the author, and
which made it impossible to pass on his book even to the men among my friends,
while, as to the women among them, if I had done such a thing they could only
have felt that I regarded them as so lacking in refinement, as so battered and
benumbed morally, as so impervious where they ought to be most sensitive,—
that their self-respect must have compelled them never to speak to me again.
The right kind of woman, whether young or old (for age does not necessarily
coarsen them, thank God), instinctively shrinks from the knowledge of evil,
while her father, brothers, husband, if they be the right kind of men, con¬
sciously do their utmost to protect her from the taint which that knowledge
inflicts. She knows inevitably, and ought to know, that there is evil in the
world, and that sex is horribly misused in many ways; but her purity violently
rejects the approach of any picture of such things, and she instantly turns from
the materials, as it were, out of which such pictures are made. She will not
allow herself to become contaminated; she values herself and her own soul far
too highly. A married woman and perhaps the mother of a family, she is not
innocent in the ordinary sense, but she is morally clean, she is pure, and, be¬
cause she loves purity and reverences love, she hates impurity with all her
womanhood, with all her heart, with all her strength.
“An author who writes a book of the kind to which I refer, implicitly damns
his mother, his sisters, his wife, and all the other women of his acquaintance,
for he assumes they will read his book with pleasure. In other words, he be¬
lieves they are just as ‘tough’ as he is. And perhaps they are; but it is insulting
to assume that they are; it is disloyal to announce publicly that they are,—
which is what he does when he writes a book, avowedly for popular consump¬
tion, and to be read by women as well as by men, the contents of which violate
every canon of good taste, and which cannot fail to disgust any woman of any
class who has preserved some sense of delicacy in matters concerning sex.”
“But is it not true that, To the pure, all things are pure’?” asked another of
our visitors.
“It is not true”, was the immediate response. “I know of few proverbs that
are more misleading. To the pure, impure things are vile, and they are recog¬
nized at a glance, for the pure have preserved that ‘sense’ intact. A child of
six is innocent rather than pure, and can read things, let us say in the Old Tes¬
tament, without any understanding whatever. A child of that age is constantly
reading things that are not understood. Once there is even a glimmer of com¬
prehension, the same passages will be read, either with instinctive repulsion
and immediate transfer of attention (the reaction of innate purity), or with
curiosity and an effort to ‘find out some more’ (which is the reaction of innate
ON THE SCREEN OF TIME
i 47
pruriency). In that case, the dictionary is consulted, the imagination is stimu¬
lated,—and you have the beginning of a psychic picture gallery of the worst
kind, one result of which will soon be the desire to experiment, followed by
moral perversion.”
‘‘But some women—women doctors, trained nurses, social workers and
others—are compelled to give their attention to all kinds of evil, and in con¬
siderable detail. Would you condemn them as necessarily impure?”
‘‘Of course not. A good woman may be cursed with a degenerate, depraved
husband, and may yet preserve her purity. But at what cost, and with what
dreadful suffering,—not only directly, but, as she will realize, from the inevi¬
table soiling of her own mind. Remember that, as always, it is the motive that
counts. Children need to be watched intelligently, and a mother ought to be alive
to certain possibilities, a sufficient understanding of which should, if anything,
tend to strengthen her love of purity and her loathing of sin. The performance
of duty produces its own prophylactic. Further, a mother who has kept her¬
self ‘unspotted from the world’, will refuse to know more than she actually
needs to know for the right performance of her duty.
‘‘Few more scathing things can be said of a girl than, ‘There is nothing she
doesn’t know’,—and the remark never is made except with disgust, even to-day,
which suggests that at least a memory of the ideal persists.
‘‘But leave women out of it entirely; my point is that even if novels, rem¬
iniscences, books of travel, and so forth, were written for men only, indecency
leaves a trail of slime which is morally poisonous. In some cases it is introduced
deliberately to supply ‘spice’ for the perverted appetites of readers; it ‘sells
the book’: in other words, the publisher assumes the r61e of Pandarus,—and
should be ostracized accordingly. Some day he will be—if the best in our
civilization is to survive. There are authors, however, from whom this sort of
thing flows spontaneously. A number of comparatively recent books by Amer¬
ican and English newspaper correspondents, or by Secret Service agents, re¬
counting their experience in Russia during the revolution—a subject in itself
of real interest—are made odious by their parade of illicit sex ‘adventures’.
The same is true of certain current War books, otherwise admirable. All these
are cases of downright indecency. There are authors, however, who do not
parade their immoralities, and who may be innocent of them, but whose atti- ^
tude toward such things makes it impossible to recommend their books, much 0
as, in other respects, one would like to do so. For example: Rom Landau’s
Seven , the general tendency of which is religious and almost theosophical, drags
its readers into the perverse filthiness of Berlin’s night life during the infla¬
tionary period in Germany, and concludes, under this head: ‘Berlin taught me
broadmindedness in matters of sex’. What the author means by ‘broadmind¬
edness*—toleration of such hideous evils—is further revealed by his comment
when travelling by train in Japan: ‘I liked the lack of prudishness when at
night men and women undressed in the Pullman car without doors or curtains,
and behaved with a natural grace that our own absurd codes of shame have
dest^Jed’. If a man’s mother and sisters and wife refuse to undress in public,
148
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
and the man tells them that their refusal is not due to natural and proper mod¬
esty, but to an ‘absurd code of shame’,—that man, in my opinion, has been
‘born too soon in human shape’, and I am as certain as I live that Madame
Blavatsky and Judge, both of whom were rigid in these matters, would agree.
Not only are the most absolute moral integrity and purity essential in Occultism;
they are fundamental in the theosophic life. In fact, refinement, delicacy of
feeling, in matters of sex, and good taste in any reference to the subject, are
supreme tests of a true as opposed to a perverted Theosophy. This, inci¬
dentally, is one of the directions in which Adyar has proved itself to have gone
hopelessly astray.
“The more coarse the taste of to-day, the greater the obligation of Theos-
ophists to uphold the higher and better standards of the past. We must
come out into the open and protest, individually as well as collectively, against
everything that is indecent and low in current literature.
“We shall be met, doubtless, with the statement—as a pretext for verbal
licentiousness—that the Elizabethans and early Georgians were ‘down-right
and honest’ in these respects, while the reticence of the Victorians was ‘mealy-
mouthed and hypocritical’. ‘We’, it will be said, ‘prefer the former’. But the
facts are that while the Elizabethans and early Georgians had many admirable
qualities, and were superior to us in some ways, they were coarse in speech,
which was a defect, not a virtue, and that the Victorians recognized this, and
evolved to a higher level, leaving that defect behind them, just as they grad¬
ually left behind them the drunkenness which had been such a disgusting feature
of fashionable life in earlier days. We are not obliged to imitate the worst in
past ages; if imitate we must, let us imitate the best. Why pick from the civili¬
zation of Greece, for instance, whatever was depraved and debasing, and imitate
that, instead of what was beautiful in her art and noble in her great dramatists?
The answer is obvious: it is only the depraved who do so.
“Not long ago, the attention of a New York publisher was called to a par¬
ticularly offensive passage in one of his books. His reply was: ‘That passage
sells the book’. On that basis, and in comparison, the liquor business must
rank as elevating! But was the man right? The book in question was inter¬
esting and worth-while, except for some half-dozen pages, and perhaps would
have sold at least as well without them as with them. Trash undoubtedly is
sold on the strength of interspersed salaciousness. But think of those three
volumes of reminiscences by Lord Frederic Hamilton— The Vanished Pomps of
\ esterday , 7 he Days Before Yesterday , and Here , There , and Everywhere —which
have run into twenty-five or more editions, and are still in demand: there is
not an unclean word or suggestion, direct or indirect, in one of them.”
“He happened to be a gentleman”, said the Ancient, dryly.
“With the inference that the dirt-mongers are nothing of the kind”, the
Philosopher added. A fair inference,—and a fact. Universal education is
responsible for much. Women, however, are among the worst offenders. I
tried to read Gone with the Wind , simply because it is a ‘best seller’ of which
ever a million copies have been sold already—which means at least five million
ON THE SCREEN OF TIME
149
readers—and I wanted to know what kind of book can interest the American
public to that extent. It is not easy to speak of the result. It is one of the
most revolting books I have ever read: it is bad. It is all the worse for being
well and vividly written. The story centres in a woman who is morally rotten,
and whose abominable feelings and motives are described in detail. The foul
language of a drunkard is recorded with pornographic verisimilitude. Some
of the Elizabethan dramatists were coarse enough, goodness knows; but they
spared you the psychology of the thing; they did not drag you into the filth
of the psychic substrata; they were not bad. In terms of art, the book presents
an utterly false view of life. The only decent people in it are weaklings or
dupes. To be able to read it with pleasure, implies either a moral void, or a
secret craving for the worst forms of sensual stimulation. The harm done by
such books is incalculable. The mind-images they create will fill the world
with horrors,—for mind-images must spill over into this world in one form or
another; sooner or later all of them will incarnate here.”
“We certainly need a war”, commented the Historian, “and a war that will
shake both men and women to the depths; either a war or some frightful pesti¬
lence, that will bring every man and woman in the country face to face with
death as an immediate, overwhelming probability.”
“It makes it easier to understand why the Dark Powers are trying to divert
our minds with Social Reform”, said the Student, thoughtfully. “Personal
ambition in high places falls an easy prey to the bait of popular approval, and
to smother the real issue, the moral issue, the eternal issue, under a blanket of
political claptrap in the guise of humanitarianism,—would undoubtedly be a
clever move on the part of the powers of evil.”
“What do you mean by the ‘eternal issue’?” asked a visitor. “Is not justice
the supreme issue always?”
“Yes; but God’s Justice, not man’s. The eternal issue is, whether the soul
of man shall survive and finally triumph, or not. Moral corruption destroys
the soul. If this nation is becoming morally degenerate and corrupt, it is in
such terrible danger that, in comparison, nothing else matters. The Dark
Powers, therefore, would do their utmost to divert attention from the spiritual
and real danger, to issues which can be made to appear important and, if pos¬
sible, ‘ethical’, but which actually are material, transitory, and of quite minor
significance.”
“Have the professional reviewers called attention to the immoralities of
Gone with the WindV ’ someone asked.
“So far as I am aware, No; but one thing most professional reviewers (like all
ordinary people) really fear, is being ridiculed as prudish. Moral cowardice is
an almost universal failing.”
“I suspect that lack of self-confidence has much to do with it also”, sug¬
gested the Ancient. “When ‘all the world’ praises, most people hesitate to con¬
demn; they mistrust their better instincts; they are afraid to commit themselves.
But tH^igain, of course, is only another form of vanity,—a morbid fear of
being mistaken. Probably, in the majority of cases, toleration of evil was ac-
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
150
quired—was indeed cultivated—one step at a time, until now the readers of
such books have become indurated, callous. They began by telling themselves
they must not be old-fashioned or puritanical, when some word or incident in a
book offended them, and they gradually ceased to ‘register’ offence. They forget
that in this as in all other directions, eternal vigilance is the price, not only of
liberty, but of safety; for what often happens is, not induration so much as
enjoyment of depravity by proxy; and that is pernicious: it kills the soul.”
‘‘The Student mentioned Lord Frederic Hamilton’s reminiscences as having
an immense sale”, the Historian now said; ‘‘but we should not forget Kipling;
he uses words occasionally which the Victorians would not have used—and
I think they were right—but he was clean all the way through, and there is
no author living whose books are in such world-wide and constant demand.
When he has to refer to a nasty subject, he does it with decency. In his re¬
cently published Something of Myself , he mentions incidentally, and without
any detail, the perversities so often met with in boys’ schools, which were un¬
heard of in his own, and says that, talking it over long afterwards with the
Headmaster, the latter stated that ‘his one prophylactic against certain un¬
clean microbes was to send us to bed dead tired’. Imagine the pages of re¬
volting incident and detail, and brutal language, into which the up-to-date
author would have plunged, revelling, as he covered the same subject!”
‘‘Why limit your criticism to books?” asked the same visitor. ‘‘The stage
and the ‘Movies’ are often just as bad.”
‘‘I know they are, and I came prepared, to a limited extent, for that too”—
whereupon the Philosopher produced a newspaper cutting. ‘‘At a hearing in
Washington the other day, before the House Immigration Committee, the
newspapers reported testimony that ‘the American girl was the greatest ‘‘strip
tease artist of them all, and that “stripping” was a typically American art.’
The New York Times added:
Strange as it may seem , Mr. Minsky told the committee, “these strip tease artists
have to be trained and schooled. They have to be taught rhythm in a manner syn¬
chronous with the music. They are taught to strip and unclothe by specialists in the
atmosphere and lighting of the stage.”
“No need to comment on that, I imagine.
But as I started this general subject, let me reply to your question about
limiting criticism chiefly to books,—that not even for readers of the Quarterly
am I prepared to spend an evening witnessing scenes such as I have just indi¬
cated, in a psychic atmosphere which would asphyxiate a goat. It is bad enough
to feel obliged to look through a ‘best seller’ like the one I named: that is as far
as I am prepared to go. If people seek salaciousness, they must have it,—and
take the consequences. Warnings would be wasted, and might even whet an
appetite already so far depraved.”
"Now for the signs of promise”, said the Recorder. “We know that behind
the blackest sky, the sun still shines, and that often through chinks between
clouds, we are reminded of its hidden radiance. It is vitally necessary to do
what we can to prevent darkness being mistaken for light, coarse for ‘honest’
ON THE SCREEN OF TIME
151
speech, retrogression for progress; and we must fight to the end against the
smug self-satisfaction which regards this age as the culmination of human
achievement,—realizing, as we do so, that those who love the things of dark¬
ness will call us scolds, reactionaries, and kill-joys. Especially are we likely to
hear this from the young people, for in some ways they are innocent,—though
they would hate to be thought so. Youth necessarily lacks experience—not
always of evil, alas, but certainly of its consequences—and is, therefore, all the
^nore inclined to be cock-sure of itself. We must have patience with it; we were
once like that ourselves! And there is a crying need for remonstrance, which we
must off-set by pointing out that what we urge is reaction from evil, from debase¬
ment, to the heights of spiritual attainment,—to those magnificent possibilities
which Theosophy, from the far past and throughout history, reveals as within
man’s compass, as offered for his conquest, even now, by the Divine compassion.
It is because he might be so great, that man’s defilement is so terrible.
“Perhaps I should lead off with what struck me as a favourable omen, and as
a hint of little-suspected prevision and superintendence. I refer to the publi¬
cation in the March Scientific American (of all places) of an article on “The
Problem of the Holy Shroud” by a Professor of Biology who believes in its
authenticity. On pages 148 and 162, there are reproductions of the form and
face imprinted on the shroud, supposed to be that of Christ, which cannot
fail to impress those older students of Theosophy who are familiar with other
portraits of other Masters, and who will recognize the ‘family’ resemblance.
The shroud has been in the custody of the House of Savoy since 1453, and was
transferred from Chamb<h*y to Turin in 1578. It was not photographed until
1898, when something of a sensation was caused by the discovery that the
image on the linen was a negative, with lights and shadows inverted, which
photography of course rectified. So far as I am aware, a negative image, in a
photographic sense, was unknown in remote centuries; but apart from that,
no one with any knowledge of Pre-Raphaelite art (and the authenticity of the
portrait was discussed in 1389) could possibly believe that it was the work of
an early painter. The wounded but majestic face is stamped with the effects
of dreadful suffering—with all the grief and torture of the Passion. The nega¬
tive image shows none of this. Why was it that the revelation of the face was
made impracticable until 1898, and that only now has it been brought to popu¬
lar attention in this country—for very few people in the English-speaking
world can have so much as heard of the exhaustive monograph on the subject,
in French, published in Paris in 1929, under the title, Le Saint-Suaire de Turin.
Why now? And can the inherent inhibitions and their final removal have been
foreseen at the time of Christ’s death and burial? But I must refer you to the
Scientific American , for, without seeing the photographs, it is not easy to appre¬
ciate the significance of the event. Students of Theosophy particularly should
be interested, because they will realize that the precipitation of the image on
the linen shroud could have been effected even without the chemical processes
which explain it to the satisfaction of the author of the article.
“Now for other good omens.”
152
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
“Omen or not”, responded the Student, “an article by Roger W. Babson,
the well-known statistician, in the March number of The Commentator , is most
refreshing. More than that, it is a real ray of light in a distressingly dark
world. His title is: ‘Beware of the Boom!’ He points out that the bigger the
boom, the deeper the depression which always follows it. Plenty of people
are saying that: but listen to this:
We are the dictators of our own destiny. Our destiny, however, whether happiness
or misery, must be evolved in accordance with fundamental principles. If the coming
period is to be anything sounder than a “rake's progress”, business must not sheer away
from the line of normal growth. We are squarely set for a boom and there is but one
protection against its becoming unwieldy—and that is a spiritual revival. The sure
safeguard against degeneration is regeneration—that alone. I believe there is a fair
chance that this may come. Therefore I continue to be optimistic. . . .
It is easy to understand why it is hard to guard against a boom. The seeds of the
recklessness and greed that breed booms are not strewn from without. They germinate
within the human mind. Only as the hearts of our people are cleansed of evil can we hope
to avoid falling into evil. A permanent economic revival depends upon an immediate
spiritual revival. Furthermore, let me add that I believe this may be in the cards.
“My emphasis, which the Recorder will please reproduce in italics, is not in
the original; but the entire article is on those lines. Could anything be more
satisfactory in a secular magazine? By the way, other articles in the same
issue of The Commentator , on ‘The Labour Lobby’, by George Sokolsky, and
‘Russia A Government of Gunmen’, by Joseph Shaplen, also are promising
signs, and deserve wide attention.”
The Recorder now asked the Historian what he could contribute under this
head.
“I find considerable comfort in the way England has been behaving”, the
Historian replied. “She stood the test of Edward’s abdication wonderfully,
as everyone recognizes, and gained strength of purpose and clearer vision from
that moral victory. Almost at once there was a subsidence of Pacifism. On
Christmas Eve, the London Times , in an editorial entitled ‘Peace on Earth’,
struck the key-note of much that has happened since. I will read you the few
sentences which give the substance of it:
If Christ applauded the man who did not resist injury done to himself, He never com¬
mended those who stood by in passive acquiescence while injury was done to others.
He praised a soldiers faith with no hint that his was an unworthy calling. Pacifist
doctrine, when translated from generalities into concrete terms, requires us to believe
that European nations were wrong when they used force to resist the Moslem invasion,
and that fidelity to the teaching of Christ would have been best shown by permitting
the unresisted extermination of Christianity.
“Shortly afterwards, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in an address to his
diocesan conference, declared: ‘The use of force by the State was the ministry
of God for the protection of the people. (Cheers.) If that were true of the
State in its domestic relations, it was equally true for the State in its inter¬
national relations. It all depended on the motive or intention with which it
was used.’
ON THE SCREEN OF TIME
iS3
“Still later, on February 5th, the Bishop of London protested that ‘the real
dangers to the peace of the world to-day are pacifists. If we had taken the
views of pacifists in 1914, either the German Emperor or Hitler would now be
in Whitehall. The German plan was first to swallow France and then to go on
to Great Britain.’ He added: ‘I should have thought that Ethiopia would
have cured every pacifist in the world.’
[American pacifists will please note.— Editors.]
“Then came the huge credit voted by Parliament for national re-armament.
“I see in all of this, both a return to right principles, and a new willingness
to face the facts. England is no longer shutting her eyes and living on vain
hopes. England, so to speak, has gone back to work. May not a corresponding
change of heart take place here?”
“Well”, said the Philosopher, “miracles still happen. I, for one, should not
be alive to-day—in any case should not be spiritually alive—if it were not for a
prolonged series of miracles, to which I have not been in the least entitled. So
it is not for me to question the possibility of a miraculous change in the situa¬
tion here. Members of The Theosophical Society can in any case do their
utmost, from day to day, to make divine intervention possible. Faith will
move mountains. Everywhere there are well-intentioned people, as well as
people who, like Babson, realize that a spiritual revival would save us; but
there are very few who, with that degree of understanding, have the faith and
will which call down from heaven the passionate sympathy of the Just,—of
those ‘just men made perfect’ whose will is God’s will, and who, therefore, are
creators in their own right,—not ‘out of nothing’, true, but out of the sacrifices
offered them by the unselfish, trusting, aspiring hearts of otherwise ordinary
men. If there were enough of these—not many, but enough—our nation, now
destroying itself, might be turned from its greed and pruriency, vulgarity and
self-satisfaction, to the ideals of George Washington, which we were intended
to follow, and infidelity to which is the cause of all our troubles.”
T.
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair; the rest is in the
hands of God .— George Washington.
THE BEATRICE OF DANTE
FROM A THEOSOPHIC POINT OF VIEW * 1 * * *
O NE of the most interesting things in the history of intellectual develop¬
ment, is to note the manner in which certain ideas crop up here and
there in different ages and different countries, seemingly without con¬
nection, and yet bearing the marks of unmistakable family likeness. And as
the summits of the highest mountains resemble each other closely, and in all
countries the towering pinnacles of snow and ice catch the first gleams of sun¬
rise upon their dazzling brows, and glow with the rose of sunset long after the
lower world is dark, so it is with the greatest minds. They rise above the gen¬
eral level of the race, to receive the first glimpses of the eternal light, and in all
countries and all ages, Wisdom is their common portion. Especially is this to
be noted of the seers of the world, of those who use their spiritual insight rather
than their intellectual owteight, and of these was Dante—as he himself said of
Aristotle—“master of those who know”. Dante is said to have belonged to the
Order of the Templars, to that body of men acknowledged by all to have been
reared in the utmost refinement and culture of the day, men imbued, through
their travels and residence in the East, with much of its mystic learning and
hidden secrets. The religion of the Templars has long been known to have been
no tissue of childish absurdities and superstitious practices, but to have rep¬
resented that advanced thought which in an age of persecution it was most
necessary to conceal. Rightly considered, says Wilcke (the great German au¬
thority on the subject), their secret doctrine was nothing more than Protestant¬
ism in general and rationalism in particular. But we are told that the Temple
signified the Wisdom-religion, handed down in secret from remote antiquity,
and even Ozanam, the principal Roman Catholic writer upon Dante, declares
‘This article by Miss Katharine Hillard is reprinted from Lucifer, of August 15th and September 15th. i8or. It
had been read by the author, prior to its publication, before the Aryan T. S. of New York.
1 TK; W ^°u d !f d n m November, 1915. was an old and greatly valued member of The Theosophical Society.
^ a ¥ ?£ S V n £ ul ? 1 M d Dante s ^olar. Her translation of the II Convito into English (Kegan Paul. Trench & Co.,
jf 1 r f^ ,zed as perhaps the best. Member of a prominent Brooklyn family (Mr. Seth Low,
fnr 1 °! tmiversity, later, a reform Mayor of New York, was her cousin), she lived
M met Bla vatsky in London in 1887; returned to the United States; became a devoted
iwi M ' an * d did everything in her power to assist him in his work, continuing her loyal and active
membership m the Society to the day of her death.— Editors.
154
THE BEATRICE OF DANTE
i55
that the plan of the Divine Ccnnedy closely follows the outlines of an initiation
into the Egyptian mysteries.
However this may be, it is at least true, as Ozanam says further, that “mystics,
by a certain divine intuition which they had no leisure to verify, often had a
presentiment of certain natural laws whose complete revelation was reserved
for subsequent ages. ... In mysticism a great power was given to the heart
over the mind, and the imagination held the keys of the heart; thence a real
need, a constant habit, of allegorical expressions and legendary allusions. Con¬
templative, ascetic, symbolical, such has mysticism ever been, and it has left
its triple seal upon the philosophy of Dante.”
Science has found in that philosophy, the germ of many of the most modern
ideas in physiology, more than a hint of the laws of gravity and attraction, a
foreknowledge of a western continent, and a theory of morals far in advance of
Dante’s age. He was accused of heresy many times, as a Ghibelline and a Tem¬
plar, both before and after his death, and Cardinal del Poggetto was with diffi¬
culty restrained from exhuming his lately buried remains and having them
publicly burned as those of a heretic.
Many authors, English, French, Italian, have held similar views as to Dante’s
secret connection with the Templars, and about 1835, Vecchioni, President of
the Supreme Court of Naples, tried in vain to be allowed to publish a book on the
Divine Comedy in which he proposed to show that a treasure of primitive wisdom
had been handed down by the Egyptian priests who transmitted its secrets to
the initiated alone, by means of a secret language; that this language passed
with the mysteries into Greece, was employed by the early poets, and then
adopted by the philosophers, especially by Plato; from Greece it was trans¬
mitted to Italy, and handed down to the time of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio,
who used it in their works; and finally, that the Divine Cmnedy was arranged
after the plan of a Taletes, or initiation to the mysteries, ending in the Eposis
or vision of the Divine. This secret language, or rather conventional use of
language, was taught by grammarians , Grammar being the first of the seven
mystic sciences known as the Trivium and Quadrivium , and defined as the art
of expressing a thing with two meanings.
I have no time to go into the history of heresy in the Middle Ages, but it is a
significant fact, that Catharism , generally identified with the religion of the
Templars, is said to be derived, not from a Greek, but from an Indian word,
the name of a river and of a people. The Brahminical white thread was used
as a girdle by both Catharists and Templars.
Loiseleur, the great French authority on the Templars, says that they be¬
lieved in a Divine Spirit, as opposed to the organizer of matter and the creator
and preserver of the world, and that they were closely connected with the sect
of the Enchetes or worshippers of Lucifer. Here we recognize the old opposition
of Spirit and Matter, and the dawning recognition of the formula Demon est
Deus inversus. Heckethom, in his Secret Societies of All Ages , speaking of the
Catharists-says that in their chivalric orders, the degrees, at first three, after¬
wards hedfe seven, and at the time of their presumed fusion with the Albi-
156 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
genses, the Templars, and the Ghibellines, thirty-three. We know , at least,
that Dante was a Ghibelline, and thirty-three, the number of the degrees in
Masonry, is the number upon which he bases the structure of the Divine Com¬
edy . “The statutes of the Catharists closely resembled those of the Templars ,
continues Heckethorn, “and their clothes were of the same three colours with
those of Beatrice, and the three circles in Paradise”, i.e ., red, white and green,
the colours of the Trinity.
The idol Baphomet, that the Templars were accused of worshipping, repre¬
sented the head of an old man with a flowing white beard, undoubtedly identi¬
cal with the Ancient of Days or the White Head of the Kabbala, a symbol of the
Deity. The name signifies the baptism of wisdom , and corresponds to the Abraxas
of the Gnostics, often represented under the same figure, surrounded by four
stars, and beheld as the sun. Dante uses Cato in the Banquet (iv, 28) as a symbol
of the Deity, and describes him in the Purgatory (c, I) as an old man with a long
white beard, surrounded by the four consecrated stars, which shone so brightly
upon his face that the poet beheld him as the sun.
One of Dante’s French critics speaks of the Pagan characteristics of the In¬
ferno; of the many occult elements of the Purgatorio, where we have all the
tests of initiation, both ancient and modem; of the many heretics and heathen
in the Paradiso ; of the fact that Virgil and Statius, Dante’s guides, are both
pagans, and that St. Bernard, to whom is given the part of third hierophant,
or high priest, was the compiler of the rules of the Templars.
Many authors, as I have said before, have pointed out the resemblance be¬
tween the course of the Divine Comedy and the old initiations, but we must not
forget that, while to the profane these mysteries represented the story of a
hero’s descent into hell and subsequent ascension into heaven, and, to the scien¬
tist, the progress of the sun through the signs of the Zodiac, to the more en¬
lightened they typified the regeneration of the soul. The Masonic initiation
for instance, exoterically represents the murder and resurrection of Hiram, the
architect of Solomon’s Temple, and the assassins slay him at the west door,
because the sun sets in the west. They are twelve in number, to correspond
with the signs of the Zodiac, and they bury the body and mark the spot with a
sprig of acacia (emblem of immortality) to typify the new vegetation to follow
the sun’s resurrection. The body of Hiram is discovered on the seventh day,
to symbolize the renewed life of the sun in the seventh month, and can only be
brought to life by “the lion’s grip”, because the sun’s full strength is attained
when he enters Leo (July).
This is the astronomical key, but we are told that to all significant myths,
the keys are seven. We are also told that the building of Solomon’s Temple
typified the acquirement of the Secret Wisdom, and that this is why it is said
to have been reared without sound of hammer or axe. All initiations follow
the same general lines. Beginning with the death of the old man , they symbolize
re-birth, accompanied by the baptism of Lethe, or the forgetfulness of evil,
and Eunoe, or the reception of good, followed by resurrection, or ascension to
the higher life. The neophyte’s entrance to the new life is almost always made
THE BEATRICE OF DANTE
i57
through a narrow crevice, from which the initiate emerges, as from the gates of
birth. Such passages still exist in the old crypts of many cathedrals, as well
as in the Great Pyramid, and when Dante leaves Hell, he emerges through a
narrow crevice in the rock, from which he first beholds the stars.
The Freemasons of to-day proudly claim descent from the Templars, and
there are many singular coincidences in Dante’s poem with portions of the
Masonic symbolism. It would take too long to go through the whole story of
the regeneration of the soul, which Dante himself tells us to be his subject, its
mystical sense; “the passage of the holy from the slavery of present corruption
to the liberty of the eternal glory". Some of the most striking resemblances,
however, are found in the description of the gate of Purgatory, led up to by
three steps, at whose top stands an angelic warder with a naked sword, to de¬
mand of the poet who he is, and where is his escort. In fact, the whole descrip¬
tion of his passage through the seven circles of Purgatory, with its two baptisms,
and the vision of the glorified Beatrice, or Divine Wisdom, at the end, corre¬
sponds most closely, as has been said, to the old Taletes. So in the Paradiso,
with its voyage from star to star, there are many symbols recalling the Masonic
temple with its starry roof. Reghellini (who wrote a book on Masonry as the
result 0f the Egyptian religions) was so impressed by these resemblances, that he
declared Dante an initiate of the Kabbalistic and Rosicrucian orders. King,
in his book on The Gnostics and their Remains, says that the 18th canto of the
Purgatory is “replete with the profoundest symbolism, which the Freemasons
claim for their own”. To confirm these statements, it is enough to speak of
Dante’s use of such symbols as the imperial eagle, the mystic ladder, the rose
and cross, the pelican, the supper of the Lamb, the three pillars of Faith, Hope,
and Charity; of symbolic colours, letters, and geometric figures—the point, the
circle, the triangle, the square; the trampling of crown and mitre under foot by
the neophyte; the invoking of Divine vengeance on the destroyers of the Temple;
the choice of St. Bernard, organizer of that Order, as High Priest.
To all these coincidences in the Divine Comedy, the other works of Dante’s
great trilogy, the Vita Nuova (or New Life), and the Convito (or Banquet), supply
even more ample confirmation, and it seems to me strange that any one familiar
with the character of the man, his age, and his studies, could fail to see the mys¬
tical element to be the uppermost in all. Lest this should be missed in the New
Life, in spite of his efforts to make it plain, Dante wrote the Banquet, a philo¬
sophical work in prose, especially intended to explain and corroborate his other
works; and he also wrote to Can Grande a much-neglected letter about the
Divine Comedy, in which he tells him that this book, like all other books, can be
understood, and ought to be interpreted, in four ways, the literal, the allegorical,
the moral, and the mystical; and moreover he is careful to inform us that the
literal is not necessarily the historical, but may be only “a beautiful fiction”.
The Vita Nuova, or story of Dante’s New Life, has been too much studied
from the historical point of view, and the Beatrice of that “beautiful fiction”
considered as a real person. Of course, there is no time to go fully into this
much-vexed question; suffice it to say that we know that a Beatrice Portinari
158 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
existed, but we have only the authority of Boccaccio for her identification with
the Beatrice of Dante, who nowhere names any family or any place in his book;
and that Boccaccio is an exceedingly untrustworthy chronicler, all his dates
(which are very few) being at variance, either with Dante’s, or with history,
while all Dante’s dates in the Vita Nnova are mystical combinations of the
number 9. The usual number of degrees in the secret societies is 33, the num¬
ber Dante uses in the Divine Comedy. In the mediaeval associations at least,
these degrees were denoted by a series of odd numbers, and when the man was
born again and rose to the new life , these numbers were called years. The third
degree, for instance, was called the 9th year. Dante’s story of his New Life
describes his meeting Beatrice (the “giver of blessings”) for the first time when
he was nine years old, and though he sees her often after that, it is nine years
before their second meeting, when for the first time he hears her speak. Now
in the third degree, the neophyte (then said to be nine years old) “beholds the
light”, symbolized by a fair woman, with whom he is said to fall in love. “Be¬
holding the light” consisted in seeing the sacred symbols and hearing them
explained. The two mystic baptisms of Lethe and Eunoe signified purification ,
or death to sin, and manifestation , or rebirth in purity. Manifestation was per¬
formed in two ways,—by showing the symbols to the neophyte, and by explain¬
ing their meaning to him, and was therefore the same process as “beholding the
light”, or “falling in love with Madonna”. This ocular inspection and oral
instruction were called “the eyes and mouth” (or smile) of Madonna, and con¬
stituted her first and second beauty.
In his New Life , as I have just said, Dante at the age of nine, sees Beatrice,
and nine years later, hears her speak. And when he meets her in Purgatory,
after her death, she wears a veil, through which he can only see her glorious
eyes , and then she throws it off, and he discovers her second beauty , her smile,
“the splendour of the living Light Eternal”. “Not in mine eyes alone is Para¬
dise”, says Beatrice to him, further on.
In the Banquet , Dante explains that by the eyes of his lady he means the
demonstrations of Wisdom, and by her second beauty , her smile, that intuitive
conviction whereby we perceive Wisdom as without any veil.
Such mystical dates as Dante uses all through the New Life occur in almost
all the writings of the mediaeval poets, and these coincidences, if they are noth¬
ing more, are very striking. The Holy Week is almost always made the turning-
point of their lives and of their loves. As Dante chooses it for the time of the
Commedia , so Boccaccio takes it for the Decameron , and dates his mystical work
Filocopo on Holy Saturday. He first meets his Fiammetta “in a temple”, on
Holy Saturday, while Petrarch meets Laura “in a temple” on Good Friday, at
“the first hour of the day”; she is bom on Good Friday, and she dies on Good
Friday, “at the first hour of the day”. Camoens, and several of the Troubadour
poets, describe themselves as falling in love on Good Friday, and their ladies,
like Laura, all die on Good Friday, many of them, like Laura and Beatrice, “at
the first hour of the day”. The degree already described as “beholding the light”
or “falling in love with Madonna”, was given at “the first hour of the day”, and
THE BEATRICE OF DANTE
i59
when the light was withdrawn again, in the last degree, it was said to disappear,
or “Madonna died”, at “the first hour of the day”.
Dante then begins the story of his New Life by saying that he was nine years
old when first the glorious lady of his mind appeared before his eyes, even she
who was called Beatrice (the giver of blessing) by many who did not know it
to be her name. She was not quite nine, and when he saw her, the spirit of life,
which hath its dwelling in the secretest chamber of the heart, trembled violently,
and said to him (in Latin): “Here is a deity stronger than I, who, coming, shall
rule over me”. And the animal soul, dwelling in the lofty chamber whither all
the sensitive spirits carry their perceptions, was filled with wonder, and speaking
more especially unto the spirits of vision, said: “Your beatitude hath now been
made manifest unto you. . . . And Love many times commanded me to go in
search of this very young little angel”, continued Dante, “wherefore many
times in my childhood did I go in search of her, and saw her to be of such
noble and praiseworthy bearing, that certainly to her might be applied these
words of the poet Homer, ‘She seemed not the daughter of mortal man, but of
God’.”
Nevertheless, it was nine years to a day after their first meeting before Dante
ever heard her speak, and then she only saluted him as she passed him in the
street. It is after this second meeting that the poet’s love makes such havoc
with his bodily health, that his friends, noting his weakness, ask him: “By
whose help has Love done this?” “I looked in their faces smiling”, says Dante,
“and spake no word in return”. And then, seeing Beatrice across a church one
day, he notices a gentle lady midway between them, and makes, in his pretended
devotion to her, a “screen” for his love to Beatrice, by this means keeping his
secret for some months and years. Now the love of a boy of 18 or 20, whose
only demonstration had been one salutation to his lady in the street, scarcely
needed such concealment, and yet when this lady left the city, Love named to
him another “screen”, and this second pretended devotion was so well enacted
that people gossiped of it, and accused him of vicious conduct, so that when
next Beatrice met him, she denied him her most sweet salutation, in which lay
all his beatitude.
Passing over his glimpse of Beatrice at a wedding (where none but married
ladies were wont to go) and the account of the death of her father (the only
realistic incident in the book), we come to Dante’s mention of his severe illness,
on the ninth day of which he has a vision of Beatrice as dead, in many respects
like the vision of her in Purgatory. Following this dream, comes his description
of his last meeting with Beatrice in life, as she passes by him preceded by that
lady Joan, whom he compares to St. John, going before the True Light, saying,
“I am a voice crying in the desert: prepare ye the way of the Lord”. And then
Dante declares that Beatrice should be called Love.
The narrative of the New Life abruptly breaks off soon after this, with the
news of the passing away of Beatrice, which news comes to Dante as he is
writing a sonnet in her praise. “This happened”, he says, “at the first hour of
the ninth day of the ninth month (according to Syrian reckoning) of that year
i6o
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
of the thirteenth century in which the perfect number {ten) was nine times
completed.” And one reason why nine plays so conspicuous a part in her his¬
tory, he tells us, is, that all the nine heavens were in the most perfect harmony
at her birth, but “the more subtle and infallibly true reason is, that she was a
miracle whose sole root was the blessed Trinity”.
At this point the story of the Banquet comes in (as Dante said he intended
that it should) to help out and corroborate the New Life. In both books the
idea is the same, and it is a curious fact that neither in them nor in the Divine
Comedy (except once where the rhyme necessitates it) does the poet ever use
the word death in connection with Beatrice. Two years after she had been made
“a citizen of the Eternal Life”, Dante says in the Vita Nuova, he first beheld
at a window a gentle lady, who so comforted him with her pitying glances, that
he thought of her with too much pleasure. By this gentle lady, he tells us in
the Banquet , he meant Scholastic Philosophy, and for the next two years and a
half he devoted himself to this branch of learning.
But in spite of its attractions, and those of the active life of soldier and states¬
man that soon followed, the love of his first ideal was still latent in the soul of
the poet, and as the Banquet proceeds, Dante shows us how far beyond all science
and all morality is the Divine Philosophy or Eternal Wisdom, which is full of
all peace, and whose dwelling-place is that Quiet Heaven where the soul is at
rest with the Supreme. So at the end of the New Life he has a vision, about
the ninth hour, of the glorified Beatrice, clothed in that sanguine raiment in
which she first appeared to him, and seeming as young as when he first saw her.
And remembering the past, he grieves to think that he has ever been led aside
by any other love, and all his thoughts return to centre upon their first beati¬
tude. And he has another vision of Beatrice receiving homage “beyond that
sphere of widest range”, the Primum Mobile; that is, within the Quiet Heaven
of Divine Wisdom and Peace. And after that other vision embodied in the
Divine Comedy , he resolves to say no more of this blessed one till he can more
worthily treat of her.
\\ hen Dante next meets Beatrice, on the summit of the Mount of Purgatory
(in that terrestrial Paradise, explained by the Fathers of the Church to mean
the contemplative life), she says to him with keen irony, “How didst thou deign
(being lost in the pride of learning) to come unto this Mount?” And turning
to her attendant Virtues, she continues: “Not only by the influence of the stars
at his birth did this man receive great intellectual power, but also by special
gift of Divine grace did he become such in his new life that everything good
was possible to him. I revealed myself to him in his youth, and for some time
led him with me in the right way, but ... as I ascended from flesh to spirit
and beauty and virtue increased in me, I became less dear to him, and he turned
to pursue those false images of good that never fulfil their promises. . The
law of justice would be violated, should he pass Lethe without tears and re¬
pentance.” And when he has repented, confessed, and undergone the double
baptism of water and fire, Beatrice leads the poet upward from heaven to
heaven, until St. Bernard guides him to the final Vision of the Divine.
THE BEATRICE OF DANTE
161
In the New Life , the Banquet , and the Divine Comedy , the descriptions of
Beatrice are almost identical with those of Wisdom in the various books of
the Bible and the Apocrypha, which Dante was so fond of quoting, and he
identifies Beatrice continually with Love, with Wisdom, and therefore with the
Logos. In the New Life he declares her to be identical with Love , and in the
Banquet he writes: “Wherefore it is written of this eternal Love which is Wis~
dom, ‘He created me from the beginning before the world, and I shall never
fail’ (Eccles. xxiv, 9). And in the Proverbs of Solomon (viii, 23) she, Wisdom,
says, ‘I was set up from everlasting’. And in the beginning of the Gospel of
John her eternity is openly declared.”
From these and many other passages quoted or assimilated by Dante, we
see the deep hold that the Gnostic ideas had taken upon his mind, and the v
close resemblance that his Wisdom (here and in many other places identified
with the Logos and the Second Person of the Trinity) bears to that spiritual
intuition, or secret Knowledge of Divine things, common to mystics of all ages.
The highest Good, beyond which there is nothing to aspire to, Dante tells us,
is that blessedness (or beatitude) which follows the exercise of the soul in con¬
templation 2 . He has a vision of this beatitude as a child, he loses it for awhile
in the busy whirl of the active life, the pursuits of the world, the cares of the
state and the family, the duties of the soldier, the studies of the poet, the artist,
the musician, and the scientist (for the many-sided Dante was all these), but
at last the vision of the higher life, as he had seen it when a boy, came back to
him, and he returned to the love of Divine Wisdom, that “splendour of the
living Light Eternal”.
“And thus it appears”, says Dante, in the Banquet , “that our beatitude, that is,
this felicity of which we are speaking, we may first find imperfectly in the active
life, that is, in the exercise of the moral virtues, and then almost perfectly in the
contemplative life, that is, in the exercise of the intellectual virtues; which two
operations are unimpeded and most direct ways to lead us to the supreme
beatitude that cannot be obtained here below.”
The schoolmen of Dante’s time, who based their philosophical speculations
upon the system of Aristotle, defined the intellect as the capability of receiving
abstract ideas, the possibility of understanding, in short, and therefore this was
called the “possible intellect". It was compared to a mirror, and ideas to the
reflections therein, and Aristotle was the first to recognize that as this faculty
bore the same relation to pure conceptions that the sense of sight does to visible
things, it was necessary to admit also the existence of an active principle which
should stand to this in the relation of light to the sense of vision. This principle
Aristotle called the “Active Intelligence ", and in the union of this with the
Possible Intellect , is consummated, he said, the act of pure comprehension.
This Active Intelligence is universal, immortal, perpetual; “the intellectual life
through her is the greatest beatitude to which man can aspire; indeed, it marks
him more than man, divine”. So that Dante was following his master closely
when he wrote: “In every noble soul is its own virtue, and the intellectual and
1 Identical with the "Concentration” of Patanjali.— Author.
162 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
the divine”, and again in the Banquet , when he speaks of mind as ‘‘that cul¬
minating and most precious part of the soul, which is Deity” (Banquet, iii, 3).
Dante, then, in identifying Beatrice with the Logos, with “that eternal Love
which is Wisdom”, identifies her with that principle that Theosophists would
call Buddhi , or Spiritual Wisdom, the vehicle by which the Supreme (or Atma)
enters into and illuminates the mind of man. For to Dante, who followed
closely the system of Aristotle, ideas corresponded to things seen; the intellect
to the sense of sight; and the intelligence or intuition (“that most precious part
of the soul which is Deity”) to the light by whose aid alone the sense of sight
can perceive visible things. “In every noble soul is its own virtue, and the
intellectual, and the divine”, and so (while realizing that all such divisions are
- but varying aspects of the Consciousness, not different entities), Dante divides
the soul into life , which is one in all things (corresponding to Prana) ; into
feeling , which includes desire and passion (corresponding to Kama ); and into
reason (or Manas) which he divides into the higher and lower, the imaginative
and creative, and the reasoning or logical faculties. ‘‘And thus”, he says, ‘‘the
soul partakes of the Divine nature in the form of sempiternal Intelligence”
(which we should call Buddhi ), ‘‘because the soul, by virtue of this sovereign
power, is so ennobled and set free from matter, that the Divine Light, as in
the angels, can shine through her”. ‘‘And this Divine Wisdom”, says Dante,
quoting from the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon , ‘‘is the brightness of the
Everlasting Light (or Atma), the unspotted mirror of the majesty of God”.
There could scarcely be a closer parallel with the theosophic ideas than this,
and many more such passages could be cited, both from Dante’s prose and his
poetry. No less significant is that chapter of the Banquet (iv, 21) wherein he
explains the conditions necessary to growth in spiritual knowledge as they have
been so often explained to us, the absoluteness of the law that when the vessel
is ready, it will be filled, and that if some are made to honour and some to
dishonour, as St. Paul says, it is because they have made themselves fit for
such various use. If a man purify his soul, ‘‘he shall be a vessel unto honour,
sanctified, and meet for the Master’s use, and prepared unto every good work”
(2 Tim. ii, 21).
“And if it happen”, says Dante, “that by the purity of the receiving soul the
intellectual virtue be absolutely separate and free from any corporeal shadow,
then the Divine goodness multiplies in that soul, as in a thing worthy to receive
it; and further, it multiplies in the soul endowed with this intelligence according
to her capacity of reception. . . . And some are of opinion that if all these powers
should co-operate in the production of a soul according to their most favourable
disposition, the Deity would descend upon that soul in such fulness that it
would be almost another God incarnate” ( Banquet, iv, 21).
Not all the poetry and philosophy of mysticism embodied in Dante’s New
Life, however, were sufficient to convince the world at large that it was the
history of a soul that he was writing, and not that of a lover, and so in the
Banquet (begun even before the New Life was finished, and left uncompleted at
the poet’s death), he tried to be even more explicit. In the first part he declares
THE BEATRICE OF DANTE
163
his object in writing the Banquet to be twofold; firstly, to set forth certain
teachings which he could give in no other way; and secondly, to clear himself
from the infamy of being held subject to such passion as those who read his
Canzoni (lyrics) might consider to possess him, whereas not passion but virtue
was their moving cause. “And I say that Love held discourse within my mind,
that it might be understood that this Love was bom of the noblest part of our
nature, that is, of Truth and Virtue, and also to exclude any false opinion of
me, by which my love might be suspected of being a sensuous delight”. . . .
“By my lady”, he says again, “I always mean that Philosophy treated of in the
preceding Canzone" —that is, Philosophy identified there with Wisdom, “which
exists above all in God, because in Him is supreme Wisdom, and supreme Love,
and supreme Power, which cannot exist elsewhere, except as it proceeds from
Him. Therefore the Divine Philosophy is of the Divine Essence, because in
Him can be nothing added to His Essence; and she is most noble, because the
Divine Essence is most noble: and she exists in Him perfectly and truly, as it
were by eternal wedlock.”
Therefore I think, we may conclude, from Dante’s own words, that his Bea¬
trice was the light of Divine Wisdom first made manifest to him in his youth,
then for a time obscured by the shadows of the world, to shine out more clearly
than ever as he neared the end of his mortal pilgrimage. He spent the last
nineteen years of his life in loneliness and exile, occupied with his greatest work,
the Divine Comedy , and writing at the same time the Banquet , a prose exposi¬
tion of his philosophy, full of hints as to the hidden meaning of his symbolism,
so often and so grossly misunderstood. To a man whose thoughts continually
soared above the earthly plane, whose very features bore such marks of pro¬
found study and profound sorrow, that the Florentine women pointed at him
as he passed, and said: “There goes the man who has seen Hell”; to a regen¬
erated soul who had chosen the contemplative life as his beatitude, what need
was there of earthly ties? There is no occasion, I think, to stigmatize the wife
of Dante as unworthy of him, because he did not send for her to join him in
his exile: he had become a wandering ghost, wrapped in visions of another world,
long before his body was laid to rest in the ancient city of Ravenna.
“And since God is the source of our soul”, says the great poet and seer in
his last work, “and has made it like unto Himself, therefore this soul desires
above all things to return to Him. . . . And because her knowledge is imper¬
fect, because she has neither experience nor learning, things of little value seem
great to her, and therefore she begins by first desiring them. . . . Wherefore
we may see that one desirable thing stands before the next one to the eyes of
the soul, almost like a pyramid; for at first the smallest thing hides all the
rest, and is, as it were, the point of the ultimate subject of desire, which is God,
standing at the base of all” ( Banquet , iv, 12).
“Therefore” (says Dante again, in his book on the Monarchy) “the ineffable
Providence of God proposes to man two aims; the one the beatitude of this life,
which consists in the operation of his peculiar faculties, and is represented by
the tcrre^al paradise: the other the beatitude of the eternal life, which con-
164
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
sists in the fruition of the Divine aspect, to which human goodness cannot
ascend if not aided by the Divine light, and this is what is meant by the celestial
paradise. To these two beatitudes, as to diverse conclusions, we must arrive
by different ways.” And again, in the Paradiso:
All natures, by their destinies diverse,
Tend more or less close to their origin;
Hence they move onward unto different ports
O'er the great sea of being; and each one
With instinct given it, which bears it on.
Katharine Hillard, F.T.S.
I have aforetime seen at the opening day , the eastern sky all rosy red, and the
other parts of the heavens adorned with a beautiful serenity, and the face of the sun
rise shadowed, so that , tempered by mist, the eye for long could endure it.
Thus in a cloud of flowers, which arose from angelic hands, and showered down
again within and without, a Lady appeared to me, crowned with olive over a veil of
snowy white, and, under a green mantle, clad in hue of living flame.
And my spirit, now that so long a time had passed, was not, though trembling,
broken down by awe in her presence; and, without having further knowledge of her
with my eyes, through some occult virtue that went out from her, felt the great potency
of the ancient love.
As soon as smote upon my sight that high virtue which already had transfixed me
while I was as yet a boy, I turned me to the left with the confidence of a little child
who runs to his mother when he is afraid or when in trouble , to say to Virgil: Less
than a drop of blood is left in me that does not tremble; I know the token of the
ancient flame .—Dante (Purgatorio XXX).
REVIEWS
1
Atew £*6/e Evidence , by Sir Charles Marston, F.S.A.; Fleming H. Revell Co.,
New York; price, $2.00.
In reading this book, we are once more impressed by the immense amount of
light thrown, by means of archaeological research, upon what have long been
considered very hazy and questionable traditions. In some of the so-called
critical methods of the past few generations, there has been a marked tendency
to discredit many of the ancient records which have been preserved and which
have come down to us; to relegate them, rather contemptuously, to the realm
of “fairy tales”—as though “even fairy tales” had no foundation in truth!
By means of very painstaking investigation, comparison and analysis, Sir
Charles Marston, long known to us in connection with excavations in Palestine
in company with Professor Garstang, has given us striking proof of the reality
of certain events referred to in the Bible—events, the actual occurrence of
which has been under dispute—and his conclusions are based on very con¬
vincing archaeological data known but recently. Professor Garstang, for
many years in charge of the excavations at Jericho and other ancient cities, has
discovered, after careful and systematic work, much testimony as to the correct
chronology of the Old Testament from the Exodus onward, and as a result of
pottery-dating (the modem archaeological method), has been able to establish
the true date of the conquest of Jericho by Joshua. He places it more than
two centuries earlier than has hitherto been supposed.
This readjustment of dates—throwing backwards by two hundred and
twenty odd years many of the former calculations—does not, however, affect
Palestine and its history only. It has re-staged, as it were, one of the oldest
of historical and archaeological mysteries. The date of the Exodus has long been
a matter of dispute, and until very recently it was generally placed in the XIXth
Dynasty, Rameses II being thought the Pharaoh of the Oppression, with
Memeptah, a weaker follower, as the Pharaoh of the Exodus. But where,
then, was the all-powerful “daughter of Pharaoh” who found the infant Moses
in the bulrushes, and who befriended him throughout so many troublous years?
There is no known woman of the XIXth Dynasty who would seem capable of
having assumed this prominent r 61 e. Now, however, with this revision of
dates on thoroughly sound, archaeological evidence, we find ourselves moving
in the gre^^VIIIth Dynasty, with Thothmes III as the Pharaoh of the Op-
165
*
166
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
pression, his successor Amenhotep II, as the Pharaoh who (after a prolonged
struggle with Jehovah) finally let the Children of Israel go, and the gifted and
imperious Princess Hatshepsut, direct descendant of the old Theban royal
line which gave her a unique right to the throne, as the long-sought “Pharaoh’s
daughter”. All the known facts, as well as the human characteristics which
have become so familiar to us, now corroborate the statements of the Old
Testament. It was only the supposed date which made the reconciliation
difficult—though why the truth was not earlier accepted is hard to under¬
stand, for Josephus, even though usually scoffing at Manetho’s dating, has
definitely given the name of the mysterious Princess as “Thermuthis”, and
it does not take much imagination to reacj. into this name that of Tahutimes or
Thothmes, with the first three of whom she was so closely associated. It will
be remembered that Hatshepsut was the daughter of Thothmes I, and was the
real heir to the throne, hence her far-reaching influence; that she married
Thothmes II who died soon after, and then the mighty Thothmes III (half
commoner), and that many years of struggle for supremacy between these
two ensued, Hatshepsut, because of her “divine birth”, usually managing to
retain her royal ascendency. Therefore, so long as Hatshepsut lived, Moses
would have had a powerful protector. She was a remarkable woman in every
way, as all the records show. Is it possible that, as she bent over the lonely
baby in his little “ark” hidden among the reeds by the river bank, she recog¬
nized something unusual about him—the future Initiate which The Secret
Doctrine tells us he was? Was that, perhaps, part of the mystery of his claim
upon her? There are many questions as to that first meeting and the later
connection which one would like to have answered. When she died, the “Op¬
pression” by the great but uncompromising Thothmes III would have begun,
and the Exodus, so difficult of accomplishment, would finally be forced under
Amenhotep II,—by no means a weakling, however, as the obstinate holding
out against the several plagues would indicate. There is one curious fact which
would seem to accord with the dating of the plagues at this period of Egyptian
history. Readers of the Quarterly (January, 1935), may remember that
there is a well-known and very interesting record of Thothmes IV, now recog¬
nized as the son of the Pharaoh of the Exodus. Thothmes IV came to the
throne unexpectedly; he was not the original heir, but his elder brother had
died prematurely. Could we, perhaps, connect this death with the last of the
plagues: the death of every “first born” in the land? We do not wish to make
Sir Charles Marston responsible for the suggestion, but there can be no doubt
that the unlooked-for coming to the throne of the young Prince Thothmes is
given a more prominent place in the ancient annals than such an occurrence
usually receives.
The facts put forward in this book are in general most interesting. We
cannot help feeling, however, that there is an unnecessary amount of repeti¬
tion of statements and of references—repetition which is confusing rather than
elucidating, as an over-supply of material to work on is invariably confusing
until well sifted. \\ e also feel that some of the philosophizing is without war-
REVIEWS
167
rant, such, for instance, as the part concerning the evolution of religion, and
the statement in regard to Dr. Langdon’s “discovery” that monotheism always
precedes polytheism. This is not an attempt to throw discredit upon Dr.
Langdon’s monumental work, Semitic Mythology; but to claim that he discovered
a fact which Theosophy has taught throughout the ages, seems to us to reveal
a very limited knowledge of the subject, and all that has been written upon it.
There are other portions of the book with which students of Theosophy will
not agree, but there is so much in it of valuable information, that anyone even
moderately versed in Bible history or study, will find it very helpful.
T.D.
The Nineteenth Century and After , March, 1937; London; price, 35.
We call attention to this issue of the well-known English magazine because
it contains an article by Nesta H. Webster, entitled “Marie Antoinette: A
Slandered Queen”, which many readers of the Quarterly will wish to read.
Mrs. Webster disposes effectively of the Fersen legend, and deals with the
pseudo-historian, Herr Stefan Zweig, as he deserves. We despise slanderers,
whether of the living or the dead, and we despise them all the more when their
victim is a woman, and when they assume, like Zweig, that stories against her
must be true because they are nasty. There is not a shadow of evidence to
support such accusations against Marie Antoinette, any more than there is in
the case of the murdered Empress of Russia. On the contrary, all the evidence,
and all the human probabilities, exonerate them completely. Herr Zweig goes
so far as to ignore the existence of Mrs. Sullivan, and Fersen’s avowed relations
with her, as he knows it would be impossible to reconcile these with his defama¬
tion of the Queen. It is not easy to account for this malignant dishonesty (and
there are others besides Zweig). “Or is it,” as Mrs. Webster asks, “as Ovid
recorded two thousand years ago in his Tristia , that illicit love is a ‘best seller’?
Thus it must be invented where it never existed in order to commend books
of small intrinsic worth to the jaded palates of the patrons of lending libraries?
Or is it that enemies of monarchy, of Christianity, and indeed of European
civilization, inflamed with hatred against all that commands reverence, all that
is hallowed by tradition, hurl themselves against this woman as symbolical of
that superiority they have vowed to destroy?”
The subject concerns members of The Theosophical Society, whose motto is,
“There is no Religion higher than Truth”, because, if it be true, as Mrs. Webster
states, that a film of Marie Antoinette is shortly to be produced, it is almost
certain that the “love interest” will be a sensational version of the Fersen myth,
as sponsored by Zweig and his compares, —in which case it will be the duty and
privilege of all of us to protest against the vulgarization of a great tragedy, and,
in the name of truth and fair-play and decency, to defend the honour of the
martyred ^^een.
Calumny of the dead should be punished as a crime. T.
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
168
Mediaeval Legends of Christ, by A. S. Rappoport, Ph.D.; Charles Scribner’s
Sons, New York, 1935; price, $3.00.
There are, or course, more reasons than one for reading legends, but readers
who are drawn by the title of this book to seek in it spiritual food, have dis¬
appointment in store. It contains a fair number of legends, gathered from a
moderate variety of sources, but the compiler has retold them in his own lan¬
guage—at the sacrifice of beauty, flavour, individuality. Those who love the
Biblical phraseology, and who are familiar, for instance, with the priest named
Zacharias who walked in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord,
may recognize him with difficulty when presented as “the husband of the in¬
fant’s aunt”. Similarly, tales from French, Old English or whatever sources,
when divorced from their original quaint form and setting and clothed in the
same infelicitous garb, seem rather like a group of little orphans.
When motifs, originating perhaps in pagan antiquity, recur among different
peoples and widely divergent faiths, the compiler, in explanation, offers nothing
deeper than the assertion that religious ideas and myths and legends “wander
all over the world—they are carried hither and thither like light leaves by the
breeze, from the East to the West and from the West to the East”. The whole
fabric of Mediaeval religious life seems not even to be glimpsed by him, nor the
long, slow growth of legendary lore through devotion, aspiration and loving
contemplation. The measure of his understanding is perhaps indicated in his
observation that, “Instead of reasoning and collecting facts, the religious mind
in legend can dream pleasantly and be instructed as well as entertained”. What¬
ever the merits of the book, its aftermath is: Why gather flowers at all, if in¬
sensible to their beauty and perfume, and impervious to the message they
bring? J.C.
La Penste et le Mouvant, by Henri Bergson; Librairie F£lix Alcan, Paris;
price, $1.00.
In our opinion, Bergson is one of the very few philosophers of the twen¬
tieth century whose work will survive. During the decade before the World
War, when his influence was at its height, his power as a moulder of ideas was
international in scope. There can be no doubt that this influence was, on the
whole, beneficent. Bergson exposed the inadequacies and fallacies of the
mechanistic materialism which had become the “orthodox” doctrine of so many
schools. He re-affirmed the existence of Spirit, the significance of conscious¬
ness as the only fact in Nature, the certainty of which is incontestable. Using
the evidence assembled by the biologists themselves, he demonstrated that
evolution is a creative process in which man can participate, if he so will. He
re-stated the function of the philosopher,—which is, not to invent abstract
systems without reference to concrete events, but to meditate upon experi¬
ence. It is a fact that an existent thing can only be known through an experi¬
ence of it. . . . This experience bears the name of ‘intuition’ when its object
is Spirit. . . . This metaphysical experience is akin to that of the great
mystics.”
REVIEWS
169
With the exception of two introductory chapters, “Thought and Motive
Force is a collection of essays and lectures dating from 1903 to 1923. Many
chapters are quite technical, dealing with subjects which can scarcely interest
the general reader. In particular, Bergson returns again and again to the
problem of time. He discovered, or rather re-discovered, a truth, which should
always be self-evident: that mathematical time—the “divided time” of our
clocks is an invention of the mind; that real time or duration is continuous
and indivisible, since it is inseparable from the Han vital , the stream of con¬
sciousness, the universal creative energy. But he assumes too readily that
there can be no Being apart from flux and change. He questions the validity
of the ancient doctrine that all time, all transition is “a moving image of Eter¬
nity , for he seems to believe that this “Eternity” is a mathematical term
corresponding to nothing outside the intellect. However, the reality of the
Eternal, of immutable and timeless Being, is a fundamental proposition of all
great metaphysical traditions. It is legitimate to regard it, not as an arbitrary
assumption of the intellect, but as a deduction from actual “metaphysical
experience”.
It may be argued that “metaphysical experience” is the basis of the unify-
generalizations by which classical philosophy has under various forms rep¬
resented the inner oneness of the Universe. The Ideas of Plato, the One of
Plotinus, the Substance of Spinoza, the undivided Self of the Vedanta, point
to the possibility, nay the certainty, that the unmanifested essence of Nature,
as well as its manifested ever-changing form , can become an object of real
knowledge. In Greek mythology, Chronos, the lord of things temporal, is the
offspring of Uranus, the everlasting Heaven.
Bergson s tendency to question the truth within these magnificent concepts
may be partly explained by the fact that their content becomes barren when
the “metaphysical experience” which justifies them is not perpetually re¬
newed. The Hegelian idealism of the nineteenth century was as void of life
and meaning as the materialism which it opposed. It might even be said that
the materialists were closer to the truth because they at least had some con¬
tact with experience, however limited it might be, whereas the idealists were
for the most part only playing with ideas as a pure mathematician plays with
formulae. Bergson’s principal aim seems to have been to induce both the ideal¬
ist and the materialist to repeat the experiment of Descartes, to recover the
immediate vision of reality. When the mind is crowded with lifeless ideas,
it would seem that its only salvation is a return to experience, which implies
a tentative rejection of all that it thinks it knows, a vigorous investigation
of the sources of all conceptions. It is interesting to note that the philosophers
of France have through the centuries been especially active as defenders of
this experimental method of approaching truth.- One need only mention
Descartes, Pascal, F^nelon, Maine de Biran.
Bergson acknowledges a particular indebtedness to a French philosopher of
the nineteenth century, Ravaisson. Ravaisson was one of the most remark¬
able men of his time, although he is unfortunately little known outside France.
170
THE0S0PHICAL QUARTERLY
Therefore, the essay on his work which is included in the present volume is of
exceptional value and interest. One is impressed by the theosophical trend of
Ravaisson’s thought. Two citations from Bergson’s essay should make this
clear. In the first, reference is made to Ravaisson’s little treatise on “Habit”.
The author actually presents here his philosophy of nature. What is nature? How
are we to represent its inner being? What does it hide under the regular succession of
causes and effects? Does it hide something, or can it be reduced, in the last analysis, to
a wholly superficial complex of movements which work into one another mechanically?
In conformity with his principle, Ravaisson seeks the solution of this general problem
by means of a very concrete intuition, the intuition of our own mode of being when we
contract a habit. For a “motor habit”, once contracted, is a mechanism, a series of
movements which determine one another: it is that part of us which is inserted in nature
and which coincides with nature; it is nature itself. Moreover, our inner experience
shows us in every habit an activity which has passed, by insensible degrees, from con¬
sciousness to unconsciousness, from the voluntary to the automatic. Is it not under this
form, as an obscured consciousness and a dormant will, that we should represent nature?
Habit thus provides the living demonstration of this truth that mechanism is not self-
sufficient: it is, so to speak, only the fossilized residue of a spiritual activity.
This is an admirable example of reasoning from the known to the unknown,
and also of seeking in consciousness, in the inner world, the explanation of the
material and the external. Incidentally, it recalls the antithesis between pu-
rusha and prakriti, between the spirit and its vesture, which is the central theme
of the Sankhya system of ancient India, and which is so familiar to all readers
of the Bhagavad Gita.
In a complementary passage, Bergson illustrates Ravaisson’s analogy be¬
tween the exfoliation of the Universe and the creative act of the artist.
If life be a creation, we should be able to represent its analogy with the creations which
we can observe, that is, with those which we accomplish ourselves. In artistic creation,
for example, the material to be used—words and images, forms and colours, rhythms and
harmonies seems to be spontaneously set in order under the impulsion of the idea which
it must express, attracted, as it were, in some way by the charm of a superior ideality.
Is there not an analogous movement, a state of fascination, which we should attribute to
the material elements when they are organized in living beings? In the view of Ravaisson,
the force which originates life is of the same nature as that of persuasion. But whence
come the materials which have undergone this enchantment? To this question, the
highest of all, Ravaisson replies by revealing in the original production of matter a move¬
ment which is the inverse of that which occurs when matter is organized. If organiza¬
tion be like an awakening of matter, matter may be only the spirit falling to sleep. It is
the last degree, the shadow of an existence which has attenuated itself and, so to speak,
emptied itself of its content. If matter be “the base of natural existence, the base from
which—by that continuous progress which is the order of nature, passing from degree
to degree, from kingdom to kingdom—all returns to the unity of the spirit”, inversely, we
shou d represent at the beginning a distension of the spirit, a diffusion in space and time,
which constitutes materiality. The infinite Thought “has annulled some part of the
plenitude of its being, in order to draw forth from this, by a kind of awakening and
resurrection, all that exists.” ... 'I hus the Universe is presented to us as the external
aspect of a reality which, seen from within and known as it is in itself, appears to us as a
tree gift, as a great act of generosity and love.
S.V.
CORRESPONDENCE
171
Faiths and Fellowship (World Congress of Faiths, London, 1936), with Fore¬
word by Sir Francis Younghusband; J. M. Watkins, 21 Cecil Court, London,
1937; price, 155.
This volume contains addresses by representatives of the different faiths of
the world,—by men such as Dr. Suzuki, Sir S. Radhakrishnan, Professor J.
Emile Marcault, Mr. S. I. Hsiung, A. Yusuf Ali, Professor Berdiaeff, S. N. Das
Gupta, Sir Abdul Qadir, and others, with a resume of the discussions, together
with a report of the public meetings held in London as part of the proceedings.
The Maharaja Gaekwar of Baroda is President of the Congress, which will
meet again this year, July 23rd to 27th, at Oxford, England.
The addresses, and the discussions which followed, are of great and lasting
interest. The Congress met on the understanding that no religion should be
regarded as exclusively true, but as complementary one to the other, and as
mutually contributory to World Fellowship. We hope to revert to the contents
later, but mention the book now, as we have been asked to announce the meet¬
ing at Oxford in July. The publisher, Mr. J. M. Watkins, is to be congratulated
on the admirable appearance of his volume. H.
CORRESPONDENCE
To the Editors of the Theosophical Quarterly:
I happened to pick up a copy of the Quarterly for January, 1937, in the
Library, and noticed that you are friends with all religions; but on page 73
you say, “Unconcerned about politics; hostile to the insane dreams of Socialism
and of Communism, which it abhors”. That seemed a bit odd to me because
the Federal Council of Churches has a socialist programme, which it appears
now to be making an integral part of its religion—“to bring the Kingdom of
God on earth”, as they say. Therefore, if you are hostile to Socialism, you are
hostile to Protestant Christianity, because socialism is basic to Protestant
Christianity at least in the United States. Personally I do not blame you for
being hostile to Socialism, but it does seem a bit contradictory.
I was interested to read about Theosophy in the encyclopaedia. The Quar¬
terly says that you have no creed or dogma, but the basic principles as an¬
nounced by H.P.B. certainly are “apriorism”—quite. That means as a neces¬
sary consequence—dogma. I have studied some of the beliefs current in India,
and what I read of Theosophy is indeed suggestive of India. Perhaps in the
Quarterly it might have been more clearly expressed by saying that Theos¬
ophy has dogma and plenty of it, but its dogma is not insisted upon for mem¬
bership—much as is the case with the more liberal Christian churches.
Theosophy is primarily interested in finding the “truth”. That is what all
Christians want, except those who believe that they already have it! But if
you will pardon the observation, the method of “apriorism” does not appeal to
me to be ^yalid method. Certainly that of Kant was not. But I will say
that the method Theosophy uses is as good as that of the more liberal Christian
172
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
churches—but not more so. However, it seems to me problematical in the
extreme, if Theosophy ever will find the “truth”, any more than will Christianity.
Certainly the lore of the East does not seem as likely to be fruitful of results
as does the thought of Hegel, Berkeley, Hume and Hobbes among the moderns,
or of the little appreciated Cameades among the ancients. Perhaps that has
something to do with the reason why Theosophy has divided into East and
West branches. However, I do not condemn esoteric thought ipso facto; it
would depend upon what that esoteric thought is. No, I could not agree with the
college boy, who was disgusted with the Quarterly, and I hope you will excuse
the liberty of expressing some views anent Theosophy, as merely a superficial
observer. A Reader.
Reply
1. That which seems to the writer of the foregoing letter “a bit contradic¬
tory”, is the result of a two-fold misunderstanding. First, neither the Theo-
sophical Quarterly nor the Society of which it is the official organ, has any
connection with any Church, whether Protestant, Roman, Buddhist or other.
Second, the Federal Council of Protestant Churches in America speaks for a
section only of Protestant Christianity, that is, for the radical, humanitarian
element in Protestantism, which reverses the teaching of Christ by giving
love of our neighbour priority over “the first and great commandment”,—
love of “the Lord thy God”, the result of which reversal is to treat man’s per¬
sonal comfort as of primary importance, and to regard his relations with the
spiritual world and his own soul, as the result, not the cause, of his environ¬
ment. Fortunately for America, there are still great numbers of Protestants
who do not fall into this crude error, and who do not believe that mankind
can be legislated into the kingdom of heaven.
2. Articles in encyclopaedias are often written by doctrinaires whose knowl¬
edge is clouded by their bias as well as by their sense of superiority. Articles
on Theosophy in the Encyclopcedia Britannica are superficial, and in many
important respects, misleading. It is more profitable to read a book by a
Theosophist, such as The Ocean of Theosophy , by William Q. Judge. Echoes
from the Orient , also by Judge, serves as an admirable introduction to the
subject.
Theosophy relies as much upon the a posteriori as upon the a priori method.
It is not content to reason from cause to effect, or from universals to particulars,
but insists upon the need to “prove all things” by verifying deductions in
the light of experience. For example, while it is legitimate to postulate the
existence of the soul, and to believe in it, the student of Theosophy considers
it his duty to seek within himself the evidence which will turn his belief into
knowledge. It is one of the basic principles of Theosophy that knowledge is
obtainable.
4. It is not stated in the Quarterly or elsewhere that Theosophy is without
dogma, but that the Society as such has “no creed, dogma, nor personal au-
CORRESPONDENCE
i 73
thority to enforce or impose”. The writer of “some views anent Theosophy”
is quite correct in saying that “Theosophy has dogma and plenty of it”. See-
ing that Theosophy is the ancient Wisdom Religion from which all other reli¬
gions were derived, it necessarily has dogmas, which, after all, simply means
that it has doctrines.
5. It is important, however, to distinguish between Theosophy as Divine
Wisdom, “eternal in the heavens”, and Theosophy as indicated in the writings
of Madame Blavatsky, Judge and others. It is impossible to do more than
indicate Divine Truth in human terms. Knowledge is obtainable, but only
by becoming the Truth that is. Reason can guide us, as Virgil guided Dante,
but only to the threshold of knowledge, after which, vision—direct experience
—leads the way to Union. In the same way, Christianity will not “find” the
truth; it is the Truth, like all the great religions. But this eternal Truth could
be expressed in symbols and in parables only, as in the mystery of the divine
life and death and resurrection, and Christians (though hardly any realize it)
can find the whole Truth in no other way than by union with Christ, who is
the Way, the Truth, and the Life,—the source, if they use it, of their ultimate
immortality.
6. It is not usual to bracket such divergent thinkers as Hegel, Berkeley,
Hume and Hobbes, but, in the light of Theosophy, which reconciles so many
seeming contradictories, all of them may be studied with advantage as repre¬
senting visible rays in the spectrum of Truth; Cameades too, for that matter,
though we should soon outgrow the stage at which a philosophy of scepticism
is helpful; a cathartic is not a diet.
7. We are glad to receive criticisms of Theosophy or of the Quarterly,
and are much obliged to our correspondent for the opportunity he provides
to remove misconceptions under which others of our readers may have laboured.
The Editors of the Theosophical Quarterly.
Let not thy peace depend on the tongues of men; for , whether they judge well of
thee or ill , thou art not on that account other than thyself .— Thomas A Kempis.
Not in the clamour of the crowded street ,
Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng ,
But in ourselves are triumph and defeat.
—Longfellow.
Question No. 401. —It is said that we have the faults of our virtues. Could this be illustrated?
Have we also the virtues of our faults?
Answer. —We may be determined and persevering; we must take care not to become
obstinate and opinionated. A man of aggressive courage may become rash, and so jeopardize
all for which he is striving. In being charitable to the weaknesses of others, we may be over¬
come with sentimentality. And so on. Every fault in us has, as its opposite, a corresponding
virtue, into which that fault can be changed. But we only have these virtues potentially,
until we have done something about it; until we have recognized the need for their attain¬
ment, have desired in our hearts their attainment above all things, and have set our faces
and have aligned our wills to that end. C.R.A.
Answer. —An article by Mr. Griscom, entitled “Vanity”, in the Theosophical Quarterly
for January, 1919, gives an illuminating table of virtues, faults and sins. The article states:
“Every spiritual quality has its defective operation or negative aspect, and its polar opposite.
A defective operation or negative aspect of a virtue is a fault. Its polar opposite is a sin.”
Mr. Griscom gave as examples of this: humility (virtue), pride (fault), vanity (sin). Again:
love (virtue), indifference (fault), self-love (sin).
The virtues of most of us are only partially developed, are shot through and through with
some form of self, and are at best but a pale reflection of those of a Master. We are able to
recognize virtues but dimly through the veils of our personalities. Mr. Griscom’s definition
of a fault, therefore, should prove helpful in enabling us to discover not only what are some
of our faults, but of which of the virtues they are the “defective operation or negative aspect”.
If the ideal of perfection exemplified in our own individual Master is kept constantly before
us, and an honest and determined effort made to obey the admonition, “Man know thyself”,
we shall become more keenly aware of our faults, and at the same time sharpen our perception
of the virtues we have perverted. Such a practice would also help us to purify our motives,
and assist us in avoiding the danger of thinking that the possession of a virtue in and of itself
is necessarily of any real merit. Our ideal should be to regard the elimination of faults and
the acquisition of virtues as aids in making us better instruments for the work of Masters.
G.H.M.
Answer, —We have powers, which are faults or virtues in accordance with the way in which
they are used and our purpose in using them. That which springs from self-love, or is directed
to its gratification, is a fault. The same power used for an end other than self, a purpose of
righteousness, becomes a virtue. Our task is to transform all our faults into virtues, to re¬
claim the force we have locked in them, and to use it for the Masters’ purposes. Timidity,
for instance, is a fault, but prudence, and the power to estimate risks accurately, are virtues.
Recklessness is a fault, but the power to “dare the impossible”, to run any and all risks, with¬
out a thought of the danger, when duty or the service of one’s cause demands it, is a virtue
essential to manliness. All our powers are divine in origin. Perhaps we might say that a
174
I
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 175
virtue is the habit of using a given force for the purposes of the soul; a fault is the habit of
perverting it to the use of the personality. J.F.B.M.
Question No. 402. —Is there any advantage in choosing work which n goes against the grain ”,
if one can find some congetiial occupation which would not involve neglect of an obvious duty? Do
not people do best the work they enjoy?
Answer. —The wording of the question is obscure. Does one put the finding of a congenial
occupation first, and make the performance of obvious duties incidental to it? Why should
one choose work simply because it “goes against the grain”, when it has nothing to do with
any obvious duty?
Once we have set our faces towards ch£laship, there cannot possibly be any more congenial
occupation, there is nothing we can enjoy more, than the performance of our duties, or those
things which we are able to recognize as duties, at the point at which we find ourselves. At
that stage, all our duties may not be obvious. We shall have to ask ourselves, “Is this not a
duty?” As we seek, we shall find. As we grow, as our performance improves, new duties will
be added unto us, new privileges, new opportunities for service. After a while, we shall not
have time to look for congenial occupations. Nothing will be congenial but the doing of that
which is our duty. There will be no time, no desire, for anything else.
Finally, we shall find ourselves asking, “Is this a duty? Will the Work be aided or bene¬
fited in any way by my interesting myself in it? Of what real, practical value is it to the
Movement?” If it fails to measure up in these terms, we discard it, whether it is congenial,
or whether it goes against the grain. Nor, if it is the latter, need we fear that we are missing
some opportunity for inner growth and development. If we are wholeheartedly trying to
expand an ever-widening field of duties, we shall find, in their very multiplicity, enough of
those which go against the grain to afford us ample opportunity for hardening and toughening
our moral fibre. Nor will it be for long that they will “go against the grain”, once we realize
the opportunity that they present. C.R.A.
Answer. —Let us, first, get our planes straightened out. Man is a creature of dual nature;
he has a Higher Self and a lower self, the latter created by himself through his misuse of divine
force. This lower self is essentially selfish, and grasps at, and clings to, whatever it finds con¬
genial. These two natures within man are in constant conflict, man’s immortality depending
on the Higher Self regaining its sovereign authority over his whole nature. Hence it is safe
to surmise that the Higher Self and the lower self are not, necessarily, in accord as to congenial
occupations. The probability is, that usually they are at variance on the subject. The lower
self seeks to have its own will. The Higher Self is concerned with the will of the Father, and
with training the whole nature to be an instrument for carrying out the Father’s work. Any
occupation furthering that work would be congenial to the Higher Self, no matter how it might
go against the grain of the lower self. It would be part of the training of the latter. Of course,
it may be a duty, sometimes, to do work that the lower self finds congenial, which allows the
exercise, for the sake of others, of some talent one has developed in the past. However, it
should be clear that against-the-grain work can create new talents, which, added to previous
acquirements, can make us more useful for any task which may be set by the Father. The
answer to life is not to be found in what is congenial or enjoyable to the lower self, but in how
best to develop new talents which, through the Higher Self, are placed at the disposal of the
Father. G.M.W.K.
Answer. —The application of common-sense is the best solution of such problems. If it is
a question of the best means of earning a living, it would clearly be wrong and also foolish
not to select one which would best promote the discharge of that duty, regardless of whether
or not it “went against the grain”. In the case of an aspirant for ch61aship, any harmless act
of self-dis^J^ne, self-imposed, would be fruitful,—that is, so long as it is not carried out at
the expensrof others. G.H.M.
NOTICE OF CONVENTION
The Theosophical Society
To the Branches of The Theosophical Society:
Mews T New n Yo U rk ***** be held at 6 <' Washi ^ ton
2 LTl- u? d y ' Apnl 2< * th - > 937 , beginning at 10:30 a. m.
TbeseXt “"iT « » “" d —*
who is resident in New York or is to attend th r ' t0 ^ ° ffi ^ er ° T member of the Society
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to to. w Ur*” °' y ~‘- ,h ' - d ~ "< *"■ C»™*ton «
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Secretary, The Theosophical Society,
February 15th, 1937. ‘ U * Box 64 ’ Station 0 , New York, N. Y.
NOTICE OF MEETINGS
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•to to New Veto. Visitore .he he totted to'**
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Philosophical: Abridgment of the Secret Doctrmp* t • t* -i ,ce °1 the Silence.
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The Theojanhical Society and TWphy ° CCult World i ^ Ocean of Theosophy:
L. XXXIV, No. 3
Founded by R, p. Blavafsky at llew York In 1875
|HE Society does not pretend to be able
, «--- -v ioviv to establish
at once a universal brotherhood among men, hot
only strives to create the nucleus of such a body.
y °* Its members believe that an acquaintance
with the world s religions and philosophies will
reveal, as the common and fundamental principle
underlying these, that "spiritual identity of 7l SoukSX
W L C t “% ba3isof *«* brotherhood, and man!
of nature 4 and mTnwill stillf«Xr emKie^Ls^eyeS
dovIi e n^“^?.“ “ L " h ?L ,jr . sectarian, with no creed.
mmmwm
fraternal goodwill andttSCxT does h . ereb y proclaim
Theosophy and members of d te m l - Tc^. aU stod entsof
and however sitSK It fufc™'. 1 f 00 * 4 *" wherever
hearty sympathy S ^ avers its
organisations inwall theosoohirlf sucfl Persons and
government and administration nia t te * s except those of
"■«*<» and £%%££* “<* «"*«* tbeir cor.
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and unselfish regard one for peace, gentleness#
such knowledge of men and nature as'shafi SV. Cq *t ^ of
tion and advancement of the human * S * enc * f° the eleva-
••^WaiidlrMlyprofferstevS SendS “ 0St£f i e ndly
arodifKted tothepurif&o^of ^religious bodies whose
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PUBLISHED BY
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CONTENTS OF VOL. XXXIV, NO. 3
July, 1937
NOTES AND COMMENTS.
FRAGMENTS.
THE CORONATION.
THE STONE OF DESTINY.
MAN, THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS.
“MAN, KNOW THYSELF".
FOLLOW UP!.
T.S. ACTIVITIES: Convention Report; Letters op Greeting
REVIEWS.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS.
PAGE
• i79
. 191
• i93
• i 97
. 200
. 209
. 2T2
■ 215
■ 255
263
Act of March 3, 187^°" ° laS3 matter September 5, 1933, at the Post Office at New York,
in. Y., under the
Copyright, 1937, by The Theosophical Society
of such study; and t h * * sciences » and the demons c . ,ent an <* modern
»VLt % ,A A
~US
*"*•'»~ - —*. tmf.5%%
E "°”' T "
NOTES ^COMMENTS
J ULY, 1937
-, -.
7 * they tffl use it, it is nSSS- fn PhyS1 . aStS - In the sen se in which
not an indivisible unit but a congeriesVf ^ at ° m ” ° f moder n science is
asT"h P r t0nS ’ eleCtr0ns ’ P os itrons, neutrraT etc ^ TheSC infinitesimal en-
as a whole as the ce]ls of ^ organ . sm are Ut r r °^ , e t c -are related to the atom
ey are, as it were, organs or parts of a lar ° 116 1Vlng body as a whole
royt Although they are saidTo differ 2T “ d ^ be Cached
i t !° n ' 1S quite impossible to visualize them \ ^ maSS and structu re and
look like if they could be sufficiently maraud’/ ' maglne what they would
^d^ eyes - An electron, for instance Z 2 k T t0 . See them with our
pparent contradictions. It is both a clot of m n 6 deScnbed by a series of
electricity; it is both a particle and a wavicle-T^ ^ 3 Charge of negative
also takes up the whole of space The dt ’ l ° CCUpies a g ive n position and
tempted to believe that the physical atom wither? SpeCtator is sometimes
a mathematical phantom, incapable of existence outs d IS nothing but
The electron itself may be as unsubstantial 1 T* ® SClentific intellect.
1 IS alleged to explain are concrete enough f * • rearn ’ but the facts which
activity and transmutation, it has been manifesTthaT rt, ^i d ' SCOvery of mdio-
of matter is not as simple as the nineteenth celt ultlmate cons titution
e , As Madame Blavatsky suggested fifty v ^ matenallsts fancied it to
substance and force. cannoTbe SSefshTS'S ^ 3nd
the definition of light as a vibration in some h V oo w TV example > tba t
that physical light is the visible emanation or i f her IS inadequate;
in its proper nature is invisible and inrnm ? je i Ctlon a substance which
not developed the "sixth sense^chr^lt i^S^ " ^ We ba -
contemporary physicists have reached a simihrV ' Strange “ h may seem,
- » t , i8h , **
179
i8o
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
has been necessary to postulate forms of matter which are quite inconceivable,
inasmuch as they bear little or no resemblance to any of the forms within the
range of our sensation or imagination.
We should not be surprised or shocked, if at least one new “fundamental
particle” of matter were “discovered” each year. The latest of these revela¬
tions occurred at the April meeting of the American Physical Society. Certain
very ingenious experiments with the so-called “cosmic rays” have convinced
Drs. J. C. Street and E. C. Stevenson of Harvard that at least 80 per cent of
this radiation reaching sea level is composed of corpuscles of a type hitherto
unrecognized. We quote from The New York Times , April 30, 1937.
The particles, it was stated by Professor H. A. Bothe of Cornell University, may be
a fundamental atomic entity that does not occur at all on the earth, constituting a cos¬
mic wanderer from an entirely different world, where matter is differently fashioned
than in our own corner of the cosmos. Ever since the discovery of the cosmic rays, the
most penetrating form of radiant energy so far observed in the universe, leading scien¬
tists have attempted to determine their nature. One school held that they were primarily
photons, resembling light. X-rays and gamma rays from radium. The other school
held that they were largely composed of the same type of electrical particles of which
all matter in the universe is constituted, namely electrons and protons, which are, re¬
spectively, the atomic particles carrying definite units of negative and positive electricity.
... It turns out that fully 80 per cent of the most penetrating components of the cos¬
mic ray, namely, those so powerful that they can penetrate the earth's atmosphere to
reach sea level, is definitely not photons, but neither is it protons or electrons, or any¬
thing else known on earth or so far observed throughout the vastness of the cosmos.
In fact, nobody knows what the particles are, except that they are fundamental and
that they carry a unit of electrical charge equal in magnitude to that of the electron or
proton. The charges on those observed so far have all been negative. ... It is in
their mass that these new particles differ from the electron, the proton and tlie positron,
the three other electrically charged fundamental building blocks of matter. They are
heavier than the electron but much lighter than the proton.
Visible and Invisible Nature
“The things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen
are eternal.” The mode of substance which we call physical matter is a local
and transitory phenomenon in the great universe. The immeasurable reaches
of interstellar space seem to be literally “formed of radiance”, augoeides — if
we may borrow the term used by Philo of Alexandria to serve as a name of the
manifested Divinity. A physical body, whether it be a star or an atom, appears
to be nothing but a modification or limitation of the universal radiance, emerg¬
ing for an instant from the “ocean of light” and then receding into its unfathom¬
able depths. Thus “force” crystallizes into “matter”, and “matter” dissolves
into “force”. Such is the view of Nature, the imago mundi , suggested by the
recent experiments and speculations of physicists and astronomers. It is in¬
teresting that the most advanced scientific theories concerning the constitution
of matter can actually be illustrated by a quotation from St. Paul. As jar as
they go, in certain aspects, they resemble the occult hypothesis mentioned in
The Secret Doctrine— that real or ^/-matter is not an object of mortal percep¬
tion; that there is a fundamental difference “between manifested and unmani-
NOTES AND COMMENTS
181
tested Matter, between Pradhana, the beginningless and endless cause, and
Prakriti, or the manifested effect” (ed. 1893, I, 595).
One Great Barrier to Scientific Progress
However, it is only too evident that these modem theories do not go very
far. They take us to the boundaries of the invisible, and there they stop. The
physicist is compelled to admit that matter can exist in forms so unlike those
which we experience through our senses that we cannot imagine them. He
can conceive of no method of representing them other than that of the higher
mathematics which is specially designed for the logical development of concepts
based upon axioms or postulates that are in themselves contradictory or unintel¬
ligible. Doubtless, mathematical invention has a definite place among the
activities of the human intelligence. Not infrequently, as in the science of
electrodynamics, it may greatly stimulate the imagination and guide the experi¬
ments of the laboratory physicist. But it is necessary to realize that mathe¬
matics per se can never reveal the veritable nature of anything. There is only
one way truly to understand a thing, and that is to experience it. Why does
the visible and transient seem more intelligible to the average mortal than the
invisible and enduring? Because he is in constant contact with the visible;
because it is the persistent object of his senses and provides the forms of his
imagination. Concentrating upon the activities of the body, identifying him¬
self with the body, he erects a barrier between the visible and the invisible, a
barrier which only he can destroy.
One great obstacle to scientific progress to-day is this deep-seated habit of
regarding the things which are seen as more concrete, more actual, than the
things which are not seen. Therefore, although men of science recognize in
the abstract that the subtile substance within physical matter is more lasting,
more fundamental, than physical matter itself, in the concrete they know only
the physical, and conceive of the subtile only in so far as it impinges upon or
overflows into the physical. What is needed is the development of a new sense
which will bring direct perception of the substance which is “formed of radi¬
ance”. Why must we assume that our little gamut of sense-experience includes
the whole range of the possibilities of objective consciousness? We have not
even fully developed the physical senses which we have. Certain insects, for
instance, see infra-red or ultra-violet colours to which we are blind.
The Kabalists taught that above or within the outer body or “shell” of the
cosmos, there is a series of “worlds”—astral, archetypal, spiritual, divine—each
with its characteristic inhabitants and states of matter. Moreover, they pro¬
claimed the accessibility of these inner spheres, affirming that he who follows
to the end the proper course of training can discover their reality for himself
and learn their nature at first hand. In other words, invisible Nature can be
made visible, the abstract can be made concrete, the inconceivable can be made
conceivable. “There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial.” What
appea^pnmaterial and metaphysical at one stage of evolution, may appear
material and physical at another. In one sense, it might be said that the conver-
182 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
sion of the divine and spiritual into the objective and actual is the subject-
matter of occultism.
The Extension of Vision
What the modem scientist utterly fails to understand, is that our experience
of Nature is conditioned by our moral and spiritual development. The course
of training to which the ancient Kabalists referred, is not merely intellectual.
It is a training of the will as well as of the mind; above all, it is a training of
the heart, involving the purgation and transformation of the whole emotional
nature. The Albigensian mystics aptly called it the gai savoir , the “gay sci¬
ence", the art of spiritual love. Before we can enter into the invisible cosmos
and dwell there, we must fall in love with the source of our real life, with the
Higher Self, the Heavenly Father, the Master, who reigns in that unseen world
and who is the perfect embodiment of its laws. We read in Through the Gates
of Gold:
The man who is strong, who has resolved to find the unknown path, takes with the
utmost care every step. He utters no idle word, he does no unconsidered action, he
neglects no duty or office however homely or however difficult. But while his eyes and
hands and feet are thus fulfilling their tasks, new eyes and hands and feet are being
born within him. For his passionate and unceasing desire is to go that way on which
the subtile organs only can guide him. . . . This state is possible to man while yet
he lives in the physical; for men have attained it while living. It alone can make actions
in the physical divine and true (pp. 99, seq).
One may infer, that the scientist must remain indefinitely at the threshold
of the invisible unless he extends his vision and thereby makes visible what is
now invisible. And he can accomplish this extension only by transforming
himself, by making himself over in the image of the augoeides , of that which is
“formed of radiance”. Becoming himself a centre of radiant, creative con¬
sciousness, all the radiance in Nature which is cognate to him will become as
objective, as sensible as the simplest physical form is now to any of us. But
until he achieves this self-transformation, until he has engendered within him¬
self the characteristics of the worlds within the physical, how can those worlds
ever mean anything more to him than a mathematical formula ?
According to the theosophical doctrine of “cosmogenesis”, the evolution of
matter at every point in space proceeds pari passu with the evolution of spirit
or consciousness. Each great cycle or Round, is said to develop “a nature and
a humanity in what may be spoken of as one aspect of Nature”. Thus gradu¬
ally, through the long succession of ages, the Elements and the creatures which
live in and by them have been brought to their present stage of unfoldment;
nor is there the slightest reason to believe that the exfoliation of the invisible
into the visible has come to an end.
I he qualities, or what is perhaps the best available term, the characteristics of matter,
must clearly bear a direct relation always to the senses of man. Matter has extension,
colour, motion (molecular motion), taste and smell, corresponding to the existing senses
of man, and the next characteristic it develops—let us call it for the moment "Perme¬
ability”—will correspond to the next sense of man, which we may call "Normal Clair-
NOTES AND COMMENTS
183
voyance”. ... It will only be in the next, or Fifth, Round that the fifth Element,
Ether—the gross body of Akasha, if it can be called even that—will, by becoming a
familiar fact of Nature to all men, as Air is familiar to us now, cease to be, as at present,
hypothetical. . . . And only during that Round will those higher senses, the growth
and development of which Akasha subserves, be susceptible of a complete expansion.
As already indicated, a partial familiarity with the characteristic of matter—Perme¬
ability—which should be developed concurrently with the sixth sense, may be expected
to develop at the proper period in this Round. But with the next Element added to
our resources, in the next Round, Permeability will become so manifest a characteristic
of matter, that the densest forms of this Round will seem to man’s perceptions as obstruc¬
tive as a thick fog, and no more ( The Secret Doctrine , I, 272, 278).
The evolution of matter and spirit are thus represented as inseparable as¬
pects of a single undivided process. According to our measure of time, it is a
gradual progression, requiring for its fulfilment hundreds of billions of years.
But it is a tenet of Theosophy that the individual need not wait until greater
love and wisdom and power cvme to him , as to others, in the ordinary course of
nature. By devotion and determined, unselfish effort, he can seize his heritage,
at least in part, here and now, reaching, far in advance of the majority, the
goal which is reserved in some distant future for humanity as a whole.
Man and His Environment
From these broad cosmological principles certain practical corollaries may
be deduced. If the cosmic Elements and the forms of matter be the objective
counterparts of the forms of spirit, the environment in which any individual or
group of individuals is placed at any given moment, invariably reflects the
qualities of the consciousness of the individual or group. The environment,
of course, includes all the circumstances of existence, physical and psychic,
economic and social and cultural.
In Hindu philosophy there is frequent reference to Kundalini Sliakti , “the
universal life-principle which everywhere manifests in Nature. . . . This is
the power which brings about that ‘continuous adjustment of internal relations
to external relations ,’ which is the essence of life according to Herbert Spencer,
and that ‘continuous adjustment of external relations to internal relations ',
which is the basis of transmigration of souls ... in the doctrines of the ancient
Hindu philosophers” ( The Secret Doctrine , I, 312).
The modem mind can understand how and why the creature must adapt
itself to its environment. Much stress is laid by biologists upon adaptability*
to external relations as the first requisite of success in the struggle for existence,
the fittest who survive being the organisms which adjust themselves most
adequately to surrounding conditions. It is less easy to conceive of the way
in which the creature actually moulds and changes the environment to suit
its varying needs. Certainly civilized man acts definitely enough upon the
physical world, altering the aspect of the earth by means of his arts and sci¬
ences, turning deserts into gardens and gardens into deserts. Civilized man,
therefore, lives partly in an environment of his own making, but life under
suak artificial conditions tends to become increasingly difficult, and at last in-
184
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
supportable, for neither body nor soul can adapt itself to an existence which
contradicts both natural and spiritual law.
The “continuous adjustment of external relations to internal relations”, is
a more subtile action. Its mechanism, its modus operandi , is largely hidden
from us, for it is the expression of a creative power which few, indeed, use
consciously. As the above quotation suggests, it is the basis of reincarnation
and karma, of re-birth and liberation. We may identify it with the mysterious
agency which selects the time, the place, the family in which a child is bom,
which gives the body its life and personality, working always to hasten the
hour when a sound mind in a sound body will receive and respond to an incarnat¬
ing soul. We may identify its action also with our physical separation from an
environment as the result of having become completely detached from it in¬
teriorly. Ceasing either to love or to hate it, and, instead, cheerfully accepting
it, an environment literally drops off.
How many people in the modem world attach significance to the fact that
they are placed by Nature in one geographical, economic and social situation,
rather than another? Most of us spend our lives moving or trying to move,
literally and figuratively, from place to place. We are obsessed by the notion
that if we could only be somewhere else our lives would be both happier and
more brilliant. Or, if we cannot move about, we have the impulse to change
the appearance of our environment, so that we may at least have the illusion
of being elsewhere. All this restlessness would seem to be a perversion of Kunda-
lini, “the universal life-principle”. It may be assumed that it is the mission
of the incarnating soul to transform the personality and the body with which
it is brought into contact; that by so doing it will inevitably, though more
slowly, transform the whole environment which encompasses it. But such a
change must take place from within outwards , first inwardly and subjectively,
then externally and objectively, following the lines of exfoliation invariably
traced by Nature in all her works. From one point of view, our native en¬
vironment, whether it be a palace or a slum, is divinely ordained, first to stimu¬
late the soul to embody itself, and then to be itself transmuted into a more
appropriate abode for the soul.
The Improvement of Social Conditions
The existence of social evils and maladjustments, of desperate poverty co¬
existing with the vulgar display of wealth, is a persistent commentary upon the
failure of the vast majority of mankind to evolve beyond an elemental stage of
consciousness. The few who have perfected themselves, the Masters, are said
to remain near at hand, to postpone indefinitely their own individual progress,
because they cannot contemplate without anguish the blind wanderings of
the great orphan, Humanity”. They are ready for any sacrifice, if thereby
they can lift some of the burden of Karma from the races of men. As they
themselves have testified, what they need most of all is a following in the world.
They need disciples, living among men, but absolutely devoted to the Masters’
purposes. As has been said so often, a growing body of disciples, in the world
NOTES AND COMMENTS
185
but not of the world, constitutes a channel through which “the universal life-
principle , represented by the Masters, can pass downwards and outwards,
rightly adjusting external relations to internal relations.
A student of Theosophy ventures to suggest that practically all the panaceas
of economists and social reformers, of which we hear so much to-day, are as un¬
substantial as a vacuum. And why? Because whatever may be their other
merits, they take no cognizance of spiritual law or of spiritual ends. They
fail to show the least comprehension of the only way in which enduring social
amelioration can be brought about, which is, by creating within the undiffer¬
entiated body of society a stable nucleus of noble and enlightened individuals.
Reformers habitually begin at the wrong end, where mankind has begun and
failed so many times before. They are always trying to alter the environment
without altering human nature and, first of all, their own natures. This is not
remarkable when it is recalled how many of them have derived their inspiration
from Karl Marx.
An illustration of this modernistic delusion is offered by a recent pronounce¬
ment by Professor John Dewey of Columbia University. Addressing a convoca¬
tion of the American College of Physicians, he proposed that the old phrase,
“a sound mind in a sound body” should be changed to “a sound human being
in a sound human environment”. He argued that the change in aims and
methods which would be necessary to achieve such an ideal “would mean
more than most of us can estimate”. By a “sound environment” Professor
Dewey meant in particular, as the context makes clear, the social conditions
which produce reasonably happy human beings”. All this sounds innocent
and amiable enough, until one remembers that Professor Dewey delivered his
speech en route from Mexico City where he had served on a committee formed
to determine whether Trotzky is as bad as Stalin says he is. Anyone addicted
to that sort of futility must have strange ideas concerning the nature of reason¬
able happiness.
Indeed, Professor Dewey is a typical representative of the intelligentzia , of
the caste of intellectuals who are limited to relatively harmless pursuits
during the more healthy phases of national cycles, but who become active and
prominent during periods of economic or social confusion. The philosophes of
the eighteenth century, dreaming of the “rights of man”, also professed that
their goal was the reasonable happiness of the human race; but the environ-'
ment which their “idealism” finally produced was certainly not what most
of them had expected. It was the Reign of Terror, the dreadful Karma of
which still weighs upon the soul of France. To-day, Professor Dewey and his
companions may generally be found on the so-called left or radical side in
every controversy which involves the basic principles of civilization. Most of
them are utterly illogical when they express opposition to Nazi or Fascist
standards, for the regulation of happiness, as they conceive it, implies a totali¬
tarian state which would decree and enforce the redistribution of wealth, the
control of prices and wages, the regimentation of social relationships, the sup¬
pression of what is individual and spontaneous in religion and education, in
i86
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
science and art. That is what they want, if we may judge by what they say.
What they will get is another matter. The student of history can draw his
own conclusions.
The point is that Theosophy does clearly reveal the distinction between an
unsound and a sound environment. Nothing outside Paranirvana is ideal, but
everyone bom into the world is wise to assume that the environment where
he is placed by Nature is sound. This truth is accepted as axiomatic by the
disciple who sees the hand of the Master in every event, great or small; but
why should one doubt that the ordinary man, or the bad man, or even the
devil clothed in human shape, is equally placed in the best of all possible
settings for his ultimate transformation—or for his ultimate elimination, since
Nature labours to destroy as well as to upbuild?
The state where one is placed by Nature is easily discovered. It is the state,
exalted or mediocre or lowly, where one is detained by duty, by loyalty, by
responsibility to others, by common-sense. In contrast to the jargon of econo¬
mists and psychiatrists, these remarks may sound like platitudes; but that may
be because so few ever really try to test them in daily life. It seems so much
simpler to change the state of Nature to suit our desires of the moment, to cure
squalor and filth by tearing down old tenements and building new ones, to make
everyone rich by confiscating the assets of all who are not yet bankrupt, to
increase wisdom by multiplying the facilities of free education. But sordid¬
ness, destitution and ignorance cannot be removed by outward means alone.
When the general consciousness of mankind becomes pure, deep, enlightened,
then, and not before, the Golden Age will return, social problems will cease
to exist, and, incidentally, such a thing as “social-mindedness” will be incon¬
ceivable. Meanwhile, whenever we attempt forcibly to alter “external rela¬
tions” without reference to “internal relations”, all that can be accomplished
is a temporary dislocation. Sooner or later, Nature re-asserts itself and moves
towards the restoration of the lost equilibrium. This process of readjustment
has been defined as an aspect of Karma. It reveals one of the meanings of
pain. “Suffering is instruction”, remarked an ancient sage. It brings proof
that a beneficent power, greater than our self-will, is affecting our consciousness.
The Power of Regeneration
It has long been known that the principle of readjustment operates in vege¬
table and animal tissues to replace as far as possible any part which has been lost
or mutilated. The simplest example of this regeneration in the animal body is
the healing of a slight cut in the skin. By some method which the biological
mechanists are altogether unable to explain, the little wound is healed, a new
skin grows over it, and the original pattern is restored with no sign that it had
ever been disrupted. Among the lower animals the faculty of self-repair is
much more developed. If a sponge be minced and the resulting mixture be
forced through a cloth filter, drops of the debris, under proper conditions, will
grow into new sponges. Remarkable possibilities are opened up, when one
reflects upon this organic law. It explains, for example, the growth of the
NOTES AND COMMENTS
187
scion upon the stock in plant grafting. The horticulturist takes advantage
of the healing force of Nature. It is now evident that the science of “grafting”
can also be practised upon animals, and at the annual meeting of the National
Academy of Sciences it was suggested that within a century biology may be
able to produce “complete new individuals from any part of another individual.”
This was the signal for the popularizers of science to hint that the time may
come when the individual who has grown tired of his body will build himself
a new one and move into it. To be fair, this idea was not seriously put forward
by any official biologist.
However, Professor Oscar Schotte of Amherst College reported some remark¬
able experiments, illustrating once more the eccentricity—to use a mild word—
of the scientific imagination. He planted bits of embryonic tissue in living
animals, and observed that these tissues developed in their hosts the organs
which they would have normally developed in the course of embryonic growth.
They even stimulated the growth of sets of neighbouring organs which had
been supposed to lie outside their zone of influence. Thus, after removing a
tadpole’s tail which would have resprouted at once if left alone, Professor
Schotte “grafted” upon the injured tissue “seeds” from the “head-region” of
the egg. The tail stopped growing, and a new head appeared in its place. We
have gone into these painful details, because they exemplify what is, in our
opinion, a characteristic attitude of the scientific mind towards the mysteries
of Nature. Although the man of science is trained to observe with care and
to measure with exactitude, too often he seems to be impelled by some inner
demon to miss and to distort the sense of what he sees.
The universal power of regeneration is not merely the force which repairs the
body from instant to instant. It is the efficient cause of evolution itself, re¬
producing the same organic pattern in an ascending series of species, in ever
more subtile form. If we really understood and worked with it, we might indeed
build for ourselves new and better minds and bodies. We might regain a power
which the lower orders have not entirely lost, and which was, according to
theosophical science, the normal possession of the first semi-ethereal human
races.
This is the mysterious process of the transformation and evolution of mankind. The
material of the first forms . . . was drawn or absorbed into, and thus became the comple¬
ment of the Forms of the Second Race. . . . The Race never died. Its “Men” meltecL
gradually away, becoming absorbed in the bodies of their own “Sweat-born” progeny?
more solid than their own. The old Form vanished and was absorbed by, disappeared
in, the new Form, more human and physical. There was no death in those days of a
period more blissful than the Golden Age; but the first, or parent, material was used
for the formation of the new being, to form the Body and even the inner or lower Princi¬
ples or Bodies of the progeny (The Secret Doctrine , II, 128).
Certainly we shall not be co-operating with Nature, if we bring into existence
a shoal of monsters with duplicate or displaced organs. A tadpole with a head
at each end actually reminds one of the “bright new worlds” and “managed
economies” of the social reformers who have an uncontrolled propensity for
putting heads where tails ought to be, and vice versa. Unfortunately, the
i88
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
production of two-headed tadpoles is worse than futile; it is, in essence, like all
kinds of vivisection, a sin against Nature, an infraction of the law of the unity
of life. Man, the custodian of the earth, has positively no right to use even
tadpoles as subjects of cruel or grotesque experiment. The knowledge which
he acquires by such means will return to plague him some day.
The Causes of Social Strife
The psychiatrist has to a great extent taken the place of the priest in the
modem world, especially, it would seem, in the great cities of the United States.
The unfortunate go to him for help and comfort. He is compelled by pro¬
fessional duty to play the r 61 e of mentor to the human soul. Such a task de¬
mands the exercise of such exalted powers of mind and heart that only a Master
can perform it perfectly. Does the psychiatrist reveal any sense of the over¬
whelming responsibility which he has assumed ?
Without doubt, there are all kinds and conditions of psychiatrists. Some
are little better than the Freudian psychoanalysts, as anyone can judge by
the coarse materialism which colours all that they say and write. Many are
good and sincere men, dedicated to the purpose of relieving human pain, and
often gifted with the intuition which is bom of sympathy. Nevertheless,
even the best of them are handicapped by their education. Their view of
human nature is conditioned by an arbitrary and artificial classification of its
component parts. No one can use their terminology without confusing his
mind. Moreover, there is no place for the soul in their system. The higher
qualities of man are generally defined as “emergences” from the primitive
and the unconscious, when they are not cynically dismissed as the survivals of
the taboos of savages. There is practically no recognition of the validity of
spiritual and mystical experience which testifies to the duality of human nature
as at present constituted, this duality being the effect of the blending of two
streams of consciousness in man, the animal and the divine. But how can
anyone effectively aid the souls of men, if he does not even believe that a soul
exists?
The limitations of psychiatry are revealed in a recent address by Dr. C.
Macfie Campbell before the American Psychiatric Association. He suggested
that the psychiatrist could find the causes of social unrest and labour troubles
in the frustration of individual satisfactions under modem conditions. Much
that he had to say is of interest and value; but this only brings out more clearly
the insufficiency of his diagnosis.
In his patients the psychiatrist may see the importance of lack of status, of a feeling
of inferiority, of frustration, of self-expression, of dehumanized personal human rela¬
tions, boredom, envy, depressive preoccupations. When these responses of the indi¬
vidual life are subject to the astounding amplification observed in group phenomena,
a community is divided against itself, labour unrest and class war take the place of
friendly social co-operation. For the solution of these problems, or for the amelioration
of the situation, a clear grasp of the human factors is essential. ... In labour conflicts,
where the discussion is officially about hours and wages or forms of organization, the
urge for power in the protagonists of the two sides, the results of early conditioning, of
NOTES AND COMMENTS
189
unresolved conflicts, of present tensions, may have much to do with the intransigent
attitude which foments trouble, neglects friendly approaches; while the response of the
less articulate members of the group can only be understood if we know the actual con¬
ditions of their life and are sensitive to the needs of human nature and the results of its
frustration. The insight into the laws of human nature gained by the psychiatrist is
of practical importance for the conduct of every human life. ... In the muddled state
of human affairs, blind, instinctive and unconscious forces will continue to be operative,
but it is our task to see that rational considerations play an increasingly important
role. Foremost among these considerations is sound knowledge of the component forces
of human nature and of the forces at play in group life.
We do not doubt that in very large measure the world-wide disturbances of
to-day may be traced to frustration. But frustration of what? There are in¬
numerable forces of human nature which seek expression in envy, vanity,
sensuality, arrogance, ambition, and the like. These forces are always frus¬
trated to some extent; otherwise any sort of human life on any terms would
be impossible. But few people have the character to discipline themselves, to
check their own “self-expression”, and this beneficent function is performed by
the karmic law adjusting internal to external relations. The environment in
which we are cast, saves us from sudden and irrevocable insanity.
However, there is one type of frustration which is prevalent to-day and
which is indeed responsible for our woes. It is the frustration of the soul and
its growth. Doubtless, many human entities, perhaps the vast majority, have
not evolved to the stage where the soul ceases to be a mere potentiality and
becomes a living reality; but Nature respects the potential as well as the actual.
If the universe exists for purposes of soul, any deviation from this general
direction of evolution, at any point, must be regarded as vain and evil. What
right have we to expect that we can escape disorder, anarchy and decay, if we
frustrate the purposes of soul ?
Thus the psychiatrist, dwelling upon the evils of repression, does not rightly
understand, in our opinion, that there is a right and a wrong repression. Too
often, the repression which he condemns is the natural and proper check im¬
posed by the physical and social environment upon the exuberance of the
animal personality. In so far as this lower personality is released from its
inhibitions, the growth of the spiritual consciousness, the real man, is checked.
Therefore, whatever solution there may be to the labour problem, it can only
be found upon terms favourable to the soul. Certainly there must be an appeal
to the reason; but the reason alone can achieve nothing. It can only act upon
the data provided by experience or by fancy. However, all men except the
wholly depraved are capable of some response to the demands of “immaterial”
ideals,—loyalty, honour, self-sacrifice. But to be really effective, these de¬
mands must be presented by leaders who themselves embody loyalty, honour,
self-sacrifice. In this way, and not otherwise, the world-religions were bom.
And does not a religion die when its adherents cease to incarnate the truths
which they preach? What the modem man needs beyond anything else is a
religion, a renewed belief, however crude, in the superior reality of an invis¬
ible, immaterial world. If psychiatrists truly understood the problem, they
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
190
would have no other objective than to lead the men of the Occident back to the
religion which is native to them. They would labour day and night to make
themselves true exemplars of the doctrine of the Master Christ.
Faith in an Orderly Way of Life
“The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but
canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth: so is everyone that is
bom of the spirit.”
Men needlessly strain themselves in the vain effort to create by their own
efforts,—as if of themselves, with their own power, they could invent any¬
thing whatsoever. It is the universal Spirit, the Mysterium Magnum , which
creates in man as it creates in Nature. All that we can do is to make ready
our natures for the reception of the Spirit. The ancient Chinese well under¬
stood this simple law. As their scriptures so often affirm, the dignity of the
human being depends upon the measure of his awareness that he participates
in an existence infinitely greater than his own; that his acts only have value in
so far as they are responses to intimations of the Master-Soul, the Tao, the
Great Nature, from which he cannot separate himself in thought without being
overtaken by sterility and death.
It is pleasant to know that the soul of China has not wholly withdrawn from
that land of tragedy. Mr. George E. Sokolsky, writing in the New York Herald-
Tribune (April 19, 1937), speaks of an experience which awakens memories of
the Zen teachers, of the Analects , of the Tao-Teh-King.
I once visited a Buddhist monastery on an island of the Yangtze River off Soochow.
The abbot was a most unusual man, learned, keenly understanding. I see his red beard
before me as I write, the round, full Chinese face in a red beard. Not the red of the
Scandinavians, but a different red, which one occasionally meets among Chinese. He
and I were worried about the revolutions and the civil wars and the slaughter of human
beings to improve their lot. And we could not understand how it was making life better
for them to kill them off and rape their women and sell their girls into slavery. And
he led me to the southern tip of the island, and there the Yangtze swishes about the
rocks with swiftness, and he told me to sit and to listen to the river. And he said that
if I would learn to think of nothing, the sound of the river would wash my brain. . . .
And at first I thought that he was a superstitious priest, but I tried what he said. And
in time I learned to let the swish of the river carry me away with it and it did wash my
brain. For it came to me there on Chin Shan that we rush on like the Yangtze and we
make a great noise, but the rocks stay in their place and do not move. And when we
shall have ceased to make our noises, the rocks will still be there. And the strongest of
rocks is faith in an orderly way of life.
“Faith in an orderly way of life”,—or, as a student of Theosophy would say,
faith in life designed by a Master Designer, which provides the ideal means, at
every stage, for the attainment of life’s, and therefore of its Designer’s, purpose.
Misery begins when the Designer’s purpose is ignored that self-will may be
gratified. Misery culminates when, as the fruit of self-assertion, we lose faith
in the existence, even, of a divine Designer. Real happiness begins when we
align our wills with the Designer’s Will. It culminates when we meet him
face to face.
FRAGMENTS
T HE air is full of Voices these days for all who have faith, and will listen.
The Writing on the Wall is there in letters of flame for all who have
the eyes to see, and will look upon it. But louder and louder grows
the din of the world to drown these Voices, while the skies darken, and the false
lights glare the more, to hide the mysterious Hand that is writing. Yet it con¬
tinues to write, undisturbed and implacable; the mystic characters are forming
day by day; and the Voices call insistently, beseechingly, that man will attend
and take warning.
The hour of need has never lacked its true Daniel,—the Lodge sees to that;
though to-day the alien prophets, crying Lo here and lo there, are all that the
distracted herd seems able to follow,—some in one direction, some in another,
clashing and colliding, as, drunken and dazzled, they are goaded by the Brothers
of the Shadow to their doom.
He who will stand aside for one short breathing-space can see the situation
clearly, simply with the eyes of his mind. He who has separated himself from
the herd, even though he be as yet without attainment, will see and hear far
more. The Writing and the Voices will be plain to him, though their surface
meaning only may be all he understands. But he will realize that they have
depth upon depth of meaning, through the Seven Layers to the heart of the
sacred Inner Three. Furthermore, to him who has separated himself from the
herd, the Master is at hand, so that he knows there is plan and guidance
in the midst of the tumult and storm. And for him who has steadfastly abided
by th$ Four Rules, the Master is “consciously at hand”, some outline at least
of his plan is visible, the Writing tells its story, the Voices are obeyed and
understood.
For in his place and degree, like all the Masters beyond him, he has died to
himself and to the world for love of the Masters’ Cause, that, in the inner world
of which he has now made himself an integral part, no matter how small, he
may live under those “laws of order” which he no longer desires to break, but
within whose grip of iron he is determined to come. Thus he partakes of the
life and seclusion of the Masters, entering into that service which is indeed
sublime, “if only from the character of those who share it”,—the Masters
191
192
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
themselves. His object is a divine object. As Light on the Path tells us: “He
looks neither for pleasure nor pain, asks for no heaven, and fears no hell. . . .
He lives now not in the world, but with it”, for his life is “hid with Christ in
God”.
Therefore the Voices receive his close attention, the interpretation of them
becomes a chief occupation and duty, that he may impart such of the interpre¬
tation as those about him will suffer him to utter. Thus also of the Writing on
the Wall, though its meaning be so dreadful to the unwilling hearts for whose
instruction it is given.
What he tells will be rejected save perhaps by a handful, who may, however,
while attentive to-day, turn against him to-morrow (was not the Beloved, for
whom he labours, despised and rejected?). For this he must at all times be
prepared, never dismayed nor swayed from his purpose because the follower of
one hour has become the persecutor of the next, but humbly thankful, if even
one of the many he reaches will listen, to his soul’s salvation, and in turn be
Torch Runner in the Great Race of the Mysteries.
* * * * * * *
Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? What is there in life save the Voices,
the Writing on the Wall, and the Great Lodge from which they come?
Cav£.
THE CORONATION
Blow trumpet! he will lift us from the dust.
Blow trumpet! live the strength , and die the lust!
Clang battle-axe , and clash brand! Let the King reign. . . .
The King will follow Christ , and we the King ,
In whom high God hath breathed a secret thing.
Fall battle-axe , and clash brand! Let the King reign.
Tennyson, “The Coming of Arthur”.
HE Theosophical Quarterly is an international, not an American
magazine. It is “the official organ of the original Theosophical Society
founded in New York by H. P. Blavatsky, W. Q. Judge and others, in
1875”, and is published for the equal benefit of the Society’s membership through¬
out the world. Further, it is of the essence of Theosophy that “what affects
one, affects all”, which means among other things that events, and especially
their causation or repercussion on inner planes, whether these events take place
in England, France, Germany, or China, directly affect and concern our entire
membership. Provincialism of any kind is incompatible with the spirit and
purpose of Theosophy.
This will explain in part why we reprint the leading editorial, entitled “The
Lord’s Anointed”, from The Times of London of May 13th,—the day following
the Coronation of England’s King and Queen. Many of our readers will have
heard the service in Westminster Abbey as broadcast by wireless, and will
have been impressed by its solemnity and spiritual significance. It was not a
show; it was a reality, as The Times editorial recognizes. It was a world event
in the deepest sense.
Editorial comment in The New York Times , on the other hand, revealed the
regrettable habit of judging all things with Broadway as background; and,
on Broadway, the Taj Mahal would look “over-done”. There are , however,
other backgrounds, other traditions, other atmospheres, other worlds, and,
fortunately, there are still some New Yorkers who realize this, and are glad.
Students of Theosophy, wherever situated, will have interpreted the Corona^
tion, and all that led up to it, in the light of this fundamental truth:—that no
one can begin to understand what is taking place outwardly, without keeping
always in mind the eternal struggle between good and evil, between the White
and the Black Lodge; nor without recognition of the ceaseless efforts of the
White Lodge to further the spiritual progress of nations as of individuals.
The British Empire, during the past seven months, has passed through a grave
moral crisis: it was compelled to choose, and it chose rightly. The crowning
of Edward, and of the influences to which he had become subject, would have
i93
194
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
Elizabeth was a victory for our Masters,—for the Powers of Light. It was a
dim sense of this victory, for their share in which the people of the Empire
deserve endless praise, that accounts for the depth and warmth of their re¬
joicing, and for the universal feeling that the service in the Abbey was the
climax of a tragic but infinitely beneficent release, was the visible and superb
sign of an inward and far-reaching triumph.
Once more, may the divine blessing rest upon and support the King and
Queen who, at any cost to themselves, put their duty to God and to their coun¬
try first.— Editors.
THE LORD’S ANOINTED
Froyn “The Times ”, London , May 13th , 1937.
With festal pomp coming down from the days of King Edgar and from dim¬
mer aeons beyond, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth have been conse¬
crated to the service of their Empire. The King has been acclaimed by his
people; he has sworn to defend their laws; he has been solemnly anointed into
his mysterious dignity; he has received glowing emblems that only an anointed
King may hold or wear; he has been lifted into his Throne and so taken posses¬
sion of his kingdom; his prelates have sworn him fealty and his lay lords have
become his men “of life and limb and of earthly worship”. A tumult of loyal
enthusiasm, rising in sonorous crescendo through months of preparation, reached
its climax yesterday in the cheering of such crowds as no event in history has
assembled before, in fanfares of trumpets, in peals of bells, in salvos of the great
guns at the Tower. Yet at the heart, in the time-mellowed grey stillness of
the Abbey, there was silence. As the golden canopy was held over King Ed¬
ward’s chair, and the Archbishop went in under it to the King, bearing the
consecrated oil, as into a tabernacle, it seemed that those two men were alone
with God, performing an act greater than they knew, more solemn than any
person present could hope to understand. Upon the great congregation who
watched the ancient rite performed, on the same holy ground where their
ancestors had seen the unction of so many English Kings, there could not but
descend some of the feeling of those same ancestors, that a man who had sat
in that chair and passed through that experience must rise up something other
than he had been.
For, with an obstinate unanimity beyond the power of republican rationalism
to touch, men in all ages have associated the idea of kingship with the idea of
the Divine. Melchizedek, King of Salem, who was a priest of the most high
God, the mysterious primitive figure that haunts the imagination of the Middle
Ages with the dream of a harmony of flesh and spirit in the domain of politics,
we know now to be a conception common to all the races of mankind. Wherever
men have formed societies there are or have been Kings; and the King, when
first he appears, is a man who draws his strength from powers outside human
life, yet draws it not for himself. Because he is in mysterious communion with
forces greater than man, his life is the life of the tribe; for his people he lives,
THE CORONATION
i95
and for his people sometimes he must sacramentally die. European kingship
has travelled far out of the remote world in which these ideas were conceived;
in England its character has been translated and retranslated, it had at one
time been rationalized almost out of existence, before it took on the Imperial
and federal significance it bears to-day.
And yet, whatever may have been the forces making for the survival of the
Throne at different phases of its long history, nothing is more remarkable
than that now, when by common consent it is more firmly established than
ever before, it reposes upon almost the same body of sentiments out of which
the idea of monarchy sprang. George VI, anointed, crowned, and enthroned,
is become a sacramental, even a sacrificial, man, in one sense set apart from
his fellows, but in a far deeper and more ancient sense made one with them
as never before. Like the magical Kings of remote pre-history, he has become
the mortal vessel of an immortal idea; and the idea is the life of his people.
Because the life of every subject has communion with the King’s consecrated
life, they are enabled to feel themselves one organism, and believe that the
unity is sacred. More than this: because many peoples draw this vivifying
inspiration from the life of one King, they are enabled to realize themselves as
a single living body, and the soul of an Empire is preserved after all the visible
links between its parts have been relaxed. For in the last resort that which
most surely commands human allegiance is not an abstraction but a man.
This is the truth upon which the Christian faith is built; and in the Coronation,
where the King becomes the Lord’s anointed, Christus Domini , its two expres¬
sions, religious and secular, are visibly fused into one.
Such a community of sentiment between the present and the far past might
be interpreted in very different ways. To some, no doubt, it seems no more
than an outworn superstition, cumbering the paths of progress. A more
profound view will see evidence that kingship is not an administrative device
suitable only to a particular age and level of civilization, but that it corresponds
to some permanent instinct in human nature itself, and so is capable, in Lord
Bryce’s words, “of satisfying the need men have to find a consecration for
Power and a tie which shall bind them together and represent the aspirations of
collective humanity.” avOpuTrog perpei tt dvra. Not decaying superstition, but
living humanism, demands that monarchy shall be Divine. This refreshment^^
of the idea of monarchy from the first fount of its being allows the sanctity^r
of kingship to remain entirely distinct from the totality of power. Despotism,
such as England knew in the Tudor age, is an intermediate phase of the idea,
which is foreign both to its infancy and to the maturity we now see. To-day,
like our remote ancestors, we do not attribute to a King a Divine right to rule,
but a Divine duty to live, and to live a representative life. Purists in the last
weeks have objected to the popular name of yesterday’s great ceremony, saying
that its essence is in the unction, and not in the imposition of the Crown. Yet
there is deep meaning, though perhaps an accidental one, to be traced in the
common name. It is a right instinct that seizes upon the Crown as the pre-
emijgnt emblem of all the emblems that were yesterday bestowed upon the
196
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
King. The symbol of power, older in our English tradition than the Crown,
is the Rod of Justice, which survives among the regalia as the Sceptre with the
Cross, and in another shape as the Orb. This, great and noble as its meaning
is, has not for centuries been regarded as the principal part of the King’s in¬
vestiture. The Crown has a far greater hold on the imagination; and the mil¬
lions who heard yesterday the words with which the Archbishop put it upon
King George’s head must have noticed that there was no mention of authority
and power. It is the Crown of glory and righteousness, the Crown of princely
virtues, to be associated with a right faith and manifold fruits of good works.
It stands indeed for everything that makes the King both the exemplar and
the epitome of the life of all the peoples who are linked together by his name.
It is this sense of the representative character of the Monarchy that makes
the Coronation of the Queen so necessary and so moving a part of the great
rite. She has little or no share in her husband’s authority—the beautiful gesture
of Queen Elizabeth yesterday, when, crowned and sceptred, she made a deep
obeisance to the enthroned King on her way to her own Throne, reminded all
present that she is one of his subjects. But in his life as representative of his
people she has an equal share, recognized for nearly a thousand years, since
St. Dunstan first provided an office for the crowning of the Queen. Hers is
described as the Crown of glory, honour, and joy; through her the life of the
King is completed, and made a true microcosm of the life of his peoples. The
many who still hear the voice of King George V, diffidently describing himself
as “in some sort the head of this great family”, will understand how much the
King’s life of honour and joy in the circle of his own home enhances his quality
as the hallowed representative of the national aspirations.
Yet, while that which was personal to the King ranged so far beyond the
idea of mere authority, yesterday’s ceremony, taken as a whole, remains a
benediction upon power. There breathes through all the august ritual a sense
of how sublime and awful is the “endless adventure” of governing men. There
come moments to all engaged in that adventure when their calling seems no
more than a petty scuffle of selfish factions, a sordid huckstering over the mere
material means of life, even an ignoble personal rivalry for place and power.
“What shadows”, cried Burke in a moment of political disillusion, “what
shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!” To such moods of pessimism
the great solemnity of the Coronation is the answer. Confortare , says the
ancient antiphon over the crowned King: “Be strong, and play the man.”
This vocation of politics is the noblest of all human callings; its business is not
with the market-place but with the stars; it is still what it was to Plato, to
St. Augustine, to Sir Thomas More. Its purpose is no less than the building
of the City of God. To that exalted task King and people have been conse¬
crated together. A vow has been made that binds all who exercise any degree
of political authority—that binds, therefore, every subject of the King. In
redeeming it the responsibility rests upon all; but it is the King’s part to be at
the centre, uniting in his hands all the threads of the Imperial endeavour,
counselling all, interpreting all the parts of his Empire to one another.
THE STONE OF DESTINY
T HE pageantry of the recent Coronation has placed strikingly before a
world little mindful of it, the insignia of royalty, and to some extent
their symbolism,—a symbolism handed down, in essence though with
many modifications, from a remote antiquity, when the monarch was recognized
as mediator between his people and the Supreme King from whom alone all
power is derived. Referred to less frequently than other emblems, but with
a past that extends, symbolically at least, back to the dawn of creation, is the
so-called Stone of Destiny, which lies beneath the Coronation chair in West¬
minster Abbey.
In all stones there is more than meets the eye,—which is true, of course, of
every material object, but which needs to be remembered especially in the
case of stones, because they are regarded almost universally as devoid of con¬
sciousness and even of life. Naturally, they are not all alike: there are stones
and stones, differing not only in substance, but in endowment, attainment,
and significance. For they are creatures, long antedating anything we now know
as of the vegetable or animal kingdoms, while their stored-up experience, or
accumulation of psychic impressions, because so slowly acquired, by far out¬
lasts the races of men.
The student of Theosophy sees all things as living things. All matter is
alive. Its different forms are expressive of different aspects of the spirit. The
degree of what we call its materiality is the degree to which, in it, the spontaneity
and freedom of Divine Life on the one hand, and of personal self-will on the
other, have been surrendered in fidelity to a particular loyalty, and have thus
become fixed. In that, as Bergson pointed out, matter is like habit, which is
the relatively fixed and predictable way in which we now act, without need
for conscious volition, as the result of choice and will consciously exercised and
reiterated in the past, in accordance with some desire or quality of our being,
to which we yield dominance and of which the habit becomes an external ex¬
pression. So all forms of matter express some quality of spirit; and their fixed
and predictable response to given conditions, the attribute of matter which
makes science possible and which, too often, makes us think of material things
as dead, reveals their undeviating fidelity to the ray of spirit which formed
them. In this, the mineral kingdom is closer to the spiritual than is either
the vegetable or the animal. The image it reflects is clearer, because less over¬
laid and confused with extraneous impressions; and, in consequence, those who
can read the hearts of stones find them books of spiritual truths. Above all,
they tell of the quality of loyalty, the supreme attribute of the spirit—and of
every true King.
The symbology of stones is a study in itself. We read in Isaiah (28; v. 16):
“Therefore thus saith the Lord God, Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation
197
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
198
a stone, a tried stone, a precious comer stone, a sure foundation”; and in Reve¬
lation (2; v. 17): “To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden
manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written,
which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it”.
Madame Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine devotes an entire section (Vol.
II, pp. 341-349; ed. 1888) to the subject of stones, dealing at length with the
rocking or Logan stones; the clacha-brath , the “Destiny or judgment-stone”
of the Celts; the divining-stone, or “stone of the ordeal”, and the oracle stone;
the moving or animated stone of the Phoenicians; the rumbling stone of the
Irish; the ophite stones described in a poem on Stones attributed to Orpheus.
Referring to the Stone of Destiny, or Coronation Stone, she says (p. 342):
4 ‘It is also known that the famous stone at Westminster was called liafail —
‘the speaking stone’—which raised its voice only to name the King that had to
be chosen. Cambry {Monuments Celtiques) says he saw it when it still bore
the inscription:
“ l Ni fallot fatum , Scoti quocumque locatum
ll Invenient lapidem , regnasse tenentur ibidem'
Some say that this inscription was engraved on a brass plate attached to the
stone; others, that it was cut into the stone itself. The Latin has been trans¬
lated as follows:
If fates go right, where’er this stone is found,
The Scots shall monarchs of that realm be crowned.
In the “Official Souvenir Programme” of the Coronation, Sir Gerald Wollas¬
ton, Garter Principal King of Arms, writes:
A word may here be said of that most venerable relic, King Edward’s Chair. It is
made of oak of an architectural [Gothic] design, the feet being formed of four sejant
lions, and is attributed to the time of Edward I [1239-1307]. But this structure was
designed to contain a far more ancient and famous object, known as the Stone of Scone,
which forms its seat. It is a block of reddish sandstone and, if the legends about it are
to be believed, is the stone on which the Patriarch Jacob laid his head at Bethel [and saw
“a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the
angels of God ascending and descending on it”], its subsequent migrations ending in its
removal from Spain to Ireland by Simon Brech, who was crowned upon it there 700
years before the Christian era. There certainly was a stone corresponding to it in Ireland,
preserved on the Hill of Tara, possibly as a stone used for purposes of consecration
in that country. The Irish called it the Stone of Destiny, due to its alleged power of
emitting an oracular sound to show the legitimacy of Royal descent. It may well have
been taken from Ireland to the West of Scotland, early in the Christian era, by the
settlers from Ireland who established themselves in that country [it is more likely, as
many authorities assert, that in the sixth century, in a war of conquest, it was taken to
the island of Iona, where St. Columba is said to have pillowed his head upon it at the
time of his death in 597], for it certainly existed in that part of Scotland long before
the ninth century, when it was removed by King Kenneth from Dunstaffnage to the
Abbey of Scone. In Scotland the stone was accorded the same veneration, including
the tradition that its possession was essential to the preservation of regal power. At
Scone all the Kings of Scotland were crowned upon it until the year 1296, when Edward
I brought it to England and left it as an offering of conquest at the Shrine of Edward
the Confessor in Westminster Abbey. There it has ever since remained, and has been
used for the crowning of almost every successive Monarch of our land.
THE STONE OF DESTINY
199
Note how fitting is this stone as a symbol of the test for royal legitimacy.
Kingly power can only rest on rock-like fidelity to that spiritual hierarchy,
linking heaven and earth, of which Jacob dreamed. Only as that ladder rises
through the King’s person, is he legitimately King; only by virtue of his own
obedience and loyalty to the King of kings, can he command the obedience of
his people. Note, too, how, despite the obvious corruption of the legend, caused
by the interblending of different local interpretations of it, the history that is
ascribed to the stone follows the course of kingly power which it symbolizes.
There are different traditions as to the way in which this stone was conveyed
to Ireland from Palestine. MacKenzie, in his Royal Masonic Cyclopedia (1877,
p. 698), says:
The legend is, that Adam possessed this stone while in the Garden of Eden, and that
he used it as an altar, and carried it with him on his emergence into the world, and Seth
received it from him. Noah preserved it in the ark, and left it on Mount Ararat, where
Abraham found it. His grandson Jacob took it with him in his flight to his uncle Laban
in Mesopotamia. . . . The history of the stone here becomes very indistinct, but one
legend asserts that Jeremiah, escaping with a Jewish princess, took it to Spain, and
thence it was brought to Ireland [where the Jewish princess is said to have married a
King of Ulster], and that one of the Dalriad Kings conveyed it to Scotland. . . .
According to another tradition, recorded in The Coronation Stone , by G.
Albert Rogers, the Patriarch Jacob carried the stone to Egypt when Joseph
commanded his brethren to bring their father to the Court of the Pharaoh;
Moses took it with him in the Exodus; it was used as the comer stone in Solo¬
mon’s temple and was always called “Jacob’s stone”, after which, at the time
of the Babylonish captivity, the Prophet Jeremiah took it first to Egypt, then
to Spain, and finally to Ireland.
The stone itself, disregarding the chair, is about twenty-six inches long, by
sixteen and three-quarters, by ten and a half inches in depth,—a red sandstone
block. It would seem that geology might throw some light on its place of origin,
but here again, authorities differ, for while there is stone like it in Scotland,
there is also stone like it on the shores of the Dead Sea, no great distance from
Bethel. Judging by what H.P.B. says in The Secret Doctrine about other “stones
of mystery”, it seems likely, however, that the Stone of Destiny came originally
from one of the great submerged continents, probably from Atlantis, and that
it was used for oracular purposes many thousands of years before the days of 1
Jacob. That it has ceased, for the present, to serve as an oracle, is not surpris¬
ing in view of the blank amazement, or laughter, with which such “fantastic
notions” would be received to-day. Even now, speak to it with the faith that
it hears and might answer,—and perhaps it would; though the probability
is that only on great occasions, and for great purposes, with the faith of many
to evoke and hear it, would the voice of the far past be heard again. Possibly,
if England continues to respect her own traditions, and to respect, though
blindly, her Coronation Stone, the time will come (in the distant future, we fear)
when its voice will be heard: “Behold the Adept-King for whose coming you
hav^crayed!”
Frere servant.
MAN, THE MEASURE OF ALL
THINGS
BrahmcL is Self , Vishnu is Self , Indr a is Self , S/imz ts Self, all this world is Self;
nothing is but Self. . . . Like the ether , stainless , undivided , unperturbed , *m-
changing , /ree within and without , a/cwe, owe, f/ze Se//, //ze Supreme Eternal;
what else is there to know? —ShAnkara Acharya.
41 y^AN is the measure of all things.” According to the occult principle of
l\/l un ^ versa ^ analogy, the human being is the microcosm of the macro¬
cosm ; all the attributes of divinity can become his attributes; he who
truly knows himself, knows God. The most persistent theme of theosophical
literature is the perfectibility of man. “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your
Father which is in heaven is perfect.” The Secret Doctrine records the evidence
that human nature can be transmuted into the form of its paradigm, which is
the Divine Self, the Eternal.
The principle of universal analogy does not fit into the conventional moulds
of modem thought. The prevailing conception of man’s place in Nature pro¬
vides no space for the soul nor for any cosmic prototype of the soul. Life itself
is regarded as an incidental by-product of a vast inanimate process. The idea
of a consciousness diffused throughout Nature, present even in the inorganic
kingdom, is almost unintelligible to the modem mind. Such a concept seems to
contradict the whole testimony of physical science.
Physical science is a system of calculation which has been developed during
the past three centuries to a marvellous degree of efficiency. It is based upon
the simple observation that physical Nature, in its most obvious aspects , behaves
like a machine. Outside the organic kingdoms, the motion of material bodies
appears to be uniformly automatic. It conforms to certain general “laws”, and
can be charted, predicted, controlled. It is not astonishing that the scientist
should study by preference the vast field of the determinable in Nature, for his
primary function is to calculate and to direct the course of events—so far as
this is possible—thus increasing man’s power to constrain the brute forces of
the earth.
The extraordinary success of the scientist in enlarging the field of the de¬
terminable, has blinded many to the fact that his methods of calculation do not
apply to modes of motion which are not uniformly automatic. This explains
why biology, medicine and psychology, as well as sociology and economics, are
relatively so ineffective and so inexact. They represent vain attempts to adapt
the formulae of physics and mathematics to living things. Even in the lowliest
organisms, life generates movements which are incalculable. Who knows how
or when or why a hen will cross a road? Doubtless, life has its own “laws of
200
MAN, THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS
201
motion” corresponding to the “laws of motion” of inorganic matter, but they
are incomparably more subtile, more plastic, more flexible, like the laws of
composition in the arts. There is in the modem world no science of ‘‘life’s
motion”, nothing, for instance, which resembles the Indian science of karma ,
the knowledge of the ways in which the principle of ‘‘cause and effect” operates
on the various planes of consciousness. The principal ‘‘achievement” of modem
psychology and sociology has been to weaken men’s faith in the moral and spirit¬
ual science of ancient and mediaeval Europe, the product of centuries of expe¬
rience; nor has anything been put in the place of what has been destroyed.
Curiously enough, the least materialistic of the sciences to-day are those
which deal with matter in its most inorganic states, at the subatomic level which
underlies the evolution of molecular forms. Madame Blavatsky predicted that
physicists would be compelled by the progress of experiment to revise their
conceptions of the ultimate constitution of substance. Not long after her death
a series of discoveries, beginning with that of radio-activity in uranium and
radium, began to reveal a new world within the visible shell of gross matter.
In this new world the fundamental principle seems to be “uncertainty”. It
cannot be pretended that the behaviour of the electron, for instance, is auto¬
matic and mechanical. One can only assume what will probably happen. For
all practical purposes, this probability is virtually equivalent to certainty, for
by the “law of averages” every motion tends to recur periodically according to a
relatively fixed pattern. The analogy with human and animal habits is ap¬
parent. The subatomic particle or wavicle actually behaves, in its own
infinitesimal domain, like an organism endowed with an inalienable spark of
“free-will” but conditioned by its “experience” to repeat indefinitely the same
responses to the same stimuli. *
There are other similitudes between the subatomic and the organic. The
universe within the atom is in itself neither form nor force, neither matter nor
radiation. Certain physicists compare it to a void, an abyss, a state of primor¬
dial emptiness,—like the sunyata of Mahayana Buddhism or the chaos of Orphic
theogony; also like the chasm which we feel when we try to look into our “sub¬
conscious”. What, then, is the substance which seems to occupy this space?
It is not physical, as we understand the physical. It is as elusive, as intangible
as thought. By virtue of its own momentum, by virtue of the real love of truth
which has been put into it, science seems to have passed the borders of th^
physical and to have come into contact with things of an astral or semi-astrar
constitution. However we may venture to represent the astral, it suggests a
mode of substance as fluidic, as transformable, as empty per se , as the stuff of
which dreams are made. It may be compared to a mirror reflecting states of
consciousness, alternately or even simultaneously, as force and form, as “wavicle”
and “particle”. Its basic principle might well be called “uncertainty”, although
as this principle exfoliates, it assumes an increasingly certain “physical” aspect,
a limitation, an enduring shape, a habit.
Ultra-modern physicists are making desperate efforts to define the incon-
enuties of subatomic motion in mathematical terms. A whole new branch of
202
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
mathematics, which a cynic might describe as the calculus of the incalculable,
has been devised. Some explanations, as has been suggested, are more difficult
to understand than the things which are being explained. Perhaps, the ultimate
entities of subatomic Nature are essentially inexplicable, in any mathematical
sense, because they are in esse living things, atoms of consciousness. This is
suggested by the “uncertainty” which is the root of their existence. Our inner,
subjective experience testifies that wherever there is uncertainty in Nature,
there is present a will which freely chooses, however infinitesimal the field of
choice may be.
Will science, which has apparently touched the fringe of the astral in Nature,
discover the psychic potencies within or beyond the astral, perhaps even the
Kingdoms of the Elementals obscurely designated in Rosicrucian fragments?
It is said that these arcana can only be penetrated by the wisest and most in¬
trepid of mankind; that they are too intimately linked with the inner destiny
of man to be understood and controlled by anyone who neither understands
nor controls himself. The science of real Nature advances pari passu with the
science of man. One must have realized what is potential within the human
self, before one can unveil the forms of consciousness which the visible body
of the universe, according to tradition, both symbolizes and conceals.
Scientists have weighed and measured millions of human and animal bodies,
living and dead, have analysed their contents and catalogued their physio¬
logical actions and reactions. But as Madame Blavatsky remarked, biologists
as a class attribute no specific properties to the life which animates the organisms
they dissect. They consistently leave the factor of life out of their theories and
formulae, and in general still cling to the mechanistic hypothesis which has been
discredited in physics as a final explanation even of inorganic causation.
Madame Blavatsky, testifying from her own experience, insisted upon the
reality of psychic and spiritual powers in man that cannot be interpreted in
terms of any science which limits its research to his physical organs and func¬
tions, without reference to any soul or vital principle. The simplest fact of con¬
sciousness a thought, an emotion, a volition, a sensation—contradicts the
whole thesis of mechanistic materialism. But because the mind is apt to take
no notice of ordinary details of life, she drew attention to the world-wide and
age-long evidence of extraordinary psychic and spiritual experiences,—ranging
from table-tipping, “materializations” of ghosts, and magnetic cures, to the
highest expressions of mystical exaltation, the immediate perception of divine
powers both transcendent and immanent. Science, she asserted, could not
ignore this evidence without disloyalty to the ideal of truth which it professes.
It is useless to affirm: Let truth prevail, though the heavens fall”, and then to
refuse even to consider the possible existence of any fact which threatens to
upset one’s preconceived notions as to what can or cannot exist.
In recent years there have been signs of increasing dissatisfaction among
biologists as to the state of their science. The doctrine of emergent evolution,
General Smuts theory of Holism, the late Professor Osborn’s “energy concep¬
tion of heredity, represent efforts to devise “working hypotheses” which take
MAN, THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS
203
into account the phenomena which distinguish the organic from the inorganic
in Nature. Particular notice should be taken of a recent book by Dr. Alexis
Carrel. 1 Dr. Carrel, speaking as a practical physician, does not hesitate to
affirm that medicine, in spite of all its apparent triumphs, “has been paralyzed
by the narrowness of its doctrines”; that the average medical man reveals an
abysmal ignorance concerning the real nature of the human being. The most
important knowledge which we can possess is the knowledge of ourselves; but
as he points out, scientists by preference choose almost any other topic, and even
when they ostensibly specialize in the study of man, they actually limit their
experiments to the body, as if man were nothing but a body. It is the dominant
motif of Dr. Carrel’s book that a true science of man includes the investigation
of all human activities, the mental, moral and spiritual, as well as those which
we define as the purely physical. In brief, man should be studied as a whole.
It is said that Dr. Carrel’s criticisms have awakened various reactions among
his colleagues. At least, no one can assert that he is an upstart. His official
credentials are unimpeachable. After a distinguished career in France, he
joined the research staff of the Rockefeller Institute. He won the Nobel Prize
in 1912 and the Nordhoff-Jung Cancer Prize in 1931. He is universally recog¬
nized as one of the greatest living surgeons.
He suggests that our ignorance of ourselves is partly due to the nature of our
minds. The conditions of human existence on earth enforce a state of constant
struggle against the gross energies of Nature. Man must dominate his physical
environment or perish as a physical entity. As Bergson has demonstrated, our
habitual modes of thought have been evolved, like our bodies, under the mould¬
ing influence of “natural selection”. The mind tends to form a conception of
the world, best adapted to enable us effectively to calculate and control our
action upon the world or its action upon us. Whenever this is possible, it isolates
from the complex of experience certain simple data which provide us with the
information that we need in order to act, or to direct physical energies, existing
outside our bodies, to act for us. Certainly, the mind is capable of other con¬
cepts, for it reflects upon the whole of experience; but because physical expe¬
rience seems more vivid and more concrete to the average mortal than any
other, the racial mind tends to draw most of the subject-matter of thought
from the data of sense-perception. This racial proclivity has reached a sort
of climax in the applied science and material progress of the modem world.
The formulation of certain “laws of nature” has revealed nothing of what
Nature is in itself, but it has immeasurably extended the dominion of the human
mind over “matter”. It is unnecessary to emphasize the “wonders of science”,
for this is a favorite theme of the newspapers. We understand better than
ever before during the present historical cycle how to harness and direct the
forces of the physical world where we have to live.
Unfortunately, by an excessive concentration upon the phenomena of inor-
gani^Nature, where calculation is easy and certain, the modem mind has over-
charPi itself with images of machines and automata. Dr. Carrel has no illu-
1 Man the Unknown, by Alexis Carrel; Harper & Brothers; New York. 1935; price $3.50.
204
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
sions regarding the dangers latent in this simple fact that we know so much
about the substance which is “dead” and so little about the living.
The sciences of inert matter have made an immense progress, while those of living
beings remain in a rudimentary state. The slow advance of biology is due to the con¬
ditions of human existence, to the intricacy of the phenomena of life, and to the form of
our intelligence, which delights in mechanical constructions and mathematical abstrac¬
tions. The applications of scientific discoveries have transformed the material and
mental worlds. These transformations exert on us a profound influence. Their unfor¬
tunate effect comes from the fact that they have been made without consideration for
our nature. Our ignorance of ourselves has given to mechanics, physics, and chemistry
the power to modify at random the ancestral forms of life. Man should be the measure
of all. On the contrary, he is a stranger in the world that he has created. He has been
incapable of organizing this world for himself, because he did not possess a practical
knowledge of his own nature. Thus, the enormous advance gained by the sciences of
inanimate matter over those of living things is one of the greatest catastrophes ever
suffered by humanity. The environment born of our intelligence and our inventions is
adjusted neither to our stature nor to our shape. . . . The only possible remedy for this
evil is a much more profound knowledge of ourselves. ... In bringing to light our true
nature, our potentialities, and the way to actualize them, this science will give us the
explanation of our physiological weakening, and of our moral and intellectual diseases.
We have no other means of learning the inexorable rules of our organic and spiritual
activities, of distinguishing the prohibited from the lawful, of realizing that we are not
free to modify, according to our fancy, our environment and ourselves. Since the natural
conditions of life have been destroyed by modern civilization, the science of man has
become the most necessary of all sciences (pp. 27-28).
There is a fatal law from the operation of which no previous civilization has
escaped. Both in the animate and in the supposedly inanimate worlds, certain
limitations are imposed by Nature. When these limitations are transgressed, a
monstrosity is produced, a lusus naturae, an entity relatively over-developed in
some functions and under-developed in others. But Nature has no place for
monsters and freaks. If they cannot be “cured”, they are destroyed. Every
civilization which has left a record has ended by becoming a deformity. Instead
of making manifest the real nature of man, it has denatured him. In spite of
whatever glory it may have achieved, it was erased from the surface of the
earth, and the human race subsided into a “dark age” during which it slowly
recovered its vitality and resumed a natural mode of life. Dr. Carrel’s diagnosis
of the mental and moral state of the average modem man suggests that our
present civilization has already entered its monstrous phase and may soon be
npe for destruction.
Moral sense is almost completely ignored by modern society. We have in fact sup¬
pressed its manifestations. All are imbued with irresponsibility. Those who discern
good from evil, who are industrious and provident, remain poor and are looked on as
morons. The woman who has several children, who devotes herself to their education,
instead of to her own career, is considered weak-minded. If a man saves a little money
for his wife and the education of his children, this money is stolen from him by enter¬
prising financiers; or taken by the government and distributed to those who have been
reduced to want by their own improvidence and the short-sightedness of manufacturers,
bankers, and economists. . . . Robbers enjoy prosperity in peace. Gangsters are pro¬
tected by politicians and respected by judges. They are the heroes whom children ad-
MAN, THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS
205
mire at the cinema and imitate in their games. A rich man has every right. He may
discard his ageing wife, abandon his old mother, rob those who have entrusted their money
to him, without losing the consideration of his friends. . . . Sexual morals have been
cast aside. Psychoanalysts supervise men and women in their conjugal relations. There
is no difference between wrong and right, just and unjust. . . . Ministers have rational¬
ized religion. They have destroyed its mystical basis. But they do not succeed in
attracting modern men. In their half-empty churches they vainly preach a weak moral¬
ity .. . (pp. 152-153).
The loss of faith in God, even in an anthropomorphic God, has immeasurably
impoverished the concept of Nature. We have little respect for natural forms
or for natural processes of growth. Whenever it is possible to do so, we alter
normal functions and impose an artificial direction upon them. There is evi¬
dence that even our staple foods have become artificial. “Mass production has
modified the composition of wheat, eggs, milk, fruit, and butter, although these
articles have retained their familiar appearance” (p. 116). It is by no means
impossible that many of the degenerative diseases from which civilized man
suffers are related to the abnormalities of a civilized diet. The digestive, cir¬
culatory and nervous systems are not adapted to foodstuffs produced, like our
ultra-modem eggs, through the over-stimulation of organic processes by chem¬
ical and physical agencies never present in a state of nature.
It is useless to pretend that we can become anything which we want to be¬
come. Man cannot adequately be conceived apart from his real potentialities.
These are rich enough to warrant our abandoning without regret the search for
potentialities in him which by the very nature of things cannot be there. It is
vain and dangerous, for instance, to fancy that there is no fundamental differ¬
ence in aptitudes between the sexes.
Ignorance of . . . fundamental facts has led promotors of feminism to believe that
both sexes should have the same education, the same powers, and the same responsi¬
bilities. In reality, woman differs profoundly from man. Every one of the cells of her
body bears the mark of her sex. The same is true of her organs and, above all, of her
nervous system. Physiological laws are as inexorable as those of the sidereal world.
They cannot be replaced by human wishes. We are obliged to accept them just as they
are. Women should develop their aptitudes in accordance with their own nature, with¬
out trying to imitate the males. Their part in the progress of civilization is higher than
that of man. They should not abandon their specific functions (p. 90).
The failure to recognize the physiological and psychological laws which de¬
termine all human possibilities, is responsible for all the Utopian dreams which
are ravaging our civilization as they have ravaged the civilizations of the past.
Although physicians, educators, and hygienists most generously lavish their efforts
for the benefit of mankind, they do not attain their goal. For they deal with schemata
containing only a part of the reality. The same may be said of all those who substitute
their desires, their dreams, or their doctrines for the concrete human being. These the¬
orists build up civilizations which, although designed by them for man, fit only a mon¬
strous image of man. The systems of government, entirely constructed in the minds of
doctrinaires, are valueless. The principles of the French Revolution, the visions of Marx
and Lenin, apply only to abstract men. It must be clearly realized that the laws of
huma®Mations are still unknown. Sociology and economics are conjectural sciences—
206
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
that is, pseudo-sciences. Thus, it appears that the environment, which science and tech¬
nology have succeeded in developing for man, does not suit him, because it has been
constructed at random, without regard for his true self (pp. 26-27).
We must discover our potentialities. Students of Theosophy will sympathize
with much, if not all, that Dr. Carrel has to say upon this subject.
Man consists of all his actual and potential activities. The functions which, at cer¬
tain epochs and in certain environments, remain virtual, are as real as those which con¬
stantly express themselves. The writings of Ruysbroeck the Admirable contain as many
truths as those of Claude Bernard. The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage and the
Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine describe two aspects, the former less
frequent and the latter more usual, of the same being. The forms of activity considered by
Plato are more specific of our nature than thirst, hunger, sensual appetite, and greed.
Since the Renaissance, a privileged position has arbitrarily been given to certain aspects
of man. Matter has been separated from mind. To matter has been attributed a greater
reality than to mind (pp. 119-120).
The suggested remedy is, therefore, to study man as a whole, to test every
experience upon every plane of one’s own being, to examine without prejudice
the possibility that various experiences recorded by other men, perhaps in other
ages or upon other continents, may be none the less real because one has not
known them oneself. Dr. Carrel reveals a truly extraordinary tolerance and
broad-mindedness. He believes in telepathy and clairvoyance, in the cures at
Lourdes, in the power of prayer, in the divination of truth by super-sensuous
intuition, in the reality of the Mystic Way. In some ways, his arguments recall
those of Madame Blavatsky, since she also argued that the existence of super¬
normal powers in human consciousness cannot be explained by any science of
man which does not pass beyond the analysis of his physical body and its func¬
tions. Dr. Carrel even favours an interpretation of spiritualistic phenomena
which, as far as it goes, is not dissimilar to the hypothesis proposed in early
theosophical literature.
The medium believes himself to be inhabited by the spirit of the deceased. He may
reveal to the experimenters some details known only to the dead man, and the exactness
of which is verified later. According to Broad, these facts could be interpreted as indi¬
cating the persistence after death, not of the mind, but of a psychic factor capable of
grafting itself temporarily upon the organism of the medium. This psychic factor, in
uniting with a human being, would constitute a sort of consciousness belonging both to
the medium and to the defunct. Its existence would be transitory. It would progres¬
sively break up and finally disappear (pp. 264-265).
He nowhere expresses himself clearly upon the subject of personal immor¬
tality of a higher order than that envisaged by most spiritualists. The most
that he dares say is that we do not know where our true spatial and temporal
frontiers are, that sometimes “personality seems really to extend beyond phys¬
iological duration’’ (p. 264); that each one of us, while living, is “certainly far
larger and more diffuse than his body” (p. 258).
Perhaps his hesitation at this point is not wholly due to scientific caution.
Admirable as is his exposition of human potentialities, it would seem that he
invents a premature generalization when he defines—quite tentatively, it is
MAN, THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS
207
true—soul and body as inseparable aspects of one entity. The whole question
is, what is meant by these terms, “soul” and “body”. His studies in mysticism
might have suggested the idea that there are several “souls” and several “bodies”.
In particular, he might revise his somewhat disparaging opinion of the great
Hindu mystics, if he seriously investigated the basis for their threefold and
sevenfold divisions of man. It may be granted that wherever there is conscious¬
ness, it is related to some state of substance, to some material vehicle, subtile
or gross. The modes of consciousness, which immediately depend upon the
gross physical body for their manifestation, must disappear when the body dies;
but according to the experimental science of the Upanishads, for example, there
are other modes of consciousness which do not immediately depend upon the
physical body and which survive its death, although their activity may, in a cer¬
tain sense, be suspended until, by the operation of Karma and of cyclic law, a
new physical body is bom in which they can reincarnate. Many students of
Theosophy have accepted this theory, which incidentally was not limited to
India, since it was clearly expounded by Pythagoras and Plato. It is logical
and rests upon well-attested experience.
However, the essence of the ancient Indian science of consciousness is the
doctrine of the identity of the Real Self of man with the Eternal. As the Vedanta
teaches, the Atman and the Brahman are one. “This is the meaning, this the
final word of the teaching of wisdom: the individual life is the Eternal, the whole
world is the Eternal; to be established in the secondless Eternal is liberation;
this too the Scriptures declare” ( The Crest Jewel 0] Wisdom [ Vivekachuda -
mani\ t 480).
According to the doctrine of the One Self, the true man is not his body, not
his mind, not even what some religious people have imagined to be the “im¬
mortal soul”. “The destruction of the body, the sense-powers, the life-breath,
the mind, is as the destruction of a leaf, a flower, a fruit; but the Self stands
firm as the tree.” The Self is immanent in every atom but is also removed from
all the accidents and purgations of conditioned existence. One of the titles of
the Real Self is “the disinterested spectator”. Only he who has realized his
essential being, who knows by immediate experience that he is that eternal Self,
can be described as the Immortal, the Master, the Mahatma, the “Great Soul”.
However, it may be suggested that the Self is always present to our conscious¬
ness, though we recognize it not, for it is the power that makes manifest the
purpose which presides over every motion of life and which reveals in every
event the meaning which can be found by those who diligently search.
Students of Theosophy who attempt to make the doctrine of the One Self the
guiding star of their lives, find in it the supreme expression of the maxim that
man is the measure of all things. This man is the Master, he who has embodied
the Essence of Nature in his individuality, and who is immortal because the
Essence of Nature, the Logos, with which he is one, is immortal. Madame
Blavatsky brought to the world the testimony that such men are not metaphysical
abstractions, that they exist as living witnesses to the divine potentialities of
humanity.
208
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
Dr. Carrel is, perhaps, not far removed from the doctrine of the One Self, when
he meditates upon the cause and quality of true greatness.
Between certain individuals and nature there are subtile and obscure relations. Such
men are able to spread across space and time and to grasp concrete reality. They seem
to escape from themselves and also from the physical continuum. . . . Like the great
prophets of science, art, religion, they often succeed in apprehending in the abysses of
the unknown, elusive and sublime beings called mathematical abstractions, Platonic
Ideas, absolute beauty, God (p. 262).
Only men of the superior order, only “God-instructed men” can save our
civilization from shipwreck, if indeed it be worth saving. The most that we can
do is to act and to plan as intelligently as possible and to pray for their coming.
Dr. Carrel’s last chapter, “The Remaking of Man”, in our opinion, falls below
the general level of the book, because he takes up there an idea which he has
effectively refuted, the idea that all would be well if the government of the world
could be turned over to a high commission of scientists. It is true that these
scientists would be unlike any others of whom we have ever heard. They would
assemble all the facts of human history in all its phases from the biological to
the mystical, and would then almost automatically pronounce sound judgments
and issue edicts which the masses would almost automatically obey. At least,
such is the impression which his argument leaves. Such an ideal is, of course,
Utopian in the extreme. Scientists of that species simply do not exist, nor is it
conceivable that the human race can be renovated by any number of edicts
though they emanated from God Himself. The whole experiment, assuming
that it could even be launched, would terminate in one more planned economy;
and the world has at present all the planned economy that it can endure.
This does not imply that one does not sympathize with Dr. Carrel’s funda¬
mental ideal of forming body and mind “according to natural laws, and not to
the prejudices of the various schools of educators” (p. 286). One agrees in
principle with his assertion that minds capable of understanding those laws
exist. But such minds cannot be formed by the discipline of modem science
alone. Indeed, certain current scientific practices, such as the inoculation of
animals with vimses, lead not to spiritual knowledge but to black magic. One
knows the laws of subtile Nature by direct experience of their action in one’s
own consciousness. One knows the Real by becoming real oneself. “Thus says
the Scripture.” There is no other way. Doubtless, the “God-instructed man”
must know all that is known to the modem scientist; but in addition he must
be a saint, a sage, a creative genius of the first magnitude, for it is part of his
function, not the least important part, by the force of his love and compassion
to create in the hearts of other men the desire to know themselves and to reno¬
vate themselves. The builders of real civilizations cannot be manufactured in
any academy. We do not understand the law of their coming. One may sur¬
mise, however, that they would come even at this late date, if they were sin¬
cerely invited. S.V.L.
KNOW THYSELF”
“MAN,
AT the Theosophical Convention of 1936, the above was one of the texts
/A upon which was based the Report of the Committee on Resolutions.
A companion text was: “Man is the Mirror of the Universe”. That
address contained matter of vital importance to students of Theosophy who
are eager to promote the aims and objects of the Society, and especially to
those who aspire to discipleship, because, as the speaker said, “discipleship of
any degree is impossible except on the basis of my texts”.
The speaker referred to “Mr. Judge’s oft-repeated statement that everything
in life and in nature should be interpreted in the light of the seven principles”,
and then suggested that it would be simpler, for the present purpose, to think
of the upper triad as the immortal part of man, and of the lower quaternary as
the personality, and continued: “Man being the mirror of the universe, we find
that the hierarchy which he is by nature (before he has perverted his nature),
reflects the hierarchical principle which is manifest everywhere in the universe
around him, except where, as in himself, he has turned things upside down;
for the vast majority of men, instead of being governed by the immortal part
of themselves, are governed by the personality,—which means that they are
governed by their own mob, by their own demos—their elemental inclinations
and desires. This is why man is the demos-controlled animal which he is to-day,
and why the whole world is in a state of such deplorable confusion. The hier¬
archical principle, inherent in Nature both seen and unseen, was intended to
inspire and guide the evolution of man as of all else.” Later the speaker said:
“This doctrine of the higher and lower nature of man, and of a similar duality
throughout the manifested universe, needs to be emphasized by all students of
Theosophy. . . . Because of this duality in manifested Nature, so marked in
man,—necessarily his life, and the life of the universe itself, is a ceaseless con¬
flict, with the corollary that conflict is not an evil, but is essential to health and
growth. The most terrible of all conflicts, because incessant, age-long, is that
between the Powers of Light and those of Darkness,—between the White Lodge
and the Black, fighting for the souls of men. That most people no longer believe
in the Devil, who was, after all, the symbol of a dreadful realitv, a synthetic
representation of the Powers of Darkness, is a victory for them for which they
had long been working.”
How many of those who heard that address, or who read it in the published
report of the Convention, have made any serious or determined effort to act
upon it? And yet, we must believe that that message—that appeal—was made
because of a great need. The present cycle of indrawal emphasizes the urgency
of that need. In this Black Age, or Kali Yuga, the sincere, determined efforts
of a very few can count for infinitely much. As Mr. Judge says in Letters that
have Helped Me\ “Kali Yuga by its very nature, and terrible, swift momentum,
209
210
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
permits one to do more with his energies in a shorter time than in any other
Yuga. But heavens, what a combat!” Therefore, that Convention address
was not only an appeal, it was a challenge.
It has been said that, considering the indrawal now taking place, we should
become more and more concerned with inner things. In other words, the com¬
bat to which we are urged is an inner conflict between the Self (the immortal
part of us) and the self (the personality). How many of us are aware of any
struggle taking place? If there is no struggle, then we may be sure that we have
surrendered, lock, stock and barrel, to the enemy! Or, perhaps, we have been
unwilling to give up our illusion that the personality is something lovely to
contemplate because we have spent so much time, attention and effort in build¬
ing up this false image of ourselves, until it appears to us as an angel of light,
instead of the ugly, hideous thing it is. One of the favourite tricks of the lower
nature is to prevent us from being absolutely honest with ourselves. Few men
are. The average man finds it easier to live in desires. Inertia, sheer laziness,
are potent weapons of the lower nature. Yet, if a man will but look within,
and not blind his eyes to the light of the soul, his search will be rewarded. If
he has come to recognize that the hierarchical principle was intended to inspire
and guide his evolution, he will endeavour increasingly to bring his thoughts,
his desires, his aspirations and efforts under the guidance of the immortal part
of him. Once this step is taken, he will recognize his personality for what it is:
“the snake of self”, which is his own worst and, in reality, his only enemy.
All that has been said in the foregoing has been repeated in theosophical
literature so often, in so many different ways, that it is to be feared the constant
repetition has in some cases deadened the understanding of its deep significance.
There is also a danger that some students of Theosophy have unconsciously
been influenced by the general disbelief of the present day in the Devil, who
was ‘‘the symbol of a dreadful reality, a synthetic representation of the Powers
of Darkness”. If so, they should realize that they have contributed, to that
extent, to the magnitude of the victory of the Black Lodge over the world.
This tragic fact is an illustration of the way in which we may unconsciously be
betraying the Cause to which we have dedicated our lives. Oh! that each one
of us could be brought to realize more keenly than we have ever done the fact
that our lower nature, the thing which we have nursed and fostered so assid¬
uously, will turn and rend us; that it is, in fact, fighting for its own life, which
it maintains by feeding upon the spiritual qualities which all of us possess, but
which we have allowed it to pervert and misuse. Realization of this truth can¬
not fail to result in serious efforts to curb the lower nature, which will then
become restive, and will fight,—for it must not be imagined that it will surren¬
der without a life-and-death struggle. Even a rat will fight when cornered, as
anyone who has ever had any experience with rats can testify. This ‘‘rat” of a
lower nature will do the same.
A competent general knows from experience that in planning a campaign he
must first study the terrain, the strength and disposition of the opposing forces.
He is aware that his opponent is wily; knows his antagonist’s weak as well as
“MAN, KNOW THYSELF”
2 11
strong points, and will therefore dispose his forces so as to guard against ambush
and surprise attacks. All rules of civilized or uncivilized warfare are as nothing
to our inner enemy, who will employ any tactics, any deceit, any means what¬
ever, to gain his ends. In this warfare, no quarter is asked or given; therefore,
the would-be disciple must both study his enemy, and be ‘‘on sentry go” every
minute. Above all, he should be aware of the spiritual forces which he already
has at his command, and the immeasurable reinforcements which may be sent
him in case of need. It is all too common for people to think of ‘‘the spiritual
world”, the ‘‘upper triad”, the ‘‘spiritual hierarchy”, as something above us,
to which we vaguely and more or less blindly appeal. We should be conscious
of the spiritual qualities which we already possess and are constantly using.
The Buddha, when asked what needed to be done, in order to develop the
‘‘iddhis”, or powers of the soul, replied that, among other things, we should
learn “to see through things”. All of us are closer to the spiritual world, and
our life is closer to the life of the soul, than we realize. The good qualities we
possess, and all of us have at least a few, are part of the immortal in us. What
we need to do is to realize that this spiritual life is close to our every-day life
and consciousness, and that we use the qualities of the soul constantly. By
learning to “see through things”, as the Buddha advised, we shall learn to dis¬
criminate between these higher qualities and the perversions which our per¬
sonalities have made of them.
The cycle of indrawal is an opportunity provided for gaining greater realiza¬
tion of the need to employ these qualities of the soul more intelligently, more
constantly and determinedly, in order to draw closer to the centre and source
of spiritual life for each one of us—our own Master. In this mortal combat
we can invoke the aid of all the heavenly host; our reinforcements will be those
of the Great Lodge itself; every power of the spiritual world will be aiding us.
H.G.
It is not the weeds that choke the grain; it is the negligence of the cultivator .—
Confucius. A
Beware of moods and ill-humour; to give way to these is to impair our strength
of will and even our mental powers. —T. Pesch.
FOLLOW UP!
S TUDENTS of Theosophy are accustomed to think in terms of cyclic law,
or indeed, if such is not their custom, they have at least had their atten¬
tion drawn to the need to do so. “If the trumpet give an uncertain sound,
who shall prepare himself for battle?” Forty-three years ago our leader, W.
Q. Judge, waged in London, almost single-handed, his Homeric battle against
the forces of darkness. Staying alone, in the house of enemies, from the 5th
to the 19th July, 1894, he fought the combined forces of treachery, malevolence,
spite, betrayal; answered the charges levelled against him, and defended the
Cause of the Masters, not in his own right but by their power. Because he
won, we, as a Society, are alive to-day. The following year, on July 5th, 1895,
the few loyal members who remained in London, separated themselves from the
treacherous “Parent Society”, and re-organized the T.S. in Europe on the
lines laid down at the Boston Convention earlier in the year. Thus the “Theo-
sophical Bridge” between East and West was maintained and strengthened,
that Bridge which is also a gateway “for egos who incarnate in the silent work
of making a new Race”. 1
Ten years before the “trial” in London, in the summer of 1884, the great
attack had been launched by the Psychical Research Society, an attempt to wreck
the patient, constructive work of the T.S. since its foundation. From both
attacks the Work itself emerged the stronger, more fitted to stand the strain of
repeated conflict in the years to come.
The very name of H.P.B. sounds the lion note, H.P.B., “adept in all the
noble arts of righteous war”. 2 Think of her, and one can almost hear the roll
of the drums that reverberate through the first books of the Bhagavad Gita , the
Pandu army drawn up for battle, Krishna standing in his great chariot, Arjuna
sinking down in despondency at the thought of slaying his own kindred; then
the rousing words of the Warrior Lord, “Arise, 0 son of Kunti, gird thyself for
the fight”. Only six years ago, in July, the T.S. celebrated the centenary of the
birth of the founder of the T.S. 3 She had spent the last years of her heroic
warfare in Europe, dwelling in London since 1887,—years which saw her greatest
output of literary and other work, leaving as lasting records The Secret Doctrine ,
Key to Theosophy , Voice of the Silence , Theosophical Glossary. With reference to
her stay in London, she stated in a letter 4 that she was going to “galvanize a
corpse” which would later turn to destroy her; but she predicted that America
would prevail. Her birthday, coming in July, reminds us that this month is
dedicated to all Warriors, radiant in the light of the Sun at its Zenith, illumined
by the rays of the Lion of Judah, sacred of old to Mithras the Mediator. In
1 See Theosophy. Vol. XI, 1896-1897. P- 262, "On the Future", by W. 0 - Judge; reprinted from Lucifer, 1892.
* Thus described by W. 0 - J. in the Path.
•See Theosophical Quarterly, Vol. XXIX, July, 1931.
4 See Irish Theosophist, Vol. Ill, May, 1895.
212
FOLLOW UP!
213
the midst of the chaos and darkness of this world the Warriors fight, as in the
realms of light, fight to win their true place in the ranks of the Lodge, and when
they have won it, fight all the harder to maintain their position. Les combats de
la vie sont incessants; guerre en soi y guerre pour sot , defense aux autres , soutien des
blesses , sus an mal } a Vennemi lucifdrien tant de fois triomphant. 6
Just twenty-three years ago, in the summer of 1914, the inner warfare was
brought to a focus in the outer War in which allied European nations were
instantly involved in hand-to-hand conflict with the powers of evil; and be¬
cause of the consistent appeal of the leaders of the T.S. in America, the U. S. A.
won, at long last, her right and privilege to fight on the side of the armies of the
Lord. In that warfare men found themselves, for in them arose again all the
traditions of the knighthood of old. Through the horror and darkness of fight¬
ing conditions in this century, they could yet discern the lighted trail of the
Quest of olden times. In them rose up, to fight and to conquer, the courage of
the warriors of old,—bronze-clad Persians, Assyrians with winged lion for em¬
blem, ancient Egyptians, worshippers of the Sun-god Ra, Indian Rajputs, Chinese
and Japanese warriors who see death in the clouds and defy it. In them arose
the valour of all the European fighting nations, Greek hoplites, Roman legion¬
aries, Gallic men-at-arms, Celtic warriors, Norsemen and Danes, Vikings from
over the sea. In them was reborn the spirit of the ancient Phoenicians, Etrus¬
cans, Pelasgians, the explorers, adventurers, colonizers, on to the days of the
Pilgrim Fathers and the heroic early settlers in northern America. In them
was renewed the ancient chivalric code, from the times of the Arab and Moorish
conquerors, through the days of the Crusades and of mediaeval chivalry,—the
fighting spirit of Templars and Knights, of the captains who fought under Joan
of Arc (and her Leaders), the generals who conquered under Napoleon the Em¬
peror. The true fighters in the great War were fashioned of the same steel that
has hardened every soldier to endure, at all times, in all climes, in the scorching
sun of desert wastes, in the bleak cold of frozen wilderness. In their thousands
they fought and died, and left their earthly vesture on every battlefield, their
finest memorial those words of Thucydides: “The whole earth is the sepulchre
of heroic men . . . their story is not graven only in stone ... it abides every¬
where without visible symbol . . . woven into the stuff of other men’s lives.” \
In our days the warfare continues, more pressing than ever; and we have
learned to be afraid of eloquent words that find no corresponding response in con¬
sistent action, steadfastly maintained on a level with the ideals set up. As to
this it is written: “First the ideal . . . and then the daily trudge onward, when
the splendour has faded from view, but is all the more closely wrapped round
the heart. . . . Let us hold to a religion which, while it exults in being the secret
of enthusiasm and the inspiration of heroism, is daring and Divine enough to
find its climax in the commonplace .” 6 Within the commonplace is to be found
the battleground of daily life, with every opportunity for adventure and chiv-
alry. But we must needs learn to restrain, check, direct all false impulses,
* ChrllMnt, by Mme. Adam.
• George Adam Smith.
214
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
remembering that by patience alone we may “possess our souls”. That patience
can only be won at the cost of heroic self-sacrifice, looking ever to the example
and leadership of the Masters of Wisdom, the Warrior Lords, who are the living
pattern of all true chivalry, of the Knighthood of the Cross. It is their call
which resounds through the ages: what is the response from soldier-hearts ?
Oh! be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
So the War-cry is “Forward”, where the banner moves on, borne aloft by the
Standard-Bearers of the Lodge. Across the sacred oriflamme shines out, in
letters of fire: “Upward and onward for evermore”! Companions of old have
responded to that call. Once a fellow-worker of Mr. Judge, who understood
the need to rally to the defence of the leader, wrote of the fact that the sword
(which is kept sheathed in the case of every personal attack) must be instantly
unsheathed to defend a Companion. “Such was the ethical code of the steel-
clad seekers for the Holy Grail, and of the mailed Templars . . . who fought
‘under the red cross of the Four Powers of the Hidden Majesty’.” In that Sign
shall we conquer, for it is the watch-word of brotherhood given by H.P.B. in
her Convention message of 1889. * 7
The ancient sign, the Master’s accolade, is given to those who earn it by right
of conquest. “Through this sign hast thou conquered”, the holy letters I.H.S.
(the sign on the Labarum, the standard with eagle as emblem) 8 belong to the
Brothers of the Light, who have fought and won and still fight on. “The Cross
descends from the sun and covers the whole earth. In that sign shall each man
conquer, raising himself by the ladder of light within him and without him.
. . . The square gives place to the X and all is light.” 9
How shall we conquer, children of dust and earth and sin? Even by that
knowledge that we are sons of God, children of the light, when at last we have
the courage to claim and hold our inheritance. How shall we win, single-
handed against the forces of evil arrayed against us? Not single-handed indeed,
single-hearted is the word, in the ranks of the Fellowship which is one army
under the Warrior Lord. In that unity is our strength, to fight and fall and
fight again; relying on that “united spirit of life”, which is our only true self,
we may at last win through to victory for Him.
Draw near together, none be last or first,
We are no longer names, but one desire,
W ith the same burning of the soul we thirst,
And the same wine to-night shall quench our fire. 10
7 Reprinted in the Theosophical Quarterly. January. 1934.
• See Theosophical Glossary.
• Freemasonry and the Ancient Gods, by J. S. M. Ward.
10 Newbolt: Sacramenlum Supremum.
Miles C.
1 J
Cl
m
fT
IES 1
REPORT OF THE ANNUAL CONVENTION OF THE
THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY
Morning Session
The Annual Convention of The Theosophical Society was called to order at
64, Washington Mews, New York' at 10.30 o’clock, on Saturday morning,
April 24th, 1937, by Mr. Hargrove, Chairman of the Executive Committee, who
served as Temporary Chairman of the Convention. A Committee on Cre¬
dentials was appointed, consisting of Mr. H. B. Mitchell, Miss Perkins, and
Mr. Kobbd, to confer and report at once.
Address of the Temporary Chairman
Mr. Hargrove : While the Committee is at work, it is my privilege to wel¬
come you to our Convention. It should be much more than an official or per¬
sonal welcome. We assemble in the name of the Masters of the Great Lodge,
and, in will and desire, in order to serve them; and we must keep that objective
constantly before us while we meet, because some of us learned years ago,
that that which is said here, if it be said with conviction, with understanding,
from the heart, and above all for their sakes rather than for our own,—carries
far indeed. We are not speaking only to a group of members and delegates.
Because of what that group represents, because of the way in which it is sup¬
ported by the Lodge,—every word and every thought and aspiration, going
forth from this place on this occasion, reaches throughout the world’s atmos¬
phere. And we have an advantage, in a sense, over Masters, since we, for them,
are speaking on the level of those in hell. We are in direct contact with the
world, and in so far as, in these moments, we can overcome the world within
ourselves; in so far as the past year’s efforts, and this occasion, lift us above
ourselves, to that extent we can be sure of reinforcement, and of the trans¬
mission of what is truly said and felt to every mind and heart on earth that
is in the least degree open to the truth.
In the nature of things, it is an immense pleasure once more to greet you.
Old faces, familiar faces, which we are ever-increasingly glad to see again;
newer faces, equally welcome—because while all represent the present, there
are some who can speak for the past, and others who are the promise of the
215
2 l6
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
future. And I want to repeat what I said once before on a similar occasion;
I want to remind the newer members of the Parable of the lord of the vineyard
and his labourers. You will remember that those who were called to service
late, were treated exactly as those who had borne the burden and heat of the
day. It must of necessity be true that the longer we have been in the Move¬
ment, the more gladly shall we welcome those who, because of their devotion,
because of their self-forgetfulness, develop within themselves the spiritual
perception that will enable us to look up to them. There can be no organiza¬
tion anywhere in which the older members would more thankfully give place
to the new. So it will not be for lack of encouragement if the newer members
do not make good; not for any conscious lack of helpfulness on our part if one
or two or three or many do not force their way through to that place where
they will know of a certainty that the inner world is the real world, and that
Masters always have, and still do, guide this Movement along the way it
should go, for the purpose for which it was founded, until at last its work is
done.
Once more, then, on behalf of the Executive Committee, I welcome you.
The Report of the Committee on Credentials was then called for, presented,
and accepted; next, Mr. H. B. Mitchell was elected Chairman of the Convention,
and Miss Perkins and Miss Chickering, Secretary and Assistant Secretary.
Address of the Chairman
The Chairman: Each of us speaks here for himself. It is our custom to
put that on record at the beginning of our proceedings, so that the freedom of
the Society shall be in no way impaired. Yet each one who speaks here must
feel that he is speaking for something far greater than himself or his fellows,
for more, even, than the Society, which explicitly stands uncommitted by what
he says. He feels that he is speaking in the presence of, and under the pressure
of, the Wholeness of Truth, of which his own truths and his fellows’ are but
fragments,—under the pressure of that guidance which, as Mr. Hargrove has
said, has never failed the Society; in the presence of the great Lodge of Masters
from which that guidance comes. It is this overshadowing of the imperfect
by the Perfect, this sense of the whole that inheres in the part, this sure knowl¬
edge that Truth exists, changeless and eternal, and that the inner world is at
hand,—it is this which is my theme to-day.
Three Questions , and Their Answer
It is my theme because in it is the answer to three questions which I asked
myself, as I thought of what the great founders of our Society would wish said
at this Convention. The first was: What, of all the gifts the Theosophical
Movement has brought us, do we most desire to make sure will be passed on
unimpaired to our successors? The answer to that question would tell us what
should be most emphasized here, among ourselves, when we consider our duty
as the trustees of those gifts.
The second question was: What, among all the manifold needs of the world,
REPORT OF THE ANNUAL CONVENTION
217
is its most crucial need? That would tell how we should speak to that need,
in the knowledge that here, year after year, is repeated the miracle of the loaves
and the fishes, so that the power of what is said is multiplied a thousand times
because it is said here, and because of what is focussed here and flows out from
here to the world.
And finally, the third question: What is it that makes these Conventions so
peculiarly dear to us, setting them apart from ordinary gatherings and confer¬
ences of friends and comrades, so that, for many of us, the Convention of the
Society is the culmination of the year? That would show us where to look,
and what to keep constantly in mind, that we might make the best use of the
day.
The answer to all three questions is the same, and is found in the conscious¬
ness of the power and the presence of Eternal Truth, and the power and the
presence of its Servants, the Lodge of Masters. Of all the gifts the Theosophical
Movement has brought us, none is more inclusive, more potent to reproduce
from within itself all else that we have received, than our knowledge of the
Masters. Of all the needs of the world to-day, none goes deeper, none is more
sorely needed, than to regain its lost recognition of the existence and supreme
authority of the unchanging Truth. And in that dual recognition which we
have, of the Perfect in which our imperfect is upheld, of the Whole of which we
are but parts, is the secret of the sympathy and understanding, the close, dear
comradeship, that we find here.
Change Lays not her Hand upon Truth
Theosophy has given us this awareness of the inner world which both inter¬
penetrates and transcends the visible world of our physical senses, and which
is lit everywhere and for ever by the unfading Light of the Spirit, moved only
by what is itself moveless, changing only to reveal more of the changeless
Truth. Yet it has no name. We are faced by that problem whenever we try
to talk of the Real, which gleams beyond us and draws forth our love and
worship. Call it God, call it the Platonic Trinity of the Good, the True, the
Beautiful, call it Theosophy, or the Eternal Wisdom, or the Perfect, or what
you will,—but know that it is there. Know that there is a Completeness in which
our incompleteness is made whole; that above all change, is the Changeless;
above all opinion, is the immutable, inviolable Truth; that “Change lays not
her hand upon Truth”.
We do not need, to-day, to remind ourselves that we live in a world of change.
On every side we hear of the “new” this and the “new” that, and looking in
vain for former things, are told that they have passed away. But the more
rapid and radical the change, the more vital it is that we should remember
ceaselessly that we live equally in a world of Truth, the same yesterday, to-day,
and to-morrow, and that, in the swirling flux of the temporal, we should hold
steadfastly to the Eternal.
Our Motto and Seal
“^fc^re is no religion higher than Truth.” All that I am saying might be
said as a commentary upon our motto and seal, as we see them there on the
2 l8
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
shield above Mr. Judge’s bust. In the centre of the seal is the crux ansata, or
ankh y the symbol of immortal life, the spark of the Eternal individualized in
the soul. Around it are the interlaced triangles, the symbol of the “ever be¬
coming” and of manifestation, through which life evolves,—the triangles
pointing up and down, forward and backward, linking spirit and matter, the
past and the future, the already formed and the potential that is yet unborn.
And around that again, circumscribing the world of duality and change, is the
symbol of the Changeless, the circle of Eternity, the serpent swallowing its
tail, in which the end is as the beginning, and alpha and omega are one, uniting
through the Wheel of the Law. Thus the Eternal is both the centre and the
circumference of the temporal. It is both immanent and transcendent; both
the source and goal of change. The long evolution of life is the action of the
Changeless Perfect drawing to itself and its own perfection its imperfect
fragments.
Evolution: the Response of the Imperfect to the Perfect
I should like to make this as clear as I can, and to that end we may consider
a contrast presented by pictures in the two museums on opposite sides of Central
Park, in this city. On the western side is the American Museum of Natural
History, in whose Hall of Man are exhibited modem, imaginative paintings of
“primitive” humanity, purporting to represent reconstructions, made in accord¬
ance with the evolutionary theories of our western anthropologists, from some
fragments of skull or jaw-bone found buried in deep-lying strata of the earth.
All of us are familiar with such pictures. Typically, they show a more or less
human figure, unkempt, as animals are not, but with a wholly brutish expres¬
sion, coming forth, club in hand, from a cave; and the notable thing about
them, to any student of Theosophy, is that, in thus making the body human
and the face brutish, the artist has reversed the attributes of flesh and spirit,
so as to represent degenerating, not evolving, humanity. For the body, the
vesture, of any living thing is woven of its past; but the expression of its counte¬
nance is the stamp of its spirit and the forecast of its future. Primitive man,
if such there ever was, may have had the body of a brute, but in his eyes would
have been the aspiration which made him human. The museum’s “history”
is fiction.
On the other, the eastern, side of the Park is the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, where we may see some of the earliest surviving records of man’s own
account and picture of himself. What they show us is the human soul in worship
and in prayer. The murals from the tombs of Egypt are not the oldest records,
but they are typical; for however deep we dig, wherever we find man telling
of himself in art, he tells of his religion. He paints himself with hands uplifted
to his gods,—his vision of the Perfect, to whom he, imperfect, owes worship
and obedience; in whom is the power to uphold and save, or, in judgment, to
condemn and destroy. In that worship and obedience is the moving power of
evolution, so far as it acts from within and not merely from without through
the pressure of necessity. The ability to grow is the ability to surrender what
is, for the better that may be, and, so far as it is a conscious or willed process,
REPORT OF THE ANNUAL CONVENTION
219
it is dependent upon a love that forgets self wholly, in its desire to serve the
object of its worship. The whole story can be read in the eyes of a dog; and it
is the same story that the art of ascending man is for ever trying to tell of his
own indwelling spirit. Here “art” is history. The two museums have reversed
their r61es.
The Perfect in the Imperfect: the Whole Immanent in its Parts
I hope to return later to a consideration of growth, as symbolized in the
intertwined triangles of our seal, but I am immediately concerned with the
Changeless Perfect which circumscribes it and which is reflected at its heart.
It is always the Perfect that supports the imperfect. It is only through the
Eternal that the temporal can be, even for its time. In the philosophy of the
Middle Ages, the philosophy which Dante illumined, there is an illustration
which we may borrow, for it is entirely in accord with our most modem science.
It is drawn from the universe of light. Our sight is but the capacity to receive
and respond to light. All that we see, when we see anything at all, is some
modification of universal light. As we look around this room and see one
another’s faces, or the beauty and varied colouring of the flowers, we are seeing
light and only light,—seeing in each only what each has been able or willing to
take to itself and assimilate of the wholeness of light poured out upon it. It
is the same light, whole and lacking nothing, that is given to all; but one reflects
it in this form, and another in that; one as red, another as yellow, another as
blue. Yet we see them at all only because each is, however limited, still some
facet of light,—because of the Perfect Whole which is immanent in the im¬
perfect fragment.
That is the first lesson our illustration should make clear. There is a second,
equally important. Whence comes the light, by which we see these flowers
and each other? It is not of the earth. It is of the sun. It is solar light, heavenly
light. It is light from beyond the world that alone enables us to see the world.
If we reject the light of heaven, we reject all vision of earth. Earth becomes
dark to us; and in the deepening twilight where sight fails, fancy becomes its
substitute, with its will-o’-the-wisps of false hope and its ghosts of baseless
fear.
That which is true of human sight is correspondingly true of the human
intellect, which is but the capacity to receive and respond to the universal
thought. Whatever we think, we think with divine intelligence, as we see
with divine light. We open our minds to elements which we strain from the
universal mind, rejecting other elements, to which we are impervious, or which
we are unwilling to accept. By these selections and rejections our thought,
being made partial, is constantly falsified; but nevertheless it is always a frag¬
ment of the divine thought,—no matter how distorted, or even perverted. We
think only with the thought of God; and in our thought God thinks. In every
activity of the finite, there is the Infinite supporting it.
This is as true of love as of sight and thought. It is “from above”, and
cannot survive if separated from what is above. Particulars can be linked only
by universals. The brotherhood of man exists only through the fatherhood of
220 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
God; and if the love of God be not in our love for any man, then is that love
not love, but either fancy or self-seeking. To shut out the divine is to shut out
the human.
Worship and Growth
As we gain clearer recognition of this relation of the temporal to the Eternal,
so that the Perfect is seen always both circumscribing and supporting the im¬
perfect, and immanent and active in its heart, we find it clarifying our view
of all life’s processes. This is notably true in the whole field of religious philos¬
ophy, though we can only pause to point to it here. Faith, hope and love are
three aspects of the response evoked in the imperfect by its vision of the Per¬
fect,—these three, and the humility, which is their basis, in the perception of
self as the imperfect. From them comes obedience, the free-willed obedience
which is the turning of the imperfect to the Perfect, so that its judgments be¬
come commands. As the intent of any act inevitably serves as the standard
by which the result is judged, so the Perfect, by being the Perfect, inevitably
judges and presses upon the imperfect, both from within and from without,—from
the Perfect immanent within us, as aspiration and the voice of conscience;
from the Perfect transcending us, as the Divine Will we worship. This ceaseless
judgment and pressure of the Perfect, and the response which the imperfect
makes to it, are the moving power of growth and evolution,—as we said before,
and as our seal symbolizes.
The two triangles represent the two sides of our nature, the higher and the
lower; broadly speaking the good and the bad, but good and bad because the
one points up and forward in line with the drawing, the attraction, of the Per¬
fect, and the other points down and back, against that drawing, toward the
imperfect to which we cling. Thus the one symbolizes the past and matter,
and the pull of the body. The other tells us of what we see beyond and above
us, the vision which we worship and to which we aspire in love and emulation.
The point of this triangle is for ever breaking through the base of the other,
for ever breaking through the base of what has been formed (whether it be
the vesture of our thought and hopes and desires, or the physical body that
clothes the soul), necessitating “reforming” and “redressing” of what has been
formed and clothed imperfectly. He who worships finds the object of his
worship always compelling such growth and change. It speaks with the voice
of authority. Its revelation of itself, in response to the appeal of worship,
brings ceaseless judgment and condemnation,—showing us to be “far off, in
the region of unlikeness”. But also it brings faith and hope in the possibility
of drawing nearer, of transforming self, through love and obedience, into the
closer likeness of what we love. Always it is the Eternal that draws us forth.
It is through worship that life has risen. Do not let us think that man alone
worships. All life worships. Can we see a flower grow, and not see its worship?
Or a mountain? Or a tree at dawn? At the heart of all is the spark of the
Eternal, being drawn back in worship to its Source.
This is true of all life, but of ourselves something more is true. How is the
Eternal conceived by us? As we ponder that question, we come to see that
REPORT OF THE ANNUAL CONVENTION
221
it is not worship of the Perfect in an abstract or general sense that leads us
forward, but in the particular and very concrete sense of hero-worship,—for
our clearest revelation of the Perfect is in perfect Man. We know what courage
means through those who are courageous; we know what truth is, through
those who seek it and conform their lives to it. It is the “Great of Soul”, the
Mahatmas, who, through their incarnation of the Perfect, reveal it to us, inter¬
preting for us what lies deep in our hearts, and who have thus led mankind
along the long road it has travelled. It is they, our Elder Brothers, who lead
us to-day.
The closer union with our fellows, the enhanced inspiration and resolve, the
sense of coming home, that we feel in these Conventions, are all due to the
drawing nearer to the Masters which we here achieve, as we concern ourselves
with their work and will, putting aside our own worldly affairs. Our personal
preoccupations veil the inner light, as the clouds that form in the earth’s atmos¬
phere veil the sun; and when these are put away, and the light of the Perfect
shines through, we experience more consciously and keenly all the action of the
Perfect upon the imperfect, such as we have discussed. Therefore where the
Masters are, we are closest to our fellows. Where they are, the light is clearer
by which we see; the power stronger by which we act. For the Masters are the
links which unite us to the Perfect, and which unite us, also, to those we love.
The World Without Worship
We turn away from what Theosophy has given us and look out upon the
world. The contrast between what we see there and what we find here in this
room, is sharp,—nowhere more sharp than in the world’s lack of that sense of
the overshadowing Perfect which fills our hearts and minds. We look upon a
world that has lost the habit and the supporting power of worship; lost, as we
said before, its recognition of the existence and supreme authority of Eternal
Truth. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth
his handiwork, but our generation has been taught to close its eyes and ears.
By law, our public schools are forbidden to teach religion. Our science has
explicitly limited its field to those aspects of nature that can be described with¬
out reference to purpose or significance. Thus, in the common thought of the
day, man’s sentient life has been isolated from the rest of being, and that life,
and its inherent though deep-buried awareness of the moral law, have been
left without the support of reason rooted in universal truths. Modem man’s
myopic eyes no longer focus beyond the limits of his man-made world. In
consequence, he sees no limit to that world, nothing to prevent his doing with
it what he pleases; nor does he know how narrow and insecure it has become,
for he has no longer any independent standard by which to measure it. He
has given economics the place of religion, and, looking only to the earth, has
substituted his material and personal desires for the judgment of the Perfect in
Beauty, Holiness and Truth.
Two things have resulted which it concerns us to note. The first is that
which our illustration showed we must expect. In shutting out the light from
beyonJ^le world, man has become unable to see the world, and, in the failure
222
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
of sight, he follows the ignis fatuus of fancy. The whole of life is falsified, and
words, phrases, pictures, projected by our desires and our fears—psychic counter¬
feits of every kind—are substituted for reality.
Psychic Substitutes for Truth
It would not be fitting to take time to-day to expand this aspect of my theme,
but it is important that we should, in our own thinking, be ceaselessly alert to
reject such counterfeits, for they are all about us and are offered us as genuine
every day. Think, for example, of the “movies”, and their pictures of love,
marriage, business, pleasure, crime. Nothing is portrayed as it is; nor even
as the author or director believed it to be; but rather as he believed the “masses”
fancy it to be, or desire or fear it to be. We can—and if we have any respect
for our own mental integrity, we do—stay away from the “movies”; but the
same counterfeit presentments crowd upon us through the press, not only in
the tabloids, but in periodicals and books that purport to express no opinion
of their own, but to confine themselves to impartial summaries of facts. One
such, a weekly of wide circulation through our whole country, now displays
each week upon its cover a photograph of “timely interest”. One week it was
of an air raid on Madrid,—fireworks and wrecked buildings in the background,
and a pitiful mother with her baby in the foreground. Another week it was a
photograph of a “dog’s toilet”,—a dog being manicured and brushed by a
liveried maid and valet. Again, it was a “tramps’ encampment”, comic clowns
around a fire. Not one of these photographs was genuine. All were posed in
a studio. Not one of them was even pointed at reality; for it cannot be sup¬
posed that the photographer honestly thought that, in becoming homeless,
a man became a clown and gained access to a theatrical wardrobe for his clothes.
Nor can he have thought that his “dog’s toilet” represented routine in the
homes of the rich. No, he neither tried to depict the facts, nor his own concept
or interpretation of the facts. He tried, instead, to imagine how the facts
might lie reflected and distorted in the minds of the “masses”, and to reflect
these reflections back to them, their falsities posed as truth. So does popular
education confirm prejudice and ignorance, and substitute the counterfeit for
the real. Love, marriage, poverty and riches, virtue and vice, are our neigh¬
bours in the city or the country, to be known as they are, in their concrete
reality, without the intermediary of letters. Yet the thought of the day is
based largely upon the falsehoods and psychic counterfeits of fiction. We are
not endorsing Plato’s judgment that he would banish poets from his Republic,
since they are but imitators of imitations of the Real, but is there not that in
our own experience which gives warrant for it ?
There is the classic example of Mr. Wells’s Outline of History. He criticizes
encyclopaedias of universal history as lacking the unity of having been “passed
through one single mind”. His own history has been so passed; and because
the mind through which it has been strained, and from which it is reflected
back to us, is, in its conceit and sentimentality and materialism, impervious to
any recognition of a Perfect transcending his own concept of himself, not only
is the picture he presents a psychic reflection from a warped and distorting
REPORT OF THE ANNUAL CONVENTION
223
mirror, but the very substance of it has been poisoned and made venomous.
So is the thought of our times ceaselessly poisoned.
Or again, consider how spurious are the abstractions and generic terms which
we substitute for concrete reality in our theorizing. “The labouring man”,
who probably labours less than most of us here, and for whom laws are asked
to make him labour even less. The “liberal”, who stands pre-eminently for
narrow restriction and compulsion. But the list is endless, and anyone may
continue it for himself. Our first point is made if it is clear that, on every side,
the world, having rejected the Divine, has lost its hold upon the real, and now
deals, instead, with psychic counterfeits.
The Turning Backward 0f Desire
The second point we have to note is that, as man ceases to worship, he ceases
to grow. Evolution turns back upon itself when, in the loss of the vision and
desire for the Perfect, the power that moved the imperfect is cut off, and there
is nothing to counteract the dead weight of the past. Then man, lacking, as
we saw, any standard of value external to himself, chooses “the dearer” rather
than the better , and, thus choosing, abandons himself to degeneracy and
decay. This is a truth to which theosophic literature returns again and again.
So Death speaks, in the Katha Upanishad, “The better is one thing, the dearer
is another thing; these two bind a man in opposite ways. Of these two, it is
well for him who takes the better; he fails of his object who chooses the dearer.”
So Christ bade his disciples, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father
which is in heaven is perfect”. But it is the world, and not themselves, that
men now wish to alter; not Christ, would they follow, but the Persian poet,
“To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire . . . shatter it to bits, and then
remould it nearer to the heart’s desire.” But the heart’s desire clings to the
past and to satisfactions which, having served their turn, should now be held
in check that they may give place to new. To follow them is to turn back-
ward.
Self-Preservation Sought in Subordination to the Divine
We spoke of this a year ago, in connection with Dr. Carrel’s finding, as a
physiologist, that the advances in science and civilization, enabling man to
avoid hardship and indulge his desires, have corrupted and enfeebled his entire
organism. The same conclusion has been reached from the psychological
approach by Dr. Henry C. Link, Director of the Psychological Service Centre
in New York, as the result of his study of the lives and problems of thousands
of people whom he had been called upon to advise. But Dr. Link’s outstanding
contribution is his demonstration that the primary cause of the ailments and
maladjustments, little and big, which afflicted these people and robbed them of
happiness, was their rejection of religion; and that in the return to religion and
the subordination of self to its discipline and truths, lay the road to their cure.
The Return to Religion is the title of his book. He tells us that he and his wife
had both been educated out of religion by their college and professional train¬
ing, and forsome twenty years had congratulated themselves upon their emanci¬
pation ai^uperiority to it, until, little by little, he realized that it was precisely
224
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
the counsels of religion which he, as scientist and specialist, was daily prescribing
to those who consulted him. When he realized this, he was forced to conclude
that he should take his own medicine. He does not pretend that he is in love
with religion. He tells us frankly that he goes to church because he hates to go
but knows that it does him good. He is much like a man who, having jilted a
girl when he heard she had lost her fortune, returns to marry her when he
learns the report was unfounded and that she is still rich. The thirsting heart
of the mystic will find little of its own within the book, tut every honest intellect
will find direct, outspoken honesty, and truths too little recognized, which,
once faced, can neither be disputed nor ignored. He tells us that no discovery
of modem science is more important or more sure than psychology’s proof
that self-sacrifice and discipline are essential to self-realization and happiness;
and though other interests (including the necessity of earning a living) may
compel such subordination of self, only religion embodies the principle as the
major premise of a normal life. He exhibits the folly of our western glorification
of the intellect at the cost of the “disintegration of the basic values which
make the intellect worth having”, so that “the vice of education” produces
“fools of reason”, who, unable and unwilling to reform themselves, seek, as a
substitute, to reform the world. We may grant that the argument is directed,
paradoxically, to self-interest, above which religion should lift us; but for that
very reason it is the kind of argument suited to a fortune-hunting generation
which has thrown religion away. We should be able to use many of his con¬
clusions in our own work, and it is a hopeful sign that the book should have
become a “best seller”, as did Dr. Carrel’s.
Self-Preservation Sought in the Denial of the Divine
We have, however, to contrast it with another “best seller”, Mathematics
for the Million , by Lancelot Hogben. Of the author, M.A., D.Sc., Fellow of the
Royal Society, and Professor of Social Biology in the University of London, I
know no more than what Who's Who and his own books reflect; but that is
enough for our purpose. A very clever student at Cambridge, where Bertrand
Russell’s influence is strong, he appears to have formed his mind in the essen¬
tially shoddy school of thought which puts mere cleverness above all else. That
school includes men of many professions, but they are alike in their arrogance,
intolerance and bitterness. Knowing themselves to be clever, and early winning
scholastic recognition, but failing to receive other rewards commensurate with
their concept of their deserts, their dissatisfaction does not prompt them to
seek to change themselves, but makes them rabid to change the world. Above
all, they are rabid against religion and any idea of a Perfect, with its inevitable
implication of a standard of worth to which they do not conform. They are to
be left as they are, and the world changed to satisfy them* as they are. In
them, evolution is to reach a dead end.
From the time of Egypt and of Greece, the perfection of the relations of form
and of number which Mathematics reveals, has been read by men as a reflection
of the perfection of the Eternal, which gives meaning and value to the imperfec¬
tion of the temporal. Dr. Hogben will have none of this, and devotes the
REPORT OF THE ANNUAL CONVENTION
225
opening pages of his book to its ridicule, as the invention of a priestcraft which,
he would have us believe, now as then, is always striving to keep knowledge
and power away from “the people”. Throughout the volume, no matter what
be the process or principle he expounds, it is first stripped of all that can en¬
noble, and then is made the carrier for his materialistic philosophy and propa¬
ganda for social change. It comes to us as an English forerunner of what the
Nazi Ministry of Propaganda must have had in mind, when they announced
that, in the future, German science must be made subservient to the doctrines
of the German state. It is this which has made me think it of sufficient im¬
portance to mention here. Dr. Link, in discussing the deleterious effect of most
modem education upon the formation of personality, excepted mathematics as
the one school-subject which acted favourably, and contained within itself a
standard of perfection and a rigour of discipline which inculcated precise, sus¬
tained and closely knit habits of thought and work. It is just this standard
of perfection and rigour of discipline, which Dr. Hogben employs all his in¬
disputable cleverness and skill to destroy. As we said earlier of Mr. Wells’s
Outline of History , so we must say of this book of Dr. Hogben’s, which Mr.
Wells unstintingly commends: it is a great and noble theme, degraded, poisoned
and made venomous by having been passed through an envenomed mind.
The Call to Battle , the Call of the Eternal to the Temporal
There we may leave these two books. Each appeals to man’s self-interest:
the one, to seek satisfaction by changing the self; the other, by changing every¬
thing but the self. The one aspires to subordinate and merge itself in what
is above itself; the other, to subordinate all things to what it, itself, already is.
On the plane of man’s thought of his own self-interest they confront one an¬
other. Unimportant though they would otherwise be, on that plane they
may illustrate for us the intertwined and opposing triangles of our seal, sym¬
bolizing the age-long conflict involved in evolution and growth, which is not
other than the conflict between the White and the Black Lodge.
In that conflict this Society, founded by the Masters of the White Lodge,
has its part to play. And thus from this Convention, as from all that have been
held, whether it be heard and recognized or not, goes forth a call to arms and
battle. It is the call of the Eternal to the temporal. When we point to the
circle of the Infinite, in which the end and the beginning are the same, we are
not looking to something that can excuse inaction and inertia, or a mere clinging
to the old. We are pointing, rather, as we have reiterated, to the dynamic
power which moves the universe, the action of the Perfect upon the imperfect
which compels ceaseless change, and to which we must respond if we would
live. Behold, I make all things new. Thus spake the Christ, the Power of
God and the Wisdom of God. Only by that divine action, only as it is renewed
from within itself, can our Movement survive. It is a call to the new, a call
to youth. Youth is not asked to put its new wine into old bottles—the form
as well as the substance will be new—but it is asked to remember that the
grapes, from which its new wine is to be pressed, must be grown by its labour
and sacrifice^day, as by its fathers’ labour and sacrifice in the past. There
226
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
will be no grapes, no harvest and no wine, unless it be the Changeless that
guides and circumscribes the change.
In the Presence of the Eternal
So we, too, end as we began, with the knowledge pressing on us that here, in
this Convention, we stand in the presence of the Eternal. As members of this
Society, founded by the Masters to serve the Truth which they serve, than
which “no religion is higher”, we stand before them. In them, and in that
service, in their warfare to which they call us, we may find the Truth their
Truth—perfect, immutable, and whole, and the Truth shall make us free.
The Chairman then called for the report of the Secretary T. S.
Report of the Secretary T. S.
Miss Perkins: I have the honour to submit the following Report:
Branch Activities
All the Branches report an encouraging year, and as we shall find ample
evidence of this in their letters of greeting to be read this afternoon, I shall
not attempt to indicate in this report the special lines followed by each Branch:
the fruit of the year’s endeavour is embodied in their letters to the Convention.
All speak of the marked unity and solidarity among Branch members, and
some connect this, directly, with their increasing sense of obligation to keep
alive in the world the principles and ideals of Theosophy,—to give them in¬
carnation through personal and united effort. The cessation of the New York
Branch Reports is felt to be a distinct loss, but our members couple with their
regret, sincere gratitude to the memory of Miss Dodge for the service she had
so long rendered by the preparation of them. Serious illness among Branch
officers has forced members of several Branches to stand shoulder-to-shoulder
in carrying out their plans for the year, and two Branches have suffered serious
loss: the Arvika Branch, Sweden, in the death of its President, Mr. J. E. Jons-
son, who was infusing new life and energy into its work; the Norfolk Branch
of England, in the death of Mrs. Graves, so well known to us all by her annual
account of activities there. The new Secretary writes: “Our Branch has suf¬
fered much sorrow in the recent death of Mrs. Graves, its devoted Secretary
for a quarter of a century—ever since the time of its foundation. Her loyal
years of service are a part of the inheritance of the Branch, nor can its members
feel that she is absent from their work, though she has passed on to join the
ranks of those who axe fighting on the further side.” The Branches in Europe
have continued to contribute to some Allied Relief Fund the amount they
paid the Society in dues prior to 1929, and the Society has again received, from
one of its members, as yearly since 1929, a special donation that more than
reimburses the Treasury for the sum thus diverted from it.
The Theosophical Quarterly
The widening influence of our magazine is reflected in communications re¬
ceived from non-members who read it in the libraries. When launching the
Quarterly in July, 1903, Mr. Clement A. Griscom set forth its purposes in
REPORT OF THE ANNUAL CONVENTION
227
an editorial announcement, in the first paragraph of which he said: “It has no
plans that are not fluidic and subject to change with changing conditions”; he
concluded with this challenge, “Members should consider it a duty to send in
questions they want answered”. His plans, however, were so well laid and so
comprehensive that the growth of the magazine in these 34 years represents
their fulfilment rather than a change of direction or method. To-day, good
questions are even more in demand. It must be evident also, that since death
has taken from us more than one older student whose contributions to the
magazine were constant and varied, loyal support on our part requires our best
effort to supply suitable material. If every member who has ever written an
article for the Quarterly were to make it a matter of conscience to prepare
another for submission by August 1st, the labour of the Editors would surely
be lessened, and the gratitude of our membership given very practical expres¬
sion. It should be added, however, that response to this suggestion would in¬
crease instead of lessen the labour of the Editors, if manuscripts submitted
require much correction and revision. Whenever possible, a contributor should
ask some friend who has had experience of writing for publication, to criticize
and clarify his article before he sends it to the Quarterly.
Book Department
The business of supplying standard theosophical books has been conducted
as usual by the Quarterly Book Department, an organization that provides
its own capital, but operates solely for the purpose of carrying out the plans of
the Society. During the year, several of its publications have been reprinted,
which is evidence of sustained interest in the fidelity with which they interpret
ancient scriptures, and represent the Theosophy of Madame Blavatsky and
Mr. Judge.
Secretary's Office
When additional assistance was needed this winter, two of our younger
members, of the latest generation so to speak, volunteered for service, having
prepared themselves by special training in office requirements; the prospect
is that they will soon be able to attend to the distribution of our magazine
and books. Other New York members, whose aid is gratefully acknowledged,
are co-operating as usual; and the Assistant Secretary, to whom we are all
deeply indebted for her full report of Convention proceedings, is always ready
to help.
It would be gratifying if more general use were made of our “Travelling
Library”, a modest collection of standard books on Theosophy that can be
sent by mail to members and inquirers. There is no charge for the loan of
these books and the procedure is very simple. It is also possible to lend bound
volumes of the early numbers of the Quarterly, which few members possess,
and of the oldest theosophical magazines, in which H.P.B. and Mr. Judge fought
the battles of the Movement, giving at the same time much instruction in
practiq|| applications of Theosophy. Would not our isolated members-at-
large oestimulated and encouraged by such reading,—by companioning those
leaders in their trials and their victory? Distant members frequently ask if
228 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
some of the work of the Secretary’s Office could not be sent to them. This is
seldom possible, but may I suggest that typing magazine envelopes, tying up
book parcels, writing letters, can accomplish little for the Movement when
done as ends in themselves; but, wherever we may be stationed, we contribute
to its success if we have at heart Ruskin’s motto: “There is no action so slight
that it may not be done to a great purpose, nor is any purpose so great that
slight actions may not be so done as to help it much.”
No account of the year could be concluded without mention of the older
students, trained and trusted by Mr. Judge, who stand at the centre of our
activities and under whose guidance it is our great privilege to serve, ap¬
prenticed to him through them. When occasion requires, they are quick to see
how errors may be rectified and generous in indicating the origin of our mis¬
takes, whether in motive, understanding or method. Thus helping us to feel
after the will of Masters who stand behind the Movement, they make us lower
links in that great hierarchical chain that stretches beyond our boldest imagin¬
ing. Gratitude to them wells up wherever members are gathered to-day, but
how is the Society to express this; that is, how put it into action? To-day, the
T. S. begins a new year; it would be well started if, here in the presence of our
comrades, seen and unseen, and of the “Great Companions , each heart were
to record an unalterable resolution that the high mission of the Society shall
be fulfilled.
Respectfully submitted,
I. E. Perkins,
Secretary , The Theosophical Society .
This report was unanimously accepted “with the sincerest thanks of the
Society to the Secretary”, who, in turn, requested the Chairman to express
the thanks of the Secretary to the Society for the privilege of serving it. The
Report of the Executive Committee was then called for.
Report of the Executive Committee
Mr. Hargrove: The only official act that the Chairman of the Executive
Committee needs to report, is that we found it necessary to cancel the charter
of a Branch in central Europe. Personal dissensions (trivial and inexcusable)
among its members, reduced it to a condition in which it ceased in the real
sense to be connected with The Theosophical Society. It became the duty,
therefore, of the Executive Committee to confirm officially that which the
members of the Branch had already done; so the charter was withdrawn. It
is just as well, perhaps, for all of us to remember that the same action would
be taken in the United States, without a moment’s hesitation, if any Branch,
anywhere, were to get itself into a similar condition.
It has always been understood that in the report of the Executive Com¬
mittee there is more than the surface of events to be dealt with. We have to
report to you something of our experience during the previous year, something
of our hopes, and something of the need of the Society. Professor Mitchell
REPORT OF THE ANNUAL CONVENTION
229
has already indicated clearly that perhaps the greatest need of the Society is
a clearer realization of the inner world as the world of fact; a clearer realization
that our external world is merely a world of effects, of shadows.
This can be considered under various heads. Perhaps the first, because the
simplest, realization that we need to strengthen, is of a truth stated many
thousands of times in the course of the Society’s history, namely that “thoughts
are things”; that we are at least as responsible for our thoughts as for our acts.
I doubt whether many of us have more than a theoretical belief in that truth.
For instance, do we, if we find ourselves entertaining thoughts of depression
or of discouragement, expel them because of the realization that they might
be just enough to tip some unbalanced person into a condition of absolute
despair and possibly of suicide? In other words, do we really believe and
act upon the belief that thoughts are things and things of tremendous power?
Thoughts, because they are unseen, do not seem to us, perhaps, to be so very
real. What I want to suggest to you is that throughout the universe, in fact
and not only in theory, it is invariably the unseen force that is more powerful
than the visible.
That, of course, is a vast subject in itself, and I am not going to talk about
it this morning. My subject will be: is the spiritual world a reality for us?
And I am going to suggest a test: if the spiritual world were a reality for us,
life would be full of romance, of poetry; all things would be full of wonder. Let
us then ask ourselves: is my life a thing of romance and poetry and wonder?
Alack and alas, in most cases, it is not, and it is our own fault, because we, as
students of Theosophy, have every reason to be convinced, when we do not
know, that the spiritual world is real, that the spiritual world is here.
I was asked recently whether it was not easier, in the very early days of the
Movement, when H.P.B. was here, when Judge was with us,—whether it was
not easier then to make contact with that world than it is to-day. The ques¬
tion was based upon a misunderstanding. It was based upon the supposition
that there is an actual difference between conditions then and now, when in
truth there is only an appearance of difference. Let me give you an instance
of what I mean. It was at Avenue Road, at the Blavatsky Lodge, in 1888 or
thereabouts, and Madame Blavatsky was still very much alive. A visitor
began to talk about his own ideas on life and so forth, until H.P.B. suddenly
turned on him with some blistering comment and the statement that people
came to those meetings to listen to her views, and not to those who wished to
air their own. It might well be said that to-day our procedure in similar circum¬
stances would be different, since we have an “open platform” and so forth.
But would the difference, after all, be real? Suppose that at one of our Branch
meetings in New York, a visitor were to proclaim the blessings of Bolshevism,
free love, or some other horror. I should be sorry indeed if we could not dis¬
pose of him with at least something of H.P.B.’s finality and promptitude! We
should not do it in the same way, but we should, I am confident, be uncompromis¬
ingly, flat-footedly truthful,—as she was, for the truth is that people were
nvited to the Blavatsky Lodge to listen to her views.
232
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
Blavatsky and “The Secret Doctrine ”,—all tending to show how close the Masters
then were to outer events and persons, though no closer then, he reiterated,
than they always have been and always will be.]
From the beginning of history there has been knowledge of the Great Ones,
of Masters, though knowledge even of their existence has increasingly dwindled,
especially in Europe and America. It is part of our function to keep that
knowledge alive, and the knowledge, too, that there are more kinds and degrees
of consciousness, a greater “diversity of creatures”, on planes both above and
below this world, than there are on earth, or than egocentric humanity dreams
of. Christianity, in theory, recognizes many classes or grades of angels; Hindu¬
ism, always more detailed, believes there are three hundred and thirty millions
of devas, or “shining ones”—good, bad, or indifferent—and innumerable other
hierarchies of invisible beings or creatures, some, exalted in nature, others,
primitive,—irrespective of hosts of human souls and conscious astral “leav¬
ings”. And while it is distinctly unfashionable in so-called Christian countries,
even among the clergy, to believe in devils,—logic insists that, in a world of
duality, devils must off-set angels, just as surely as heat and cold are unthink¬
able unless both exist.
At the last meeting of the New York Branch, Colonel Wise was telling us
about experiences during the Great War, of those who had seen the invisible,
as it were, and the great Archangel Michael. Some of you may have been
reminded of the story in the Old Testament about Elisha and his servant, sur¬
rounded by the armies of the King of Syria. Elisha prayed that the eyes of the
young man might be opened (it is a pity, perhaps, that a similar prayer could
not be answered here this morning,—and yet, who knows!), and they were
opened, and, behold, on all the hills around, he saw the armies of the Lord,
“horses and chariots of fire”,—the legions of angels that we hear of in the New
Testament also.
At that same meeting of the New York Branch, a question was asked about
these soldiers of the other world. In reply I suggested that many of those
who had been killed in the War formed part of that army; but the underlying
truth is that the great Archangels—special ch£las in the Lodge—are the Cap¬
tains of legions which at one period of history are seen as angels; at another
period, as men in armour; at another, like men clothed as in the Great War.
It is not the form that counts; all that concerns us is the inner reality,—which
is, that there are legions of angels, of warrior devas , and that some of those
who die in battle are drawn, because of their complete self-giving, into the ranks
of these legions. So it is that whenever men are lifted out of their littleness
into the greatness of self-forgetfulness, they are likely to see something of that
world of reality, and to share in the work and consciousness of those who dwell
there.
Only a day or two ago it happened that I came across a collection of letters
from men who had served and died under the British flag in France. Those
of them who had consciously and gladly surrendered their lives in advance—
who had become indifferent to death, not because they were tired of life, but
REPORT OF THE ANNUAL CONVENTION
233
because they had thrown their lives overboard for love of a Cause which they
recognized as the Cause of God—such men remind us once more that all we
need, if we would get into touch with the everlasting verities, is the conquest
of self for love of that which transcends self. In terms of the inner life, pure
passion of love is the reward of self-discipline, and pure passion of love means
Union.
I shall quote from the letters of one of these men only,—“Billy” Grenfell,
son of Lord Desborough. His elder brother Julian, poet as well as soldier,
had been killed already. Trying to console his mother for their loss, the younger
son wrote: “Just one word of blessing and good hope. I know how strong you
have been and will be. How can we feel anything but serenity about our darling
Julian, whether the trumpets sound for him on this side or the other.” (The
reference of course is to the passage in Pilgrim's Progress , where Mr. Valiant-
for-Truth “Passed Over”, “and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other
side”.) And then, shortly afterwards—he was twenty-five, and was going to
be killed in a few weeks: “The more I think of darling Julian, the more I seem
to realize the nothingness of death. He has just passed on, outsoared the
shadow of our night, ‘here where men sit and hear each other groan’, and how
could one pass on better than in the full tide of strength and glory and fearless¬
ness. So that there is no interruption even in the work which God has for him.
Our grief for him can only be grief for ourselves. How beautiful his poem is.
[“Into Battle”, which ends: “But Day shall clasp him with strong hands,
And Night shall fold him in soft wings.”] It perfectly expresses the unity and
continuity of all created things in their Maker. I pray that one-tenth of his
gay spirit may descend on me.” That was in June, 1915; then, finally, writing
to his parents, and showing once more—which is our lesson—how self-forget¬
fulness lifts to a higher consciousness and to a vivid recognition of reality:
“Darling Julian is so constantly beside me, and laughs so debonairly at my
qualms and hesitations. I pray for one-tenth of his courage. All love to every¬
one.”
I shall not attempt a better conclusion than that young man’s splendid note
of certainty and promise.
The Report of the Executive Committee having been accepted with thanks,
the Chairman, who had previously been authorized to appoint the usual three
standing Committees, announced the following:
Committee on Resolutions: Mr. Hargrove, Mr. Miller, Dr. Hohnstedt.
Committee on Letters of Greeting: Mr. J. F. B. Mitchell, Dr. Clark, Mrs. Regan.
Committee on Nominations: Mr. Auchincloss, Mr. Saxe, Miss Hohnstedt.
After the announcement of Convention activities, adjournment was voted
until 2.30 p. m.
Afternoon Session
The session opened with the report of the Treasurer T. S., and when this
report had been accepted with the thanks of the Convention, the report of the
Committee on Nominations was called for.
234
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
Report of the Committee on Nominations
Mr. Auchincloss nominated for the Executive Committee, Mr. Miller to
succeed himself; Mr. LaDow, to succeed Mr. Harris, whose term expires; also,
as Secretary T. S., Miss Perkins, with Miss Chickering as Assistant Secretary;
for Treasurer, Mr. H. B. Mitchell, with Mr. Kobb6 as Assistant Treasurer.
It was voted that the Secretary of the Convention be instructed to cast one
ballot for the election of officers as nominated, and that the Committee be
discharged with thanks.
The Chairman added that it was a matter of great regret to the Executive
Committee that the retiring member, Mr. Harris, owing to his distant residence,
had been prevented from coming to New York, and therefore prevented from
taking the active part in the work of the Committee which Mr. Harris felt
that all its members should take. The Society was very much indebted to
Mr. Harris for his invariably sympathetic understanding of the needs of the
situation. At the same time it was with very sincere pleasure that the Com¬
mittee welcomed Mr. LaDow to its membership.
The report of the Committee on Resolutions was then called for.
Report of the Committee on Resolutions
Mr. Hargrove: Mr. Chairman , Fellow Members: With your permission I
should like to begin by making one or two things clearer than I think I made
them this morning when comparing the methods of the Lodge, and the oppor¬
tunities of members, to-day, with the methods and opportunities of the past.
As all of you know, there was an outflow of force from the Lodge, down to this
plane, from 1875 onwards. The tide turned as the century drew to its close.
During the outflow, physical phenomena of all kinds—including objective
means of communication—were “normal”. Incidentally, it was the play of
those forces that tore H.P.B.’s body to pieces.
When the tide turned, and the force indrew, members had the opportunity
to indraw with it, and thus to be carried with the back-flow, up toward the
Lodge: they could, as it were, hold on to the tail of the kite. This means
that collectively, as a Society, we are much closer to the Lodge now, than
we were in 1890. The spiritual average of our membership to-day is higher
than it was at that time, or in 1900. There is, for one thing, a far better under¬
standing of the fundamental theosophic truth that self in some form or other
is the supreme obstacle in the way of human progress, of service, of discipleship.
And there ought to be a better understanding of that truth, seeing that it has
been hammered into us incessantly during the intervening forty years!
It follows from all of this that although Masters could and would use ma¬
terial means, such as precipitated letters, if to-day there were need to do so,
the existence of such a need would be a grave reflection on our membership:
it would be a disgrace. The power of Masters is exactly the same as it was;
they could do now all that they ever did,—but, to use a crude illustration:
if you can make people hear in a normal tone of voice, why shout at them!
And the fact is that our membership, all round the world, does “hear”: the
REPORT OF THE ANNUAL CONVENTION
235
Quarterly, for instance, when interpreting some outstanding event in the light
of theosophic principles, does not need to argue to convince the large majority
of our members, who, almost invariably, have been thinking along the same
lines already, and find in the Quarterly the confirmation, and perhaps also
the clarification, of what their own intuition, their own inner light, had enabled
them to sense or perceive.
Now for the Committee on Resolutions: as a committee we have no formal
resolutions to recommend, but there are certain ideas that we should like to
suggest for your consideration, involving, perhaps, personal resolves, as well
as ways in which the work of Masters can be furthered in the world.
Much has been said in the Quarterly and at our Branch meetings in criti¬
cism of democracy. This has been done to counteract the tendency to think
that there is only one country on the face of the earth that is governed on
scientific and enlightened principles,—that country being the United States
of America. It is not wholesome for people to labour under such delusions.
No one should infer, however, that we, as individuals or as a Society, want to
introduce another form of government, whether Monarchical or Fascist or
Nazi. We do not want a Hitler or a Mussolini in Washington—still less a
Stalin—and what is more, we do not want a totalitarian state, which avowedly
is their common aim. The totalitarian state, according to its advocates, means
this: “Nothing outside or above the State, everything within and for the
State”. That may sound harmless enough, but in practice, as you know, it
means that the State assumes control of every human activity, and, the indi¬
vidual existing solely for the benefit of the State, it means that your children
exist solely for its benefit, and that the State assumes control of their education,
both in the primary school and in college; that the State must control the
religious or irreligious training of your children, and must control your own
religion and its expression. What would become of The Theosophical Society
and of our literature if we were living in a totalitarian state! Democracy
has become synonymous with demagogy; but we have no desire to get out of
the frying pan into the fire, and, in America and England and some other places,
we still have religious liberty.
Every government reflects the character of its people. We have in this
country at present, not only what we deserve as a nation (you and I may think
we deserve something better, and I hope we do!), but also what the natiom
wants. The chief desire of the majority is to spend without self-restraint?
they will not save. They will work at their own gait for high wages, in order
to spend freely; but if they cannot get high wages, they stop working and
demand “Relief”, and get it—because they have votes. As a coloured man
said to me not long ago,—Why should he work six days a week when his friends
on Relief worked only three, or at the most four, and were paid enough to
enable them to “go see places” during their spare time? Watching games of
base-ball was his dream of the perfect life.
Democracy at its best, even under a limited monarchy as in England, is a
manshift, a stop-gap, until we can get something better. What is that some-
23 o THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
Having recalled one of Madame Blavatsky’s more humourous aspects, it is
as well to recall the serious,—to speak of her marvellous devotion. From six
o’clock in the morning until six at night, writing every minute except for a
brief interruption for lunch; in great pain most of the time, suffering as she was
from a complication of internal disorders. It was magnificent, and the only
conceivable explanation is her passionate devotion to her Master. Something
for us to remember; something to imitate, so far as that is possible for frailer
mortals like ourselves. She was heroic.
In other ways also, she showed her nearness to the heart of the Lodge. The
day before she moved from Lansdowne Road to the house in Avenue Road,
the Countess Wachtmeister took her for a drive in Hyde Park. When she
returned, Mrs. Cooper-Oakley and Mrs. Cleather were in the drawing room.
H.P.B. came into the room, apparently in a passion. She was in a passion,
but it was a passion of grief. Limping up and down the room, her rheumatism
crippling her, with the tears pouring down her cheeks, she exclaimed: Not
one Soul among them! Not one!” Not one Soul had she seen among all those
people, driving, as fashionable people used to drive in those days, “round the
Park”. That sort of distress cannot be simulated. It was genuine. She felt
it to the very depths of herself—compassion, echoing the compassion, the sor¬
row of her Master who, perhaps, had helped her to see as she had never seen
before, the condition and need of those people.
More than once I have been asked to recommend a book that describes truly
those early days of the Society, and the days that followed when Judge was still
with us. Documents deal with the surface of events only, and the surface is
often misleading. People have written about Judge who never set eyes on him;
others have written about him only to condemn him, thus for ever condemning
themselves. The motive of too many people when writing about the dead is
to display their own superiority. In any case, there is no book that we can
recommend. Yet, if you should meet people who know of your interest in
Theosophy, and who speak of Count Witte’s criticisms of H.P.B., or of the
criticisms of the viperish Margot Tennant, Lady Asquith, it is well to keep
certain facts in mind.
The facts are that in 1890 both Judge and H.P.B. brought suit for libel
against the “New York Sun”, which was at that time one of the leading news¬
papers in the United States—brought suit for libel because the “Sun” had
published an attack on H.P.B. by Dr. Elliott Coues, which the “Sun” had
endorsed. As usually happens, the case dragged along. The “Sun”, chal¬
lenged, began to hunt for evidence to support its case,—and you will realize
that a powerful newspaper does not retreat easily or in a hurry. Hunting
everywhere for confirmation of the accusations brought against H.P.B., dis¬
covering, incidentally, that the Report of the Society for Psychical Research
contained no real evidence whatever,—in 1892 they gave it up in despair, and
publicly retracted the charges they had endorsed, at the same time publishing
a laudatory article by Judge about H.P.B.
Count Witte and Lady Asquith and others of their kind, libelled H.P.B.
REPORT OF THE ANNUAL CONVENTION
231
when she and Judge were dead, and when nobody could sue them; they re¬
peated in safety the charges withdrawn by the “Sun” under threat. So all
you have to do is to remember and state the facts. And do not imagine that
the “Sun” retracted willingly. In the spring of 1894, I was in New York.
Judge asked me to accompany him to the office of the “Sun”. He wanted
them to publish an article he had written about the Convention shortly to be
held in San Francisco. We were shown into the editorial sanctum. The editor
knew Judge and at once referred to the suit for libel, exclaiming against the
idea of his asking any favour of them. Judge replied serenely that that was
all of the past, and that he was offering some interesting news which he was
willing to give to the “Sun” exclusively. The upshot was that Judge got what
he wanted. But that the retraction of 1892 had been made grudgingly, and
that the memory of it still rankled, was obvious. Once more then, there is no
need to argue about details: the action of the “Sun” disposes of all serious
accusations against H.P.B.
I am drawing on the past, because I want so greatly to emphasize the reality
and nearness of the inner world, and at the same time to insist that it is not
only just as real, but even nearer than in the old days of which I speak. Many
of you have read or heard most of these things before, but others have not.
In any case it is hard work for those who have to concentrate their attention on
business for the greater part of every day, to escape from being drowned in the
mire of material life; for them, the inner and real world is likely to become
diaphanous and remote; they need to be reminded of happenings which speak
in material terms of that near-by but usually invisible Kingdom. No need,
thank heaven, for the same things to happen in the same way to-day, since
increasing indrawal has lifted the Movement whole stages closer to the Lodge.
In those days, the consciousness of members was so far out of tune with Lodge-
consciousness, that the Masters had to lean down, as it were, and shout to
make themselves heard, and, even so, with small chance of being understood.
Ask yourself: were Hume and Sinnett, vain and self-opinionated, closer to
the spiritual plane, merely because they received letters from Masters, than
many humble and comparatively unknown members of the present time? The
question answers itself.
I am going to draw on the experience of the Countess Wachtmeister. I do
not see how anyone can doubt the honesty of that old woman. (She has been
dead for years.) She was the wife of the Swedish Ambassador in London. Her
father was French, her mother English, of distinguished family on both sides.
Her husband died. She heard of Theosophy and became a member of the
Society. I am indebted to her for information which was helpful in the early
days of my membership. In 1894 I travelled with her from London to San
Francisco. She did not understand Judge; followed Mrs. Besant, but became
disillusioned and left the Adyar Society, never losing her faith, however, in
H.P.B. She made mistakes, but, as I have said, was honest.
[The^peaker then related stories of the early days of the Society, some of
them forded by the Countess Wachtmeister in her Reminiscences of H. P.
236
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
thing better? “God-instructed men”: yes, let us never cease to pray for God-
instructed men to rule the nations. But before we can get them we must not
only want them, but earn them; and the majority of people at present are very
far indeed from wanting anything of the kind.
It is important that members of the Society should understand these matters,
because it is their mission to understand, and never to be carried away by
popular sentiment. They must think for themselves. They must see the evils
of our present system, but must not rush off toward something even worse
than the evils which already afflict us. They must realize that it will take time
to improve the government of nations, for the reason that it is going to take
time, much time, to improve the character of the men to be governed. As I
have already said, governments reflect the nature of their people. Hitler
may have a few critics in Germany, but what did Germany want before Hitler
came into power? Germany wanted to assert itself again as the victorious
ruling nation of the world. It wanted to assert once more, Might regardless
of Right. It was Germany’s moral obliquity that called Hitler into being,
and that has kept him where he is; for just as the Kaiser was an expression
of what the German people wanted prior to 1914, so Hitler is an expression of
what the German people hope for now. “Our religion is Germany”, as their
“Youth Leader” proclaims.
Naziism, Fascism, are the logical expression of national self-assertiveness,
of a hectoring, bullying spirit and purpose; but it is the spirit that creates
the form: the form, at most, can only reinforce the spirit. The monarchical
form is as adaptable, and as responsive to a nation’s real desire, as any other.
Karma takes care of that; and we have seen quite recently in England that
Karma, through its many agents, seen and unseen, can act quickly, as well
as with “the inexorable fatality of years”. Hence the form of government is
of secondary importance; the form is a response, and, as it were, takes care
of itself. This should again help us to realize the folly, of which so many “re¬
formers” are guilty, of imagining that because, in America, a Constitution,
a President, a Senate, a House of Representatives and so on, “work”, some¬
how,—our form of government is suitable for the Filipinos or for the people
of China. I say “suitable”; but there are many who believe that our system
would cure the world’s ills everywhere. They do not understand that one
man’s meat may be, and often is, another man’s poison.
Another, though closely allied subject, upon which members of the Society
might helpfully bring sanity to bear, is that of British rule in India. The in¬
fluence of American public opinion on that of Great Britain is great,—and un¬
fortunate in many ways. It reinforces the radical and unintelligent; it cheapens
the tone of society and of much of the English press; it provides justification
for those who—not only in England but all over the world—are victims of the
get-rich-quick obsession. America is a very big country, and many people
are impressed by bulk. Consequently, when considering the problem of India,
there has been a tendency in England to argue: We must give India Home
Rule, for otherwise America will say we are Imperialistic (the same charge
OF THE ANNUAL CONVENTION 239
, _Indian Masters, reported in 7 he Occult
239
report
REPORT OF THE ANNUAL CONVENTION
237
which, in America, is constantly brought against France). I do not mean that
England, without the influence of America, would have seen the Indian problem
clearly. On the contrary, uninformed provincialism there as here, because
it believes in the democratic theory, wants to apply it universally without
regard to differences of race, tradition, or actual need. What I do mean is
that American public opinion has been used by the deluded in England as a
weapon against those who know better,—who know India, and who know that
the application there of the Home Rule panacea would result in irretrievable
disaster. If members of the Society will acquaint themselves with the facts,
as they easily can, they could do much to neutralize the propaganda cease¬
lessly carried on in this country by paid agitators from India, by the Irish
element here, and, on general principles, by our large German population.
Articles in American magazines and newspapers occasionally remind us of
the undoubted truth that a subjugated people, a people that is kept in sub¬
jection by foreign troops, is in a very evil plight; apart from other considera¬
tions, people, in such circumstances, are likely to become liars, hypocrites,
sycophants. But beware of false inferences from sound premises; beware, in
this case, of the inference that it must be harmful to the natives of India to be
subject to British rule. The reading of a book such as that by General Mac-
Mun, entitled Turmoil and Tragedy in India , would be enough in itself to
show the absurdity of this and many other current misconceptions. India
has a more diversified population than that of Europe, and while Europe, in
name, is of one religion, India has two main religions, Mohammedanism and
Hinduism (ignoring the innumerable sub-divisions), and these two are in¬
herently more antagonistic than, let us say, Brahminism and Roman Catholi¬
cism. Of its population of over three hundred and fifty millions, about seventy
per cent are Hindus, and twenty-two per cent Mohammedans; but the latter
are war-like, which the immense majority of Hindus are not. For hundreds of
years before the English acquired possession of India, the country was governed
by Moslem rulers.
The practical question is: what would happen if British troops were with¬
drawn from India? What happened there, immediately after the Great War,
was not noticed in America; too many other things were going on at the same
time. Briefly, the Afghans, who are Mohammedans, invaded India from
the North—as India always has been invaded; and if it had not been for British
troops, and the loyalty to the British Raj of the vast majority of Moham¬
medans in India, the Afghans, aided by their co-religionists, would have con¬
quered and looted the country. In 1921-1922, the Mohammedan Moplahs
on the Malabar Coast were stirred up by the Ali brothers (Mohammedan
“nationalists”, differing from Gandhi only in method), and attacked their
Hindu neighbours with indescribable ferocity, skinning them alive being a
favour^e expression of their disapproval. I cannot even hint at their treatment
of Hitfhlwomen: it was unspeakable. On the other hand, the Hindus are
equally excitable, and can be equally savage, when their bitter hatred of the
Mohammedans can be vented with some likelihood of success. In other words,
238
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
when lecturers and writers on the subject inform us that if India were inde¬
pendent, her people would live together like brethren, our knowledge of the
facts should be sufficient to warrant immediate and flat denial.
There are great Indian patriots among the Masters of the White Lodge: what
do they want? What did H.P.B. say about it? Her Master was a Rajput.
He set her to work to bring about a better understanding between the different
races and religions of India; he, like the other Masters, wanted the English
who lived there to see, beneath the surface of Hinduism, of Mohammedanism,
of the Zoroastrianism of the Parsis,—the eternal truths of Theosophy which
are common to all the great religions, Christianity included; he wanted the
more thoughtful natives to accept the Master Christ as a brother of the Master
Krishna, of Gautama Buddha, and of the other world saviours; he wanted
India to profit from the best in the life of the West, and the West to benefit
from the hoarded wisdom of the East. He did not want the Bhagavad Gita
to take the place of our Bible, but he knew that we should understand our
Bible better if we studied it afresh in the light of the Gita , as so many of us
have done. He wanted right brotherhood, not a flat and ridiculously impossible
equality; he wanted right appreciation, both ways, with clear recognition of
the evil as well as the good. And the last thing in the world that he wanted,
or that any Master wanted, was to see the British withdraw from India. Masters
knew well and sympathized deeply with the troubles of the Indian peasant;
but they also knew that these troubles were due in far greater measure to the
peasants’ co-religionists, the money-lender and the landlord, than to any act
or failure of the British Raj. The British members of the Indian Civil Service
—the men actually in touch with the native population of all classes—are
probably the most intelligent, most sympathetic, most unselfish, and least
mercenary of any group in the world performing similar functions. If these
men were replaced by Indian Nationalists, all that can be said is: Heaven
help the rest of the native population! The Great Lodge above all else is sane —
represents, in fact, all the sanity there is in this world—and, in addition, takes
very long views. Its plans for the far-distant future of India, hundreds of
years hence, we do not know; but we do know that Home Rule, and the elimi¬
nation of British control, are not what it wants now: no Indian patriot with
sense, wants that. Gandhi has emotions, unlimited ambition, and considerable
cunning, but is destitute of sense.
There are two outstanding reasons why members of the Society should do
what they can to help India in the right way, which is, as I have said, by off¬
setting the tale of her unreal grievances with the tale of her many real blessings.
The first reason why we should do this is our immense debt to India, and es¬
pecially to Indian Masters, for our understanding of Theosophy. It was Indian
Masters who were responsible primarily for the founding of the Society and
for the work of H.P.B. and Judge. The second outstanding reason why we
should do what we can to help India, is that India has suffered so grievously
at the hands of pseudo-Theosophists, beginning with Hume and culminating
in the person of Mrs. Besant. It was Hume, as you know, who had that very
REPORT OF THE ANNUAL CONVENTION
239
early correspondence with one of the Indian Masters, reported in The Occult
World. Proceeding on the supposition that he, a scientifically-minded Eu¬
ropean, necessarily knew more than any Oriental, except, perhaps, within
narrowly prescribed limits, he decided finally that Masters were a myth, and
proceeded to organize the Indian National Congress, which has represented
the worst of India from that day to this. It was vociferous on behalf of Indian
Nationalism, and many years later, in 1917, as a reward for her violent cam¬
paign against “British misgovernment”, the Congress elected Mrs. Besant
its President. She filled the entire Indian press with her clamour, doing an
infinity of harm. She avowedly tried to stir up discontent—always an evil
thing to do, except against self—and as this is never difficult among the poor and
ignorant, nor among half-educated failures, of which India is full, she met
with the popular success for which her insane love of power had always craved.
Whether under the influence of Chakravarti or of Leadbeater, she was the curse
of the Theosophical movement and, in India, turned that movement over,
root and branch, to the worst enemies of the White Lodge. We, of course,
were not even remotely responsible for what she did; but she did it in the guise
of Theosophy, and we must do everything in our power to remove the stigma
from our good name.
Yet another way in which members of the Society can further the purposes
of the Lodge, is through the Protestant churches, especially in America. The
Protestant churches have a wonderful opportunity to serve the Master Christ,
but too often are dis-serving him. True and deep devotion will, in time, pro¬
duce enlightenment, but such devotion is very rare, and, in its absence, a right
philosophy is essential. Unfortunately, the clergy constantly reveal that their
philosophy of life is thoroughly materialistic; they have no grasp whatever
of fundamentals, no recognition of causes,—the result being that (like so many
members of the medical profession) they believe the removal of effects, of
symptoms, as, for instance, by means of “social legislation”, should be the
chief field of their endeavour. In other words, their diagnosis is superficial,
mechanistic, and entirely opposed to the principles and practice of Christ.
How many of them realize, and preach, that the besetting sin of this country
is and always has been, greed? I am not an authority on American history,
but those who have studied it, and who were bom in the midst of it, so to speak,
tell me that most of the people who came here originally did so to “improve
themselves”,—to make money more easily and rapidly than they could in
Europe. Some came seeking religious liberty; some were commissioned to
govern the other colonists; but the large majority came (and still come) for the
reason I have stated. Then, to further this primary purpose, slaves were
imported, as the cheapest form of cheap labour: greed again. Later, when
slavery was abolished, the lowest grade of labour was imported from Europe,
and this, imported for selfish reasons, before long organized its own selfishness
and greed so effectively that to-day it practically controls the government,
not for the benefit of the country, but for its own class purposes. There have
been periods in history, as everyone knows, when employers were in control,
240
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
and when—as in the early days of mechanization, say in 1840 labour was
shamefully exploited. Carlyle will never allow us to forget that. But the
tide has turned so completely that greed, still the dominant motive, and always
irrational, has now become a sort of religion in the C. I. 0 . and in its less noisy
but equally selfish rival, the American Federation of Labour.
This is obvious to everyone who sees the situation dispassionately. But
how many of the clergy point to Labour organizations as rivalling the worst of
“Trusts” in greed and selfishness? Whether their failure to do so is due to
intellectual blindness or to moral cowardice, the fact remains that the clergy,
with few exceptions, are not performing what ought to be their function, namely,
to guide their people into the way of truth.
But while, in that respect, unthinking sentimentality, and a materialistic
philosophy, may account for their inability to recognize facts as facts, their
silence on the subject of many current “best sellers” among novels, is even
less excusable. It is the duty of a clergyman, a minister, to keep himself in¬
formed as to the habits of his congregation, and when “all the world” is read¬
ing some book, he should know that his own people are likely to join the pro¬
cession, and, if he finds such a book to be indecent and corrupting, he should
say so. His own perception of such things may have been blunted; but this,
in a religious teacher, would be the worst of condemnations. On the other
hand, he may see clearly, but may fear that, if he speaks the truth, he will
empty his pews,—will be derided as old-fashioned, as narrow, as “not a man
of the world” (and it is the tragic longing of many of the clergy, especially of
the younger among them, to be considered “men of the world”). In that case,
they are untrue to their Faith. Has not the preaching of the Cross always
been considered by “them that perish”, foolishness? They need encourage¬
ment, perhaps,—and it is for us, as members of The Theosophical Society, to
supply it whenever we can, chiefly by the example of fearless denunciation
of all that is vile in literature and in the habits of contemporary life. H.P.B.,
many years ago, laid that charge upon us in her article, “Is Denunciation a
Duty?”
Above all else, what needs to be impressed upon the Protestantism of to-day
is that the purpose of life is spiritual; that comfort and health and enjoyments,
and other things which the world desires, are of no importance whatever in
comparison with man’s first duty as their own Catechism defines it, namely,
our duty “towards God”. Our materialistic Protestantism now sees “more
leisure” as the supreme desideratum. What use is made of the leisure men
have already? “Leisure”, to the vast majority of people, means: “I have
nothing to do; I am free to enjoy myself!” No duty to God; no duty to man,—
thank goodness! But let us be fair: are we entirely satisfied with the way
we use our leisure (if we have any) ? And if not, what can be expected of those
who have never heard of Theosophy? It is character that determines whether
leisure is harmful or helpful—leisure is neither good nor evil in itself; and char¬
acter is the product of man’s attitude toward changeless spiritual values,—
toward spiritual qualities which it is the purpose, the sole purpose, of man’s
REPORT OF THE ANNUAL CONVENTION
241-
existence to manifest and embody. Let us seize every opportunity to declare,
by our own attitude rather than in words, that Christianity, like Theosophy,
is a revelation of the spiritual purpose of life.
Finally, so as to deprive ourselves of the excuse that for us the “small old
path” is too difficult; that we are not fit, and that the call of the Lodge for
helpers must be answered by others,—let me remind you of the statement in
The Cloud of Unknowing : “For not what thou art nor what thou hast been,
doth God regard with his merciful eye,—but what thou wouldst be”. There,
indeed, is provided a sure footing and a new hope for all of us: it is not what
we were, or are, but what we want to be and are striving to be, that the Lodge
regards,—and accepts. This does not mean a sentimental pious wish that in
some far-off day—the further off the better, perhaps—we may become ch 61 as;
it means a real longing and a real effort. Granting these—no matter how “un¬
worthy” the longing and effort may be—they will be seen and loved and wel¬
comed, and all the powers of the spiritual world will strive to strengthen the
effort and increase the desire. Full of that conviction, how can we fail to go
forward hereafter with a new hope and new determination, no longer fussing
over our failures, no longer thinking about ourselves, but seeing Life as a gift
within our reach, for us to grasp and make our own, for love of the Giver of
this as of all good gifts.
That is part, at least, of the message of Theosophy, as the Lodge declared it
originally and still declares it; and that is part of the message we can carry
with us from this Convention: that one and all can make a new start, with out¬
stretched arms of welcome just ahead.
This report having been accepted with thanks, the report of the Committee
on Letters of Greeting was called for.
Report of the Committee on Letters of Greeting
Mr. J. F. B. Mitchell, after speaking of the great interest with which
these letters had already been read by officers of the Society, read them aloud
for the benefit of the Convention, interrupted by frequent applause. In calling
for a motion to accept the report, the Chairman said that thanks were due,
not only to the Committee for presenting the letters, but especially to the
writers for conveying to us so vividly their thought, their feeling, and almost
their presence here with us. This motion having been unanimously carried,
delegates were invited to address the Convention.
Miss Hohnstedt, who was called upon first, said that the Cincinnati Branch,
confronted with the world’s increasing unrest, had decided that the best anti¬
dote would be to study once more, Light on the Path. This had been done,
the speaker quoting its four unnumbered rules with the comment: “I think
we have all tried to embody that in our lives this season.”
Dr. Hohnstedt then spoke of the opposition which Madame Blavatsky
had to face during the last quarter of the last century, referring to her as “intel-
242
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
lectually and spiritually a giant”. Many of our early writers, he said, such as
Sinnett, had approached Theosophy from a mental standpoint, without inner
perception. What we need is to arouse our intuition that we may reach the
spiritual world. “Live the life and thou shalt know the doctrine. Unless we
do that, all our efforts will be fruitless.”
Mr. Oberlander, also from Cincinnati, expressed gratitude for all that
Theosophy had done for him, and for its preservation “in its purity down to
this day”.
Mrs. Regan (Providence) recalled that at the previous Convention much
had been said to the effect that if the Movement were to continue, it must
produce ch£las, and that this must have led us to further study of ch£laship and of
its laws. So she had re-read the third volume of Fragments , on the 28th page
of which she had found parts of a letter from a Guru to his ch£la, which she
quoted. She called particular attention to one of the rules suggested, “beware
of impatience”, saying that if this or any other of the rules were made the
subject of meditation and of real effort for a single day, much knowledge would
be gained of the spiritual quality involved, with the realization that the de¬
velopment of one such quality compelled the exercise of some aspect or element
of all the others. She concluded by quoting the closing sentence of the letter:
“If you can do that while fighting for my cause, and aid those with you so to
do, I can do anything.”
Miss Husby, on behalf of the Pacific Branch, Los Angeles, said she felt
that she had been commissioned by the members to come to the Convention
as an act of devotion, to place upon its altar the frankincense and myrrh of
their love and aspiration, that they might share in both its joy and pain. In
thinking of the pain, she had thought of Saint Joan of Arc, who, when the
vehicle was burned away, had entered into the heart of her Lord, so that grace
flowed from her into the channels which he had made years before. So it could
be hoped that we, to the extent that we permitted our personalities to be burned
away, might be permitted to enter into the mystical body of the Lodge, whence
flows a spiritual impulse through all the ancient mystical veins of the world.
Mr. A. GonzXlez Jimenez then read a paper in which, after reviewing the
early issues of Lucifer and The Path , as conducted by H.P.B. and Judge, he
urged that no one aspect of the truth should be over-emphasized, and applied
this to the subject of cyclic law. He quoted Zoroaster: “One moment of Eternity
is of as great consequence as another moment, for Eternity changes not, neither
is one part better than another part”. “Cycles”, he continued, “are the clock
of time, and time is an ephemeral display of intercepting clouds on the screen
of Brahma. . . . Our categoric imperative as a centre of solar theosophy is to
exalt humanity to the divine state; to galvanize its creeds and destinies, to
move it theosophically, awaking it to the consciousness of its inherent immor¬
tality, not to burden it with more theories, more theologies—the age of fossils
is past. Our mission is to beat with the rhythm of the eternal Sun; to love man
REPORT OF THE ANNUAL CONVENTION
243
for love of God. We are told that it is inconceivable what each one of us can
accomplish for his own people, for the country where he was born: he is a
true lightning-rod. But in every other country are also centred our mutual
problems, and in their struggles, our collective future is, more or less, decided.
We are the only league of nations. ... We are—or ought to be—the knight¬
hood of God, and our canons take account of every idle word, condemn mental
inertia, and regard discouragement or indolence as treason. . . .
“And what is it that the Masters most wish that we ask of them? Assuredly
it is that we should desire them to dwell in our hearts, to let the Warrior fight
within us, pulsate in us: that we shall come back to them. The solution of
all problems; the royal road of progress; the possession of wisdom.
“This is the tragic cry of all the Avatars, of all the Emissaries of Love, of all
the sons of Father Sun. It is for this that they came—in order to be practical
exponents, not to teach doctrines: each of them came to live a life, a life which,
if emulated by us, will lead us to where it led him. The law which formed the
heart of the teacher forms the heart of the pupil. . . .
“If real work is to be accomplished by us, we ought to labour in step with and
in the rhythm of the Solar Heart, the Theosophical Movement, to synchronize
our breath with the great Breath, the Lodge. This Breath, all of it, courses
through the heart of our Master. He is the Lodge. And when we worship
him all the gods are satisfied: the genius in us, he, and the Logos are but rhythms
of the Eternal. . . . Each time we make a new start in this direction, we make
these things and ourselves new. In the history of the soul the prodigal son
must perforce return to the house of his father. Let us definitely make the
new start! Let us make ourselves new, setting our hearts on the Everlasting:
the heart of our Master.”
Mr. Alvarez Perez presented the greetings of the Venezuela Branch, which
was happy in having four delegates at the Convention, and reported upon the
work in his country. As national conditions had compelled everyone to define
his political position, so they had felt a like inner compulsion to take their place
definitely in the ranks of the right or wrong, and to this end had given much
time to the practice of self-examination. They were resolved to proceed with
their spiritual task, asking of the Lords of the Lodge the graces of wisdom and
of final perseverance, that the link, forged before Judge’s death, should be kept
unbroken, in fulfilment of the desperate cry of their beloved H.P.B., the titular
patron of their Branch.
The Branch desired particularly to express its gratitude for all the help re¬
ceived from their co-workers, visible and invisible, and their best thanks for
the clarion call of the Quarterly.
*
Dr. Urbaneja and Mr. Augusto Jimenez, the two other delegates from
Venezuela, added their greetings, and expressions of their gratitude for having
been enabled to attend the Convention, and also for all the help given the work
in Venezuela by the parent Society in New York. Reference was made to the
terrible conflict in Spain—to which Mr. Alvarez Perez had also referred and
244
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
which came close home to all the Latin races—and the hope was expressed that
through all the tragic loss and suffering, righteousness might in the end be
strengthened, and the cause of the White Lodge thus prevail.
Two members from Central Europe were then called upon, one of whom
spoke of the difficulties that confronted members of the Society in that part
of the world, and of the debt they owed to their fellows in America, and espe¬
cially to the Quarterly, for the aid which enabled them to recognize the truth
as otherwise they could not possibly have done. They prayed that from the
Convention they might take back added strength to fight a good fight for the
Masters’ Cause, and concluded by giving thanks for their presence “here in our
Father’s house”.
After greetings from Captain Hamlen on behalf of Mrs. Hamlen and him¬
self, the Chairman explained that Dr. Torrey had been kept away by illness,
and called upon some of his former students to represent him.
Mr. Politella said that, comparing the status of our Society with that of
movements which pervert spiritual principles to material and emotional ends,
it became apparent that the world is immersed in psychic dreams, and that
the activity of the devils of illusion had never been more widespread. The
question then arose: are we to shout Theosophy from the housetops, thus com¬
pelling attention? But the answer to that must be No,—not when the cycle is
in its present phase of indrawal; the wise husbandman does not sow his seed
on frozen ground. To-day, more than ever before, the problem is a personal
and an individual problem, and to-day more than ever it would seem that we
are called in particular to embody in our lives two of the principles of the Bud¬
dha’s Noble Eightfold Path: to cultivate right views, and, supplementary to
that, right conduct—right views in the sense of proper discrimination, so as to
distinguish the light from the shadow, the real from the unreal, and, seeing
what is our task, to embody it completely in our own lives. The way and the
truth come first, and when they have been perceived intellectually, then by
sheer force of character and sheer love of the Master, they must be made con¬
crete in acts. To-day more than ever, the salvation of humanity depends upon
the salvation of the individual. Only by our cultivation of right views and right
conduct are we able to transform and to elevate ’the lives of our brothers and
of humanity. Theosophical brotherhood really means the little leaven that
leavens the whole lump.
Mr. Cross, referring both to Dr. Torrey’s absence and to the statement, in
many of the letters of greeting, that the writers would be at the Convention
“in spirit”, said that, in his mind, the effect had been to bring up the question
of the reality of the spiritual world, a question he believed answered by our
own experience as members of The Theosophical Society, a body in which we
can centre our own consciousness, live with its life, and share the aspirations
of all its members. The spiritual world had been described as a plane of con¬
sciousness to which anybody can raise himself, and he was sure that all of us
REPORT OF THE ANNUAL CONVENTION
245
must have had the experience of thinking of fellow-members and then, some¬
how, of feeling our own enthusiasm and efforts reinforced, to the better per¬
formance of our duties. The spiritual life, therefore, is a real thing, and ought
to be part of our daily consciousness, to be utilized to the best of our intelli¬
gence for the Masters’ Cause.
Mr. Clark and Mr. A. H. Fisher were also called upon, the former re¬
ferring to Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life”, and the latter to the need for a great
purgation of the minds and hearts of men—perhaps some collective and dread¬
ful experience that would cause them to go down on their knees in humble
prayer for divine aid, realizing that the human intellect alone is insufficient
to solve the world’s problems and to meet its needs. But if the world is to be
brought to the realization that divine aid is obtainable, it is essential that the
link between the world and the Masters be kept unbroken, through the So¬
ciety’s aspiration toward noble ideals, its passion for perfection, and its faith
that truth exists and can be found.
Mr. Miller, Chairman of the New York Branch: It is indeed a joy to see
these younger members with us, sharing our enthusiasm and, I am sure, in
their hearts responding to the romance of the call which comes to all who
attend these Conventions.
In thinking of this Convention, I thought of that of last year, and re-read
some of the addresses then made. I have especially in mind the address upon
the ancient maxims, Man know thyself, and, Man the mirror of the universe,—
in which was pointed out the misunderstanding of the world to-day over the
dual nature of man, and the failure to realize that duality means struggle, and
that the secret of success in the spiritual life lies in warfare which must be
continually waged.
In the New York Branch this winter, we discussed the added dimension
which Theosophy brings to life, the descent of spirit into matter, and the power
of Theosophy to transform our lives and all our thought. The power of thought
itself was emphasized and explained, leading us to see that one of the greatest
services we can render the Movement, was expressed by St. Paul: Whatso¬
ever things are true: whatsoever things are venerable: whatsoever things are
just: whatsoever things are pure: whatsoever things are lovely: whatsoever
things are of good report, think on these things.
Mr. Smith being called upon, thought enough had been heard from Dr.
Torrey’s students, and that he would now follow the advice a wise man had
given to youth: “To talk little, to hear much, to reflect alone on what is said
in company, to distrust one’s own opinion and to value others’ who deserve it”.
Mr. W. S. Fisher, referring to one of the addresses of the morning session,
said that the need for a spiritual awakening might have been expressed as the
need for a rejuvenescence of the spiritual life, as that word is used in biology to
describe the method of cell rejuvenation in which the cell wall completely
breakflfcmd what is within is freed. It seemed to him to be necessary for the
246
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
continuance of the Society that our personal cell wall should break, and that
what is within should thus be liberated. He believed there is no better means
to this end than gratitude, because gratitude breaks down those barriers of self
which keep us from being of value to the Movement. Everyone must have
experienced, at least in some small measure, the truth of this, and thus have
known the wave of warmth and sympathy and union that comes from a deep
sense of gratitude. To-day he, and many others, were saying “Thank you”,
and with the words were experiencing both the feeling of gratitude and its gifts.
Dr. Clark: The Bible tells us to offer unto God the sacrifice of praise and
thanksgiving. Why that word, “sacrifice”? “Sacrifice” means that which
has been made holy. We have profaned praise and thanksgiving by offering
them to self. On Convention Day, our complete dependence upon the Masters
ought to be clear; it ought to be easier for us to offer them, not a sacrifice in the
ordinary sense, but overflowing praise and thanksgiving.
Mr. LaDow: Mr. Chairman, I wish to express my gratitude for the honour
conferred on me by my election to the Executive Committee. I can conceive
of no deeper responsibility than that which rests upon its members.
“Thoughts are things.” I think it was said that a thought of depression may,
by contagion, cause someone far away to collapse completely. But our thoughts
may influence others, not only instantaneously but after the lapse of many years.
I have been reading a book on the history of French Free Masonry during the
18th century. The author rightly detests the particular form of Masonry
which produced the Grand Orient. He points out that the horrors of contemporary
democracies and dictatorships are natural developments of the subversive ideas
which were cultivated in the 18th century lodges. Fortunately we can have
true ideas, true thoughts, and can thus plant a beneficent seed which will in¬
evitably grow and bring forth good fruit in the world.
Mr. Auchincloss: Each year the Convention of the Society follows very
closely after Easter, and it is fortunate for us that this is so. For what happens
is, that we carry forward the inspiration, the inner renewal and the Resurrec¬
tion that is Easter, and then Convention confirms and expands it, through
the contact with Reality that comes at this time.
The inspiration that we get from Easter comes often, it seems to me, from
the consideration of some incident, of something that was said, in those last
few days before the Crucifixion. Take, for instance, that scene in the upper
room, after the Last Supper, when the Master Christ was talking with his
disciples. He had just said to them that, if they had known him, they would
have known his Father also. And Philip turned to him and said,“ Lord, show
us the Father, and it sufficeth us.”
Looking for a sign. We have been talking this winter at the meetings of
the New York Branch of the descent of spirit into matter. And there, in that
upper room, those disciples had in their midst, Life Incarnate; yet, in spite of
all that had been said to them, in spite of all that they had been told,—still,
they wanted proof, still they wanted a sign.
247
REPORT OF THE ANNUAL CONVENTION
Slow of heart, as we are slow of heart. For we, too, are constantly wanting
a sign. Externalized as we are, immersed in material things, thinking too much
in material terms, we are constantly scanning the horizon of the material world
for a sign, a proof, that the spiritual world is “working”. We are constantly
expecting (although we should not perhaps put it to ourselves in just those
words) material rewards of some kind or other, as a result of the inner effort
we are making,—as a sign, a proof, that our inner effort has the approval of the
spiritual world, that the spiritual world is behind us and with us. And there
shall no sign be given us,—not in that way.
How shall we recognize Life Incarnate when it is in our midst? Not through
any outer sign, but through recognition on the inner planes, within our own
hearts. It is there that perception, penetration lie. We must quicken our
hearts. And we cannot quicken our hearts as long as they are divided. We
cannot quicken them until our identification with the spiritual world is com¬
plete; until we have gone all the way in our self-surrender to it; until we are
no longer living amidst outer events, but, instead, are living within outer events,
and are finding at the heart of them, Life.
Mr. Kobb£: We are particularly fortunate at this Convention. When I
say that, I do not refer to the remarks of this morning. To those remarks I
shall come presently. At the moment, I allude to all of the young members
gathered here to-day, the youth in our Movement; some of them having con¬
tributed orally to our discussion, and all of whom have joined us in mind and
in heart,—those who have embraced the Cause in their youth, and who, some
day, must take up what we have in our hands and carry it forward, and must
strive for what we are striving for.
Last year, a call was made for chglas. Although, this year, no such call
was made in so many words, yet, the appeal for chfilas was sounded even deeper
than it was a year ago, in all the Chairman of the Executive Committee had to
say this morning. Perhaps, to-day, the call is deeper because the need is greater,
greater by a year.
Why is it that call has not been answered more completely? Though this
may be but one of several reasons, is it because, when it comes to spiritual
things, our ideas and objectives are too general and indefinite? Often, at the
New York Branch meetings, we speak of the purpose of life. It is expressed
in one or another way,—let us say, to serve the Great Lodge of Masters, or to
help to raise the conscious level of humanity. Are not such expressions rather
general, somewhat indefinite, when considered against the specific call made
last year, that a specific need might be fulfilled?
I am going to rest the blame on our old enemy, the lower self, because the
very thing that self would like to have us do, is to continue to be general and
indefinite in our spiritual objectives. Such indefiniteness suits its purpose,
for it enables it to keep its hold over our thoughts and acts, to piece out its
existence for so many more years or centuries as the case may be; and so long
as we are living more in the lower than in the Higher Self, it is impossible for
248
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
the objective of ch£laship to be realized. The lower self has no power of
creation. It is a perversion, and, as such, it has only the power of per¬
version: to take that which is created and turn it so that it works against its
own original life, thereby killing the very thing which we want to have come
to pass.
So my message is, that we take more to mind and to heart what was said
at the Convention last year about the need for ch£las, and what was said this
morning, on the same subject, in a much deeper sense; that we try to raise the
consciousness from the level of the lower self, the perversion, and to bring it
nearer and nearer into union with the Higher Self, the creative Self within us,
the Self that functions in the creative world. Thus, we shall give the Masters
of the Great Lodge an opportunity to help us in answering the call that has
been made, to help us in fulfilling the specific need of that call. Let us make
our objective one-pointed this year. We know what it is.
The Convention then heard with much pleasure and interest from Mr.
Kobb£, Jr., Mr. Russ, Jr., and Mr. Miller, Jr.
Mrs. Lake, of Providence, being called upon, referred to the heavy responsi¬
bility placed upon us in the realization that we must control not only our acts
and words, but our thoughts, and spoke of the encouragement and incentive
which went with it, since right thought has such an immense carrying force,
and might reach in its effects to the uttermost parts of the world.
Mrs. Rose (Providence) wished to voice her gratitude to the Quarterly.
Having recently been reading old numbers, it seemed to her they were a gold
mine of help and inspiration, and that no matter what may happen in the
future, we should always have in them the guidance needed for our work.
Mr. Brush, reviewing the evolution of life through some of its lower forms,
spoke of the analogy of our own lives, especially of our inner lives, adding:
“In the years to come, when our own power of sacrifice, our own faith, our
courage may be tested as never before, we who are here to-day know that the
conditions necessary for our own next step in evolution will be supplied. How¬
ever difficult or however obscure those conditions may at times seem, we know
that nature and the Lodge will do their part. May we do ours!”
Mr. Saxe: The fundamental desire of every member of the Society must
be to help others. Theosophy teaches us to regard people, not as bodies nor as
personalities, but as souls. In order to help the soul we must attain to soul-
consciousness. In other words, we must rise above the personal consciousness.
When we succeed in that, when we are able to stand firmly on that higher
level, then we shall be able to give other souls the real help they so greatly
need, and which very few can give. It is to this end that our constant warfare
with the personality is waged.
We are here to-day because, from the very inception of the Movement, there
have always been some members, who, having attained to soul-consciousness,
were able to exercise soul-powers: the power of perception, by which they
could perceive the needs of our soul, and point out the way for us; the power
REPORT OF THE ANNUAL CONVENTION
249
of communication, enabling them to communicate truth, aspiration, and the
joy of the spiritual world; energizing in some degree our higher wills.
It is now our turn to effect this transfer of consciousness, through conquest
of the personal self. Shall we not resolve to redouble our efforts, win this fight,
and so become worthy of being called Theosophists!
Colonel Wise spoke of General Washington as having been far more than
a great soldier and statesman, and then explained something of the occult
significance of American history.
Mr. J. F. B. Mitchell: Our first thought at Convention is always the wish
to express our gratitude for the privilege of being here. The tremendous im¬
portance of the Convention, and the way in which right thinking here may
affect the entire world, were spoken of this morning. We ought, by every means
in our power, to bring that truth home, to force ourselves to realize the potency
of our thoughts and acts. It is hard to do. One feels very small and unworthy,
and it is not easy to realize that, because of our connection with the Movement,
great issues may turn on what we think, or do, or feel.
Yet great issues do turn on what seem very little things. England has an
empire in North America to-day because someone, whose name is not even
known to history, knew a path up which, perhaps, it had been his duty to
climb, and so he could guide others up it, up to the Heights of Abraham and
the conquest of Quebec. He did not have to bq a great general or a great any¬
thing else. All that he had to do was to know and to point out a path. All
that is asked of us is that each one should climb his own path to his own heights,
and the Lodge can then do the rest.
Years ago, shortly after the war, a friend told me of an experience he had
had. Though he had not been able to go to the front, he felt deeply and wanted
to do all he could to help. On the morning of one particular day he resolved
to offer all that he did, with the intention of helping the Allied cause. At the
close of the day, as he went back over it in prayer, it seemed mostly failure
and that he had done very little. As if in answer, the words came across his
mind: Yes, it was very, very little, but look. Then two pictures, one a young
French wife holding her child, and the other a charging poilu, with a German
rifle aimed at his forehead. Something touched the rifle, deflecting the muzzle
a fraction of an inch. It took very little force, but the bullet that had been
aimed at the poilu’s forehead, harmlessly grazed his temple. Masters can do
so much if we will but provide a little.
The light has been given to us to carry into the future. The day will
come when men are going to pray, with all that is in them, for some one, some¬
thing, to take them out of the mess which they have made for themselves
and the world. When that time comes, shall we have held in the world the
knowledge that there are God-instructed men who may be evoked, so that
the passionate longing of the world may be focussed on evoking them? Or
must men grope blindly in the dark, not knowing what they seek, nor that it is
obtainable?
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THE0S0PHICAL QUARTERLY
Last year at the Convention, reference was made to the many thousands in
the great war who, lifted above themselves by their passionate love of their
cause, had given their lives with gladness, with a self-immolation that had
brought their feet to the Path of Ch£laship, to which, in their next life, they
might be bom. How the Masters must long to have those men tread that path,
long to give them the reward they so completely earned. It may be that it is
in our hands to determine whether they shall receive their reward or not. Is
the knowledge of ch£laship, the fact of ch£laship, to be in the world as a living
reality when they come back? Each one of us can do something to give those
men what they have earned. We may offer our effort, with the prayer that
someone may attain.
Mr. Hargrove (In response to a question from the Chair as to whether
the Committee on Resolutions had anything further to report before it was
discharged): Merely to thank Mr. Kobbd for having made it unnecessary
for me to repeat exactly the same words that I used last year! Also a reminder
that it is not oiily outer events, such as war, that help us to rise above ourselves,
but every real love, every real aspiration. Anything and everything we can
do to deny self, to push self aside, to recognize it for what it is, will bring us
that much nearer to the time when we shall attain that state of consciousness
which means,—cMlaship.
Dr. Hohnstedt: Before we close, I wish to make a motion extending our
thanks to the New York Branch for the courtesy and kindness they have shown
us; also to the officers of the Convention; also our thanks to the Editors and
contributors to the Quarterly.
This motion having been seconded and unanimously passed, and the Com¬
mittee on Resolutions having been discharged with thanks, the Convention
was adjourned.
Isabel E. Perkins,
Secretary of Convention.
Julia Chickering,
Assistant Secretary of Convention.
LETTERS OF GREETING
Aylsham, England.
To the Secretary T.S.: Once more our thoughts must turn towards Convention; indeed I
do not see how they can help doing so, and this carries all our most ardent good wishes and
friendly greetings to fellow-members who will soon be assembled in it. Our Norfolk Branch
prepares, by a month’s study, for Convention, and I know that each member endeavours to
keep the day itself as free from outer concerns as possible, so I hope, and believe, that we
are able to be closely united with you in spirit, and to bring our own little contribution to
Convention.
Each year as the Convention Reports come to us, they seem to be deeper, more momentous,
and a year’s study of them does not suffice to teach us all the lessons they hold for us. Each
year also the whole world situation seems to become more desperate, more hopeless, and I
have been asking myself what we, who have the great privilege to be members of the T.S.,
can do to help the world and the Masters’ work for it. In a book-review I read not long ago
REPORT OF THE ANNUAL CONVENTION
251
it was stated that the author considered civilization had become so corrupt, so degenerate,
that it was hopeless to try and reform it; that it would have to be swept away in order that
a fresh one might grow up in its place. Certainly the outlook on all sides, in every land, is
dark indeed, and mankind seems to be rushing headlong towards the abyss, but I cannot
feel that we should take a despairing view of it, for to do so would be to doubt the Masters,
who for countless years have formed the “Guardian Wall” that has protected humanity
from the most terrible fate. Again and again they have saved it, and their hands can be
strengthened to do so again; but we their poor servants must do our share in helping them
in their great and wonderful work.
How can we do so? A study of the Convention Reports answers that question, for again
and again in them the call has gone out for more ch£las, for men and women who can rise
above themselves until they become instruments that the Masters can use, for their work
here in the world. We must provide them, for if we do not, that work might be gravely en¬
dangered, and such a thought is intolerable. The only real obstacles are discouragement
and inertia. We may not all be able to become ch£las in this life, although if we had the
will we could all accomplish chdlaship, but we can all try,—try with every atom of will, de¬
votion and determination there is in us, try for love of the Masters and in ardent gratitude
for all we owe them; and if we ourselves fail, our efforts may carry others over the threshold.
Also we can be a centre of contagion for good in the world, not so much by what we do, as
by what we are. As we are told in one of the beautiful “Fragments”, the little spark in our
own heart may become a beam of light that, reaching out, may enlighten the heart of another
and kindle a spark in it, until from one to another the whole world becomes aflame.
In spite of all appearances I am convinced that there are many, many men and women
who long for the light, who are groping their way towards it, and everyone of us can help
them find it, and in so doing help the Masters. So I ardently hope and pray that this Con¬
vention may indeed be blest, may be the greatest ever held, and that the outcome of it may
be a real increase of recruits for the Lodge, of chfilas filled not only with love and devotion
but with knowledge and understanding.
Espoir Bagnell,
President, Norfolk Branch .
To the Secretary T.S.: Throughout this month of April, our thoughts will often turn in
the direction of Headquarters, in preparation for Convention, as we think, with much grati¬
tude, of the fact that we are permitted once again to take part, in heart and intention, in the
coming Convention, and that the “Powers that be” have permitted it once again to be held
while the “lines of communication” remain open, as they have been maintained in unbroken
sequence since the foundation of the Society.
As we follow the cyclic processes of Nature, and rejoice in the renewal of life at this time
of the year, we can join also in “all Nature’s wordless voice” which “ariseth to proclaim—
Joy unto ye, 0 men of Myalba”,—at this time when we celebrate the Christian festival of
Easter, coinciding (in older times) with the Greek celebration of the Mysteries. Yet we
know that in the T.S. Movement, cyclic law has provided that a reverse direction should
rule the trend of our policy, at this time. Instead of renewal of outer life, we have the indrawal
which belongs to this cycle. I wonder whether, in the last year, there has been further under¬
standing of what the indrawal means, for all of us. We have to guard constantly against
the danger of allowing our thought to be coloured by any negative or inert view of the present
condition. Patanjali defines that Indrawal as “disengaging the powers from their entangle¬
ment in outer things, and their return to the quality of consciousness”. Only as we stead¬
fastly practise the detachment which is enjoined on us, even from those outer helps in the
Work which have meant so much to us in former times, can we hope to penetrate more deeply
into the true meaning of consciousness, and enlarge our experience of the inner realms which
await our exploration. We can understand that only the most vigorous, positive and forceful
effort will enable us to do this, and to correspond whole-heartedly with the plan of the higher
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THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
We have to learn to discern the word of command within ourselves, and for this, much
stillness is required, and a steadfast determination not to allow anxiety or restlessness to ob¬
scure our vision or impede our action.
So, once again at Convention time we greet you, in union with the brotherhood, in the
name of the Masters who allow of our assembling.
Hope Bagnell,
Secretary , Norfolk Branch.
Denver, Colorado.
The Virya Branch sends Greetings to the Convention, and a loving message of appreciation
of all the service so unceasingly offered by those who are bearing “the burden and heat of
the day”.
Mary Kent Wallace, Secretary.
Anne Evans, President.
Los Angeles, California.
To the Members in Convention Assembled: Our delegate, Miss Ruth Husby, will convey
our warmest and most heartfelt greetings; and so what we now write should be taken as sup¬
porting her, as well as supplementing whatever she may be inspired to say when in the Con¬
vention atmosphere.
Recently, whilst looking forward to Convention, and wondering or thinking of what its
atmosphere might be like this time, of the great Ones who, in some form or other, we are told,
attend every year, who for the most part create its atmosphere; there came vividly to mind,
Israel’s great Adept of old as he entered, for a similar brief space, the still more rarified atmos¬
phere of the Lodge itself, to receive the instructions from his Master for the freeing of Israel’s
erstwhile captive people, much as we now may do for the redemption of our own. But, as
we know, first of all there came the gentle but imperative reminder, “Put off thy shoes from
off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground”, as if in that all-else-exclud¬
ing moment, Moses had forgotten to do so; again much as we, in the figurative sense, may
forget, if in the joy or deep satisfaction of once more coming together, intimately and in per¬
son, or no less closely in thought and feeling though situated at a distance, we fail ever so
little to remember Those to whom we owe our Conventions, and who again will be there in
some form or other, so their life-giving and sustaining, strengthening and inspiring presence
may be felt.
Or, it seemed, it may be just their gentle but firm remonstrance, or stem reproof, that
many of us will feel,—whatever our short-comings, or mere “personal-self” wants, or our flinch¬
ing and squirming under the pressure of things at times (our real and immediate need in
any case) might call forth in that way. Yet, even this would not matter, however hard it
might hit, if only for the time being we can get rid of these our cumbersome “shoes”.
With every best wish from us all, while thanking you for your own,
The Pacific Branch,
_ W. H. Box, President.
Newcastle-on-Tyne, England.
To the Members of The Theosophical Society in Convention Assembled: On behalf of the
members of the Newcastle-on-Tyne Branch, I have much pleasure in conveying to you our
heartiest greetings and good wishes. We were glad to receive the notification that the Con¬
vention would be held once again, as in former years, for we feel that it is one more oppor¬
tunity to receive the Masters light and guidance, and one more opportunity to express our
gratitude and thankfulness. We shall therefore be with you in heart and mind as we gather
at our special meeting on this momentous occasion. For who knows what may be the mes¬
sage this time.
It has been said that occultism demands heroism,—of the sort which is totally unaware
REPORT OF THE ANNUAL CONVENTION
253
of itself, as such, and which is not a momentary flash of excitement, but the inflexible purpose
which seizes upon all things as means to the Masters’ ends.
Here, surely, is opportunity of the widest scope—something that we can all individually
practise and embody. It would seem that as we do this, strength and stability and vision
will result. It will be the kind of contribution to the Cause that will ensure a rocklike struc¬
ture of the Society, a powerful expression of spiritual force, and a definite challenge to the
powers of evil in the world.
We need to be positive for good, active for righteousness, that all lower things have neither
part nor lot in our make-up; that, in short, we shall be so consumed with love for the Masters
and all they stand for, that our whole weight and influence will be placed on their side and
at their service. Giving ourselves wholeheartedly in this way, what possibilities do we not
provide? As we can stand the pressure which the fulcrum must undergo to be of any service,
the Masters' work in the world can be so much more extended and increased.
What then have we done about the clarion call for ch£las during the past year? Has it
been unheeded, or has something towards its realization been accomplished? We surely
want above all to keep the link unbroken, and this cannot be unless the portals of the inner
world are entered. We would therefore pray that on the flood-tide of this Convention, and
all the effort that has led up to it, someone may attain, and rejoice the hearts of us all, but
particularly those to whom its significance is more fully understood.
E. Howard Lincoln,
President.
Oslo, Norway.
To the Secretary T.S.: We shall surely have our meeting on Convention Day,—and you will
have in the enclosed extract of my annual address to the Branch, as well as in the Report
sent by our Secretary, a testimony that in soul and heart we are with you.
With sincere thanks, as always, for all the care we receive, and to all who are working for
Truth and Righteousness, not in the abstract only, but daily, hourly, and concretely, as we
have experienced for so many years in the work of our Headquarters,—we send our greetings,
as well as to all members in Convention assembled.
On behalf of the Oslo Branch T.S.,
Henning Dahl, Chairman.
South Shields, England.
To the Members of The Theosophical Society Assembled in Convention: The members of the
South Shields Branch are with you in spirit and purpose and send you their fraternal greet¬
ings. To the editors and writers of the Theosophical Quarterly we offer our sincere thanks
for their inspiring articles. May you all receive a blessing from the Lodge of Masters that
will radiate through the whole Society and stem the tide of destruction that has been let
loose over the world. May we have the strength and courage to live up to the teachings
we have received and are receiving daily through the Society, and may we respond to the
efforts of the Elder Brothers on our behalf. We are going through a testing period, and we
pray that all will survive the crisis that appears to be close upon us, with added strength for
the Masters’ Cause of Theosophy.
Thomas Mackey,
Secretary.
Toronto, Canada.
Once again Toronto Branch takes pleasure in sending Greetings to their Fellow-Members
in Convention assembled and elsewhere throughout the world.
We should like to send special thanks to those who make possible the Quarterly. We
wonder if there is another magazine published anywhere that is so beloved as it is.
At times when the immensity of the task undertaken by The Theosophical Society is real-
254
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
ized, one is appalled by the thought of the little one is able to do; yet, knowing that it is in
human hearts that the work has to come to fruition, it is quite obvious that we can best
help by seeing to it that our own hearts respond, and then endeavour to shape our lives so
that they may make manifest in some measure, the results for which the Society is working.
For the Toronto Branch ,
Albert J. Harris, Secretary.
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
To the Secretary T.S.: It is always a privilege to receive a letter from Headquarters; there
is in them—without the specific reminder in words—the feeling of a link unbroken between
us who are, perhaps, far away, and that Spiritual Centre which I often think of as Home, or
Reality,—and to be aware of Reality is certainly of very great importance to humanity to-day.
I am very sorry that I shall not be able to attend Convention,—in person. Surely, I shall
be there in spirit and in thought. Even that is to me a great privilege; for the blessings of
the spirit will go forth from that Convention to all whose hearts are tuned to the Powers
there manifested.
Perhaps some think we should refrain from expressing our sense of appreciation to those
who do so much for us on the higher planes of life, and for the blessing of their presence at
these Conventions. I do not. If we truly appreciate the work, or the character of any person
in life, why should we not try to express our gratitude and our love, while we are alive,—
before it is too late? And so, I am glad to offer my poor expressions of appreciation to them
now, —glad, and proud to feel the inspiration of their noble living in these days of severe test,
when most of the world seems determined to rush into the bottomless pit of selfishness and
materiality.
It would do my heart good to be permitted to meet, face to face there at Convention, those
who have so long borne the brunt of the fight for the spiritual awakening of Humanity. Would
you very kindly convey to them my love and my heartfelt gratitude.
Wm. E. Mullinax.
The greatest interest was shown by delegates and members in the reading of Letters of
Greeting; comment was made, later, that the stillness of the attention given was even more
of a tribute than the frequent applause. The letters included, in addition to the foregoing,
greetings from Miss Eleanor Evans (England); Miss Anna Fjaestad, President of the Arvika
Branch (Sweden); Mr. Joseph Whitney Ganson (New York); Mr. Plinio (Italy); Mr. W. G.
Roberts, President of the Middletown Branch (Ohio); Mr. Fred’k A. Ross, President of the
Whitley Bay Branch (England); Mr. and Mrs. Schoch (Brazil); Mr. Percy W. Ward, Secre¬
tary of the Gateshead Branch (England); telegram from Miss Evans, President, and Miss
Wallace, Secretary of the Virya Branch (Colorado); cablegram from Mrs. Bagnell, President,
and Miss Bagnell, Secretary of the Norfolk Branch (England); cablegram from the Venezuela
Branch of Caracas. Other letters from abroad were read, and most appreciatively received,
but are not acknowledged or quoted in the open pages of the Quarterly for the reason that
unusual conditions in some parts of the world might make this inconsiderate and inexpedient
(see the Quarterly, July, 1934; page 33).
Whosoever strives hard and grips tight ,
The two worlds are illumined by him.
—Muhammad Iqbal.
The Return to Religion , by Henry C. Link, Ph.D.; The Macmillan Co., New
York; price, $1.75.
The increasing sale of this book, since its publication a year ago, is one of
the cheering signs which we may set against those that sadden us. It has had
the best kind of sale, building up, first slowly, then more and more rapidly as
its merits became known, till it now appears in all the lists of “best sellers”,
and has reached a total of over a hundred thousand copies. This is a notable
response to any work of sanity and wisdom, and the book is marked by both;
but to see the odds against them, in the world to-day, we have only to set these
hundred thousand copies against the one million, three hundred thousand of
Gone With the Wind , sold by the same publisher within the same time.
Dr. Link had been robbed of his religion, as are so many students, by his
college and professional training. He returns to it, not because of affection, or
because he has become converted to all the doctrines of his own or any other
church, but because he cannot escape the logical compulsion of his own scientific
findings of its necessity and value. He writes as a practising psychologist (he
is the Director of the Psychological Service Centre in New York) who has,
in the past twenty years, been called upon to study the life histories, and pre¬
scribe for the ailments and maladjustments, of some four thousand men and
women. His book, he tells us, is less autobiographical than distilled from the
biographies of his patients, and its outstanding lesson is that no discovery of
modem science is more important or more sure, than the proof, which all such
psychological studies yield, that self-sacrifice and discipline are essential to
self-realization and happiness; and that, though other interests often compel
the sacrifice of present satisfactions for a more distant goal, “only religion em¬
bodies this principle as the major premise of a normal life in all its aspects”.
Dr. Link’s chapter-headings cover a wide range, from playing bridge and
dancing and the bringing up of children, to the achievement of happiness and
the abundant life. His observation is keen, and he states his conclusions fear¬
lessly and with vigour. In his chapters, for example, on “Fools of Reason”
and “The Vice of Education”, he points out that our educational system “has
been a glorification of the intellect and a corresponding disintegration of the
basic values which make intellect worth having”. He finds “no body of evi¬
dence in the whole field of psychology that proves any definite growth of char-
255
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
256
acter or personality as a result of higher education in its generally accepted
forms” (p. 145). “The liberal mind”, the creation upon which modem educa¬
tion chiefly prides itself, is, in fact, probably its “most damaging single aspect”,
for in most cases, “liberalism”, as seen in Dr. Link’s analysis, “is the result of
an indiscriminate releasing of a person from the traditions and restraints of the
past without substituting an adequate set of restraints or ideals for the future”.
But though Dr. Link does not hesitate to expose fallacy and folly, his book is
far from being merely destructive. His concern is always to point out the
way to betterment of personal character in all its manifold relationships. We
heartily commend the book to our readers. B.
Orpheus and Greek Religion: A Study of the Orphic Movement , by W. K. C.
Guthrie; Methuen & Co. Ltd., London; price ios.6d.
During the sixth century B.C., the age of Pythagoras, there was a notable
renaissance of mysticism and asceticism in the Greek world. In particular,
there was a widespread development of certain myths and ritualistic exercises
which the ancients defined by the general term, “Orphic”. The devotees of
Orphism claimed a sort of apostolic descent from the Thracian hero, Orpheus.
Their enemies, including Aristotle, branded them as fanatics or charlatans.
There is the authority of Philoponus and Cicero for supposing that Aristotle
denied the existence of Orpheus and attributed the authorship of the Orphic
scriptures to Onomakritos, an alleged forger and adventurer of the sixth century.
We have italicized the word “alleged”, for it is possible that Onomakritos
may have had access to a tradition unknown to Aristotle. It is conventional
for the hostile critics of a great religious movement to impute its origin to
forgery and fortune-seeking. A student of Theosophy, examining what is left
of the Orphic poems, and considering the long history of the Orphic cults, can
scarcely doubt that they were based upon real spiritual experience. Indeed,
the Orphic Mysteries were accepted at their face-value by the Pythagorean
and Platonic philosophers from Empedocles to Proclus and Olympiodorus,
covering a period of a thousand years. It is also manifest, at least to the present
reviewer, that a force of this magnitude could only have been generated through
the creative activity of some very great individual. Why should one not identify
this man of genius with the Orpheus of Greek legend, the bard and seer and
magician, who was slain by the barbarians to whom he had brought an intima¬
tion of the divinity latent in man? In this connection, it is interesting to recall
that “esoteric tradition identifies him [i.e. Orpheus] with Arjuna, the son of
Indra and the disciple of Krishna” ( Theosophical Glossary , p. 225; also cf.
Five Years of Theosophy , pp. 266, seq.).
Mr. Guthrie’s book does not make light reading, but it is of great value to
any serious student of the subject. He is a tireless and painstaking scholar.
He has made easily available the epigraphical evidence which had hitherto
been known only to specialists in this field. He has also brought together
and co-ordinated the direct and indirect references to Orphism in classical
4
REVIEWS 257
literature. Thus he is able to describe what seem to have been the main out¬
lines of the Orphic doctrine in its exoteric form. There were certain basic
myths symbolizing the creative and regenerative powers in the universe and
in man. Such was the story of the Divine Son, Dionysos, whose body was
torn asunder and devoured by the Titans, the unregenerate children of the
Earth. Zeus blasted them with the heavenly fire, and from their ashes were
born the races of men who thus commingle in their natures both divine and
bestial elements. The celestial spark, the fragment of Dionysos, constitutes
the higher self of man, and it is this which is fated to reincarnate in a series of
physical bodies until the titanic part of the nature has been altogether purified
and transformed. The sacrifice of Dionysos, therefore, atones for the evil and
the unwisdom which made that sacrifice necessary at the dawn of the great
cycle of manifestation. Incidentally, the martyrdom of Orpheus, the repre¬
sentative of Dionysos, reflects and corresponds to the martyrdom of the god.
Mr. Guthrie seems to be quite free from many preconceptions of the “Golden
Bough” school; but in our opinion he fails to solve the real meaning of the
Dionysiac myth. It is far from being unique. The Mysteries of Egypt and
Greece were based upon the repetition, in many forms, of the same fundamental
theme of sacrifice and re-birth. Dionysos is the brother of Osiris, Prometheus,
Adonis, Attis, Persephone. His counterparts have existed in India and in Pre-
Columbian America. He may be compared to the Logos of St. John’s Gospel.
But Mr. Guthrie does not see the significance of these analogies and similitudes.
He imagines that the Dionysiac myth was in the first instance an invention of
barbarians; that it was an effort of the primitive mind to discover some sort of
divine precedent for certain orgiastic and bloody rites. Many centuries later,
it is assumed, the civilized Greeks appropriated the myth but endowed it with
various spiritual connotations which would have bewildered and confounded
the savages who had devised it. Mr. Guthrie seems to have been unduly im¬
pressed by the overworked hypothesis that civilized religions are “sublima¬
tions” of the dreams of savages; that mythology originates as a “rationalization”
of totemism and taboo. But there is ample evidence that the savages studied
by anthropologists are as far removed from the genuine primitive state as we
are. Their societies are almost always extremely complex, often exhibiting
symptoms of advanced decadence. Civilization in decay becomes savagery.
We need not search history to confirm this truth- It is being illustrated to-day
before our very eyes.
The myth of Dionysos may have absorbed many gross and alien elements
during hundreds or thousands of years; but anyone who has the least sympathetic
understanding of the universal Mystery teaching, can still recognize the noble
and sublime essence of the legend. Naturally the form of the Mystery teaching
must have varied with times and places. Each race has its specific talents and
limitations. Orpheus adapted his genius to the mountaineers of prehistoric
Thrace. He was not addressing the sophists of Athens.
In our opinion, the most valuable chapter in this book takes up the question
of the mkitionship between “Orpheus and other Greek Religious Thinkers”.
258
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
Mr. Guthrie suggests that Anaximander, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Plato, and
other philosophers were deeply influenced by Orphic doctrines. In some in¬
stances, their indebtedness is explicitly recognized; but often when there is
no direct reference to Orphism, there is a manifest affinity between their thought
and the Orphic mythology.
If we understand it correctly, Mr. Guthrie’s interpretation of the “myths”
of Plato is in accord with the theosophical exegesis of all “true myths”.
In his own work Plato uses myth for two main purposes. In the first place it is his
habit to take a myth . . . and use it to support or corroborate his own strict deduc¬
tions. . . . The second purpose of myth in Plato ... is to provide some sort of ac¬
count of regions into which the methods of dialectical reasoning cannot follow. 1 hat
there are such regions he fully admits. It is a part of his greatness to have confessed
that there are certain ultimate truths which it is beyond the powers of human reason to
demonstrate scientifically. Yet we know them to be true and have to explain them as
best we can. The value of myth is that it provides a way of doing this. We take account
of myth not because we believe it to be literally true, but as a means of presenting a
possible account of things which we know to exist, but must admit to be too mysterious
for exact scientific demonstration. Examples of these mysteries are free will and divine
justice, and in speaking of these Plato makes free use of the Orphic myths. His own
attitude towards them he makes clear, for example at the end of the myth in the Phffdo
(114^/): “Now to maintain that these things are just as I said would ill befit a man of
common sense; but that either this or something similar is the truth about our souls
and their dwelling-places, that (since the soul has been proved to be immortal) does
seem to me to be fitting, and I think it is a risk worth taking for the man who thinks
as we do.” * L.
Diversity in Holiness , by R. H. J. Steuart, S.J.; Sheed & Ward, New York,
1937; price, $2.00.
A first glance at the book arrests the attention, for such outstanding figures
as Saint Ignatius Loyola, Saint Francis de Sales and Saint Teresa of Lisieux
are grouped with a number whose lowly, or retired lives make them almost
unknown to the world at large—Brother Lawrence, Saint Benedict Joseph
Labre, Saint Bernadette Soubirous.
This unusual selection is coupled with a no less unusual treatment. It is a
biography of twelve saintly people, but with the facts of external life reduced to the
barest essentials, and the emphasis given entirely to the inner life,—the particular
way in which each of the twelve saw the light, and the wholly diverse ways in
which each expressed it in his life. As the title indicates, it is their diversity
for which they are chosen. Of each of the twelve lives it can be said, “It is the
same journey to the same City, but with a new map to travel by.”
Sympathy and understanding characterize the book, together with vigour
and directness, and an atmosphere as of a room well aired and sunned. The
presentation of St. Benedict Joseph Labre is indicative. Instead of a wealth
of details, morbid and often repellent, about the austerities of the saint, so few
external facts are given that the reader unacquainted with that life is, in part,
left guessing. The author’s comment, in essence, is:
The life of one who without compromise or any sort of reckoning with the opinion,
REVIEWS
259
experience, or example of anyone, puts into literal practice one of the fundamental
principles of the Christian teaching. Such a life gives a shock to our complacency, it
comes as a splash of chilly reality upon the warm comfort of our spiritual adjustments,
it breaks like a raucous shout into the harmonies to which we have tuned the claims of
the spirit and the flesh. . . . He is not proposed to us for our literal imitation—the
poverty of Christ Himself, who had not where to lay His head, touched no such depths
as his. His relation to the level of Christian practice on which we may, and should,
follow Christ to perfection, is somewhat as that of pure virgin gold to the same precious
metal made practicable for use.
The author himself sees holiness as greatly desirable, compellingly attractive,
and his purpose is to show it in that light to his readers. Furthermore, “Holi¬
ness really means no more than a task which God has laid upon us all and
which, therefore, all of us have to attempt. . . . The saint is nothing more
exceptional than a ‘whole man’—what our Lord commanded us all to be.”
The love of God, which to many seems so remote and puzzling a thing, is really the
truest expression of ourselves: we are not “whole” until the whole of our love is given
to Him: our affections are missing their aim until they find Him. Hence, to be filled
with the love of God is not to induce upon ourselves something out of the natural order,
but to restore to us the true bent of our nature: not to form us into something that we
are not, but to re-form us into something that we really are but from which, unhappily,
we have become distorted.
Where a life is characterized by extreme simplicity (as with some of the
lesser saints), or by totally uninspiring surroundings, he sees it as bringing
holiness closer home to us, placing it more nearly within the reach of the average
man.
Since Christ made His own the ordinary life of man, and for thirty years of His life
showed Himself to be the Beloved Son of His Father by no greater thing than fidelity
to the duties of ordinary human life, there is no excuse left us for lamenting our lack of
opportunity. . . . To serve God truly does not mean to try to be someone else than our¬
selves, nor even to be ourselves but in other circumstances than those that we have, but
to aim at being the best that we can be as and where we are.
As suggested already, the value of the book lies as much in the author’s
interpretation as in the biographical material. Many passages could be quoted
to advantage, but one more will suffice, giving the author’s comment on the
Abb6 Huvelin’s spiritual joy in the midst of suffering:
Christ has said that if we come to Him—are one with Him—our burden will be light
and our yoke sweet: they will not cease to be a burden and a yoke, and our poor nature
will still suffer grievously under them, but our oneness with Him will lift us into a world
of new values in which the most inveterate contradictories are reconciled, lightness with
heaviness, sweetness with bitterness, sorrow with joy. We shall learn there that grace
is not an anaesthetic, quite the contrary, but that it not only gives a strength which
enables us to do and to suffer what is difficult and painful, but transmutes such difficulty
and such pain into what, for want of a better word, we must call their opposites. It is,
as it were, our participation in the mystery of the Incarnation—the infinite bliss of
God, and all the sorrows of man, in the one God-man.
J. c.
e same book, we were especially impressed by
the author’s introduc-
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
260
tion to the life of the Cur6 d’ Ars. This of his statements first: “God is the truth
in all that is true, the beauty in all that is beautiful, the goodness in all that
is good”; then the inevitable corollary: “Art for art’s sake, or wisdom for
wisdom’s sake, are no less delusive as ideals than those which the coarsest
sensualist sets before himself; for art and knowledge and all that in our dif¬
ferent ways we apprehend as good, are so for Christ’s sake, or they are false
goods.” Oriental students of Theosophy may prefer to put the name of Krishna
or of Buddha, or the more abstract idea of the Atman, in the place of Christ;
but the principle remains the same, and it is a principle which, with few excep¬
tions, the world has never accepted. “It will, no doubt, sound over-exacting
to some if one says that the test of all excellence in all domains of human achieve¬
ment is whether it ‘shows Christ’ or does not; but what escape is there from
that conclusion? For there are two camps only, Christ’s and Antichrist’s,
and, as between the two, neutrality is impossible. . . . Again and again, if we
are to be loyal to that call, we shall have to set our teeth and say, ‘It is not
true, it is not beautiful, it is not good, because it is not Christ’. Christianity is
of its very nature challenging and intransigent. ...”
What is true of Christianity is true of any religion that is treated seriously,
and not as a mere ornament. Students of Theosophy, translating the author’s
realization into any language or terminology that will suit themselves and
their hearers, should make it part of their mission to act upon, and then to
promulgate, the same eternal principle of thought and conduct. N.
Mathematics for the Million , by Lancelot Hogben, F.R.S.; W. W. Norton &
Co., New York; price, $3.75.
This book has been enthusiastically commended by H. G. Wells, Julian
Huxley, and Bertrand Russell. Those who like these propagandists may like
the book. It bears to mathematics the same relation that Mr. Wells’s Outline
of History bore to history, that is, approximately nine parts of Mr. Wells to one
part of history. Dr. Hogben has been similarly successful in prostituting a noble
subject to the propagation of his materialistic and envenomed social philosophy.
The book is clever, popular and thoroughly poisonous. B.
Pascal: The Life of Genius , by Morris Bishop; Reynal and Hitchcock, New
York, 1936; price, $3.50.
Unlike some of his contemporaries, Mr. Bishop does not try to “debunk”
one more great figure of the past. His attitude towards his hero is sympa¬
thetic and respectful. The opening words of the first chapter sound the keynote
of this admirable book.
Blaise Pascal was, simply, one of the greatest men that have ever lived. Having made
the discovery of mathematics at the age of twelve, at sixteen he wrote a treatise on
conic sections which is the herald of modern projective geometry. At nineteen he in-
REVIEWS
261
vented, constructed, and offered for sale the first calculating machine. He gave Pascal's
law to physics, proved the existence of the vacuum, and helped to establish the science
of hydrodynamics. He created the mathematical theory of probability, in a discussion
of the division of gamblers’ stakes. His speculations were important in the early de¬
velopment of the infinitesimal calculus. After a night of religious revelation, when
he was but thirty-one, he abandoned science, returning to it only to solve, as a diversion
from the toothache, the problems of the cycloid. Espousing the religious principles
of the Jansenists, he wrote in their defence, the Lettres provinciates , a controversial weapon
which has not yet lost its edge. His prose style, novel in its strong simplicity, determined
the shape and character of the French literary language. He devised a new method
of teaching reading. ... In the lucid moments of cruel illness, he wrote his Pensees ,
in preparation for an apology for Christianity, thoughts which have affected the mental
cast of three centuries, thoughts which still stir and work and grow in modern minds.
He died at 39. . . . Here is the mind of genius, one of the authentic geniuses in human
records. ,
Mr. Bishop has made a careful study of the grand sikcle , the great century
during which Pascal and so many other men of genius appeared in France.
But it is his object to prove that Pascal’s greatness passed beyond the bound¬
aries of time and space. For instance, he is able to demonstrate that Pascal’s
struggle against the Jesuits was an episode in a warfare which is as old as civiliza¬
tion, and which continues unabated to-day. The man who “takes thought”,
and who insists upon uncompromising obedience to principle, can never live
at peace with the time-server and the politician. Pascal was, first and fore¬
most, a passionate devotee of truth and righteousness. His chief defect, as
Mr. Bishop suggests, was his pride, his libido excellendi. He had little patience
with folly and stupidity. Like Epictetus whom he so deeply admired, he did
not make sufficient allowance for the “dreamlike feebleness which fetters the
blind race of mortals”. One may recognize that his enemies, the Jesuits, had
a certain pity for the weak and sinful, a certain tolerance and gentleness which
Pascal and his associates at Port-Royal lacked. But it is stimulating and in¬
spiring to recall the existence of a man who affirmed without equivocation that
truth is superior to falsehood and can be distinguished from it. The relatively
high civilization of the seventeenth century is indicated by the fact that Pascal’s
works became almost immediately “best sellers”. One wonders whether in the
twentieth century he could easily find a publisher.
It is regrettable, in our opinion, that in one passage Mr. Bishop utilizes the
pseudo-science of psycho-analysis in an attempt to explain Pascal’s contempt
for human passions. He admits that he is dragging in an hypothesis, and takes
the precaution of quoting Pascal’s own warning: “To make an hypothesis an
evident truth, it is not enough that all the phenomena should follow.”
Doubtless, every animal instinct can be transformed or “sublimated” into its
spiritual counterpart; but this transmutation is most adequately explained as
the normal effect of the triumph of spirit over matter. The soul incarnating in
the body can and should change the nature of the body. Such is in essence the
doctrine of divine grace which was taught by Pascal and which is so clearly
explained by Mr. Bishop. S.V.L.
262 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
Damien The Leper , by John Farrow; Sheed & Ward, New York, 1937; price,
$2.00.
Mr. Farrow’s book contains nothing which may not be found in other books
about Father Damien, but it is written with great understanding of, and rever¬
ence for, the heroic priest. Surely, one cannot read the story of his life too
often. Father Damien went voluntarily to the leper colony of Molokai, in the
early days, and was the first person to work for the betterment, physical and
spiritual, of these hopeless outcasts. As a result of his efforts, carried on alone
for many years, under conditions almost too horrible for description, the state
of lepers over the whole world has been radically changed. Everyone interested
in “good works” should read the story of Father Damien. They will learn
from it that the silent, unremitting charity and sacrifice of one individual,
practically unknown and unassisted, without influence or money, can produce
an effect upon the history of civilization, and accomplish reforms beyond the
dreams of the political social-worker, although he may be provided with billions
and with official backing. The body of Father Damien has been taken back
to Belgium to be honoured by his native country. The Catholic Church, as a
first stage in his canonization, has declared him “Blessed”. He sought no such
recognition or honour, and would, doubtless, be very embarrassed by them.
The Hawaiian lepers were fond of music, and Father Damien formed an
orchestra and a chorus of singers. They composed some songs in their language,
one of which Mr. Farrow quotes:
When, oh when shall it be given to me
To behold my God?
When,
Oh, When shall the captivity of my wretched soul
Cease in this strange land where, night and day,
Weeping,
Weeping alone is my portion;
When, oh when shall I leave this valley of sorrow,
Where the only bread I eat is my continual tears?
When, oh when shall I see my well-beloved Lord?
Prince of the Heavens is he,
Guardian of my soul, my Hope, my Saviour,
My All. . . .
St.C. LaD.
Preserve proportion in your reading. Keep your view of men and things exten¬
sive .— Thomas Arnold.
QUESTIONS
WHKBi
JBB
ANSWERS
^•W
Question No. 403 .—At Convention it was said that, if the spiritual world were for us a reality,
life for us would be full of romance, poetry and wonder, and that if it is not, it is our own fault.
Much as I should like to do so, I do not see romance in my life. How can I begin ?
Answer. —What motive do wc carry into our daily life and living? Is success in all the
outer activities in which we are engaged, an end in itself, or a means to an end? Do we care
whether or not actual success comes, as long as we do our part with all that is in us, and with the
right motive? Do we know, in fact, whether our effort has been successful or not? Can we
see far enough ahead, can we take sufficiently long views, to be able to tell where the result of
our effort is going to fit in, where it may contribute to some far-seen result towards which the
Lodge has been working?
With what are we identifying ourselves? With the objectives of our own narrow-seeing and
with the interpretations of our own slow hearts? Or with the gallantry and bravery of the
Lodge, with its daring and its far-flung vision, with the wonder of its compassion and its
love? C.R.A.
Answer. —There are many ways of beginning to extract romance from life. One of these is
by deciding what form of romance we covet:—whether it be such imaginative power as trans¬
formed Cinderella’s pumpkin into the coach which carried her to the Prince, such loyalty as
Roland’s in serving his King, or such day-by-day tenacity of purpose as transported Columbus
to a New World. Then, with retrospective study of our lives, we can determine which type
of romance actually has been present at any given time. By compulsion of the will and love
of the Immortal we can set ourselves to recapture the romance, but at a higher point on the
spiral, a point where we find it transmuted into spiritual reality. The very door of heaven is
wide open before us. It is indeed our own fault if its romance, poetry and wonder do not
fill our lives. G.M.W.K.
Answer.— Romance is of the soul, which means, among other things, that it is dependent
upon one’s purpose and motive. What is your purpose in life, and what the motive back of
what you do? There is no romance in working for oneself. There may be infinite romance in
the dullest work, if it be done from love and offered to one’s Master for his cause, to bring
nearer the coming of Adept kings on earth. It is romance to give oneself absolutely to a
cause that can command and is worthy of the uttermost devotion of our hearts. It is to such
a cause that the Masters call all who will listen, and there is no one, no matter what the cir¬
cumstances of his life, who cannot aid in their battle against darkness and evil. Every man
who fights against the evil in his own heart and in the world around him, who stands for
principle against expediency or self-indulgence, strikes a blow in that battle, and there is no
one who is not called upon to do that.
What do you think of as romance? To find it, use your imagination to see the truth beneath
its outer, commonplace appearance. See yourself as what you are, the soul, incarnated to
reconquer its heritage, that it may be devoted to the service of its exiled King. See yourself,
263
*
264 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
the soul, with an infinite past, rich in experience and adventure, seeking to recover the know 1
edge of itself and of its goal, seeking, like Columbus, to find a new world, the spiritual wor c,
its age-old home, and to find again its friends of ancient days and comrades of many wars.
Think of romance as it has been seen on earth, and then ask yourself whether that is not only
a pale reflection of the actual, living romance of the soul. J.F.B.M.
Answer. —It may not be possible to perceive the romance and poetry of events in which
one takes part while they are taking place; the pressure may be too great. At the time, one
may be conscious only of struggle or combat. The mountain climber is often wholly occupied
with the difficulty and the peril of his undertaking, until finally he reaches the summit. Then
he is exhilarated, joyous. He realizes the poetry and romance of his achievement. So with us
and our day. If we regard it, not as an opportunity for personal enjoyment, or as a threat
of boredom, but as a field for self-conquest and for service, if we try to dedicate it to the Soul,
we shall be moving in the right direction, and shall soon have at least an inkling of the poetry,
romance and wonder of the spiritual world. C.M.S.
Answer. —Three men looked at a sunset. One said: “Hurry up; I want my supper.”
Another said: “Gorgeous; quite worth painting.” The third said nothing, but for him the
soft clouds were the shadows of angels’ wings, the glory and the radiance were the far-flung
splendour of his Master’s heart,—all of it a veil between himself and the Promised Land, a veil
which he tried to pierce, that he might leave his own heart where he wanted it to be. And,
though he said nothing, he thought much: If earth can display such beauty, what of the
beauty which this reflects!
So they returned to their homes, the third man to a tired woman and to peevish children;
but, as he met them, he felt their need, and rejoiced that he had brought power from behind
the sunset to see them as souls, and to lift them, if only a very little way, toward the peace of
a better world. X.Y.Z.
Answer. —Romance? Look at your life again; look beneath its surface. There is your
partner; you cut his throat once, centuries ago, because you thought he had swindled you,
when in fact he had not. And now you blame him for being suspicious! There is the girl who
will not have you: you did have her once, in the distant past, and she betrayed you. May
it not be that, having half repented then of her betrayal, her instinct tells her she would betray
you again,—and that, instead of weeping, you should sing and be thankful? You have a
younger brother and sister, whose mutual dislike makes your life miserable. Well, in Egypt,
when they were not brother and sister, you arranged a marriage between them, for your own
good reasons; and then they were miserable. Would you wash your hands of it so soon?
You do not call this “romance”? But at least your life is not common-place: it is drama,
as all life is. You insist upon romance! Then what of this? There was once a great Master
whom you thought you loved. When the hour of his trial came, you fled from him, and, for
fear of scornful faces, hid in a cellar. He was killed,—but is still alive, and from that day to
this has sought you, offering you his love, labouring ceaselessly to save you from yourself
while, life after life, as then, you have fled him, “down the nights and down the days . . . down
the arches of the years”, though he, “with unhurrying chase, and unperturbed pace” still
pursues: “Lo, all things fly thee, for thou flyest Me! . . . clasp My hand, and come!” Is
there not wonder in that?
You say this is tragedy, not romance; but, even so, you can transform it into romance this
mmute by swiftly turning and running to him,-you, the insignificant, the less than nothing
thus crowning that Great One with victory,—re-affirming his victory daily bv vour miiet
determined efforts to do all things for love of Him. q ’
Nothing has ever happened to you that was not an opportunity, was not part of his nlan
to raise you from the dust to the level of the Sons of God. Look at your life afresh- is the
no romance in it? Is it not all romance? ' t> o re
1 .R.S.
VOL. XXXIV, No. 4 OCTOBER, 1937
,WJEWb.\< -i ufN*. 136 I
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"Society and Theosophy.
VOL. XXXIV, No. 4 OCTOBER, 1937
WXWeAv
fBOIflDlC
Founded by U. P. Blavatsky at flew Vork In l$75
pretend to be able to establish
HE Society does not
T at once a universal brotherhood among men, but
only strives to create the nucleus of such a body,
i i n ■ ■ Many of its members believe that an acquaintance
EPPS with the world's religions and philosophies will
■-S8--I reveal, the common and fundamental principle
«n<ferlvin 2 these, that "spiritual identity of all Souls with the
Oversoul ” which is the basis of true brotherhood J and many
of them also believe that an appreciation of the finer forces
rf nature and man will still further emphasize *e same idea.
The organization is wholly unsectarian, with no creed,
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is it to be held responsible for the opinions of its “embers,
who are expected to accord to the beliefs of others that
tolerance which they desire for their own.
The following proclamation was adopted at the Conven¬
tion of the Society, held at Boston, April, 1895 s .
‘‘The Theosophical Society in America by its delegates and
members in Convention assembled, does hereby proclaim
Theosophy and members of Theosophical Societies wherever
and however situated. It further proclaims and avers its
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organizations in all theosophical matters except those ot
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the bettering of their ways, and it avows its harmony there¬
with. To all scientific societies and individual searchers after
wisdom upon whatever plane, and by whatever righteous
means pursued, it is and will be grateful for such discovery
and unfoldment of Truth as shall serve to announce and con¬
firm a scientific basis for dhics.
“And lastly, it invites to its membership those who, seek¬
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tread in this,"
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CONTENTS OF VOL. XXXIV, NO. 4
October, 1937
PAGE
NOTES AND COMMENTS. z6 7
FRAGMENTS. 280
YOU. 281
TEMPTATION. 2 9 i
WITHOUT CENSOR, X. *94
VINCENT VAN GOGH. 3°8
APPEAL OF THEOSOPHY. 3*5
ON THE SCREEN OF TIME. 3 W
A TALK WITH MY BRAIN (Reprint). 333
REVIEWS. 338
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS. 349
INDEX. 351
Entered as second-class matter September 5. 1923. at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., under the
Act of March 3, 1879.
Copyright, 1937, by The Theosophical Society
I
X
OCTOBER, 1937
The Theosophical Society , as such , is not responsible for any opinion or declaration
in this magazine, by whomsoever expressed , wn/ess contained in an official document.
The Law of Retribution
Karma ... is the power that controls all things, the resultant of moral action,
the metaphysical Samskara, or the moral effect of an act committed for the attain¬
ment of something which gratifies a personal desire. There is the Karma of merit
and the Karma of demerit. Karma neither punishes nor rewards, it is simply the
one Universal Law which guides unerringly and, so to speak, blindly, all other laws
productive of certain effects along the grooves of their respective causations. When
Buddhism teaches that “Karma is that moral kernel {of any being) which alone
survives death and continues in transmigration" or reincarnation, it simply means
that there remains nought after each personality but the causes produced by it, causes
which are undying, i. e., which cannot be eliminated from the Universe until re¬
placed by their legitimate effects, and wiped out by them, so to speak, and such
causes, unless compensated during the life of the person who produced them with
adequate effects, will follow the reincarnated Ego, and reach it in its subsequent
reincarnation until a harmony between effects and causes is fully established (Theo¬
sophical Glossary, p. 161).
I N St. Paul’s words: “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a
man soweth, that shall he also reap.” Such is the law, and man is as in¬
capable of changing it as he is of abolishing by edict or legislation the fact
that he has lived, that he has a past. Every act, moral or immoral, good or^^h
definitely affects, for better or for worse, the circumstances of our lives ancRhe
course of our existence. The law of retribution or Nemesis is as much a part
of Nature as the law of gravitation. Like the law of gravitation, it may be said
to act blindly, because it is inexorable and can be neither gainsaid nor mollified
by any conceivable argument.
It is well to begin by accepting Nemesis, as the Greek tragic poets accepted
it, in its unadulterated rigour. Nemesis is, indeed, only one aspect of “the one
Universal Law”. Karma signifies much more than the execution of justice.
267
268
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
Nevertheless, it is a sign of human dignity to recognize that sorrow and tragedy
and frustration are not accidents of heredity and environment, but are the
proper effects of causes generated by us in this or an earlier life. Although the
modern mind may try to deny or ignore the actuality of evil and sin, it is none
the less an experienced fact that evil and sin exist; nor is there any escape from
them save by the turning of the heart, by the act of will which our ancestors
described by the word, repentance. But how can one turn away from an evil
to which one is blind?
The colloquy between the Master Christ and the repentant thief illustrates
this theme and offers a perpetual subject for meditation. Unless a man admits,
in some degree, his karmic debt and resolves to pay it in full, God Himself
cannot arrest his descent into hell, although the Infinite Compassion of Divine
Nature may withhold for long periods the full consequences of his misdeeds,
multiplying the opportunities for repentance. So God causes His sun to shine
upon the just and the unjust.
Some Delusions of the Clergy
One ventures to suggest what should be one function of the priest. The true
priest does not sit in judgment on other men, but in so far as his vocation is
real and not assumed, he seeks to become in some way an intermediary between
his Master and those who are blinder than himself. Thus he can bring light to
the surrounding darkness, helping men to realize the cause of their miseries,
leading them by his own example to the point where they despise the mode of
life which has produced their present condition, where they determine to amend
their conduct.
In brief, the priest should minister to the soul. For that purpose he needs
the spirit of self-surrender, an uncompromising devotion to his Master and his
Master’s work. If he have knowledge and wisdom as well as devotion, so much
the better. But he can perform his work without wealth or power or worldly
prestige. He is not called to be a politician or an economist or a “cheer-leader”.
Any activity which subordinates the needs of the soul to the demands of the
flesh, should be alien to him.
At the present time, a goodly number of the clergy, Catholic as well as Protes¬
tant, are playing at social revolution. Some may be guilty of crude ambition,
using their alleged spiritual office to strengthen—as they fancy—their worldly
position, or their “influence”. Others may merely desire to be on the side of
the majority, fearing that they will lose everything if they do not at once join
the party which threatens the old order. Nevertheless, there is ample evidence
that the vast majority are moved by genuine sympathy for physical distress
and poverty. The trouble is that their sympathy is larded with sentimentality
and with gross misunderstanding of the real issues involved. However good
their intentions, they are proving the inadequacy of their faith in “God, the
soul and immortality”. Whether they realize it or not, they are deserting the
charge which they accepted at ordination. They are neglecting the cure of
souls under the pretence that no soul can be saved until the body which it in-
NOTES AND COMMENTS
269
habits enjoys security and even luxury in an Utopian environment. In fairness,
it must be admitted that they were not prepared for a spiritual office by their
education. We do not know what is the curriculum of studies in most theo¬
logical seminaries, but in some at least, the principal subjects seem to be eco¬
nomics and international politics and popular science. There is a science of
spiritual law. Where is it taught to-day, and how many are competent to
teach it?
We quote from a report of the National Conference of Jews and Christians:
Religious activity in strike zones has ranged from opinions voiced in sermons to such
practical steps as feeding strikers and adjudicating disputes. C.I.O., the sit-down strike,
local law officers, the Federal Government, all come in for a share of praise and blame by
clergymen, but the large majority of opinion has been in favour of labour’s efforts to win
collective bargaining rights. The clergy have been generally on the side of labour. . . .
In Pittsburgh, the Catholic Radical Alliance, after investigating the claims of both em¬
ployers and employees in the Loose-Wiles and Heinz plant strikes, supported the strikers,
and brought Catholic laymen to swell the picket lines. . . . Dr. Howard M. Wells,
Presbyterian minister of Cleveland, declared that the militia had been brought to Cleve¬
land by a reactionary steel management to break the strike. . . . The active interven¬
tion of a committee of ministers in Gadsden, Ala., drew a sharp rebuff from local law
officers. Growing interest on the part of clergymen in the industrial situation is clearly
evidenced by the number of resolutions approved in recently held conventions of reli¬
gious bodies.
There are many exceptions. All the clergy have not joined the rebellion
against law and order, as the authors of this report are obliged reluctantly to
admit. But the facts are none the less scandalous. Have these so-called Min¬
isters of the Gospel utterly forgotten the injunction: “Render therefore unto
Caisar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”?
They might profitably recall the example of John Wesley. Wesley doubtless
had limitations and shortcomings, but, as has been suggested, he did more than
any other individual to save England from the contagion of the French Revo¬
lution. Such an accomplishment was possible because he stirred to life, even
among the most brutalized elements of English society, the conviction that the
demands of the soul are more pressing than those of the body. There is no evi¬
dence that Wesley approved of the “labour conditions” of eighteenth-century
England. They were, indeed, more inhuman and harsh than anything which^
our most imaginative social workers can depict. But Wesley realized the trut^r
so widely neglected to-day, that the outer reflects the inner, that economic
conditions are the effects of spiritual conditions and can only be veritably
changed for the better by the cure of souls.
The Twelve Nidanas
We read in the Maha-Vagga, one of the Buddhist Pali scriptures:
Having attained Buddhaship, the Buddha, the Blessed One, was dwelling at Uruvela.
Then for seven days the Blessed One sat at the foot of the Bo-tree experiencing the bliss
of liberation. During the first watch of the night he meditated upon the Twelve Nidanas f
the Causes of Existence, forward and backward:
unwisdom (avidya) depends the impulse towards incarnation ( samskara ); on the
270
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
impulse towards incarnation depends the sense of being a separate self ( vijnana ); on the
sense of being a separate self depends personality ( namarupa ); on personality depend the
sense-organs ( chadayatana ); on the sense-organs depends feeling ( sparsha ); on feeling
depends perception ( vedana)\ on perception depends desire for sensation ( trishna ); on
desire for sensation depends attachment ( upadana ); on attachment depend the modes of
existence (bhava); on the modes of existence depends birth ( jati ); on birth depend old
age and death ( jaramarana ), sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief and despair. Thus does
the entire aggregate of misery arise.
Hut when unwisdom fades out, the impulse towards incarnation ceases; when the
impulse towards incarnation fades out, the sense of being a separate self ceases; when
the sense of being a separate self fades out, personality ceases; when personality fades
out, the sense-organs disappear; when the sense-organs disappear, feeling ceases; when
feeling fades out, perception ceases; when perception fades out, desire for sensation
ceases; when desire for sensation fades out, attachment ceases; when attachment fades
out, the modes of existence cease to be; w hen the modes of existence cease to be, there
is no birth; when there is no birth, there is a cessation of old age and death, sorrow, lamen¬
tation, misery, grief and despair. Thus does the entire aggregate of misery come to an
end.
The nidanas or stages of Karma have been converted into a sort of rigid
formula by the Hinayana School. Partly under Hinayana influence, partly
because of their native materialism, many Orientalists have attributed to the
Buddha a mechanistic view of Nature which led him to affirm that man’s moral
life is subject to the same inflexible determinism that prevails in the domain of
physics and mechanics. This represents a serious misunderstanding of the whole
purport of the Buddha’s teaching. He explained at great length that it is not
the apparently good or evil deed itself which sets the karmic process in motion,
but the intent, the state of consciousness behind and within the deed. He com¬
pared the fruition of our action to the growth of a plant from a seed.
It is like seed, brethren, which is uninjured, undecayed, unharmed by wind or heat, and
is sown on fertile soil; if then rain fall in due season, then will that seed attain to growth
and increase. In exactly the same way, brethren, when a man’s deeds are performed
through covetousness or hatred or infatuation, wherever his personality may be, there
those deeds ripen, and wherever they ripen, there he experiences the fruition of those
deeds, be it in the present life, or in some subsequent one (Anguttara-Nikaya ).
The Fruition of Unwisdom
Moreover, the Buddha was not speaking of remote metaphysical contingen¬
cies, but of events within the range of every human experience. We are con¬
stantly enacting the nidanas within ourselves. It is instructive to follow the
effects of any emotion or thought or outer act, to observe how the series of
events successively unfolds one nidana after another, almost always terminat¬
ing, as we know too well, in some form of dissatisfaction or sorrow or despair.
We cannot study ourselves without studying the “causes of existence”. In the
degree that he identifies himself with his lower personal nature, with the “self”
of his average moments, every man is a fruition of unwisdom.
Unwisdom, avidya , is sometimes used as a synonym for maya , the magical
power of cosmic illusion which makes the One appear as the many. In this
sense, avidya is not necessarily a cause of evil and misery, for it is only by means
NOTES AND COMMENTS
271
of limitation and differentiation—the One Self reflected in the atom, God in
man that Pure Spirit can attain self-consciousness. But the Buddha seems
to have used the term to denote in particular the common root of egotism and
sensuality in man. It is, as it were, the source of “original sin”, the “subcon¬
scious” seed which is transformed into self-will and personal desire and phantasy.
Because of avidya , we surround ourselves with delusions, imagining the real to
be unreal and the unreal to be real.
Karma is blind only in the sense that it invincibly tends to bring to fruition
every seed of consciousness. In every case, the punishment fits the crime, but
the justice of this divine retribution is not adequately symbolized by our human
laws; for Karma is indeed the Good Law, meting out to man the consequences
of his deeds in the way which is most likely to awaken him to a realization of
his own sin and unwisdom, and always holding before him the possibility of
repentance and consequent liberation from the “chain of causation”. Only
self-will prevents us from recognizing that “the entire aggregate of misery” is
not the meaningless round that it seems to be. As Theosophy teaches, the
Good Law is administered by agents, by divine hierarchies and powers, specifi¬
cally for mankind by the Lodge of Masters, by those who are called “Lords of
Karma” because they have learned for themselves the lesson of Karma, because
they have “burned the seed of unwisdom with fire and have scattered it to the
winds . It is a fundamental tenet of the doctrine that the divine host itself
cannot force or change the human will. Man must choose misery or bliss for
himself. All that the agents of the Good Law can do is to impress him through
events, leaving him to self-generated pain and despair, if necessary, in order
to reveal the vanity and danger of his course. This “instruction” assumes a
unique form for every individual, since his needs cannot conceivably be iden¬
tical with the needs of any other individual. We can postulate certain general
principles denoting various modes of karmic action; but only a Lord of Karma
can foresee how the law of retribution will affect a particular person under par¬
ticular conditions.
If the Christian clergy were capable of studying Buddhism with detachment
and without invidious comparisons, they would, in many instances, for the first
time acquire some real understanding of the teaching of their own Master. The
truths taught by the Buddha are identical in essence with those taught by the
Christ; only the method and form of expression differ; and as the knowledge^
of our native literature is enriched by the study of other languages, so the^
knowledge of the Christian doctrine is enriched by the study of the thoughts
and acts of other Masters. Students of Theosophy can testify that when an
idiom has become almost meaningless through lifeless repetition, its sense can
be recovered by recognition of the truth for which it stands, as this truth has
been formulated in other idioms.
For example, if some of our radical clergymen had any conception of the
Buddhist teaching concerning Karma, they would have recognized that the
Master Christ taught the same doctrine in other terms. Only a Lord of Karma
can have the right to pronounce the words which so often accompanied his
272
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
acts of healing: “Thy sins be forgiven thee”. In any event, if these clergymen
believed in a real law of retribution, they would not try to cure poverty and
misery by encouraging men to increase and fortify still further their “unwisdom”,
nor would they imagine that all the evils of the world can be removed by “col¬
lective bargaining” and the “liquidation” of “reactionaries”.
The Possibility of Liberation
It is necessary to remind ourselves that unwisdom, though “beginningless”,
can yet be brought to an end. As has been suggested, the nidanas may be said
to exist for the purpose of destroying their “first cause”, avidya. The fruition
of unwisdom is so unbearable that at last the sufferer may be inclined to turn
towards repentance, if only because he can conceive of nothing worse than his
actual condition. And this act of turning should mark the beginning of the
end of unwisdom, the first step upon the path to liberation from the “circle of
necessity”. “Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life,
and few there be that find it.”
However, it can be found and has been found. The bonds of Karma fall
away when the lesson of bondage is learned, inasmuch as these fetters only come
into existence for the correction of the soul. In the last six cantos of the Purga-
torio , Dante symbolizes what may be described as an initiation of the soul,
whereby it enters into positive knowledge that bliss and perfect freedom are
proper to its nature. At the summit of the Mount, in the Earthly Paradise
where man dwelt before the fall, the poet comes to a stream of pure water. On
the far bank he sees the Lady Matilda, whose presence awakens the memory
of a Golden Age,—“where and what Proserpina was in the time her mother
lost her, and she lost the spring”. Matilda explains that the river which di¬
vides them “is called on the one side Lethe, on the other Eunoe.” “On this
side it descends with a virtue which takes from men the memory of sin; on the
other, it restores the memory of all good deeds.” It is only after he sees Beatrice
and she rebukes him for his reluctance to face his sins—so that he confesses
them with shame—that he is drawn through the water by Matilda, and then
sees Beatrice, Divine Wisdom, “unveiled”.
At the same time, another mystery is revealed to Dante, that the flowers of
Paradise “have such virtue that they impregnate the air which in its original
motion scatters that essence abroad, . . . and were this understood, it would
not then seem a marvel yonder [on earth] when some plant takes root there
without manifest seed.” Even so, as has been said, from inner and superior
worlds can be wafted potencies of good which are not the karmic “seeds” of
any acts of man or earth. Does this not suggest one meaning of the Vicarious
Atonement, made manifest whenever a Master or an Avatar, like the Buddha
or the Christ, appears in bodily form among mortal men?
All the vicissitudes of experience take on a new aspect when they are seen as
episodes in a process designed by Divine Nature for the purpose of releasing
the soul from the prison where it has condemned itself to live. We cannot hope
to taste Lethe or Eunoe until, like Dante, we face our sins, the causes of our
NOTES AND COMMENTS
273
vicissitudes, and are “stung with the nettle of repentance”. By no other means
can we escape from our self-generated delusions. Therefore, in the strict mean¬
ing of the word, all Karma is good Karma. Karma may assume the most ter¬
rible, the most horrendous appearances, but its true name, given by the Buddha,
is the Good Law. Like Yama, the God of Death, in the Katha Upanisltad , the
Good Law reveals that supreme agony may become the gateway of regeneration.
Active and Passive Spirit
The term “Spirit” is so general and abstract that it has come to mean almost
anything or nothing. Here again we may learn much from the study of ancient
Indian scriptures. The working hypothesis of the true Vedanta of Shankara,
for instance, is that Spirit is Real Being as It is in Itself. It is summed up in
the equation: “The Atman and Brahma are one”, that is, the true Self of every
individual being is an undivided part of the Great Self of the Universe, the
spiritual man is inseparable from God. This is a magnificent metaphysical
affirmation, but it is also something more, for it suggests the mystical attitude
of heart which the individual must maintain in order to gain liberation and
enlightenment. The Self in the individual becomes aware of its identity with
the One Self of all Nature by responding to the constant presence of that One
Self within it and above it. The individual and the Universal may thus be
said to be related to one another as the passive and active aspects of an indi¬
visible unity.
However, between the Absolute Self of all that is, and the individual human
entity, there is an infinite gulf of mystery which the consciousness of man as he is
could never span in a thousand thousand ages. “You will enter the light, but you
will never touch the flame.” There is boundless consolation in the theosophical
testimony that this gulf is in reality filled by a host of active divine beings, by
an unbroken hierarchy of “creators” and “builders”, representing all the stages
of the Spirit in its active , liberated, enlightened condition between the Absolute
and mortal man. Thus although the Spirit in mortal man is still passive, clouded
by a film of unwisdom, it can be translated into an active condition by conscious
union with the particular active ray of divine light of which it is a prolongation.
“Some plant takes root there without manifest seed.” The individual finding
his Heavenly Father, his Master, in the inner world, can become in his pi
a Lord of Karma, instead of its subject. “I have said, Ye are gods; and amof
you are children of the most High.”
The Embodiment of the Spirit
There is a false asceticism, especially in the East, which is based upon the
assumption that all manifestation is unqualifiedly evil; that the great Universe
itself would never have come into being if there had not been a pre-existing
dark and violent purpose in the first nature of things which demanded and
achieved expression. This pessimism, which was popularized for the modem
West by Schopenhauer, seems to have been partly based upon a distortion of
Ihc doctrine of Karma as this was set forth in the Buddhist and other scrip-
274 THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
tures. If it were true, the logical course of the human soul would indeed be to
seek annihilation.
But even our limited observation of Nature reveals that it cannot possibly
be true. We are speaking of purposes and processes infinitely beyond the ca¬
pacity of our feeble understanding; but surely experience bears witness to the
fact that our human nature, fallen and degraded though it be, is not solely the
embodiment and fruition of unwisdom. Unwisdom is there, but also there is
wisdom, potentially if not actually. However, this wisdom remains passive
unless it be made manifest, unless it be embodied, clothed in substance, made
visible, endowed with form.
Mahayana Buddhism expresses our experience of the twofold quality of mani¬
festation by the doctrine of the alaya. The alaya is the anima mundi , the Soul
of the World, present in its integrity both in the Universe as a whole and in
every atom or part thereof in each stage of development. It is compared to a
granary containing seeds of every kind and description, all of which are des¬
tined to germinate in due season. There are the seeds, the skandhas , of all past
illusions and misdeeds and failures, and there are the seeds of all possible future
attainments of divinity. It is another version of the Parable of the Sower.
The tares must grow, for otherwise they can never be uprooted; but the whole
of space and time constitute the field where the good grain can put forth the
form which is latent in it. In the terminology of the Platonists, the Universe
exists for the purpose of making visible that which is invisible, of incarnating
in every creature the archetype, the idea in the Divine Mind, which it is des¬
tined to show forth.
Progress and Catastrophe
These considerations seem to be pertinent to a theme much discussed to-day
—the nature of progress and the possibility of catastrophe in some future, near
or remote. Two recent books deal directly with this subject. Both are inter¬
esting and stimulating to thought, although their conclusions, which are quite
different, leave at least one reader with a sense of deep dissatisfaction. The
authors are like most physicians, who know that their patients are sick, but
understand neither their disease nor its cure; we cannot refrain from expressing
the regret that they have not studied Theosophy.
Progress and Catastrophe 1 is an eloquent protest against the nineteenth-cen¬
tury assumption that progress in Nature and man is virtually identical with
change; that we cannot help improving and increasing in happiness and wisdom
because it is an intrinsic quality of all things that they must continuously grow
more excellent in every way from day to day. This naive optimism, which
incidentally denies any freedom of the human will, appears to have been based
upon the extraordinary series of scientific discoveries and inventions which
transformed the outer conditions of human life during the past century. As
Mr. Casson points out, it took no note of two fundamental facts. It did not
1 Progress and Catastrophe, an Anatomy of Human Adventure , by Stanley Casson, Fellow of New College, Oxford;
Harper & Brothers. New York and London, 1937*
NOTES AND COMMENTS
275
recognize that the study of history reveals no continuous progress, but rather
an alternation of civilization and barbarism. Moreover, the prophets of in¬
evitable progress utterly failed to realize that scientific invention can destroy
our alleged comforts and luxuries at least as easily as it can create them. Poison
gas and the air bomber are as much the products of “science” as the telephone
and the telescope.
The general idea of progress . . . was derived from the extremely popular expositions
of evolution made by Darwin and Huxley. ... I he ancient Greeks had no word at all
by which we can translate the term. “Do you believe in progress?” would to them have
been a question wholly devoid of sense. . . . They knew that with change could come
improvement and amelioration; but they also knew that such improvement could be
achieved only by immense human experiment and labour; there was no immutable force
which willed that mankind should always move onwards, improving inevitably as the
accumulated wisdom of one generation was added to that of the next. ... I he Greeks
knew that it is only by the untiring efforts of one generation that the sins of the preceding
generation could be wiped out, and then, even so, you had no more than a fair start
towards something better. . . . That progress does in fact occur on occasions nobody
but a fool would deny. That it is cumulative and inevitable no one but an idiot would
accept. What we have to find out is whether the advance of one period is ever really
indebted to the progressive discoveries of that which preceded it, whether we advance
only to retire, or advance five steps to slide back only three. ... If progress is to
achieve anything at all beyond a mere unlearning of the lessons of the past and beginning
again, ... it must be a snow-ball movement by which little is lost and something
always added.
Mr. Casson proceeds to review the evidence from the point of view of the
archaeologist. The most durable material progress seems to have been made
by the earlier races of man before the dawn of the historical civilizations. The
art of making fire, the invention of the plough, the domestication of animals, the
foundation of the arts and handicrafts, the development of metallurgy, rep¬
resent achievements which have persisted even during the darkest of the ages
which have followed. On the other hand, both the material and the spiritual
accomplishments of the great civilizations which preceded our own, have been
far more fragile. The urban societies and the empires, the religions and sciences
and arts, the refinements and graces, of Sumeria and Egypt, of Greece and
Rome, passed away, leaving nothing but heaps of stone and scattered frag¬
ments, and a more or less mutilated body of traditions. A new civilization has
been erected upon the vast ruin of antiquity, but to-day this edifice i^Pireat-
ened with a wider and more colossal catastrophe than that which reauced to
naught the power and prestige of Rome.
What is the cause of this mortality of civilization? Mr. Casson suggests
that in general the disease which attacks and ultimately undermines highly
organized societies is “the splitting up of a homogeneous whole into warring
parts . . . the rivalry within a unit of certain of its elements, the warring of
healthy and unhealthy germs within the blood-stream, the great disease of
.humanity that always reduces it to impotence and decay.” The remedy which
he proposes is internationalism, although he is most vague as to what he means
I by that term or how he expects his dream can be realized. He admits that
276
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
this is a “slender hope”, and the hope grows even more slender when it appears
that it depends almost wholly upon the support of “the despised student, re¬
searcher, professor, the non-political worker in science, the arts and literature”.
The Source of Civilization
At this point Mr. Casson leaves us, and we leave his book not much wiser
than we were before. We grant that decomposition is one of the symptoms of a
dying culture, but what is the cause of decomposition? And as for “the non¬
political worker in science, the arts and literature”, he has already done damage
enough to the fabric of our civilization without being invited to do more. Mr.
Casson violently disapproves of current “anti-intellectual” developments in
Russia, Germany and Italy; but communism, nazism and fascism were, in the
first instance, products of the minds of “professors” and “brain-trusters”. The
politician reaps what the “intellectual” sows.
The Source of Civilization 2 proposes an answer to the question, What is the
cause of social decomposition? Mr. Heard notes the same phenomenon repeat¬
ing itself in the old age of civilizations, the same “splitting up of a homogeneous
whole into warring parts”. The diagnosis and the cure which he suggests are
original and provocative. With a great deal of his argument one must unquali¬
fiedly agree, although his final deductions are vitiated by the fanatical pacifism
which colours his whole thought.
Mr. Heard develops the thesis, that the older school of evolutionists totally
misunderstood “natural selection” and the “survival of the fittest”; that it is
not the strong and the tough who survive through the aeons of organic evolu¬
tion, but the gentle and the meek. The dinosaurs were moving fortresses, armed
like dreadnaughts for offence and defence, but they perished miserably, whereas,
he argues, the obscure and tiny but more intelligent and adaptable ancestors of
the mammals persisted into the Tertiary. The mammals in turn developed
races of “imperialists”, the Baluchitherium, the mammoth and the mastodon,
the sabre-toothed tiger. The mammals who still thrive to-day are for the most
part pygmies in comparison with the giants of the past, but they are sensitive,
alert, awake. It is obvious to Mr. Heard and, we believe, to many others, that
survival is not specifically reserved for those creatures which have sought se¬
curity by means of undue specialization of their offensive and defensive func¬
tions, or which have sought relief from pain by becoming callous and numb.
Two primary factors of success seem to be the ability to keep the organs and
functions sufficiently generalized, and the retention and intensification of
sensitiveness.
Now that it seems clear that all Life has advanced only so far as it has retained sensi¬
tiveness, and that it has been destroyed when it has lost that power of feeling and suffer¬
ing, we can see how such a Natural History makes a Natural Philosophy, and man’s
values show themselves to be no longer biologically immoral but a natural development
of such a growing, essential power of feeling and finally of sympathy. Man has not to
“defy the cosmic process”—certainly a hopeless and biologically unsound procedure.
* The Source of Civilization, by Gabriel Heard ; Harper & Brothers, New York and London, 1937.
NOTES AND COMMENTS
277
His task is consciously to avoid losing his power of feeling and awareness, to keep on
casting the skin of his mind and the callus on his emotions, to avoid the danger of safety
and security and to dare, to dare, and yet again to dare to understand and sympathize.
... As we view life to-day, in the lightning-flash moment of self-consciousness, what we
see then is all fishes, all amphibians, all reptiles, all mammals, except man, no longer
progressing. The curve of their potentiality has ceased to rise. . . . Only one still
climbs—man.
Parenthetically, we wonder whether anyone is competent to affirm without
qualification that, in the real plan of Life, whatever it is, all fishes, etc. are
classified as failures. What is Nature’s definition of a failure?
The Loss of the Power of Co-operation
Mr. Heard is convinced that the same law of the survival of the meek and
sensitive operates in the evolution of civilizations; that the calamities which
visited the societies of the past and which threaten our own may be attributed
to the appearance of violence and brutality in human relations. He insists, as
if he had never heard of cannibals, that the vices which impel men to rob and
murder one another are by-products of civilization. It is his theory that
civilization suddenly “emerged” a few thousand years ago when “man
made at one time somewhere in the Middle East an integrated series of dis¬
coveries which completely revolutionized his life”. This “mutation” is alleged
to have greatly accelerated man’s mental development, and also to have
made him for the first time conscious as an individual apart from a group. Up
to that time, Mr. Heard thinks, men lived together in amity because their
instinct to co-operate with one another was not inhibited by the development
of personal self-consciousness which accompanies the growth of reason.
Our problem ... is to see now at what stage of development man lost his inherent
power of co-operation, and had to seek for some conscious way of preserving a compli¬
cated and elaborating society. It is clear that stage corresponds to the period in his
psychic evolution when he attained self-consciousness. After that he must do delib¬
erately what till then he had done without thought.
Yoga Versus the Police Power
Mr. Heard blames the Sumerians and the Egyptians for setting all their suc¬
cessors the example of trying to hold together their social organizations by the
power of the sword, that is, by the police power, by using armed force to sup¬
press the rebel within and to repel the enemy without. By contrast he pomh
to the recently discovered civilization of Mohenjo Daro in the Indus Valley
which, according to his very free interpretation of a few archaeological data,
was the principal source of the spiritual genius that has flowered through the
centuries in India. The Indus culture, he imagines, succeeded where all others
have failed, because its units were bound together not by physical force but
by the practice of various forms of yoga , graduated in some way according to
the caste and capacity of the citizens. It is not surprising that he should be a
little indefinite as to the methods used, but his main argument is clear enough.
“Yoga solves the problem of the self-divided individual, that of the individual
278
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
and society, and that of consciousness and Life and indeed the universe, through
the single solution of making the individual learn how to achieve knowledge of
his extra-individuality.” It solves the problem of “the growing fissure between
self-consciousness and the subconscious” in which, as he suggests, is buried
the instinct or intuition which makes us aware of the fundamental unity of all
souls. If yoga were universally practised, so Mr. Heard concludes, there would
be no criminals and therefore no police, and in particular there would be no
war, which Mr. Heard dislikes as completely as he misunderstands it. This,
after all, is only another way of saying that what the world needs is to be con¬
verted from sin and self to God. With that, we most certainly agree.
Progress and Cyclic Law
It is evident that a general practice of real yoga , of real union with the divine
source of human consciousness, would transform the earth. It is quite prob¬
able that the ultimate aim of the Great Lodge for humanity is to raise mankind
to the point where such a practice will be as natural as any physical function.
The traditions recorded in The Secret Doctrine actually confirm Mr. Heard’s
supposition that the first civilizations were united by yoga , though this Golden
Age seems to have been centred elsewhere than in the “Middle East” and to
have elapsed not a few thousand years but millions of years ago.
We live now, however, in Kali Yuga, the Age of Iron. The Morning Star has
fallen into matter and corruption. Yoga no longer acts as a social binding force,
and the “heresy of separateness” has taken its place. Such is the fact, and
we must face it in order to learn what it means. In the first place, we may be
certain that the real Yogis, the Lords of Karma, the Masters of the Great Lodge,
would spread the teaching of true yoga far and wide in the world if any conceiv¬
able good could come of it. But it is only too obvious that men would use the
teaching merely to turn it into a ghastly perversion. The proof of this is that the
forms of yoga which are still prevalent in the world, like the hatha yoga and
the tantric magic of modern India, are themselves ghastly perversions of the
true. Does Mr. Heard understand what we conceive to be the first principle
of the true yoga, that it unites the yogi not with the subconsciousness which is
more or less common to all men, but with the superconsciousness which the
Higher Self of man shares with his divine progenitors?
Before man can resume the practice of divine union, he must learn many
simpler things. Both progress and catastrophe begin to be intelligible, if we
adopt the hypothesis that civilizations as well as individuals die and reincarnate
in response to the cyclic or rhythmic law which governs all processes in Nature.
Periodically, without any beginning or end which can be conceived, the hidden
and invisible are transformed into a nature which is manifest and visible, and
again the manifest and visible are re-dissolved into the hidden and invisible.
But is it not the special property of this Age of Iron in which we live, that all
the seeds of our alaya, the best as well as the worst, have full opportunity for
germination and growth? Even the normal man of the Golden Age which is
past, was doubtless endowed with a goodness which we can scarcely imagine,.
NOTES AND COMMENTS
279
but the seed of unwisdom must have been within him, even if latent. We may
assume that the normal man of the Golden Age which is in the future, will not
only have increasingly incarnated his spiritual genius, but that in him unwisdom
and the chain of nidanas will have “faded out” and ceased to be. We may be
certain that no one will reincarnate to enjoy the felicity of that paradise, unless
here and now he takes advantage of the fruition of unwisdom, of its full mani¬
festation, deliberately uprooting it and casting it into the fire.
The slayer of unwisdom is sensitive, gentle, compassionate, but he cannot be
a pacifist in the presence of evil. The spiritual man, he who embodies his proper
genius, is of warrior caste. He wars first of all against his own lower self, but
whenever Karma makes it possible, whenever it is his business, he defends
those who are unjustly and brutally attacked; nor does he hesitate to take the
sword against the enemies of the Spirit in man, because perchance he may die
by the sword. A student of Theosophy is without excuse, if he be blind to the
elementary distinction between righteous and unrighteous warfare. He cannot
desire to acquire a “sensitiveness” which would make him incapable of laying
down his life for a friend.
To be humble is to forget oneself at all times for others , without ever becoming
aware of this self-forgetfulness .— Lavater.
0
Some sleep when they should keep awake, afid some forget when they should
remember; and this is the very cause why often , at the resting-places , some pilgrims
in some things come off losers .— Bunyan.
FRAGMENTS
N OT long since Haru told me this story.
A soldier lay dying in the Moroccan desert. The fight, a mere
skirmish, was over, the enemy beaten off, and the members of his
troop had not found him in the place where he had fallen. The hot desert sand
was under him, the pitiless desert sun beat on him where he lay. His wounds
made every breath an agony, but a greater suffering still was his thirst. And
he was alone.
But was he alone? No; through the fever and the pain and the mercifully
increasing weakness, he felt a presence beside him. First it was like a shadow
that warded him from the sun, then as a cool breath of air; and the coolness
lay upon his mouth like water from a mountain stream, and he had a vision of
snow-clad heights, and he heard the sound of the mountain torrent which seemed
to wash over him and bathe his wounds. Then the sound of the water had a
voice—O that voice! He could not hear what it said, he was far too weak for
that; but it was healing and benediction, it was the love of all his loved ones
mingled together, but above and beyond anything he had ever known before.
After that strong arms pillowed his head, and the voice came closer and closer
until he fell asleep in wonder and perfect peace.
So he woke up presently in heaven, that soldier, in his heaven, where was all
he had ever longed for. But he was dissatisfied. “Give me”, he said, “the
desert sands, and the burning sun, and the wounds and the thirst, that I may
have again that presence beside me and hear that voice—that voice is what I
want, and what it was saying to me that I do not know.” And so, Haru told
me, he broke through, out of his heaven, so great was his desire for that which
he had lost, and he found the Master who had ministered to him.
Meanwhile his comrades, searching for it, came upon his body, and marvelled
at the look of rapture stamped Upon its face. They brought it home for rev¬
erent burial, and grieved at his sad end—so young, and full of promise (how
could they know!), and some at home grieved long.
Thus it is that things look one way this side Earth, and another way beyond
it. Cav£.
280
VHTT
YOU
From Ptolemy to Copernicus
I
OU are, indisputably, the most illuminating object that you can choose
from the whole universe for your attention and study. There is no other
A thing that it is so important for you to understand, none other that you
can observe more intimately, none that you already know so much about, yet
none where your knowledge is so inadequate—where wider horizons open upon
vaster tracts of unexplored and untraversed country.
It does not in the least matter whether you like or dislike yourself, you have
none the less to live with yourself, “with, from, in, and by”, yourself, the whole
ablative case. Nor do you escape from yourself in any of the other cases. In¬
deed some preliminary notion of the extent of yourself, as a subject for reflection,
may be gained by running through the declension of yourself’, nominative, geni¬
tive, dative, accusative and vocative, as well as ablative. Of what verbs, tran¬
sitive and intransitive, are you the subject? Of what are you possessive? Of
what are you the origin? What comes to you? What sort of things, for example,
do people talk to you about? And why? What acts upon and affects you?
How do you comport yourself as object, not subject; when you are the anvil,
not the hammer? (And how about the negatives of these questions? What
does not affect you? And why?) How do you address yourself? To what
form of call do you respond? What accompanies you? What goes from you?
What dwells in you? What environment, mental, physical and moral, have
you made for yourself, or accepted as yours?
You are the centre of your universe. As you move, the horizon moves—the
boundary between the visible and the invisible. You are always in the exact
middle of things. There, from the very point where you stand, radiate all the
directions of space, north and south and east and west and up and down. Where
you are, there, at that precise instant of time, is the juncture of “the paj|kwith
“the future”, linked through the mystery of “the present”. That m^Kry is
with you always, wherever you go, wherever you look. In you all opposites
link and are conjoined. In you their opposition comes to a head. You are at
once subject and object, actor and acted upon, thinker and thing thought,
concrete actuality and unrealized potentiality, good and evil, variable and
unchanging, wise and foolish, bound and free, naked and revealed to all the world,
yet clothed about and hidden even from yourself. To attempt to enumerate
the contradictions and antinomies you present, is to face a list worse than
Whitman’s observations from a ferryboat, or Homer’s catalogue of ships, which
even pedagogues permit the student to skip; but here you cannot skip them,
for they are of your very nature, and at every moment you have to deal with
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them. How, then, is self-knowledge possible in the face of such contradictions?
What are you to make of these congeries of opposites?
The answer is simple. You are to make yourself of them,—recognize that
you are made of them, that you are always in the middle of things, linking dis-
similars, linking opposites.
You have always known this about yourself. It is part of the primary data
of everyone’s everyday observation, and all of these data are so familiar that
they no longer excite the naive wonder and inquiry which they deserve, and
which are a sure road to increased self-knowledge. It does not matter with
what fact of observation you begin, or how you reflect upon it. When you
stand on a primary fact, you are like a man standing at the north pole: to move
at all is to move south. Only after you have made your initial move, do other
directions become possible to you. You cannot even go wrong, until you go.
Begin, therefore, to go. Consider at random, just as they occur to you, some
of the obvious and immediate consequences of the marvellous central position
you perceive yourself to occupy in this miraculous universe. For example:
First, no matter what adjective you apply to yourself, it is only half a truth.
You may equally apply the opposite. It appears a futile undertaking, there¬
fore, to seek self-knowledge through adjectives. Instead of gratifying your
vanity by contemplating your wisdom, or relieving your feelings by objurgating
your unwisdom, you will best serve truth by keeping in mind that you are at a
point where wisdom is on one side and unwisdom on the other, and that you
link the two.
Second, there is no adjective which does not apply to you, no quality with
which you are not in contact. This means that there is no quality, no power,
in all the universe, upon which you may not draw.
Third, you are equally your past and your future, for you link the two. It is
impossible to overemphasize the practical importance and potency of this reali¬
zation. You are not only the trivial and contemptible thing you have exhibited
to the world in these past years, you are equally the secret aspirations of your
inmost heart, the as yet unmanifested potentialities of the far, far distant
future. All you would like to be you are , and there is nothing at all to prevent
your claiming this aspect of yourself and acting upon it. You may begin from
this moment, and end the false concept of yourself which you have permitted
to paralyse you.
Fourth, “Begin”? “End”? These words contrast with the fundamental
perception that you are always in the middle of everything, always linking
what has been with what is to be. What can a “beginning” or “ending” mean
to you? To what, in your actual experience, do they apply?
They certainly do not apply to you yourself. You have nowhere in your
consciousness a memory of a beginning to your own being—nor of an end to it.
So far as you believe it had a beginning or will have an end, your belief is either
assumption or inference. It is not, and cannot be, a primary fact of observa¬
tion. Professor Hocking has recently called attention to the fact that if there
ever had been a beginning to your being, a first instant of consciousness which
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283
thus had a future but no past, it would, by this fact, have been a totally dif¬
ferent kind of instant from that which you now know as linking the past and
future. So far as the naive facts of your own experience testify, you must have
been in order to be. In like manner, to be involves continuing to be. You need
not lean too heavily upon this argument. You have followed it sufficiently if
you realize that “beginnings” and “endings” are artificial importations into
any consideration of your own being,—importations drawn, it would appear,
from your notions of the external world.
Thus you say a river “begins” in a lake and “ends” in the ocean; school
“begins” at nine o’clock and “ends” at three. But as a matter of fact the lake
is fed by springs, and these by rain, and the rain is the descent of water drawn
by the sun from the ocean. Thus your thought of a beginning and ending for
the river is really the result of an artificial limiting of your attention to a mere
section of a process that is actually circular, without beginning or end. Similarly
with school: it re-opens at nine o’clock, and does but suspend its formal sessions
at three. There is all the home work to be done after three; all the preparation
that came before nine. Nowhere have you ever met a first session of a first
school, or a last session of a last school, neither a real beginning nor a real end¬
ing to school. It is clear that you often give the name of a “beginning” to what
can be identified as an emergence from the invisible (like the river from under¬
ground springs); or as recurring cycles or reincarnations of previous existences
(like the school). Behind or within every beginning or ending is something
which does not begin or end.
In these last reflections you have taken more than one step away from your
stand upon the primary data of observation of yourself; and though, as we have
seen, the first step must be right, the second may be wrong, and therefore all
that you should here assert with positiveness is that you are faced with certain
questions, which you may note for your fifth point as follows:
Fifth, what in yourself and your life is without beginning or end? And what
is the real nature of what appears as beginnings and endings? Do you habit¬
ually, or even once in a very long while, seek to discern between the mortal and
the immortal as they enter into your own experience? And is there any more
important discrimination that you can think of to practise?
Random samplings such as these—haphazard reflections upon a single pri¬
mary fact of observation—may suggest how rich is the field for exploration
which your own being offers; but only as they are co-ordinated can they give
you true self-knowledge, enabling you to turn haphazard living into the^afcnce
or conscious art of life. The best they do in themselves is to give you^mts of
self-information. As you co-ordinate these bits of information, you make knowl¬
edge of them. As you use this knowledge, consciously and deliberately, in your
conduct, you deepen it into experience and lift experience to consciousness, so
that both knowledge and experience are ready and available as wisdom for the
guiding of your will. Your problem is, therefore, not only the gaining of self¬
information, but also the co-ordinating of it into self-knowledge.
It should not surprise you if this, at first, appear complicated and difficult.
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How could it be otherwise when your being is so manifold and rich? You have
been made in the “image” of God. You are the “microcosm” of the Macrocosm,
the “atom” in which the whole universe integrates itself, the “heir of all the
ages”. Even when you are the heir to a single member of a single generation—
the storybook uncle whom you never knew, but who leaves you all his posses¬
sions—you expect to encounter complications. When you open his desk you
are confronted with a mass of miscellaneous papers to which (not having known
your uncle) you have no clue,—old maps, old title-deeds, old mortgages, old
accounts of receipts and expenditures, insurance policies, bills of sale and ex¬
change, correspondence acrimonious and friendly, names you have never heard
and of whose possessors you know nothing, save that they are obviously impli¬
cated in your inheritance. You take these papers up, one by one, and do not
know where to put them down again. Your great need is for some idea of their
relation to one another, some scheme for classifying and filing them, so that
related things may be brought into their fitting relations and help to interpret
one another. You face the same sort of situation, and the same immediate
need, when you make your first serious effort to examine your heritage from
“the ages”. You find charts, but you are not sure to what they are charts;
title-deeds to vast possessions and high powers, compromised by manifold
mortgages to old self-indulgences, so that you cannot tell what equity remains,
receipts and expenditures from sources and for ends you are not able to identify.
Your pressing need is for an intelligent filing system, a summary inventory of
the estate, which will enable you to order the chaos of uncorrelated facts.
Fortunately, such a system is ready at hand to all students of Theosophy. In
its teaching you have a skeleton plan into which you can fit the separate bits of
self-information as your observation of yourself yields them to you. It gives
you the colours and the outline of the completed picture of the jig-saw puzzle
with which you are working, and one by one, as you pick the pieces up, it en¬
ables you to identify them and to put them in their proper place. Thus, if you
have had your Theosophy in mind, you have recognized that the basic fact,
some of whose consequences we sampled—the fact of observation that you
were always in the middle of things, linking opposites—was but an illustration
of the first fundamental principle of the Secret Doctrine, that the unity of
Being, of your being and of the universe, can manifest itself only through duality.
Theosophy, whatever else it is describing, is always describing you,—your
heritage and nature, your possibilities and powers, your fate and future. That
is what its doctrine of correspondences necessitates. “As above, so below.”
The “seven principles of man” are your seven principles, seven aspects under
which to view and classify the activity and phenomena of your own daily (and
eternal) life. The “rounds and races”, the cycles of evolution through which
humanity as a whole has passed, are reproduced, and can be traced as clearly,
in your own individual and conscious development. The Mahayugas, of Pralaya
and Manvantara, are imaged in the alternation of your nights and days. When
you leave your office in the afternoon, and return again in the morning, you are
following a miniature cycle which, on its own plane and in its own way, reflects
YOU
285
the greater cycle of reincarnation through death and birth. All that Theosophy
tells you of the latter can be translated into terms of the former, and there
identified. In their correspondences, watching the transformations that take
place in the “complex” of mood and thought and will which is uppermost in
your personal consciousness, you can parallel, in your own first-hand observa¬
tion, the teaching of the separation of the principles at death, the fading out of
some, the consolidation of others, the assimilation of experience, the return to
“incarnation”, and the gathering of the skandhas that await you on the thresh¬
old. The greetings of your office staff, the mail upon your desk, the temper
that you bring to the new day’s work, all set before you lessons of Karma. The
“little”, which each hour’s experience reveals within yourself, is of one piece
with the “Great”. The little is the apex of a cone which broadens to the Great
without limit as it rises, as an electric spark is a thunder bolt in miniature.
The Cosmogenesis and Anthropogenesis of Theosophy are thus equally your
genesis, and Theosophy gives you the clue or scheme you need in order to co¬
ordinate and make an intelligible whole of your separate and fragmentary
observations of yourself. It places in your hands an inventory of the estate,
and shows you what you must do to enter into your inheritance.
II
“To enter into your inheritance.” “Heir of the Ages.” To the man in the street
such phrases seem mere literary figures of speech when applied to his ordinary
human nature. But for you, to whom self-observation and Theosophy unite to
bring self-knowledge, they have a concrete and personal significance, behind
which loom momentous questions that you are beginning to perceive, and that
must sooner or later be faced. For with knowledge comes responsibility, and once
you have become conscious of anything, it can never again be with you as though
you were unconscious of it. To “forget” is not the same as not to have known,
and you cannot even forget at will. No small part of the tragedy of life is caused
by the fact that when you are dealing with consciousness and knowledge, you
are dealing with irreversible processes. But you may turn this fact equally to
your advantage, and use it to confirm a resolution which might otherwise waver
and fail. The insight which you have gained closes certain doors behind you,
even as it opens others. There can be no going back to what was possible for
you in ignorance. Having learned of your heritage, you must either cl^^or
reject it. Your way lies forward.
Consider further, therefore, what is involved in any inheritance, the acquiring
of any possessions, be they small or great. To whatever extent you make them
yours, to a corresponding extent you become attached to them. If you have a
dog on a chain, he also has you on a chain, and just what that connection is
going to mean may depend upon the end from which it is viewed, and whether
you or the dog is the stronger. There is no right without its duty, no possession
without its obligation. That is a consequence of the duality which, as you saw,
entered into all the manifested universe, though its application to possessidns
has been obscured by the present-day tendency to consider these merely in terms
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of money—which, if they only had it, the thoughtless assume, they could
spend as they chose, without responsibility or accountability to anyone. It is a
grave error, for money is a power, and you are accountable to Divine Law for
the use you make of every power; but it need not concern you now, for it is
quite clear that your heritage from “the ages” is not something fluid and free,
like money, but something which, like real estate, is involved in manifold ways
by old and present usage, and which requires constant upkeep. To come into
possession of such real estate, means that, as its master, you become obligated
to represent or meet its needs, responsible for it. You can fulfil that responsi¬
bility or neglect it, but you cannot be without it. You can never be unconscious
of the fact that your actions must now be viewed in the light of this responsi¬
bility, and not only from the standpoint of your personal will or whim. You
can no longer refer everything to the single centre of yourself. There is another
point, outside yourself, to which reference must be made; and whereas at the
one point, the centre in yourself, you appeared free to do as you chose, it is clear
that at the other point, in the responsibility for your inheritance, your personal
preferences are quite without pertinence. There you must act not for yourself,
but for the estate,—in a representative, not a personal capacity.
It is no light matter, therefore, to awake to the realization that you, in actual
fact, are the heir to far-reaching powers and possessions. The difference it must
make in your life is clear enough when the powers are political or the possessions
physical. It is one thing to be Mr. FitzAlan-Howard. It is another to come
into the title as Duke of Norfolk, premier duke and earl, responsible for some
50,000 acres of English land. Benjamin Franklin, as representative of the
American Colonies in London, or as United States Minister at Paris, could not
act and speak as though he were merely a private citizen of Philadelphia. But
the most radical and momentous difference between the new state and the old
is the profound metaphysical and philosophic difference between one and two,—
which is, in essence, the difference between the unmanifest and the manifest;
between consciousness limited to self, and consciousness open to all Being. In
complete self-centredness, you have, as you saw, but one point for reference,
whereas in accepted responsibility for any possession you have another; and
these two points give you a line of reference , which one point does not, and thus
give meaning to direction , and enable you to determine directions and to guide
your life. To complete self-centredness not even conscience is possible; but
once you care for any other thing than self, or assume responsibility, and straight¬
way conscience walks beside you, go where you will. Perhaps in this you glimpse
something of the purpose of existence, of the going out of Being which is the
manifested universe, and will see, too, how the conditions of everyday, worka¬
day, human life—a man’s need to earn his bread by toil, his job, his wife and
children—all act to take him out of self and to lead him to his heritage of the
Spirit.
Ill
Does it seem strange that, starting from the perception that you are always
at the centre of your universe, you should have been led to see that the great
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287
desideratum for yourself and for all men is a centre other than yourself ? That
you can gain direction for your life only by subordinating it? It is part of the
paradox of duality from which nothing in manifestation can escape. Turn
back once more to that initial apprehension of yourself as linking opposites. Of
what order and nature were those opposites? Were they peculiar to you? Were
they personal or universal?
There were, for example, the divisions of time and space. You make your
own division; but time and space themselves are not peculiar to you. Where
you are, determines what is past and future, what is up and down, or east and
west, for you. But time and space are shared by all men. You link the flesh
and the Spirit, with their powers and limitations. You determine the point of
linkage; but is the Spirit or the flesh limited to you? Can there be such a thing
as a personal truth, one which permits of proprietary rights? If it be yours in
the exclusive sense, if you own it or created it or invented it, can it be true?
Is not the Spirit one? Is there not “one mind common to all individual men”,
into which and into all of which all individual minds are inlets, and all men
have access? Or if you look to your body, in what sense is it “yours”? The
evolutionists will tell you that it has been slowly developed through generation
after generation of lives. Theosophy tells you the same, but shows you how
it has been developed—the flesh having been slowly drawn up by the action of
the Spirit incarnating and reincarnating, to manifest itself more and more
completely in vehicles it fashions to that end.
In truth, what you call yourself and consider personal, is but what you draw
from the universal. As a plant lives and grows where earth and air and water
meet and receive the light and heat of the sun, so do you live and grow through
the conjunction of universals. That which you deem most intimate and per¬
sonal—as your sense of selfhood or your capacity to transcend self in love—is,
in fact, most universal. Inanimate things touch each other on their peripheries,
but animate beings meet in their central core, where lives the divine spark
that makes them animate.
Appeal still again to self-observation. Look into your own being, examine
all your attributes and qualities, all the pairs of opposites conjoined in you, and
ask of each: Is this my Self? To each such question you will have to answer:
No; these things clothe the Self, cluster around the Self, show forth and hide
the Self; but the Self, itself, lies above and beyond them. Nowhere short of the
Supreme can you find the Self. Your own Being gives you these answeg; but
so does the Being of all men. In these questions you have been follaAng an
age-old catechism, set forth equally in the Upanishads and in The^lond of
Unknowing , in the dialogues between Krishna and Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita ,
and by Dionysius the Areopagite in his treatise On Divine Names. But it is only
half the chela’s catechism. The other half is to acknowledge that all things
come from the Supreme, that naught is foreign to the Self. Thus Krishna re¬
veals himself to Arjuna: “I am the Self . . . dwelling inwardly in all beings;
Verily I am the beginning, and the middle, and the end also of beings ... I
am the word of those that speak ... I am all consuming Death; I am the
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THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
birth of things that shall be, I am honour, grace, voice among things feminine;
and memory and wisdom and firmness and patience . . . the fire of the fiery;
I am victory and decision; I am the goodness of the good.”
So, too, Dionysius tells us that the Divine Names, like the angels in Jacob’s
vision, mount the ladder from earth to heaven, through detachment and nega¬
tion of the things of earth, but descend from heaven to earth in affirmation of
the divine essence of all things that are—which earth too often thinks its own.
In little and in great your being reveals this truth. There is nothing in you
that is not drawn from the Divine; nothing in you, which, having been drawn
and limited and stamped with your separate, personal stamp, is not, by that
fact, set over against the Divine as something from which you must detach
yourself if you would rise to the Supreme. For you, too, must mount the ladder
to heaven, rung by rung, reaching up to the one above only to leave it behind
you as it is attained. Each good, to which you now aspire as an end, can
remain a good only as it becomes a means through which you pass, and which
you leave behind for the greater good that it makes visible beyond. In that
characteristic you have an unfailing hallmark of the Spirit, in the contempla¬
tion of which a new meaning may emerge for you as to that ceaseless adoration
which is the office of the heavenly host,—their unremitting outpouring of them¬
selves in love and worship of the Eternal Godhead, constituting the dynamic
power that moves all the worlds and the whole process of manifestation.
In the inspiration that quickens your will to action, in the truth which moves
your thought to speech, Spirit descends anew into matter, to reveal itself, and
to reveal, too, that it transcends its revelation. At first hand, within your own
consciousness, you may watch the whole process of incarnation by which it
clothes and manifests itself in the familiar symbols of your experience. Thus
clothed and manifested, you have, in thoughtless presumption, called it yours;
but it is yours only as a responsibility and trust are yours. It is something
which commands you, not something which you can command. You have no
power to affect Truth, but only to be affected by it. It is it, not you, that must
be master. To accept title to the gifts of the Spirit, to enter into your divine
inheritance and estate, you must, in turn, give yourself to it. You must serve
it; not ask that it should serve you, nor think that you can any longer be free
merely to serve yourself. The centre of your life lies now beyond you.
IV
There is no mental habit which will defeat self-knowledge more surely than
that of using words without clear recognition of the meaning you attach to
them; for this habit substitutes words for things, and thus takes your inquiries
out of the world of facts into the world of shadows. Be quite sure, therefore,
that you know just what you mean when you use such phrases as “centre of
consciousness”, or “centre of your life”. You are, obviously, not using centre
in a spatial or physical sense. Perhaps, if you were, you might hold that your
centre of consciousness was physically situated in your brain, so that you looked
out level through your eyes. But you can think this only if you imagine your
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289
head as a hollow dome; you cannot really picture your consciousness, or any
centre of selfhood, as located in a kind of blood-soaked sponge which is your
brain; and you must ultimately reject any physical location for it. Certainly
there has been no thought of physical location in the way you have used “cen¬
tre” here. You have been looking, instead, to something in the world of senti¬
ment and thought, as you might say that a mother “centred” her life in her
children. You would mean by this, not only that they were her dominant
interest and concern, but also that it was to them, and to their welfare, that she
automatically referred everything else. She would instinctively look at life
from their standpoint and see it in terms of what would be advantageous or
prejudicial to them. They would be her centre of reference.
To say, therefore, that “the centre of your life now lies beyond you”, is to
say that you no longer automatically look at things and events from the stand¬
point of self, but from a standpoint beyond self, and as they may affect some¬
thing beyond your personal affairs. The result is a transformation and simpli¬
fication of outlook comparable to the change from Ptolemaic to Copemican
astronomy, when the sun, instead of the earth, was made the centre of reference.
It involved no change in the observed facts. The stars and planets still rose
and set in their accustomed places, still were to be found in the courses charted
for them ages before. But those charts could now be redrawn, not as compli¬
cated by being viewed from a moving, variable earth, but with reference to the
central sun, which draws and holds the earth and all the planets, and which itself
ranks with the “fixed” stars. In such reference, what had been the complicated
interweaving of cycles and epicycles, with cusps and nodes that represented
inexplicable approaches and recessions in the planetary paths, became such
ordered revolutions round the sun as the earth itself described. It was a far
simpler system, and in that, at least, more beautiful.
So can your own life become more simple and more beautiful. It is far sim¬
pler and far better to ask what is right, than what is expedient; what is just,
rather than what you would like; to move in obedience to a gravitation that is
the law of heaven, rather than to attempt to make others revolve around your¬
self. You will see your fellow-man more truly when you trace his course in ref¬
erence to the Eternal Verities, instead of in relation to your own temporal posi¬
tion; when you value him for what he can do for the Theosophical Mo^nent
and the Great Lodge of Masters, rather than for his capacity to prorq^B^your
personal preferment, or for the favour or disfavour he shows to you.
But to make the astronomical parallel a true one, you will have to go beyond
the common, limited and materialistic view of the Copemican theory, which
pictures the sun as though it were but that focus of physical matter which is
seen in the sky, separated from the earth by vast distance. Instead of this, you
must recognize that the sun is, in fact, the whole globe of its radiating, life-
giving, life-sustaining, light and heat and subtile magnetism, within which
radiant globe the whole earth’s orbit is. The failure to recognize this has ob¬
scured the profound philosophical significance of the Copemican view, which
shows man to be a denizen of the sun no less than of the earth, and which thus,.
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quite literally, reveals to him his inheritance in a whole new world which he had
not thought of as his. In like manner, when your self-knowledge has brought
you to see that the centre of your life lies in the Divine Life above you, that
Centre will be known to you, not as distant, but as embracing, surrounding and
vivifying you, even as the sun embraces and vivifies the earth, and a new world
will open to you. Nor is the newly recognized Centre of that new world a mere
abstract point of Spiritual Being, a mere focus whence radiates Spiritual force;
it has also a being like your own human being,—even as the sun has a physical
core. Your Centre is your Master. It is in his dual nature, which is both
human and divine. From this point on, your self-study must pass into study
of him. In his being is personified all that should now rule, and in time become
personified, in yours. His radiance surrounds and supports your every move¬
ment. He is your link with the Supreme, the only Self you can desire to serve
or have. He is your Way, your Truth, your Life. In him you live and move
and have your being. And yet—he is more human than you, in that his
humanity is divine.
Henry Bedinger Mitchell.
When a man opposes me , he awakes my attention , not my anger. . . . The cause
of truth ought to be the comtnon cause of both of us .— Montaigne.
Nothing can keep you,—not fate , nor health , nor admirable intellect; none can
keep you , but rectitude only , rectitude for ever and ever !— Emerson.
TEMPTATION
T HOSE of us who would really meditate must surely confess that it
is the most difficult, nerve-racking, heart-rending task we ever
attempted (I speak only of and for neophytes). When that oft-evaded
hour arrives when the subject should be our sins, do not all beginners find
themselves pronouncing easy absolution at this point or that, or am I the only
one? It is without doubt the easiest way to meditate on sin. In the obvious
surface sense we do not steal or lie,—at least we do not steal; we are not envious
—though perhaps?— no , positively we are not envious; we very certainly (and
this is a pet absolution) are not and never have been cruel. Toward this par¬
ticular enormity we can take the attitude of a detached archangel with a lor¬
gnette,—which is the signal for suspicion to awake. If we are brave enough
and honest enough to push past this homemade and spurious comfort, a strange
and daunting experience awaits us—thus I have been told and thus I have
found. At this point, if the angels are looking out for us, we may hear behind
us a vague murmur—a still small voice—but looking back we see no burning
bush, no following Shepherd, no indulgent friend. Quiet though the voice, it
is that of indictment and not of absolution. We see a long horrific road stretch¬
ing back into the guilty past, and down it, dogging our complacent steps, limp
the victims of our persistent cruelty—those piteous ghosts, our own creation
and no other. Flash-light after flash-light turns on them as they pass—“All
the dead that ever I knew, going one by one and two by two”—and ours to
watch and remember. Sleeping memories awake and rush backward like a
reversed moving picture. Is it possible that we exclaimed to tremulous age
so soon to leave us: “Must you lose your spectacles forty times a day?” Let
the saddening of that kind tired face be your retribution now. Need we have
snubbed that excited baby rushing with a flower—“It is nothing but a horrid
weed—throw it away.” Here is the maid from whose white exhaustion we
demanded that last effort. And here the impertinent shop-worker, worn to
the verge of hysteria and carried over it by our insistence. And the little dr^-
maker who spoilt the dress while fighting weary discouragement, and for
our chilly civility was harder to bear than a good honest scolding. It is pos¬
sible to be a monster of cruelty without wiping off that benevolent smirk.
Truly, “the sins of each of us have blackened the faces of those about us”.
Such a vision is a terrible experience, and fortunate are we if it come early,
that our spiritual effort may be made from a basis of shrewd self-distrust; for
it takes much honesty, humour and common-sense to obey the injunction
“know thyself”. The hymn says, “Thy kind and searching glance can scan
the very wounds that shame would hide”. Great love is implied in the insist¬
ence that we scan with Him—that we push past the small lapses, the veni-
alities we are so complacently ready to answer for,—the “Oh yes, I know I
291
292
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
have my faults”, and begin to know that we also have our crimes. If we har¬
bour within us every potentiality of evil—and don’t we?—the sooner we develop
a spiritual inferiority complex the better, and ruthless courage in meditation is
the royal path,—the surest way to keep that “I am not as others” out of our
convictions,—the only way to save ourselves from battening on comfortable
lies. Then, turning to the Master, one can say, “I do not begin to suspect how
bad I am, but You know. Disclose me to myself with loving caution or I shall
perish of despair.”
Once I had a dear funny brother. He passed through life, as so many of his
countrymen do, with a jocular avoidance of the deep places of life, which only
served to prove to those who loved him his unreconciled awareness of them.
In his case the jocularity was so witty, and the avoidance so sensitive, that
love thrived on them. We faced many trials together and now and again our
eyes met with mutual recognition—‘‘another storm”, ‘‘a new exile”, ‘‘a fresh
heartbreak”; and in his imposed silence we met the weather. He had been a
brilliant student, piling up honours and honourable mentions while still very
young. In middle life he said to me with characteristic gravity under the fun
—‘‘Do you know I thought I was an infant prodigy till I was forty, then I sud¬
denly came to and realized that I was only a fairly good run-of-the-mill engi¬
neer after all.” It is easy to repeat this error on the spiritual plane. In this
great surge of new life we ride high upon emotion and we mistake entertain¬
ment for growth. Many of us never ‘‘come to” on any plane, and we need
not linger here over the horrors of that complacency. Adolescence is easily
convinced of supremacy, and although a sense of humour and a frank family
will work miraculous cures for the lucky, those who remain in their trance
will torment us from the cradle to the grave with the poor fit of their assump¬
tions. They need to meditate, and that is the one thing they will never do.
With wondering awe one turns to the world’s great classical meditation on
temptation. For forty days and forty nights the Master fasted and was ‘‘an
hungred”, and then the devil—a genius in the choice of times and seasons—
came, and tempted Him, and was ignominiously worsted. He was ‘‘tempted in
all things like as we are, yet without sin”. We can never again say that no
one understands us—He understands us—He drained the cup that every lip
must touch, and flung it contemptuously away.
The strange story must mean just what it says, and temptation is not merely
a malicious soliciting to evil. One said to me, ‘‘Don’t speak of the Lord’s
Prayer, I detest it! Imagine to yourself a loving father deliberately ‘leading’
his children into temptation”; and I knew that though I had given some
love to that prayer, I had given little thought. The Lord’s Prayer is human¬
ity’s prayer, for all sorts and conditions of men; it means one thing for you
and another for me; it speaks for the child, the sinner, and the saint; for the
ch£la, the Mahatma, and, I suspect, for the Dhyan Chohan. The neophyte
cries, ‘‘Take the gentle way, O Lord. Remember that I am but dust.” The
saint welcomes with courage the trial of his faith, and the ch 61 a ‘‘thinks it all
joy” to be led into temptation. A great reward is promised to these—‘‘the
TEMPTATION
293
trial of your faith worketh patience”—patience wnth life, with others, with
oneself.
The temptation in the wilderness was very real. We read, not of the haughty
repudiation of evil by a great spiritual being, but of a man, and a starving
man at that, “tempted like as we are”. Those unhesitating answers came in a
whisper but they came like pistol shots. The devil must have been astonished
with a great astonishment. A starving man to refuse the bread-line, a man
down and out, to spurn the heady draught of lower psychic supremacy! Then
he remembered the predestined mission of the man before him—that in the
long future He was to “take up His Power and reign”, and he was clever enough
to make use of the Man’s own holy dream. “Why wait for ignominy and
death and weary cycles of defeat? Worship me, and your dream is realized
and the kingdoms of the earth are yours.” Not otherwise have the Hitlers
and the Mussolinis of all time been lured. But now the Master’s tone changes.
He utters a short sharp speech of dismissal as to an impertinent subordinate,
“Get thee behind me, Satan”. The rest is beautiful. We hear the rhythmic
beat of great wings, and the stony place is splendid with angels. With in¬
effable tenderness, with love unspeakable, “they minister unto Him”.
L.S.
“She is an awful trial ”, said the Boy.
“I believe it ”, said the Man; “so is God ."— Book of Memories.
Have no unreasonable expectations where others are concerned. The as^an
never forgive the rose-bush for not bearing thistles. —T. Pesch.
WITHOUT CENSOR
X.
PON completion of the St. Mihiel operation, the First American Army
held a front from the Moselle River to a point southeast of Verdun.
In preparation for the second great American offensive on the Meuse-
Argonne front, this line was extended, first to the north of Verdun, and then
to the western edge of the Argonne Forest. This gave the First American Army
a front of ninety-four miles, or, as General Pershing has pointed out, about one-
third of the active part of the line from the North Sea to the Moselle. At the
same time that the First American Army attacked on this new front, offensives
by the British and French Armies between us and the Sea were to take place,
each army driving forward as rapidly as possible. The general plan of this
united Allied offensive contemplated advances at indicated points, which
would form salients in the enemy’s line. These salients would threaten his
forces, then exposed on the flanks, and would compel their withdrawal to new
lines in the rear, after which the Allied operations would be repeated. There was
to be no respite for the enemy. The object of the Allied High Command was
to force him, through a series of sledgehammer blows along that long line, either
to scatter his reserves and so to weaken his general defence, or to concentrate
his reserves at vital points and so greatly to endanger the remainder of his line.
The most vital point of all was his chief artery of supply, his main railroad line,
which ran through Carignan, Sedan and M6zi£res, and which paralleled his
front. It was essential, in order to maintain his Armies in Northeastern France,
that he should keep this railroad intact and in his possession. As long as he
could hold at this point, Allied offensives to the west, even if successful, would
not necessarily be conclusive. If, however, this main line of communication
and supply should be broken, he would lose his hold on all territory occupied
in Northern France, and if it should be broken before he had withdrawn his
Armies from France and from Belgium, he would be entirely unable either to
supply or to evacuate them, and his rout would be complete. He must hold
at all costs at the eastern end of his long line, and he knew it. It was this key
point, this pivot of the whole German line to the Sea—the Sedan-Carignan
railroad—which was the objective of the First American Army, and it was
opposite the front of the First Army that the enemy ultimately concentrated
his remaining strongest divisions and displayed the most tenacious and desperate
resistance. 1
The terrain opposite the front of the First American Army was ideal for
defensive fighting, and with a full realization of this and of the paramount
iIt should be understood that each of the Allied armies—American, British. French—may have been inclined in
retrospect to believe that the German resistance on its front was more tenacious and desperate than elsewhere; and
that the American army was not backward in this respect, either in thinking or declaring it.— Editors.
294
WITHOUT CENSOR
295
importance of making their line of communication practically impregnable,
the Germans had busied themselves, during their long occupancy of this sector,
in strengthening its natural advantages by an elaborate and complete series of
field fortifications. Their main permanent defensive positions consisted of
four lines, which extended from in front of Metz along the entire Western
Front; these lines were widely separated opposite Paris, but they converged
and were relatively close together in front of the German line of interior com¬
munications which was now the American objective. Along the entire Meuse-
Argonne front the enemy had the advantage of numerous commanding positions
from which he could pour cross artillery fire on an attacking force and enfilade
it, and the many woods and forests constituted natural defences as well. In
addition, he had built innumerable dugouts and concrete machine-gun em¬
placements, and had dug successive lines of intermediate trenches extending
from his front lines back to his main defensive positions, while everywhere he
had further strengthened himself with masses of barbed-wire entanglements.
The Boche knew that he must resist to the last at this vital point, if it was ever
threatened, and he had made his dispositions accordingly.
The First American Army was to attack in conjunction with General Gou-
raud’s Fourth French Army on the left, and this joint offensive was based
upon the same strategical principle as that of the general Allied offensive. The
two Armies joined at the Argonne Forest. A thrust, for instance, by our First
Army east of the Forest, by threatening the left flank of the enemy’s position
in front of the Fourth French Army, would force his retirement at that point.
It was identically the same principle—that of forcing salients into the enemy’s
lines and so exposing him to attack on his flanks—which was employed locally
on the entire First Army front as well in overcoming strong enemy resistance
points, which could not hold out when our troops had passed them on the
flanks and continued to drive onward. The successive movements forward,
whether of the various Army Corps within the First Army, or of the First Army
and of the Fourth French Army acting in conjunction, would have the inevi¬
table effect of forcing a withdrawal of hostile resistance and of throwing the
enemy back. This strategical principle proved successful in the actual conduct
of the offensive itself, although impeded and delayed from time to time by the
strength of the enemy resistance and by other factors as well.
The new front of the First American Army had been held for some time by
the Second French Army, with Headquarters at Souilly, on the Sacred Road
that led to Verdun, and in our take-over of the area and in our preliminary
reconnaissance of the enemy positions, we were greatly assisted by the Secadfc
French Army Staff, which knew all of the Boche dispositions, and conceOTa
strong points, from its long experience in this area. The French helped us, too,
in the earlier movement of American troops into the new battle area, while we
were still occupied at St. Mihiel. This troop movement of ours was a staff
operation of considerable magnitude, and was carried out with great skill and
secrecy (up to the opening of the attack, the Boche still thought that our next
major drive would be against Metz) and was the subject of favourable and
296
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
even enthusiastic comment on the part of the British and French. In view of
the fact that the jump-off for the Meuse-Argonne offensive took place just
fourteen days after the start of the St. Mihiel operation, and that some of the
divisions which participated in the earlier battle were used again at once, this
favourable comment was not undeserved. Our concentration for the Meuse-
Argonne operation involved the movement of three army corps headquarters
with their corps troops, of fifteen divisions, and of several thousand army
troops. Approximately 600,000 American troops were moved into the First
Army sector, and, as in the St. Mihiel operation, all troop movements were
made at night, either by rail, by motor transport or by marching. When the
movement, in addition, of supplies, ammunition, and hospital equipment is
considered, over roads and railway lines that were entirely inadequate for the
conduct of operations on such a scale, our effort showed without question that
the First Army Staff had been learning rapidly under the pressure of immediate
necessity, and had developed in a short time a high degree of efficiency. This
was due in large measure to the character of the men on the First Army Staff.
They recognized their own inexperience, and from the first had sought advice
and instruction from the French, who had learned from years of fighting, and
the handling of huge armies, the very things our officers needed and were anxious
to know.
In an earlier article it was possible to comment briefly upon the strategical
aspect of the St. Mihiel operation, and even to give some account of the tactical
working out of the actual battle itself. This was possible because, even allow¬
ing for local operations at the end when the line was stabilized, the battle was
not prolonged for more than five days. But the Meuse-Argonne offensive is
another story. It is not possible, it is not within the scope of a series of articles
such as these, to describe in detail a battle which lasted for forty-seven days;
which consisted of two distinct successive operations and of five separate phases;
and which involved a battle front of twenty-four miles in length,—a battle
in which the First American Army, consisting at one time of over one million
men, penetrated thirty-two miles to the North and fourteen miles to the North¬
east before the Armistice terminated hostilities; a battle in which the enemy,
throwing in against our troops his picked divisions, in order to defend his vital
point on the Western Front, finally brought against our First Army one-fourth
of his entire remaining strength; a battle which so forced him to make use of
all his remaining resources that the German delegates, who came to Marshal
Foch to beg for an Armistice, told him that they no longer had any divisions in
reserve, that every division that they had was actually in line. It is not possible
here to describe military operations of such magnitude. They are a matter of
history, they are on record elsewhere. I shall only add, in order to emphasize
the relative size of this military effort of ours, a brief comparison of the First
American Army in this operation with the Union Army in the Wilderness Cam¬
paign in our Civil War. In our First Army, in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, a
total of 1,200,000 Americans were engaged, together with 140,000 French
under American command, while approximately 2417 guns were employed.
WITHOUT CENSOR
297
The total strength of the Union Army at the Wilderness was 148,834 men,
and approximately 300 guns were used. The actual weight of the ammunition
fired in the Meuse-Argonne offensive was greater than that used by the entire
Union forces during the four years of the Civil War.
A day or two after the completion of the St. Mihiel operation, General Drum
sent for me and told me that, in preparation for the conduct of the offensive,
Headquarters First Army was about to open an Advance Post of Command
at Souilly. He said that the main Headquarters would continue to function at
Ligny-en-Barrois until this operation on the Meuse-Argonne front had been
completed, after which, I gathered, the First Army was to conduct another
offensive further to the West. Apparently at that time our High Command
did not anticipate that it would be necessary to devote more than two or three
weeks to the operations on the Meuse-Argonne front. Obviously, as those
operations proceeded, as difficulties developed, and as the stubborn resistance
of the Boche intensified, a complete change of plan took place, involving an
extension of the American front in the direction of the Vosges instead of toward
the West, and the creation of the Second and Third American Armies to operate
in that area. This plan evolved to the point of organizing the Second American
Army and its participation in the final drive which took place in those last few
days immediately preceding the Armistice; the cessation of hostilities then
prevented its further development. But when the Advance P. C. of the hirst
Aftny was opened at Souilly, some time in the third week in September, its
personnel consisted in the main of those members of the Staff who were directly
engaged in the active conduct of operations, and it was not until the offensive
had begun to slow down that, little by little, additional personnel was shifted
from Ligny to Souilly, until practically the entire Staff was functioning in
Souilly, with only its less important divisions in the rear. General Drum told
me to proceed to Souilly, and to open there an Advance P. C. of the Message
Centre, taking with me such personnel and transportation as I considered
necessary. I remained at Souilly for nine weeks, instead of for the shorter
period which was indicated at the time of my departure; and during the first
part of the Meuse-Argonne operation, and until further personnel was ordered
forward from our rear echelon, the Advance Post of the Message Centre at
fjouilly handled over twice the volume of dispatches with one-third the per¬
sonnel that had been available at Ligny-en-Barrois.
In compliance with General Drum’s instructions, I surveyed the situation in
regard to my Bureau of the Staff—the corresponding section of the staff ina
French Army headquarters was called the Bureau de Courier—made the neqjp-
sary dispositions and arrangements to ensure co-operation and co-ordinanon
with the First Army plan, left my second in command in charge at Ligny-en-
Barrois, and departed by motor for Souilly on September 21st, five days
before the start of the Meuse-Argonne operation. The Message Centre was
now “echeloned in depth”, as it had a third section as far back as Neufchdteau,
responsible for the receipt and distribution of the latest military maps, which
were received and, in some cases I think, printed in that town. Bar-le-Duc,
298
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
through which the road to Souilly passed, was seething with activity and was
full of American officers, although, it being daytime, there was no sign of the
troops to which they were attached and which were en route to the forward
areas. Souilly was a typical French village; the main road ran straight through
the place, and from it a few streets branched off at right angles and terminated
in the fields. The Headquarters of the Commanding General First Army
was in the Maine, a large stone building on the main road; the Operations
Section of the General Staff was in wooden buildings grouped together in the
immediate rear, while the other Sections of the Staff were all within two or
three minutes’ walk. The Message Centre was housed in a wooden shack
with a corrugated iron roof, which was located immediately beside the Mairie
and directly on the main road. Up to the time of the advent of the First Army
Staff, Souilly, as I have said, had been the Headquarters of the Second French
Army. The French Staff had evolved most complete arrangements for moving
their Headquarters underground, in the event of heavy shelling or bombing,
so that it could continue to function without being disturbed in case of necessity.
Far down below the surface of the ground, and reinforced on top with concrete
so that they were entirely protected from even a direct hit, were corridors with
connecting offices, sleeping quarters and cooking facilities, complete with
electric lighting and a battery of telephones, while the ventilation, for some
reason which I was never able to discover, was excellent. We never, as a matter
of fact, were forced to take advantage of these superior arrangements, but it
was a comfort all the same to know that they were there in case of need.
At about this time the Message Centre was taken from under the sheltering
wing of G-3, the Operations Section of the General Staff, and was placed under
the direct command of General Drum, the Army Chief of Staff, thus giving me
the proud distinction of commanding an independent and separate section
of the Headquarters, although the smallest and the least important. At the
same time, the functions of the Message Centre were somewhat amplified.
The Army Code Room, responsible for the receipt and transmission, and for
the decoding and coding, of all secret messages and despatches, was placed
under the supervision and command of the Message Centre, which became
responsible for the immediate distribution and transmission of such telegrams.
If I remember correctly, there were in the Code Room two American and two
French officers, together with a couple of field clerks, and while I was not re¬
sponsible for the accuracy of their work, and was only concerned with the
transmission of results, the code experts always showed me all messages in
the clear, either before or after they had done their job. These messages were
most interesting, coming as they did in cipher from Marshal Foch; from General
Headquarters, A. E. F.; from General Bliss at the Supreme War Council; from
our liaison officers with the various French and British Armies and Higher
Headquarters; sometimes from Sir Douglas Haig; and occasionally, when
General Pershing was definitely known to be at Souilly, from Washington.
Through my opportunities of inspecting these messages I was able, not only
to keep track of orders and instructions from “higher up” affecting the conduct
WITHOUT CENSOR
299
of operations by the First Army, but also to glean information from time to
time in regard to the progress of events, both military and political, outside our
own area. At about this time, too, several officer couriers were added to the
Message Centre Staff. They were used for the transmission, in duplicate, of
secret Field Orders or urgent communications to the commanding generals
of the larger French and American field units. An officer courier would be
sent by one road, while a second one would be dispatched at the same time
by another route to the same destination, each carrying identical messages, so
that, in case one failed to arrive for any reason, there was still number two to
rely upon. Callers continued to drop in upon us in force at the Message Centre,
as they had at Ligny-en-Barrois. Officers from the Corps and Division Staffs
would come, in quest of information, and while they were trying to pump me,
and asking questions to which I did not know the answers, I was usually able
to extract from them some bit of news which proved useful.
Five days was not a very long time in which to do all that had to be done before
the offensive started. My first impulse, metaphorically speaking, was to take
off my coat and go at it. But by this time I had had several opportunities of
observing how the French Staff officers handled themselves when they arrived
at a new place, and I took a leaf out of their book. I had noticed that the
very first thing with which they concerned themselves was the establishment
of their mess, and in settling themselves in their sleeping quarters. Then,
and then only, did they start on their official duties. At first I was disposed
to be rather critical of this apparent absorption in creature comforts, if they
can be called that in the field, but I speedily realized that this attention to
the machinery of living came from a wisdom bom of long experience. They
had been at the War for a long time. They knew that the body did better
work when it was rested and fed. They knew that at times there would be
long intervals between rest and food. All the more reason, when a brief oppor¬
tunity came, that they should secure a little of one or the other, that all possible
arrangements which would facilitate this should be perfected in advance.
Parenthetically, I admired intensely the systematic way in which the French
Staff officers did their work. Our own Staff, through no fault of their own,
were new at the job, and were so conscientious and so anxious to succeed that,
when they had finished a hard day, and everything that they could do h^Lbeen
done, and it was too late to change or correct anything, they would «|ht up
and sit around and go over it all again, in the endeavour to catch some mistake.
But when a French officer was through, he was through. He stopped at that
point. He shut his mind off his work, if only for a few minutes. He did not
wait around for some important message that was expected in an hour or so to
come in. He took a nap, wherever he was quartered, subject to instant call.
When the message arrived, he was rested and at his best. His duties in con¬
nection with that message, when it came, might take several hours, but they
were performed with greater vigour and accuracy because of that short respite.
It was no slothful giving way to love of comfort. It was plain common sense.
So, emulating their example, my first act upon arriving at Souilly, after seeing
300
THE0S0PHICAL QUARTERLY
where my staff and my men were to be quartered and fed, was to find out where
I was to exist myself, and to move in. At Souilly the Message Centre, now
being an independent command so to speak, had its own mess, and I presided
at the head of the table in the midst of my own official family. I missed very
much the interesting conversation of the galaxy of colonels who had adorned
the G -3 Mess at Ligny-en-Barrois, but I must confess that, in these new sur¬
roundings, the table talk was relieved from that feeling of restraint which the
presence of superior rank imposes, and this freedom resulted at times in a con¬
siderable flow of real humour.
I was quartered in a wooden shack five minutes’ walk from the Message
Centre. The only two articles of furniture in my room were a bed and a stove,
but they were the two essentials that really mattered. For several days after
my arrival I was forced to do my own valeting, as the last of a constant suc¬
cession of strikers 2 had been left behind at Ligny, and no other was available.
I was missing the services of an orderly, simply because it took so much of my
time to clean my own leathers and to attend to my equipment. I had no time
to spare, and I was wondering what I could do about it, when, one afternoon,
Major Willard Straight, who was on the First Army Staff, dropped in to see
me. He died, shortly after, of influenza. I had been working hard, and I re¬
member his remarking that I looked as if I ought to be in bed. I told him
that I was as right as rain, but I groused about the inconvenience of having no
striker, and expatiated upon the qualities of my old retainer in the Seventy-
seventh Division, saying I felt sure, if only I had him at Souilly, that I should
be able to take better advantage of such opportunities for rest as came along.
The Major at once replied that, if that was my only trouble, he would have the
man transferred from the Seventy-seventh Division to Headquarters First
Army, and assigned to the Message Centre. That act of kindness should
have been enough, but I realized that my hollow appearance was working won¬
ders, and I thought that I had better get all that I could while the going was
good, so I asked the Major if it would be possible to transfer at the same time
from my old regiment a certain Lieutenant, who, I knew, possessed exactly
the qualities which were needed in my Department at that particular juncture.
The Major replied that it would be easy, and in the course of a few days the
Lieutenant and my striker arrived together. I welcomed the latter almost
with open arms, and from then on I received every possible personal attention;
he had, in fact, no other duties than to look out for me, although nominally
he was carried on the roster in his old grade of cook. He was invaluable. My
shack burned down shortly afterwards. I was occupied during the early part
of the proceedings, so that when I finally reached the scene, there was nothing
left but a blazing ruin. I felt really discouraged, imagining that all my equip¬
ment and personal belongings had gone up in smoke, and that all that I had
left was what I had on, and wondering how many days or weeks it would be
before I could get to Paris to refit, and what I should do meanwhile. Sud¬
denly my faithful striker appeared, perspiring at every pore, and presenting a
* Military servants.
WITHOUT CENSOR
301
most unmilitary appearance owing to the absence of his shirt. After saluting
punctiliously, his broad Irish face broke into a grin, and he pointed to a heap
in the middle distance, well out of range of sparks and covered with blankets.
He had seen the fire start, and, having no duties, had left them at top speed
and, running to the scene of action, had dragged all my property out to safety,
at some personal risk and inconvenience. He invariably had in his possession
about one hundred francs of my money, with strict injunctions always to buy
cigarettes for me whenever an opportunity offered, as sometimes there were
long intervals between the arrival of quartermaster consignments, and there
was always danger of a personal shortage. Each enlisted man was allowed
to buy two packages of cigarettes at a time, and no more. One day my striker
presented me with eight packages at once. I asked him how he had managed
it, and he replied that he had gone back to the rear end of the waiting line
four times, but that on the occasion of his presenting himself at the window
for the fifth consecutive time, the Quartermaster Sergeant had recognized him
and had asked him if he was about to start a store. Small wonder that I was
overjoyed to have back again as my personal retainer one in whom the qualities
of resourcefulness and devotion were united to so great an extent. Moreover,
it was an added pleasure to hear from him, upon his arrival at Souilly, that,
after my departure from my regiment, my former Colonel had made him his
own striker, and that my late commanding officer had given way to the most
intemperate language when he had read the First Army order announcing the
transfer, feeling sure as he did that the man was going back to me, and knowing
that he could do nothing about it.
Delighted as my striker was to be back again with me, this was far from
being the case with the Lieutenant who had arrived with him. This Lieutenant
was a mere boy then. He had been perfectly happy in his work with troops,
and was overwhelmed at being taken from them and put on staff duty. Within
a couple of hours after his arrival he asked for an interview, and, after saying
that he appreciated the promotion, he broke down, and with tears streaming
down his face implored me to send him back to his men; he had been so fond of
them all, he said, and thought that they had liked him. While all this was
really touching, and did him great credit from one point of view, it was most un¬
military. A touch of severity seemed indicated, and it brought him around.
When he had quieted down, I reminded him that, of the entire First Army
Staff, probably the great majority, if it were simply a question of atonal
choice, would infinitely prefer service with troops to their present assignments;
that it was not a question of choice, but of necessity; that men possessing
certain qualifications, of which he was one, were needed on the Staff in order
that the troops should be able to function properly, and that men went without
question, sinking personal preferences, wherever their superiors thought that
they could serve for the greatest benefit to all concerned. I told him that, in
regard to himself, he would have to trust to my judgment, and that I would
not send him back to his old unit, even if it were possible to do so; that time was
pressing, and that I wished to outline at once his new duties. I immediately
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THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
gave him so much work to do, that he had no more time in which to be “home¬
sick”, and in the course of a few days he was cheerful and happy again, and
turned out to be one of the best of my subordinates, as I knew he would. Later
on, after the Armistice, I recommended him for promotion to captain, and a
letter from him, received after my return to the United States, told me that
he had obtained his step.
Preparations for the start of the offensive had been rapidly pushed, and the
Message Centre, keeping pace with the other Sections of the Staff, had been
going full speed ahead. The officer, a Lieutenant Colonel, commanding the
Bureau de Courier at the Headquarters of the Fourth French Army on our
left, came over to Souilly to see me, as it was necessary to cover, both in the
French and American Armies, through General Orders, certain details in regard
to the courier service, and it was essential that the wording in both Orders
should be identical. It was to ensure this that he had called, accompanied by
an interpreter. They entered my room together, and the French Colonel ad¬
dressed me in rather broken English, apologizing for his lack of fluency in
that tongue; quite soon, however, he began speaking in French. I replied, to
the best of my ability—it was in a curious mixture of early governess and late
“A. E. F.” French—and after we had conversed for several minutes, the Colonel
made a typically French gesture of superb politeness, and told the interpreter
that he need not remain. Nothing could have been better calculated to set
me at my ease, and to increase my fluency, if not my accuracy. The truth was,
that the French Colonel saw that he himself had enough English to make a go
of things, in case my French broke down; that was why he had tried it out
on me at the start. We remained in conference for some time, and finally
parted with mutual expressions of satisfaction and of esteem, but I was im¬
mensely relieved, not only a day or so afterwards, but upon similar occasions
later on, when I compared the French and American Army Orders as actually
issued, and found that they said the same thing.
The offensive opened on the morning of September 26th, about a year and
a half after the United States had entered the War. The attack started at
5:30 a. m., after an artillery preparation lasting three hours. The First Army
order of battle, from the Moselle on the right to the Argonne Forest on the left,
was as follows:—Fourth American Army Corps, Second French Colonial Corps,
Seventeenth French Corps, Third American Army Corps, Fifth American
Army Corps, and First American Army Corps. My former unit, the Seventy-
seventh Division, was on the left flank of the Army, facing the Argonne Forest.
No advance was intended on the line from the Moselle to the Meuse. The
attack was to be on the front from the Meuse to the Argonne, where our Third,
Fifth and First Corps were operating, with nine divisions in line. It is difficult
to refrain from describing the progress made, the various phases and incidents
of absorbing interest, for, as one thinks about it, even after all these years, the
floods of memory are released and it all comes surging back again; one re¬
captures the details, the excitement, the breathless interest of those hectic
days. But all those events of the immediately succeeding weeks must be passed
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303
over, up to the 16th of October, when Major General Liggett, then promoted
to Lieutenant General, took command of the First Army, Lieutenant General
Bullard at the same time being promoted to command the newly formed Second
American Army with a front from the Moselle to Fresnes-en-Woevre, while
General Pershing himself assumed direction of the First American Group of
Armies. It will be possible, perhaps, in a later article, to give a brief account of
the American effort in that last phase, and in the days immediately preceding
the Armistice.
Late one night I was sent for by General Drum to report to him in the Com¬
manding General’s room on the second floor of the Mairie, as he wished to give
me certain instructions personally. This room extended the entire depth of
the building, and along the unbroken surface of one of the walls was an im¬
mense military map of the First Army front, which showed in detail the char¬
acter of the terrain in which our troops were operating. Hills, forests, swamps,
streams, and altitudes were clearly indicated, so that, for the expert reader of
military maps, it was possible to stand facing that wall and actually to see ,
in the mind’s eye, the natural features of the country itself and the character
of the positions in which our troops were located. These positions had been
brought up to the minute from the evening reports of the Army Corps, and
were indicated on the map by markings in charcoal and by pins. The utmost
quiet and stillness prevailed. The windows were heavily draped with black
curtains, to shut in any vestige of light. A confidential field-clerk was working
at a noiseless typewriter in a far comer of the room. General Drum sat at his
desk, upon which were several telephones, while General Liggett, his hands
in his pockets and a cigar in his mouth, was walking slowly up and down in
front of the great map, stopping from time to time and standing motionless
while he contemplated some given point on that long line and studied the
situation there. I knew that he could visualize the terrain, and the actual
situations in which the troops found themselves, almost as vividly and as ac¬
curately as if he had been on the spot in person. There was an atmosphere of
intense concentration in that room, of nervous tension, but also there was a
feeling of complete detachment, as if one were lifted up, above and beyond
the play of great forces which it was possible to see there in that proper perspec¬
tive and with that quiet judgment and one-pointedness of mind which were
essential if those forces were to be properly aligned and set in motion. I^ramed
impossible to believe that, in the stillness of that room, with its atm^^ere of
unhurried awareness, the movements and the action of an army of over one
million men were being directed.
I saluted as I entered, and stood motionless by the door until, in a minute
or two, General Drum beckoned to me to come over to him; General Liggett
had not even turned his head at my entrance, so complete were his absorption
and concentration. I stood by General Drum’s desk, and he began in a low
voice to give me the instructions which he had in mind. He had not proceeded
far when General Liggett turned and said, “Hugh, come over here”. I re¬
mained standing where I was, and watched the two generals as they walked
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304
THE0S0PHICAL QUARTERLY
up and down together in front of the great wall map, conversing in low tones,
and sometimes standing side by side in absolute silence as they studied the
situation at some particular point. Finally, General Liggett pointed to a
spot on the map where there was a depression on our front and where our for¬
ward line was not even and continuous. I saw General Drum nod his head,
and heard him ask one or two questions; then he came, walking quickly, back
again to his desk. He took up the telephone and asked for the Headquarters
of one of our Army Corps, and the connection was practically instantaneous.
I started to withdraw out of hearing, but he motioned with his free hand for
me to stand where I was. He then gave the command, briefly, tersely, that a
certain Brigade on the front of that Army Corps was to move forward at once
a matter of half a mile, in order to rectify the line, so that the front should be
aligned and continuous when the moment came, two or three hours later, for
again moving forward. He indicated the exact position on the map which
that Brigade was to occupy when its forward movement had been completed,
listened for a moment or two to confirm that his order had been thoroughly
understood, laid down the receiver of the telephone, resumed in concise words
his instructions to me at exactly the point at which he had broken off ten min¬
utes before, waited for a moment to be sure that I had understood, and then
nodded his dismissal. From that quiet, still room there had gone the command,
first to Army Corps, from there to Division, then to the Brigade Headquarters
in question, that between seven and eight thousand men should move from
the positions where they had dug themselves in for the night, should forge
forward in spite of enemy resistance, receiving such artillery support as was
necessary, until their presence on a rectified line ensured flank protection for
the units on their right and left, and the general strengthening of the whole
front when the time came for the unified movement forward. No doubt in
that Brigade there was much grousing, many bitter complaints, much criticism
of the Staff, when the order was received. Everything was quiet on their im¬
mediate front. They had made good progress that day. Why could they not
be let alone? Why were they called upon again for further effort, and in ad¬
vance of the time when they already knew that further effort would be re¬
quired? The answer was, because they could only see the situation on their
own immediate front. It seemed quiet and satisfactory. But they, concen¬
trated at one point, could not see, from the larger perspective, the fault that
lay in the very nature of their position; could not realize that, to remain where
they were, would threaten the security and the progress of other elements, and
would jeopardize the evenly developed movement forward of our united forces.
It remained for the High Command, with its powers of perspective, with its
knowledge of the inter-relation of all the elements composing the whole, to see
this, and to call upon them for that immediate and additional effort at a given
point which would ensure the later co-ordination and even progress of our
advance.
This incident made a profound impression upon me, at first only from the
military standpoint. I had had an opportunity—as I had had before more
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3°7
WITHOUT CENSOR 305
than once on a smaller scale at Headquarters First Army Corps north of the
Marne, when General Liggett had been in command there—to see the working
of the machinery from the inside, as it were. It was of absorbing interest, for
one who had been only a civilian a few months before, to witness the handling
of army corps and divisions, to watch brigades moved about on the map as
if they had been platoons. The smooth and efficient working, the watchfulness
and ability, the close mutual understanding of the High Command, aroused
my admiration. I realized, as I thought it over, that these two men, and others
commanding the Army Corps and the Divisions, would go down in our history
as great generals; that I was watching the making of military history. Im¬
possible, too, not to catch, in the midst of the tension, the atmosphere of con¬
fidence and of sureness, of determination and of iron will. As has been so
often said, an army takes its tone from those at its head; if the morale and
ability at headquarters are high, all of the component units in turn catch fire,
are imbued with the same spirit. I could sense this leaven working in our First
Army. I had been able to see half-trained troops change in character, and
begin to produce results equal to those of our veteran divisions. The whole
First Army, staff and line, was evolving rapidly, gaining daily in efficiency,
and the impelling power was coming from those two men whom I had seen in
that quiet room.
As I thought further about this incident, however, it began to assume a far
deeper significance, a more profound meaning. In an earlier article I have
said that the military life, the military order, seemed, of all human institutions,
to be the nearest in its forms and essence to the spiritual hierarchy, to the life
and order of the spiritual world. It is easy to see that this is true in certain
fundamentals. If a man would grow in inner ways, if he would render that
service to his Master which alone makes growth possible, and which real growth
in its turn passionately demands, it is essential that he should possess the
qualities and the attributes of the soldier,—fortitude, endurance, dashing
courage, the fighting spirit. Like the soldier, he must sink all thought of self
in loyalty to a Cause; he must not only forego ease and comfort, he must gladly
welcome hardship. He must obey, he must grow in obedience, until, jyflonger
obeying blindly—as he was forced to do at first because he knew^o other
way—his obedience becomes intelligent, rendered so by his own increasing
vision, by his own deepening understanding. In our effort to accentuate this
likeness between the inner life of the individual who is striving for self-mastery,
for spiritual growth, and the life of the soldier, we constantly use military
analogies, we express our comparisons in military parallels. When we speak
of watchfulness, we do so in terms of the sentry at his post. When we would
emphasize fortitude, endurance, we speak of holding the front line trenches.
Contempt of danger, the necessity of maintaining ceaseless contact with the
enemy, we compare to being always on the firing line. When we would impress
the need for obedience, we direct attention to the fundamental fact, and rightly
in such circumstances, that unquestioning obedience is the first duty of the
soldier, as it is in the inner life. These military parallels and analogies are apt
3°6
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
and expressive; they are effective in making vivid the problem and in solving
it; they are inspiring in their implications. Parenthetically, I often think
that they would be more effective, more true to the problems actually facing
a soldier, if they were less negative, couched less often in terms which imply
stationary warfare, the warfare of the trenches, even garrison life, and if they
were expressed more frequently in terms of the warfare of movement, in the
language of the attack. That is the kind of inner warfare, I believe, in which
the Lodge wishes us to engage. I cannot for a moment think that the Masters
want us, in that warfare, ever to reach the point at which we must dig in,
either because we can go no further forward, or to prevent ourselves from
being swept back. It is the attack that they want, always the attack. So,
instead of the sentry at his post, with its implication of negative watchfulness,
I like to think of the outpost, flung forward when a battalion attack is consoli¬
dating for a further effort, actively alert to sense every movement of the enemy,
to find that weak spot at which further attack will be most effective. Forti¬
tude, endurance, it seems to me, mean to the soldier, not holding a front line
trench, but lying out in the open under shell fire, waiting until it lifts so that
he can go forward again. The thick of the fight conveys to him no implication
of a stationary firing line; he sees himself, with bayonet fixed, going forward
with his comrades, following the barrage, until they come to grips hand to
hand. In the attack, he does not have to be urged to obedience; he is trying
actively, then, to co-operate, with all that is in him. It is the spirit of the
attack that clears the air. that makes all things new and vital. It is in this
spirit that we should go forward ourselves, in our inner warfare. It is in similes
and comparisons, in military analogies of this aggressive nature, that we should
draw the parallel between the inner life, the warfare of the spirit, and the life
of the soldier, in order that their likeness may be accurate and clear.
All these things have to do with the inner life of the aspirant for ch£laship
who, we will say, is in process of attainment. When, however, he has in some
measure attained; when he is aware that, at last, certain definite qualities
have developed within him to such a point that he can consciously control
them, make considered practical use of them, in the development of his own
inner attack,—what then? The old similes and comparisons take on for him,
in addition to their former truth, a new and deeper significance. He sees the
military life, and the life and order of the spiritual world, more truly at one
than ever before. He sees himself at length in command of forces within him¬
self, which before were untrained and unruly, but which now he can use, can
swing, at will. He sees himself in the position of a general, of the commander
of an army; he knows that he can consciously use one inner quality to rein¬
force another, to relieve pressure upon another, as an army commander causes
his divisions and brigades to be moved about in an offensive. He begins to
understand something of the strategy and of the tactics of the inner life. A
whole new field of action, a new viewpoint, opens up, based always upon the
fundamental qualities inherent in the soldier, dependent always for continuity
and development upon the retention and further growth of those soldierly
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307
characteristics. If, up to this point, he has developed in the spirit of the attack,
it is in that same spirit that he will approach his new opportunity. He will
appraise his own inner position, his weaknesses and his strong points, with the
same quiet detachment, with the same perspective, as the army commander
who, at headquarters, surveys the positions of his divisions and brigades, and
those of the enemy. He will redouble his effort to strengthen some inner weak¬
ness, to move it up into line with his other qualities, so that he may not be
weakened at points at which he has already made progress. He will look
down upon the field of battle from above, as it were, consciously in control of
his forces, now able to obey with intelligence the promptings of the High Com¬
mand, because once he obeyed blindly in utter self-giving. He will never
waver in attack, even when he seems for the time to have met a check, for
there is no such thing as defeat or repulse in that warfare when the great Com¬
panions are leading and directing, and when our will is at one with theirs, and
our only thought is to serve their purposes.
Centurion.
(To be continued)
Blessed is he that truly loves and seeketh not love in return. . . . Blessed is he that
serves and desires not to be served. Blessed is he that doeth good unto others and
seeketh not that others do good to him .— Little Flowers of St. Francis.
Gentleness and cheerfulness . . . they are the perfect duties. ... If your morals
make you dreary , depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say “give them up" for
they may be all you have , but conceal them like a vice , lest they spoil th^foes of
better and simpler people. —R. L. Stevenson.
VINCENT VAN GOGH
I N thinking back over the many years of the Quarterly’s life, I can re¬
member no article devoted entirely to the work of an artist, though we
are assured over and over again that the Lodge works throughout all the
fields of human endeavour, and with special directness in those arts and sciences
where inspiration is made possible by aspiration and concentration. The
reason is not far to seek; the work of a painter can scarcely be translated into
words; it must be seen to be appreciated and understood, and to try to explain
it without examples at hand, is a futile waste of effort.
Believing this, I am making no attempt at a critical analysis of the art of
Vincent van Gogh; for the purpose in mind it will be best to accept the high
evaluation placed upon it by the connoisseurs and museums of the world, as
well as the popular acclaim which was accorded the recent exhibition of his
collected work as it toured the larger cities of America, from New York to
San Francisco. It is a tardy recognition, for he died, penniless and artistically
unknown, more than forty-seven years ago. There is, however, at our disposal
much material concerning the man himself, for perhaps no artist, unless it be
William Blake, has left such a full account of both his outer and his inner life,
in his own letters, and in conversations recorded in the volumes written by his
friends and critics. It is because these documents seem to reveal a guidance
which bears a theosophical interpretation, and because aims and ideals are
nearer the world of ultimate causes than any concrete manifestations, that this
study is offered to the Quarterly.
I think it should first of all be noted that the years of his activity lay within
the very significant last quarter of the nineteenth century, and that he was a
part of the art movement which at that time succeeded in breaking through
the hide-bound rules and prejudices of the academic schools. The great cycles
initiated by the men of the Renaissance and the Dutch masters had been fairly
rounded out, and for a long time past the underlying principles sought and
practised by a Michael Angelo or a Rembrandt, with toil and concentrated
devotion, had been turned into superficial formulas whose results were sterile
and ever-weakening repetitions. The first stirring can be traced to the English
Constable, but it was left to the strongly original group of French Impres¬
sionists to revolutionize and revivify the world of art by their discovery of
new laws which set all Europe and even America by the ears. With Manet
and Monet among the leaders, stultifying preconceptions were swept away
in favour of a fresh vision, and surprising theories of light and colour and the
laws of optics were frankly stated in canvas after canvas which are to-day
the classics of an era. Naturally some of the lesser men followed mere will-o’-
the-wisps or partial truths, and inevitably there were also the charlatans and the
seekers after notoriety.
308
VINCENT VAN GOGH
309
Vincent van Gogh was bom in 1853 at Zundert in Brabant, where his father
was the revered pastor of the village church, and his home, gently ruled and
filled with a sturdy brood of which he was the eldest, was happy and normal.
The boy was from the first intensely devout, and long religious discussions
filled the hours while he with his brother Theo, as constant companion, ranged
the fields and heaths of the country-side in untrammelled freedom. To Theo,
Vincent was already the seer and prophet he was always to remain, and when
one day while resting by the mill-brook they solemnly promised each other to
work and strive for good and the service of the world, it was a true pledge,
never lightly disregarded by either of them through all the changes and vicis¬
situdes of the years to come.
The fair prospect of a prosperous and congenial life together, stretched in¬
vitingly ahead, for in the less immediate family circle were the Brothers van
Gogh, the most famous art dealers in Europe, who were ready to welcome
their brilliant and studious nephews into the firm. Vincent was scarcely sixteen
years old when he proudly entered their employ at the Hague Branch; a natural
lover of art, he was familiar with all the masterpieces which his uncles had
collected for their private enjoyment as well as for commercial purposes,
and he quickly became a trusted and valued salesman. It was by a natural
step upward on the ladder of foreseen success that he arrived, before he was
twenty years old, at the London house as a representative of the firm.
His letters from England during the first year were rapturously happy. In
spite of his professional standing, he was blessed with scarcely an ounce of
critical acumen, and everything that he could label as morally “good” came as
grist to his mill—great pictures and sentimental trash, great music or hymn¬
singing at the Moody and Sankey revivals, great ladies who frequented the
shop, or his landlady’s coquettish daughter, were all equally a part of the
glamour of his days. It would have seemed from his letters as though he might
have gone on along the pleasant paths of least resistance for ever, when suddenly,
out of the blue, came the thunder-clap of his first sorrow, and the whole course
of his life was changed, definitely and for ever. The love affair with the little
coquette, which had really touched the depth of his ardent heart, was brought
by her to a wantonly cruel ending, and his immediate reaction reveals the
very mainsprings of his true character and foreshadows the response ha would
make to all the future crises of his career. Not for a moment did IijmI nn of
casting the blame on any save his own quite blameless head; he w^simply
bowed with a sense of his unworthiness, and he plunged into the throes of
searching self-examination to discover the faults which had made him un¬
acceptable; with Christ as the perfect pattern and example, he would strive to
renounce all selfish desires, and he would root out all the traces of evil which
he could discover. Some of this could be managed unobtrusively, he thought,
through personal sacrifice and prayer, but his business life would be more
difficult, for that involved other people; however, that too must be purified,
and he resolved to bring better judgment to bear and to be scrupulously honest
with the picture-buying public. He forthwith began to explain convincingly
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THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
to the fine ladies who were ready to empty their purses at his uncle’s shop,
how worthless and trashy were the paintings of their choice. Such financially
ruinous tactics could obviously not be brooked even in a Vincent van Gogh,
so when he proved impervious to practical remonstrances, the door of the
London house was firmly closed behind him. There was an unsuccessful at¬
tempt to reinstate him in the Paris branch, but by that time he knew that he
could never again treat art as a commodity, and he turned away from all the
glittering prospects of that world without hesitation or a backward glance of
regret. His one over-mastering desire was to throw himself into some work,
any work, where he could serve God in one-pointed devotion, free from all
compulsion to compromise with his conscience. He made the first trial of
this new life as a sort of curate-teacher in an English school, working merely
for his board and lodging; but, finding that he was hardly worth even that
pittance to the head-master, he returned to Holland with a fixed determination
to study theology and follow in his father’s footsteps. No one believed him
capable of the arduous scholastic training, and their doubts were quickly justi¬
fied. An attempt to qualify in a less demanding institution for the training of
simple Evangelists, also ended in defeat, but under the auspices of these Breth¬
ren he gained permission to go as a missionary to the miners of a stark bleak
region called the Borinage, where all the ills of hunger and cold and direst
poverty were rife. Perhaps for the only time in his life he was here able to
pour out the whole content of his compassionate heart, and to feel the
return of genuine gratitude and love. In every possible way he shared his
people’s lot, giving away, bit by bit, all the extra comforts accorded his position
—his better bedding, his more ample food and warmer clothing, till the poorest
among them was no worse off than he; he even darkened his face so that he
should not seem apart or aloof from his smoke-begrimed parishioners. He
wrote to Theo: “If I could stay here for three years, learning and teaching, I
should have something to say worth the hearing, of that I am convinced.”
He did remain there for three years, but not as a preacher, for the Brethren,
hearing of his unprecedented methods, sent officers to investigate, and he
was dismissed with a grave reprimand for his unorthodox sermons and his un¬
conventional behaviour.
He began to draw. In a letter to his brother who was now high in the good
graces of “Goupil and van Gogh”, we read: “Often I am drawing late into the
night to strengthen the thoughts raised by the aspect of things here—the dark
miners, the weary women, and the little huts with the friendly lights shining
through the windows. The dark thorn-hedges against the snow look like black
characters on white paper, like the pages of the Gospel. ... If some one has,
even for a short time, taken a free course at the great University of Misery,
and has paid attention to the things he sees with his eyes and hears with his
ears, he will end in Believing.” He begs for prints by Millet and Rembrandt
for “a great picture speaks more and speaks more clearly than even Nature
herself. One must learn to read, to live, to see; there is something of Rem¬
brandt in the Gospels and something of the Gospels in Rembrandt, if only
VINCENT VAN GOGH
311
one sees in the right way; and there is something too of Shakespeare in Rem¬
brandt. My God, how beautiful and mysterious Shakespeare is! his language
and style are like an artist’s brush quivering with fervour.” He copied over
and over again the prints of ‘‘The Sower” and ‘‘The Reaper”, but not slavishly;
he used them rather as models, much as he did the living figure, and the re¬
sults were van Gogh’s rather than Millet’s.
Toward the end of his third year in the Borinage, he writes: ‘‘Theo, I must
have instruction; I can go no further alone; some advanced artist would be as
one of God’s angels to me—I say it in all seriousness and without exaggeration.”
And from this time forward there was no doubt of his objective, art possessed
him, and with all the force of his nature he pressed toward the mark; he would
at all costs learn to draw, to subdue his clumsy and unmanageable hand till
it would do his bidding; he would master perspective and anatomy, and above
all he would cherish the salt and savour within his soul, so that when the hour
should strike—as strike it surely would—he would have ‘‘wisdom and power,
power which is the best wisdom”, to answer the call. From 1881 to 1885 there
was an unremitting grind, whether at the Academy of Brussels, on the open
moors, in his little menage at the Hague, or (for very short spells) as the pupil
of some well-known painter of the day. Anton Mauve gives an amusing and, we
feel sure, typical glimpse of him: ‘‘He seemed as modest as a worm, listened
devoutly to all I said, was grateful and industrious—and then suddenly, ‘No—
No, Mauve, that’s not the way at all’, and my studio knew him no more”.
Millet, Rembrandt and Delacroix were the teachers before whom he never
failed to bow, and from them he learned all that could be taught to one who was
so essentially a law unto himself, with the necessity laid upon him to work
out his own salvation in fear and trembling before the Lord.
The winter of 1885 he spent with his parents, impelled by a desire to paint
the farmers and weavers of Neunen, his father’s new parish. He was in a fury
of work; he longed to paint fifty of these human faces, and then fifty more,
that he might create the one head that contained them all”. His brush was
like a plough in his hand, with which he dug out the hollow planes and deep
furroughs of their rugged features. In the spring he painted a large picture
which he called ‘‘Die Ardappeleters”; it was shaggy and rough, thafrM well
knew; but it had a certain life of its own, it was at any rate the best^could
do, and he sent it to Theo, who was a very important person indeed at the
Goupil galleries. Theo wrote to him immediately, praising his brother’s advance
in drawing and composition, but scoffing at the dullness of the colour and
telling him in glowing terms of the new Parisian artists and their brilliant
palette. In response, Vincent held up the example of his heroes, Rembrandt
and Delacroix; but his self-confidence was shaken, and by February of the
next year he had yielded to his brother’s importunities and the two were living
together high up on Montmartre.
In the entresol of the Goupil gallery, where Theo was permitted to exhibit
the work of ‘‘the wild men”, Vincent met all the most revolutionary heralds of
light and air and vibrating pigments. To his eyes the pictures were incredible.
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THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
contradicting all his most cherished beliefs; but his utter modesty saved him
both from the Scylla of complete confusion, and the Charybdis of hasty refuta¬
tion. Although bewildered and amazed, he sat at the feet of the exponents
of all the strange and conflicting theories, observing everything, and listening
with all the attention he could summon to the wordy battles which raged when¬
ever two or three of them met together. The one prop common to them all
was the newly discovered excellence of the Japanese prints which could be
picked up at the book-stalls for a few sous, and over which he pored for hours
on end.
His own work was pronounced hopelessly heavy, dark and over-emphasized;
so for weeks and months on end he tortured himself with efforts to force his
talents into the new moulds, to stamp out his powerful rhythms which pre¬
cluded delicacy of handling, and to substitute primary colours for his browns
and greys. To his chagrin he seemed totally incapable of mastering the new
harmonies; he and Theo both realized that he was losing all his individuality
for no apparent gain whatsoever, and on one particularly dark day he knew
that he was through with Paris and all its sophistications, and with the same
finality with which he had left Goupil, had left the Borinage, had left Holland,
he knew that he must leave this city of changes and touch again the constant
life of the earth. Almost at random he chose Arles as his destination, im¬
pelled by a longing for the sunshine and simplicity of the south. He arrived
in February, 1887, and stepped into a new world. It was as though scales
had dropped from his eyes, and chains from his spirit, and he had entered
full-fledged into the freedom of his own creative genius; his long apprentice¬
ship was over, and he could now rally the forces of every experience among
the miners and peasants and the artists of Paris, into a synthesis which was
wholly and uniquely himself.
Everything about him cried aloud to be painted; the pulsing life of the city
squares, the bright uniforms of the Zouaves, the rich beauty of the Arlesian
women; and there was need and use for every line of the gay new palette which
he had so painstakingly acquired. Outside the town the almond trees were
laden with masses of pink bloom, and he dared not pause for a moment lest
they should vanish away; he finished ten pictures in as many days, rushing
early each morning to the city gates, paintbox in hand and a fresh canvas
under his arm, the inhabitants gazing curiously as the red-headed creature
raced past. At night he returned exhausted; ravenous too, and therefore ra¬
tioning himself with extreme care, for he wanted to conserve every ounce of
strength, and later in the evening he took stock of the day’s work. While he
was actually painting, it did not seem to him that he thought at all, it was as
though Nature were standing over and above him, and he was simply the tool
of an irresistible impulse which controlled the rhythm of his incisive brush¬
strokes and guided the co-ordination of his masses,—just as the words of a
poet are lifted beyond his own comprehension on the wings of inspiration. He
was puzzled about the connection between this dynamic power, and his own
hand which did the work, but he was pleased that it had taken shape, for he
VINCENT VAN GOGH
313
knew it to be the inherent, organic life of his creation. Sometimes he could
correct a bit here or there, but not unless he was able to feel the same unifying
rhythm under whose spell it had been formed and bound into this thing of
vital tensions. As a thinker he was a disciple of Rembrandt and Delacroix,
and as a draughtsman he had schooled himself so that visual exactitude was as
one of the Ten Commandments; but now a new element, organic Junction ,
dominated him and became all-important, so that he could say, “I will paint
a portrait of my chair—no, rather I will paint its dependability”; he ceased
to paint trees, but, instead, growth, tree-like existence; instead of blossoms,
bloom itself. Colour, too, took on a new attribute and became a spiritual
quality. When he had painted a portrait of one of his friends as true to factual
appearance as he possibly could, he said, ‘‘Now comes the reality! the blond
hair shall be enhanced to a marvellous pale yellow, the dull wall behind shall
be changed to a deep blue extending into infinity, and the head shall seem as
mysterious and as luminous as a star suspended in space”.
Week after week through the burning heat of summer, he painted as though
in a trance, and the pile of his canvases mounted so rapidly that he had to
rent a house to contain them. It was a lovely house, all pure white inside
except for the rich red of the tiled floors, and outside it was yellow like the sun
itself, and it awakened memories of a dream he and Theo had cherished, as
they wandered over the fields of Brabant, of a brotherhood of saintly men,
ten of them perhaps, who should live together and work for good. In Paris
they had talked it over again; only now it was to be a brotherhood of artists—
‘‘for were not artists the only true seekers after God, in a Godless world?”
Here it might really come to pass, here in his beautiful house; and as a be¬
ginning he invited Gauguin, who was said to be ill and quite penniless, to come
and share its hospitality. It was a disastrous experiment, hastening if not
actually causing his first seizure of insanity. Overwrought by the heat of
the sun and by the might of his creative effort, the cynical gibes of this giant
among painters, whose words and voice pierced like a dagger, could not be
sanely borne, and madness, temporary but complete, descended upon him,
and his guest departed with a cold-blooded indifference which we are under
no compulsion to condone, even though Vincent, the all-forgiving, gives the
excuses for such a course. The thought of the days which followed, when he
lay alone and self-wounded, the door barricaded against a horde of little i^ians
who shouted rhyming insults through the windows, can scarcely be endured
by the mind. The protection of the asylum to which he was removed upon
the request of the citizens of Arles, was welcomed as a very haven of rest;
there, for the next two years, and until just a few months before his death,
he remained, grateful to ‘‘the kindly warden with the face of a beast of prey”
who insured a safety that allowed him to paint, whenever his health permitted.
Between seizures he was perfectly sane, guarding with jealous care his self-
control, which meant control of his brush and the freedom of the smiling garden,
—the subject of one of his last and greatest pictures. There was a gentle accept¬
ance of his condition, and a calm content that even Theo, who knew him as no one
314
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
else ever did, could scarcely understand; Theo too was an artist at heart, and
through the inextricable blending of their natures had lived a life of keen cre¬
ative realization of his brother’s genius, and had been lifted by it above all
the drudgery of his days at Goupil’s. He believed beyond all doubting that
down there in the south had lived the master of modem times, who had brought
the “furioso” of Michael Angelo into the world of to-day, and had carried for¬
ward the tenets of impressionism to a new sublimation. But he knew also
that great as were Vincent’s paintings, the man himself was still greater, and
it had been his share of the work to guard the conditions of life so that the
innocence and purity of its aims could be preserved. The demands and the
needs had been difficult, of necessity, for it was no easy matter to keep such
purity unsullied, as it had to be in order that Vincent could see God in Nature
and in man, and could be given the power to express it in the only way possible
for him, through the language of his art.
For none of us perhaps is the man or his life or his painting easy of compre¬
hension; but there are certain verses which come involuntarily into one’s
thoughts, not quite to be grasped by the mind, but conveying a sense that,
hidden in the mystery of their wisdom, are the questions and the solution of
the tragedy and the triumph that was Vincent van Gogh.
By whom impelled flies the forward-impelled Mind? By whom compelled does the
first Life go forth? Who in sooth, is the Bright One who compels sight and hearing?
That which they call the Hearing of hearing, the Mind of mind, that is the Life of life,
the Sight of sight. Setting this free, the Wise going forth from this world become
immortal.
E.A.
No man is free who is not master of himself .— Epictetus.
To the clear eye, the smallest fact is a window through which the Infinite may be
seen .— Huxley.
APPEAL OF THEOSOPHY
T HERE is a tendency in the world to-day to disguise , that is, to take
from the past, various ideas and systems—some having reasonable
merit, but others having proved definitely pernicious in former times—
to give these ideas and systems new names, and to label them as original with those
who now advance them. The claim for their adoption, or for forcing them
upon humanity, is that they are modem, and meet circumstances such as
never existed before in the world. Under this head, we can do no better, per¬
haps, than to quote from Sir Thomas Browne: “Live by old Ethicks and the
classical Rules of Honesty. Put no new names or notions upon Authentick
Virtues and Vices. Think not that Morality is Ambulatory; that Vices in one
age are not Vices in another; or that Virtues, which are under the everlasting
Seal of right*Reason, may be Stamped by Opinion.” In the light of that warn¬
ing, contrast the method by which so many old ideas and systems are being
foisted upon mankind under false labels, with the way in which Theosophy
was brought to the Western world, and the claims made for it.
Madame Blavatsky, the accredited Messenger of the last century from the
Great Lodge of Masters, brought Theosophy to the Western world. No claim
was made for it as being new or modem. Madame Blavatsky did not call for
its adoption because it originated with her. Instead, she revived ancient truths;
truths drawn from the sages of old, the Ancient of Days, the same yesterday,
to-day, to-morrow: changeless, immutable, regardless of the surface flux and
flow down the centuries. If there were any merit in presenting something as
new or modem, it would seem that the Great Lodge of Masters would have
had its Messenger do it. Furthermore, if one takes a walk with a companion,
one should know who he is, his credentials, and whither he is bound; it is dan¬
gerous to venture forth with an impostor. So, from the standpoint of ordinary
common sense, Theosophy should have an appeal to-day, though its real appeal,
that which adds height and depth to man’s view of life, far transcends its appeal
to common sense.
Theosophical philosophy points to the fundamental Unity back of apparent
diversity, and shows that manifestation is not continuous, but periodical,
cyclic. There is the cycle of great outbreaking, and that of great int^phing.
These periods of manifestation, known as Manvantaras in Hinduism; stretch
endlessly into the past and endlessly forward into the future, with periods of
rest, Pralayas, in between. Life is eternal, beginningless and endless. Spirit
never was not, and never will cease to be. At the beginning of each Manvan-
tara, the Supreme, the One, bestirs itself, so to speak, and sends forth light or
life. This life descends plane by plane, each plane being a reflection of the
plane next above, till it reaches down to the mineral kingdom; and even below
that, we are told, though few are aware, as yet, of kingdoms below the mineral.
3i5
316
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
Then it turns, ascends back to the Source, carrying with it the fruits of the
experience gained during manifestation. Back of this conception of height and
depth, which Theosophy makes so vivid, there always is Unity, the unity of a
common spiritual source; for man, the unity of all souls with the Over-soul.
So it has been said that life proceeds from Unity, through diversity, and back
to Unity.
Very briefly, that is the picture of life which Madame Blavatsky revived for
the Western world. A picture showing force, inspiration, coming down to man,
which is his to use and to give back again; a lesser cycle, as it were, described
within the Great Cycle: from inspiration, to experience, and back to inspiration.
Considering the magnificence of it, man might ask himself, “Where do I fit
into it, poor little creature that I am,—into that tremendous sweep of height
and depth?”
These tenets drawn from the sages of old, were not matters of speculation
with them. They were principles of life which they lived and experienced, and,
by so doing, attained immortality. They are laws of the growth* of the soul,
which, if used and followed, will lead to attainment, just as they have, and
always will. Surely, if that is the case, Theosophy was not brought to the
Western world merely for man’s intellectual entertainment, or for his emotional
indulgence; but, undoubtedly, in the hope and belief that these laws of the
soul would be read and studied, tested and lived, here in the West by man as
he is. How? Where to begin? Theosophy calls attention to the value of
correspondences, asks man to look about him and seek correspondences, which
he, in turn, can apply to himself. Acting on this advice, let us quote from
Isis Unveiled , and follow a clue growing out of the words quoted: “Nature is
triune; there is a visible, objective nature; an invisible, in-dwelling and energiz¬
ing nature, the exact model of the other, and its vital principle, and above
these two, Spirit, source of all forces, alone, eternal, and indestructible. The
lower two constantly change; the higher third does not.” The passage calls
to our attention that man, also, is triune; with body, soul, and, brooding over
and illuminating these, immortal Spirit. “When the real man [or soul,] succeeds
in merging himself with the latter, he becomes an immortal entity.”
With this statement in mind, if we consider the vegetable kingdom, we
find, there, examples of the natural law of growth, from within outward; each
species pressing toward the fulfilment of its kind, and thus fulfilling its destiny
in the great evolutionary sweep of life. Take the rose for instance, as it un¬
folds, gradually, to full bloom. There is, first, the stem; then, the leaf; the bud;
and, at last, the radiant beauty of the flower itself. When we come to man,
however, we have to reckon with mind and free will, with his self-conscious
power of choice. Though it is by exercising this power in making wrong choices
that man has degraded himself, nevertheless, it is through the proper exercise
of this power that he can fit himself into his rightful place in the evolution of
the soul; that he can properly apply this body of laws of soul-growth, knowledge
of which Madame Blavatsky revived for the West; that he can, in short, grow
as the flower grows,—exfoliate.
APPEAL OF THEOSOPHY
3 i 7
There are various ways in which the correspondence suggested by the quota¬
tion from Isis Unveiled may be used to the profit of the soul. However, in
the light of his power of choice, an apt correlative is found in the realm of con¬
duct. In this connection, the late Lord Moulton drew some pertinent and
helpful distinctions. He was not, primarily, a philosopher, a scientist, or a
moralist. Rather, he was a man of action, and Great Britain’s Minister of
Munitions during part of the World War. In an address, delivered before the
Authors’ Club of London, Lord Moulton spoke of three domains of conduct.
First, the domain of positive, man-made law, which must be obeyed. Next,
the domain of free choice, where we claim and enjoy (or think we enjoy) com¬
plete freedom,—as in choosing from a menu what to order in a restaurant.
Between these two, Lord Moulton placed what he termed the domain of “obedi¬
ence to the unenforceable”, in which there rules neither positive law nor absolute
freedom. As Lord Moulton emphasized, this third domain is the large and
important one which lies between “can do” and “may do”, where there ought
to be obedience to the sway of duty, fairness, courtesy, courage, honour, good
taste, and all those qualities which, combined, comprise nobility, and which
are expressions of the “draw” of the Divine Will acting upon and within us.
* Here, then, is a clue to a method of using theosophical tenets as practical
aids in making daily, hourly, minute-by-minute choices, which will tend to
throw the weight of imagination and will on to the side of Divine Will; as aids
in helping man, in his present sphere of circumstances, self-consciously to be¬
come an integral part in the great purpose and plan of evolution. Regardless
of his social status, there always is a best choice to be made in every event
which presents itself. If he cannot discover that, at least he can base his de¬
cisions on moral right and wrong. Moral right is a step toward spiritual right.
Too often, however, during his busy hours, those hours spent in earning his
daily bread, man thinks he must be over-shrewd, and, in a sense, must circum¬
navigate principles, if he is to maintain his business success.
Recently, the writer had the pleasure and privilege of meeting the president
of a company which deals in a certain important commodity. He was so im¬
pressed with the man and the general atmosphere of his office, that, later, he
made inquiries about him. It developed that in 1928, the president of the
company in question attended a conference in Holland, at which certain pro¬
posals were made in connection with the marketing of the particular com¬
modity. He stated at the conference that if these proposals becan^teffective,
the price of the product would drop to a mere fraction of the currei4flxiotation;
that this would prove embarrassing, perhaps ruinous, to many companies in
the field. Despite his protests, the conference found in favour of the proposals.
He returned home to his company, of whose capital stock he owned sixty thou¬
sand shares. As he had information which, for the time being, was not available
to other stockholders of his company, nor to those who might purchase his own
stock in the open market, he deemed it unfair to sell his shares; so he held them,
doing all he could to prepare the affairs of the company so as to meet and with¬
stand the shock he knew was coming. It was met admirably. To-day, the
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
318
company is prosperous, and he, its president, has surrounding and supporting
him, a loyal and united group of stockholders, directors, and employees. That
is one of thousands of ways of practising “obedience to the unenforceable”.
As man tries to incorporate in his life this body of testimony, drawn from
the sages of old, and revived by the Lodge Messenger of the last century, surely
he will not be left to enter and travel alone the “small old path” leading toward
immortality. How could he be a solitary wayfarer, when we consider Theos¬
ophy, whence it came and who brought it? As he tries to live according to
these laws of the soul, tries to make choices on the side of nobility, bringing
himself nearer to merging with the ideal, he sets up a claim upon all who have
lived, and do live, by the same code. Not a personal claim, in the ordinary
sense of the word, but one which is much deeper and more lasting: the claim
which Light on the Path speaks of as the claim of co-nature.
G.M.W.K.
Think of God more frequently than you breathe .— Epictetus.
When we consider peace in and of itself , we realize that it is neither a saintly
habit nor a virtuous action. It is to the soul what health is to the body. As health
is not a distinct quality , but a harmonious equilibrium of bodily strength and feel-
ings t so also peace results from the order that reigns in the soul .— R. P. Riondel.
ON THE SCREEN OF TIME
T HE Recorder was at his wits’ end. Then, suddenly, an “inspiration”:
What have you been reading?” he asked, apparently addressing his
question to a row of superb lilies, planted along an edge of woodland.
All day long it had been cruelly hot,—almost intolerable in town, and even here,
in semi-country, hot enough to scorch the grass and to give every growing thing
a consuming thirst. So, as the direct rays of the sun were now cut off by inter¬
vening trees and rising ground, one who loved these growing things and felt
their silent suffering, was watering them for dear life, “that the Master might
not suffer when he saw them”, while we, inexpert, certain either to drown them
with too much or to tantalize with too little, sat and watched and talked,—
which, as some would say, is the way of men. But the Recorder, determined to
get something out of it, perhaps for shame of the love and zeal he witnessed,
not only repeated his question, but turned directly to the Historian for answer.
“Some books on recent history”, was the response. “What is more, I have
brought them with me: three books on the Abdication and Coronation; first,
Coronation Commentary , by Geoffrey Dennis; second, King Edward VIII: An
Intimate Biography , by Hector Bolitho; third, The Magic of Monarchy , by
Kingsley Martin, editor of the English New Statesman and Nation. Of the last,
our friend who is watering over there, in spite of intense fatigue, as if the fate
of the world were the issue—and God knows, perhaps it is—of the last of my
three books our friend remarked after reading it: ‘Heaven help England if there
are many men of that kind injecting their venom into unthinking minds!’ For
it is the aim of the author to ‘debunk’ the best in English tradition. His thesis
is—implied when not explicit: ‘All this Coronation business is childish flum¬
mery; a King is no better than I am; they made a little tin god of George V,
which created an impossible situation for Edward VIII, and it is the job of all
clear-seeing, sensible, glamour-proof men like myself, to enlighten the public
before they make a little tin god of George VI.’ There always have been
men—Bernard Shaw is one of them—who cannot endure the idea that any
human being should be considered superior, by birth, position, or character, to
themselves. By some of these men, disparagement, direct or indir^fcecause
it relieves the pangs of their envy, comes to be regarded as a mX. The
editor of the New Statesman and Nation is of that kind. Fortunately, while he
does his best to be poisonous, the cheapness of the man and of his envy is so
transparent, that no one who reads his book, unless suffering already from the
same moral disease, could fail to be disgusted. Readers of the Quarterly can
judge for themselves. In our last (July) issue, we reprinted an editorial, en¬
titled ‘The Lord’s Anointed’, from the London Times. That editorial naturally
aroused the resentment of a man with the mission of Mr. Martin. So, in an
effort to drag things down to his own plane, he writes of it: ‘If the Times leader-
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THE 0 S 0 PHICAL QUARTERLY
writer had been dealing with his subject in an antiquarian instead of a reveren¬
tial spirit, the natural title for his article would have been “George Barley¬
corn’”—because, ‘anthropologically considered, the Coronation is a piece of
magic, a magic ceremony carried out by the medicine-man, with the King as
hero and victim, designed to bring fertility and prosperity’, ‘the same ritual
that is used when Kings are crowned in Fiji, and when royal chiefs ascend the
throne in darkest Africa’. What a mental content! One ought to feel sorry
for him—and in a way I do. The stars he never sees; he sees mud. These
self-satisfied illuminati, with the anthropological superstitions of forty years
ago still serving as their stand-by, who have not yet waked to the fact that
blood sacrifices and so forth, instead of being the origin of religious ritual (Ma¬
sonic included), were the degenerate and perverted remains, from long ante¬
cedent civilizations, of spiritual truths which the Greater Mysteries revealed
and the Lesser Mysteries dramatized,—these unhappy envious deceive no one
except themselves, while the only people they delight are men and women of
their own circle. It surprises me that a publishing firm like that of Thomas
Nelson, should have lent itself to that sort of propaganda.
“The first book I named, Coronation Commentary , is different. It was written
to sell, and for no other purpose. Its author writes for the man in the street, in
‘journalese’,—in short, snappy (what a word!) sentences. ‘We demand’, he
says, ‘a damnably high standard of personal morality from these people’, i.e.,
from English Royalty. Quite obviously, Rumania is where he belongs. But it
certainly is not on this account that the former King Edward VIII has brought
an action for libel against both author and publisher in England. The para¬
graph that gave particular offence is said to have been this: Baldwin, it was
whispered, ‘would never be taking so strong a line unless there were other things’;
and the author lists them: ‘Things done and said in his infatuation; his lover’s
prodigality; his shrill King’s rage against those who denied her to him. In
moments of recourse to other sources of courage [insert Dutch, as being implied]
as well. In hours of erratic, or erotic, obstinacy. Things left undone, in his
infatuation. Duty neglected. Papers held up. Papers curiously, neo-Kaiser-
ishly, annotated. . . .’ Personally, I suspect that the paragraph which really
precipitated the folly of Edward’s action for libel was one which referred to the
woman; this: in the opinion of his subjects, ‘for Queen of England an itinerant
shop-soiled twice-divorcee with two ex-husbands living was not good enough ’.
The characterization might well have jarred on a man whose own perceptions,
at that point, were at least temporarily in ‘occultation’.
“As might have been expected, such a book, for a brief period, became a
best seller in America. I do not recommend it, either for information or en¬
tertainment. The tinsel tarnishes even as you look at it, though basically, when
he deals with the former King, the man sees straight.
“My third book, King Edward VIII , by Hector Bolitho, is of a different kind.
It is a serious account and study of Edward’s life, from early youth to the day of
his Abdication, and it traces, with some degree of frankness, the causes of his
moral degeneration and collapse. The author is a New Zealander, but has lived
ON THE SCREEN OF TIME
321
for years in England, at Windsor, and has written a number of books, including
a well-known Life of the Prince Consort, entitled Albert the Good. He accom¬
panied the former King on more than one of the latter s Empire and foreign
tours. This close association with the subject of the author’s study, ties his
hands in at least one important respect, because, while not a guest, he was in
any case ‘permitted’ to accompany the Prince (as Edward then was), and
would doubtless feel bound not to draw on his personal observations, made
possible only by his privileged position. His code in such matters would be
different from that of a man like Linton Wells, the much-travelled American
newspaper correspondent, of the ‘good fellow’ type, who, in his autobiography,
Blood on the Moon , rather features his own heavy drinking and his own ability
to stand up under it, and to whom it seems quite natural, therefore, to mention
incidentally that the Prince ‘danced every afternoon and evening, imbibed
freely of his favourite tipple, which is whiskey-soda’, aboard the Berengaria ,
when Wells accompanied him on the Prince’s last visit to America,—the Long
Island visit of painful memory. Wells writes: ‘My memories of association with
H.R.H. are pleasurable for he treated me with splendid consideration. I ate and
drank, talked and walked with him and listened to his stories and with each pass¬
ing day grew to like him more.’ The two men had much in common; but habits
grow on some people. In any case, Bolitho, as I have said, is of a very different
type, and while expressing admiration for qualities which the Prince revealed
in earlier years, such as his modesty, simplicity, and unfailing consideration for
others, he does not hesitate to speak of ‘the strange changes which came before
his abdication, when he seemed to turn against his own kindly instincts’. His
father’s strong disapproval of the Prince’s intimacy with Mrs. Simpson (and
what father or mother would not have disapproved!), simply made him ‘secretive,
stubborn and more self-willed than ever’. Later, during his brief reign as
Edward VIII,—
It seemed that his judgment was no longer calm and, instead of finding peace and
grace in his infatuation [for Mrs. Simpson], he found only a means of bringing distress
to his staff and disappointment to the servants who had always found him, in the past,
to be a considerate and friendly master. He became a piteous figure as he estranged
himself from those who served him and who had respected him. Some who saw him
murmured that there was a fault in his reason, and they wondered how far he was bring¬
ing his country to peril.
“It so happens”, the Historian continued, “that I can confirm, frq^nde-
pendent sources, the statement I have just read to you, for I have thebest of
reasons to believe that his temper became ungovernable, not, perhaps, when
dealing with Baldwin, the Prime Minister, but in his relations with his staff—
men of his own age, who for years had been his intimate friends. These men
were not stem moralists (far from it, in some cases), but, because they were his
friends, they almost certainly intimated that he was making a fool of himself,
thereby bringing upon themselves explosions of uncontrolled fury.
“The author makes it clear that the Prince’s decay was gradual, and did not
culminate until after the intimacy with Mrs. Simpson, a year or two before the
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THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
death of his father, George V,—whose end was, in my opinion, undoubtedly
hastened by grief over this entanglement, which, even then, had become a
scandal in informed circles. As early as 1925, however, self-will and self-indul¬
gence had done much of their work of destruction. Bolitho says that the Prince,
on his way back from the Argentine, wrote to his father that if he were not
allowed to follow his own way thereafter, he would renounce his rights and
settle in one of the Dominions. Bolitho adds:
The tragedy of his isolation had already begun. His stubbornness was alleviated by
his great charm, his sympathy and his desire to do what was right. But he discounted
his powers by turning from advice and whenever possible, playing a lone hand. His
scattered experience of men had not taught him the value of quiet conference, and his
restlessness and superficial view of human nature still debarred him from realizing the
difference between popularity and respect.
“He still desired ‘to do what was right’; but it does not take long for con¬
stantly indulged self-will to reach the stage at which whatever I want is right.
It is largely because Edward’s dtbacle, properly understood, is a universal warn¬
ing, that it seems worth while to refer to his case at some length and to take
advantage of Bolitho’s study. Older students of Theosophy have hurled them¬
selves in vain against similar threatened downfalls, so they ought to know the
symptoms, from first to last; but is there one of us who can wisely count him¬
self safe, at any stage and at any age, from disasters at least as fatal? Truly,
‘the way to be safe is never to feel secure’.
“It is still suggested occasionally in the American press—although, as Bolitho
says, it is ‘a crazy view’—that Baldwin, the Archbishop of Canterbury and
others, conspired to get rid of Edward as King, and forced his abdication upon
him; but anyone who reads the speeches of those men at the time of Edward’s
accession, cannot fail to see that Baldwin sincerely believed that the shock of
King George’s death, and Edward’s new responsibilities, would cause a change
of heart and of behaviour, while the Archbishop spoke more cautiously, with
little hope and less enthusiasm,—the explanation being that George V had called
upon the aged Prelate, as an old family friend, to support his own ineffective
remonstrances against Edward’s intimacy with Mrs. Simpson. The appeal and
protest of a devoted father, as well as his own, having failed, the Archbishop
could not possibly have felt very hopeful, although he continued bound in duty
to serve and support him so far as he could.
“No one conspired against Edward VIII; he conspired against himself; he
made his own position impossible; he everlastingly disgraced himself in the eyes
of all right-thinking men. That Baldwin, the Archbishop, and, for that matter,
everyone in England who knew the facts, breathed a deep sigh of relief when at
last they were rid of him, goes without saying: they were inexpressibly thankful
that he had removed himself .”
“ A-propos de rieri', the Student now remarked, “it was reported in the Amer¬
ican press, the New York Times included, not long after the former King had
joined Mrs. Simpson in France, but a few weeks before the ‘marriage’, that he
had abandoned the use of whiskey at her behest, and was limiting himself to
ON THE SCREEN OF TIME
323
wine and beer; and this statement seems to have been given out by their host,
Mr. Rogers, who was acting as their intermediary with the newspaper men who
still swarmed in attendance.”
“For a variety of reasons, all of them more or less obvious”, the Historian re¬
plied, “I do not see that that affects the fundamentals of the situation in the
least. As a matter of fact, some of the worst moral failures I have ever known,
due primarily to self-will and its indulgence, have been those of total abstainers.”
“Another book, which devotes a long and very interesting chapter to the
Abdication, is Ordeal in England , by Sir Philip Gibbs”, the Philosopher volun¬
teered. “The chapter is entitled, ‘The Crisis of the Crown’. It is graphically
written, by a reporter of conversations and impressions who is an expert at
that sort of thing, and who related the reactions, day by day during the Crisis,
of men he met in all walks of life in England. It is a really valuable record, and
shows how splendidly sane and sound and free from sentimentality, the almost
universal reaction was. On all sides, in clubs, among young men of the Air
Force, waiters in hotels, girl accountants,—the verdict was, ‘We believed in
him—and he’s let us down. We gave him our loyalty and he’s let us down:
he’s a quitter.’ When it was all over, Gibbs says, ‘something else happened in
the English mind*.
It was anger. It was not anger because the King had got into trouble with a married
woman, nor anger because the King’s friends seemed to be a poor lot—according to the
Archbishop [who was right]—nor anger because he wished to marry ‘beneath him’, as
some of them said, but anger because he had ‘chucked his job’.
“Then Gibbs quotes: ‘He preferred that damn woman to England and the
whole blinking Empire. He ought to have held on to his job, even if it meant
chucking that wench’—though I doubt, incidentally, whether ‘wench’ was the
term employed. Crude language in any case; yet it does not alter the essential
facts to say: he had to choose between self-indulgence and duty, and he chose
self-indulgence. Such an old, old story: he wanted to be happy in his own way,
regardless of all else.”
Said an Old Member: “This notion that some people have, that their right
to personal happiness is entitled to precedence over everything else, including
their most solemn obligations, always reminds me of General Ludlow’s story of
Talleyrand and the young man, who, in excuse for something he had done, pro¬
tested: Mats il me faut vivre! (But I must live!). Jeune homme , je yumois pas
la ntcessitt (Young man, I do not see the necessity), was the bitid^but all-
comprehensive reply.”
“Very much to the point”, the Philosopher agreed; “and a good summary of
what seems to have been the instinctive reaction in England. It is Gibbs him¬
self, in his book, who supplies the sentimentality, and doubtless he represents
others besides himself,—a small minority; but all his books are like that.
“This is a change of subject, but now that I have mentioned Gibbs’s book, I
may as well finish with it. Ordeal in England is, primarily, a wail over England’s
re-arming, and a plea to the British people to believe that Hitler’s intentions
are purely pacific. England’s re-arming, he says, invites war, which is the
324
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
exact opposite of the truth, for as every man of intelligence in Europe knows,
if it had not been for England’s sudden awakening after Italy’s Ethiopian
brigandage, and for the readiness of Parliament to vote practically unlimited
funds for the immediate strengthening of the Army, Navy and Air force, Europe
would have been a shambles many months ago. The talk of statesmen, the
hysterical appeals of Pacifists, and the fatuous refusal of British governments
to look facts in the face, had made peace almost impossible: Europe was top¬
pling on the edge of the precipice. The instant England announced her de¬
termination to re-arm, Hitler and Mussolini drew back, almost sobered, while
the rest of Europe, for the first time in years, dared to hope that these two wolf¬
like neighbours would perhaps think better of it,—would in any case think
twice before precipitating a conflict the outcome of which, thanks solely to Eng¬
land's re-armament , would now be doubtful.
“As to Gibbs’s assurance that Hitler seeks peace and pursues it,—what is
the matter with such people, supposed to be educated, that they write, and
urge others to act, as if they were totally ignorant of history? Explain it as
you choose—either on the theory that Germany is a megalomaniac, or the
victim of a persecution complex, or a plain bandit, even as the Afridis are ban¬
dits—the fact remains that she has invaded France time after time, with fire
and sword and wanton, monstrous outrage, and that it is as certain as the rising
of to-morrow’s sun that she will do so again, just as soon as Hitler’s General
Staff give him the signal. For the moment, he does want peace; but that is solely
because he is not quite ready for war. As against that, England and France
want peace, just as ardently as the United States wants it.
“Gibbs advocates a method of preventing war which is chimerical,—a sort of
improved League of Nations, ‘a new Commonwealth of Nations’, with an Inter¬
national Police to enforce the decrees of a supreme Court of Justice and
Equity. Suppose, for instance, that this had been in effect when ‘sanctions’
proved ineffective to prevent Italy’s seizure of Ethiopia. Germany, having a
private understanding with Italy, to their mutual advantage, would have re¬
fused to participate, no matter how bound by treaty; England, France, the other
European nations, would have been called upon, presumably, to send contin¬
gents—where? To land in France and invade Italy vi 4 the Alps? Russians,
Belgians, Poles, Scandinavians, Englishmen, Frenchmen, fighting fraternally
side by side under a single command! Whose command? Supposedly, some
Bulgarian or Dutch general would be elected, so as to preserve ‘neutrality’!
And the preceding election: can you imagine the wire-pulling, the intrigue, the
bitterness? Remember that the electors—the representatives of the nations
and the controlling authority—would be men like our Senators, who represent
our own different States. Do we not know enough of what this means to realize
the impossibility of obtaining unbiased decisions ? And even if each representa¬
tive were capable of ignoring the selfish interests and the clamour of his own
nation, and could rise above racial prejudice and his political instincts,—if there
were honest difference of opinion, as there well might be over China in present
circumstances, how could you expect English or French contingents to fight
ON THE SCREEN OF TIME
325
in a cause which the government, and people back of them, believed to be unjust
and wrong? It must be remembered also that the burden of any such Police
duty would fall on the British Navy and French Army, which are now free to
act as the conscience and judgment of their own nation may decide. Is it likely
they would willingly surrender their right to decide why and for what they are
prepared to die? Can any sane American wish to place our naval and military
forces at the disposal of a committee in Geneva, presided over by De Valera or his
equivalent, and consisting of a Turk, a Spaniard, a Serb, a Rumanian, a Portu¬
guese, a Russian, a Chinaman, a Brazilian,—even if Senator Borah, or another
of his kind, were on the committee also? The idea is absurd; and yet Gibbs
and others, in most respects rational, are advocating it as practicable. At best
it is a psychic, and therefore perverted anticipation, of that far-off day when
high ch£las will be Kings of the different nations, presided over by their Adept
Emperor.
“Meanwhile we have to face things as they are, and especially human nature
as it is,—which is the factor Gibbs ignores. If we do this, we shall realize that
while all civilized people hate war as a barbarous method of settling disputes—
and it was Sherman, a great soldier, who said that ‘War is Hell’—so long as there
are armed freebooters and housebreakers in the world, the honest people, the
civilized, must be prepared to fight for their lives; otherwise they would be
exterminated, and only the brigands would survive. If this would make for
human progress, or for the coming of God’s Kingdom on earth,—I give it up.
In any case, the vast majority of mankind know better; so of necessity we shall
have wars until the righteous inherit the earth. In fact, the reign of the
Adept Emperor can only come as the result of his victory in a war such as the
world has never known. We have read of the ‘white horse’, ‘and he that sat
on him had a bow, and a crown was given unto him; and he went forth con¬
quering and to conquer’; and he was called ‘Faithful and True, and in right¬
eousness he doth judge and make war’. It will indeed be a long time before
evil is extirpated, and before nations will joyfully accept, with faith, the control
of presiding Wisdom. Meanwhile, evil and unscrupulous men will make wars
inevitable and necessary, unless as I have said, the righteous surrender right¬
eousness,—which Heaven forbid.”
There could be no questioning that conclusion, so the Recorder turned to tl
Student: “And what have you been reading?” he asked. The Student repli
that as there had been discussion recently in the “Screen” of one or more con¬
temporary “best sellers”, he had decided to read one that is now out of date,
but which is still frequently mentioned for its outstanding merit, namely, A
Passage to India , by E. M. Forster, first published in America in 1924.
“As a rule I dislike novels”, he said, “preferring records of actual, instead of
imaginary life—preferring biographies and autobiographies to fiction. But A
Passage to India is remarkable in more ways than one. The author convinces
you that his characters are real people, even when they do or say idiotic things.
It is brilliantly written, full of humour, and of fine irony unspoiled by malice.
As seems to be inevitable in a modern novel, the author occasionally uses ex-
326
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
pressions which are needlessly explicit; he could have conveyed his meaning—
as Thackeray or George Eliot or Scott or other greater novelists would have
done—just as well, without flinging the thing in one’s face. I cannot help asking
myself in such cases: Does he talk that way to his daughters, or to the daughters
of his friends ? However, this book is refinement itself in comparison with best
sellers of more recent date; and the real fault that I find with it is that it is
misleading as a picture of life.
“The story revolves around the relations of English officials and other English
people, resident in India, with the educated natives, chiefly Mohammedan. In
the first place, all the author’s native characters are Bengalis, and the large
majority of his readers will not realize—and he in no way helps them to realize
—that Bengalis differ as widely from Punjabis or Kashmiris as Bretons from
Provencals, or as a typical New York Catholic differs from his co-religionist of
Louisiana. In other words, while he emphasizes the difference in nature be¬
tween Mohammedans and Hindus, he is misleading in so far as he implies that
all Mohammedans are more or less like his Bengali Mohammedans; and we
repeat that while both Bretons and Provencals are Roman Catholic, their char¬
acters are as far apart as the poles. I say this in defence of the best in India,
because Bengal does not represent the best.
“In the second place, his English in India, both men and women, are com¬
mon, ill-bred, pretentious, and, as individuals, would be as insufferable in
England as he shows them to be in India. In brief, they are cads. Why depict
people of that kind as if they were fairly representative of the average? Life
is not like that. There are gentle people—even saints and heroes—as well as
sycophants and bullies. The author, obviously trying to be fair to the English
residents and to the educated natives alike, actually is unfair to both. Yet his
spirit and purpose are fair, so that his unintentional unfairness does not offend.
He is detached; he tells the truth as he sees it; and he is genuinely an artist.
Further, while he is probably a Liberal in the English sense, and therefore would
be mildly horrified by what I regard as the lesson or moral of his book, that
lesson, as I see it, clearly is: Indians of all creeds and races, practically without
exception, recognize and honour an aristocrat, and would accept his benevolent
despotism gladly. Democracy in any form is foreign to the instinct, genius, and
tradition of the Indian peoples. Chaos would result—to some extent has already
resulted—from the attempt to introduce English (American?) theories of gov¬
ernment into a country built on totally different lines. The attitude let us say
of the late Duke of Northumberland to his tenants, should be trained into those
young Englishmen who aspire to become members of the Indian Civil Service.
A College should be established in England, under Government auspices, for
that purpose, with another in India to provide finishing instruction. Students
should be taught, not only two or three Indian languages, such as Hindustani,
Punjabi, Pushtu, etc., but the good points in Indian religions and philosophies,
while re-inforcing their original faith in Christianity (Indians respect adherence,
outer as well as inner, to an inherited religion. Kitchener in India, was punc¬
tilious in Church attendance).
ON THE SCREEN OF TIME
327
“To treat all Indians alike, is to insult most of them. Naturally, none should
be treated with discourtesy. On the contrary, part of the training of every
member of the Indian Civil Service should include a course in manners, with
instruction in those shades of difference in the manner to be used when dealing
with different types of native. The manners of the late Maharana of Udaipur, a
Rajput, who traced his descent from the Sun, which means from the gods, are
said to have been so perfect that he filled Viceroy after Viceroy with secret or
avowed envy. Nothing short of that should be accepted as the ideal for those
who govern India. The Indian does not resent superiority. On the contrary,
he admires, even reveres it. What he does resent, and pardonably, is an assump¬
tion of superiority when this has no foundation in fact.
“I concluded, however, that to expect anything really satisfactory, really
worth-while, in any best seller, would be foolish on the face of it, seeing that
it must have appealed both to the professional critics and to the mob. So I shall
not carry my investigation further, but shall leave the dead to bury their dead.”
“But you admire Kipling”, someone objected, “and he, at one time, was a
best seller.”
“I do admire him”, the Student replied, “but Kipling wrote a lot of trash as
well as masterpieces. He was a prolific writer, and, in the early days, avowedly
ground out ‘pot-boilers’ because he needed the money,—as, for instance, to help
his parents: the best of motives. One of the most worth-while things he ever
did, A Book of Words , consisting of addresses he gave shortly before and during
the Great War, brimming over with his accumulated wisdom, will never he a
best seller: most people would think it dull.”
“Well, what else have you read”, prodded the Recorder when the Student
paused.
The response was a laugh, and then: “I can’t run on for ever! But one other
book I should like to mention,—the Vie de J 6 sus, by Francois Mauriac. The
author, as a member of the French Academy, is necessarily a man of letters of
high standing and considerable fame. He is a brilliant writer, and draws a
vivid and in some ways daring picture of the Master’s life and death in Palestine.
I say daring, because, although Mauriac is a practising and devout Catholic,
he thinks for himself, and does not scruple to depart from orthodox interpreta¬
tion when he feels like it. Perhaps that is why my edition of his book does not
contain the customary Nihil Obstat , etc. of his Church. This does not Man
that I think he is always right when he departs from customary interpretaWns.
He is quite obviously wrong in certain cases, as, for instance, in his statement
that while the Master had, at times, taught his disciples in secret, he preached
the Sermon on the Mount to the multitude. You will remember Matthew’s
explicit statement that the Master, seeing the great multitudes who had fol¬
lowed him from Galilee, and from Judaea, and from beyond Jordan, went up
into a mountain, and that, ‘when he was set’, his disciples came to him; where¬
upon he taught them, saying ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’, and so forth. This
is not without importance, because ‘the duty of another is full of danger’, as the
Gita says, and counsels of perfection are likely to lead the man-in-the-street
328
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
to feel that religion demands the impossible. The Sermon on the Mount was
addressed to would-be disciples, and to their successors for ever.
“Reverting, however, to the general character of Mauriac’s book”, the Stu¬
dent resumed, “it would be difficult to praise it too highly. The author de¬
serves our particular gratitude for having portrayed Christ as human,—not as
the ‘pale Galilean’, but as human and virile. Further, he realizes clearly, as
very few in his Church realize, that Christianity is Christ, and that ritual,
ceremony, even the Sacraments, are nothing except as means to an end, that
end being the love of Christ. Quoting, ‘Abide in my love . . . that my joy
may remain in you’, he comments: ‘What need had these men, his disciples, to
understand more than that? The whole of the New Law is contained in one
word—the word more profaned than any other in all the languages of earth—
the one word: love.’ That such a book has had an immense circulation in
France, is one of the hopeful signs of the times.”
“Which reminds me”, said the Recorder, baiting his hook with care—it had
been such an exhausting day, and no one wanted to talk—“it is quite some time
since the ‘Screen’ reported comment on the international situation. Perhaps
you”, turning to the Wanderer, “will be good enough to supply it”.
The Wanderer, not often with us diming recent years, began by saying that
the surface confusion is so great—the wrong nations often representing right
principles and so forth—that he did not believe anyone short of an Adept could
see the real tendencies until they could be reviewed in retrospect. “Consider,
for. example, the case of Italy and Abyssinia,—and I know something of Abys¬
sinia” [there are very few countries of which the Wanderer does not know
‘something’]—“all that was visible on the surface a year or two ago was the
unspeakable outrage perpetrated by Italy against an unarmed people led by
their Emperor,—a man of superior character and a sincere patriot; and what
was seen on the surface was seen truly, so jar as it went. What was not seen
was the purpose of the Lords of Karma as it is becoming evident to-day. First,
however, consider the facts of the situation prior to the d&nouement : on the
one hand Italy, whipped by Mussolini into the attitude of a roaring lion ‘seek¬
ing whom he may devour’; on the other hand, Abyssinia, a congeries of dif¬
ferent peoples and races, nominally governed by an Emperor, who was, unfor¬
tunately, quite unable to control the majority of his deputies,—men occupying
the position of feudal Barons with absolute authority in remote regions. Many
of these men spent their lives plotting against the Emperor in the hope of fight¬
ing their way to the throne. The country was a sink of iniquity, dirt and disease.
The Emperor knew it; was anxious to institute reforms, including the abolition
of slavery, but had at his disposal no central army able to cope with the armed
forces of his recalcitrant Barons. From the international standpoint, the
complicating feature of the situation was that most of the border ‘Barons’ were
marauders (the history of Wales and Scotland should make this understand¬
able), for whose incursions into neighbouring territory the Emperor was held
responsible. Alleged, or real, incursions into Italian territory constituted the
pretext used by Mussolini for his invasion and gas-bombing conquest.
ON THE SCREEN OF TIME
329
“Aware of all those facts, and of many more; foreseeing the inevitable out¬
come of the fighting, I suspect that the Lords of Karma also foresaw how Italy,
as a result of her triumph, would be bled white, while the Abyssinians, in nearly
all cases, would benefit. For their own protection the Italians are compelled to
build roads, to drain swamps, to enforce hygienic measures against the horrible
diseases of the country, as well as to maintain an army of occupation and in¬
numerable skilled and semi-skilled labourers,—all at immense cost, both in
money and in man-power (the toll in disease will be fearful), and without hope
of return for a number of years. That Italy cannot afford it, and that her people
are finding the burden of taxation almost unendurable, is known to everyone.
Further, if Italy were involved in a European war, her-troubles in Abyssinia
would be increased tenfold, not only because of the difficulty of supplying her
troops there, but because the Abyssinians would almost certainly regard Italy’s
embarrassments elsewhere as their opportunity to rebel. In brief, Italy, in my
opinion, is and will remain the loser, as she deserves, while the Abyssinians, in
appearance the victims, will gain at Italy’s expense. They will gain in every
way. The Abyssinian Church, for instance, was degenerate; its priests were
self-satisfied, lethargic, exclusive, uneducated: it will wake them up, and do them
a world of good to come into competition with the Church of Rome, backed, as
that is, by the civil and military authorities. The Abyssinian priests made no
effort whatever to convert the lower, conquered races, who form a majority of
the population, and among whom the vilest forms of black magic were practised
with impunity. The Italian missionaries will certainly wish to check that, and,
solely because they will be supported by the military, they may meet with
success.
“In a sense, therefore, Abyssinia needed to be invaded, needed just what she
has got,—and could not have been subdued by Italy unless that need had ex¬
isted. But this does not exonerate Italy in the least. The whole principle
involved is made beautifully clear by the Christian Master: ‘It must needs be
that offences come; but woe to that man [or nation] by whom the offence
cometh.’
“The lesson is invaluable if we will take it to heart; it enables us to realize
that Right, not Might, always triumphs in the end. Not that it should soften
our indignation when wrong is done—far from it; but it should enable us to
adore the beauty and the balance of divine Law; to see how the Lords of Karma
perpetually bring good out of evil, how the perpetrators of injustice^nd outrage
reap their punishment, and how their victims are compensated. ( 4 /b often men
without understanding and of little faith, are tempted to cry aloud, ‘O God, if
truly you are God, interfere you must, prevent this evil you must, for otherwise
no man can believe any more in the loving or righteous governance of things!’
They expect to understand from day to day,—to see as God sees! A very little
humility would teach them better. The most fleeting glimpse of the divine
purpose—which is the divine compassion—must fill the heart with wonder and
with worship.”
“Is there a statesman anywhere in the world, calling himself a Christian”,
33 °
THE 0 S 0 PHICAL QUARTERLY
the Student asked, “who really believes in his Master as Ruler, and who strives
to learn and to carry out his purposes? None that I know of. Partly from
vanity, but chiefly from lack of faith and in some cases from despair, they have
concluded that they and they alone must solve the world’s problems, and thus,
so far as they can, have taken the Rulership into their own hands, out of his.
Hence the frightful confusion.”
“What of the situation in China?” someone asked the Wanderer.
“On the one hand, an utterly demoralized people, most of them without the
least idea of what is going on, the vocal element among them aping American
ways (Columbia University responsible for much of it), with a large admixture
of Moscow’s philosophy and Russian gold, despising the ways of their an¬
cestors,—hopelessly degenerate. On the other hand, Japan: ambitious, arro¬
gant, unscrupulous, but rightly hating Bolshevism, and rightly convinced that
if she does not take control, Russia will. If you could isolate Japan and China,
you might urge with reason, ‘Let them fight it out; it is their business, not ours’.
Unfortunately, thanks to Science and to the elimination of time and space, in
large measure, as controlling factors, you cannot isolate Japan and China:
their quarrel has become the quarrel of political parties within both France and
England—the Right (Conservative) favouring Japan, the Left (Radical)
favouring China, partly because Hitler and Mussolini, inherently wrong, are
right in their detestation of Bolshevism, and must, therefore, support Japan.
England would like to prevent the destruction of Shanghai and of her immense
commercial interests, but cannot do this effectively as it would mean sending
more of her fleet into Asiatic waters than is possible, considering the standing
threat of Germany in the North Sea, and of Italy in the Mediterranean. Talk
about a muddle! But was it not foretold, ages ago, that confusion would be
the outstanding characteristic of Kali Yuga, the present Age of Darkness?
“Remembering that Russia at one extreme, and Germany and Italy at the
other, now represent the opposite poles on the same plane of exactly the same
evil; remembering that you cannot back either China or Japan without backing
either one or the other of those manifestations of the devil,—what have you
to choose between ? Now you will see why I spoke of Abyssinia first, for no mat¬
ter which way the moral balance may seem to tip between the widespread con¬
tending forces, with less responsible nations, such as England and the United
States, caught, as it were, between the devil and the deep sea, we may be cer¬
tain that the Lords of Karma, ever at work, will bring good out of it, will see
that justice is done, and that from all these tribulations will arise cause for
thanksgiving and praise. Meanwhile, if those in authority in England, France,
and America, would do from day to day the thing that is obviously right in
itself, with less thought of expediency and more of principle,—they would be
less likely to get in the way of divine justice.
“Spain? Spain is less of a problem. The government now operating from
Valencia, the supporters of which are described as ‘Loyalists’ in the American
press, is Bolshevist seasoned with a considerable sprinkling of Anarchist. Their
opponents, the ‘Rebels’ under Franco, represent the more decent element in
ON THE SCREEN OF TIME
33 i
Spain,—a mixed lot of Royalists, Fascists, Constitutionalists, with all others
who prefer old-fashioned law and order to the bloody despotism of the Com¬
munists and the hell-let-loose of the Anarchists. Anyone with knowledge of
the facts must hope that Franco will win,—though it is lamentable that he was
obliged to call on Moroccan troops to aid him, and to accept the active help of
Mussolini and, to a lesser extent, of Hitler. It seems, however, as if a clear-cut
issue anywhere in the international field, were at present against the rules of
the game,—as if the terms of the struggle between the White Lodge and the
Powers of Evil required a sufficient element of confusion to mislead those who
are inclined, if not anxious, to be misled. In that respect, the World War made
the choice so easy that it ought to have been inevitable; the day for that has
passed: the choice now involves a test of right perception.”
“But have not both ‘Loyalists’ and ‘Rebels’ been equally cruel?” asked one
of our visitors.
‘‘No”, the Wanderer answered: ‘T can assure you that has not been the case.
Both sides have been cruel, but much of the cruelty of the ‘Rebels’ has been in
retaliation for the unspeakable and fiendish cruelties of their Bolshevist op¬
ponents, whose deliberate outrages on nuns, crucifixion of priests, and so forth,
have naturally driven the followers of Franco, most of whom are Catholics, to
a state not unlike that of some of the early American settlers when retaliating
against the Indians for their barbarous treatment of white men—and women—
when the Indians had them in their power. It then became a case of: ‘Torturers!
Now we’ll show you l* Yet the truth of course is that the Spaniards, throughout
history, have shown themselves to be abnormally cruel, not only in days when
that was common, but in their successive civil wars since 1812, when they first
began to play with ‘Liberal’ Constitutions. That Bull-fights should be their
national sport reveals all that is necessary under that head. See the blood-lust
surge into a young woman’s eyes as she watches one of these prolonged butch¬
eries, and you will never forget it.”
‘‘How do you account for such cruelty? Spain has produced great saints.”
‘‘In a sense, the very fact you have mentioned accounts for the cruelty. Are
not all evils the perversion of spiritual powers? The great Spanish saints and
mystics, such as Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, revealed the spiritual
potentiality of their race. They were passionate in their devotion j&d self¬
giving, and yet were able to combine this with common sense and marvellous
restraint. When that potentiality fails to manifest at the spiritual pole, and is
absorbed by the animal nature and thus perverted, the passion easily becomes
ferocity, and the self-restraint, cold and calculating cruelty. They are a people
of extremes; they are saints or devils. They have turned Spain (not for the first
time) into a hell such as Dante saw and pictured; let us hope that, as a result
of their self-inflicted torment, they will ultimately rebound to ‘the things that
belong unto their peace’,—ages hence I fear, for this, as it is not the first, will
not be the last of their fratricidal struggles.”
‘‘Very interesting as an explanation,—as a philosophical explanation”, com¬
mented the same visitor, perhaps rather dryly. ‘‘But meanwhile? If I were an
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THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
English naval officer, I should object to being torpedoed by unknown submarines
in times of ‘peace’, and if I were of the mercantile marine, I should expect the
navy of my country to protect my ship, or help me to go armed against pirates.”
Now the Wanderer is a mystic—with connections; but because he is a real
mystic, he is quite unlike the type that usually goes by that name. There was
a Lion of the tribe of Juda—no longer of Juda—and the Wanderer belongs to
that ilk. Very quietly, then, he replied to our visitor’s hint of impatience:
‘‘That is a simple matter, if handled properly. We have been trying, through
our own channels, to get the British Admiralty to see the situation in simple
terms. They leave too much to the diplomatists, who rely on conferences and
talk. All that the Admiralty needs to do is to announce, quite casually, that
until further notice the British submarines in the Mediterranean will be ‘con¬
fined to barracks’, as it were,—will not leave the harbours of Malta, Gibraltar,
and so forth; then drop a broad hint to the French (nothing in writing) to do
likewise. Such an announcement might catch the attention of Italy; might
make her wonder ‘what was up’, might make her very cautious. Then, as soon
as all British and French submarines have been accounted for, the Admiral in
command of the Mediterranean fleet should give oral instructions to every
unit under him to scour the sea and to sink any and every submarine sighted
or heard, duly reporting to him on the nature of the preceding attack made
or threatened or anticipated (do you understand me?). In any case, those in
command of the units would not be slow to understand, and would act, and write
their reports, accordingly. One or two submarines ‘missing’ would be enough;
there would be no more trouble; there would be peace, perfect peace: every
submarine in that big sea would stay at home.”
‘‘But the loss of life!” expostulated another of our visitors, more by habit
than anything else.
‘‘The crews of one or two submarines”, the Wanderer replied tranquilly: ‘‘it
is their business to die, not to live; and they would die in a good cause, for they
would have been instrumental in preventing the horrors of a European war
involving, probably, the death by poison gas of thousands of women and chil¬
dren. ‘Do unto others as you would be done by.’ Surely, if you had the oppor¬
tunity to prevent such major horrors, you would be glad to be one of those, thus
drowned sacrificially?”
Our visitor looked doubtful. The Wanderer smiled. ‘‘Dying”, he said, ‘‘is
of small importance; we have died so many times already. What is of supreme
importance is how and why we die. The Lord takes care of the rest.”
T.
A TALK WITH MY BRAIN
O NE day it occurred to me that there were several matters that I needed
to discuss with my brain, and at the first convenient opportunity
when I was alone, I brought them up:
You do not seem to apprehend your proper position. You should under¬
stand that you have no independent life apart from me, or at least a temporary
one only, and that your real interests and mine are identical. You seem to
think and act as if you were a personage apart from me, with your own life to
lead, and a fixed determination to do as you see fit. You insist upon your
own ways, and these are often bad ways. You think what you believe to be
your own thoughts, but which are really only wavelets from the ocean of thought
that flow into your sphere. You refuse to take the trouble to control yourself
in your thinking, so as to consider only your duty and what I may give you
to think about. You are obstinate, you are confirmed in many evil habits,
and above all you are lazy. It is time that you acquired some appreciation of
the seriousness of existence and of your own special responsibilities. My brain
listened to all this with more attention and patience than usual. Not once
did it wander off on sQme flight of fancy, or become absorbed by some passing
thought-form. But its reply was not so satisfactory.
If, it said, I have no life apart from you, if I am but your slave and instru¬
ment, why is it necessary for you to appeal to me to do what you want, and
what I do not like? Why don’t you use the powers which you say you possess,
and compel me to obedience? I make my instrument, the physical body, do
pretty much what I want. It has no will of its own. If I leave it for an instant
it sleeps, or becomes what is called unconscious, and is but a lupp of useless
clay. I have none of the trouble with it, that you, who claim me’lsyour instru¬
ment, seem to have with me. Why is it? I do not believe what you say. I
believe I am an entity, with an existence independent of yours.
I replied sorrowfully that I very sincerely regretted hearing such a state¬
ment from him after all my labours to convince him to the contrary, for every
i This article by "G. Hijo”, a nom de plume of Clement A. Griscom, is reprinted from The Theosophical Forum
of March, 1900 (vol. V, No. xi, p. 202). The Forum preceded the Quarterly as mouthpiece of The Theosophica
Society.
333
334
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
time he took this attitude the breach between us was widened and made more
difficult to close; and once again I had to explain that our interests were really
identical in this matter, and that those interests were to bring about a closer
union, until finally we became one, our mutual consciousness merged, as it
were, into a single, elevated, powerful and efficient whole; this again being but
a ray or offshoot of the Absolute Consciousness comprising all things. So long
as he thought of himself as a thing apart, so long was he setting up a barrier
separating him from any higher life. If he persisted in such an attitude, when
death withdrew the cohesive force now keeping us together, he would find
himself deserted and alone, with nothing ahead of him but a monotonous and
perhaps painful existence for a longer or shorter period, until such inherent
force as was stored up in him, became exhausted. Then, I said, he would go
out like a candle that has burned to a finish. On the other hand an identification
of his interests with mine, a surrender of his bad habits, of his egoism and
selfishness, would mean that upon death, instead of having his own life to lead
until exhausted, he would go with me, as a part of me, to other planes of exist¬
ence, there to complete and assimilate the experiences of the past life, before
beginning yet another life on earth. This was his only chance for immortality.
As for my not being able to coerce him in such a matter, while it might be a
saving of force and energy and time, in one sense, if I could, yet in another
it would be defeating the very object of evolution itself. It was necessary
for me to acquire experience on all planes of existence. Before I could leave
any plane behind it was necessary that I should have conquered that plane
and all that pertains to it; that I should be its master, and the master of all in
it. He had spoken of his control of the body. It was true. The purely physical
body was in many ways his slave, although it was far from being absolutely
mastered, as it still had some appetites and desires not yet fully controlled.
But it was not he who had made this conquest; it was I, through him. And
now I had also to control him, to have him subject to my will, to do with him
what I liked, to silence him entirely when necessary, before I could pass on to
other planes. I must be master of his plane, the mental plane; and the trouble
lay in his not realizing that it was also to his best interests to help along this
conquest which was a necessary part of his and my evolution. Again I ex¬
plained that he was but an instrument given me to enable me to express myself
on the mental plane, that his life and power and force were but what he derived
from me, and that I was responsible for the use he made of these, and was
benefited or injured by the addition he made to the stock of our common
experience during this life. I knew that the very idea of his being controlled
was repugnant to him, that it seemed like the complete surrender of his indi¬
viduality for ever, but I had already explained that this was not really so and
that as a matter of fact his only hope of immortality was through just this
process, and I reminded him of the mysterious saying of the Master, that he
who would find his life must lose it.
The strain of continuous attention here became too great to be borne, and
my brain relaxed his effort and floated off in a maze of inconsequent and useless
A TALK WITH MY BRAIN
335
thoughts. There was nothing for me to do but to wait patiently until he again
recovered control of himself, and in the meantime I watched the panorama.
He began as follows:
That was a queer saying; but wasn’t it St. Paul who said that? I don’t
remember, never could remember quotations from the Bible. I wish I could
have an experience like St. Paul’s and have a voice out of the sky tell me what
to do. It would be so much easier. I wonder if I should be alarmed. I don’t
believe I should. What was that? Oh! only a creak of the furniture. How
it made my heart jump. I suppose it shows that my nerves are not fit for any
real experience. I wonder if B- hears internally? I notice he seems to
be looking at nothing sometimes, with his attention fixed upon something in¬
side. It must be great to hear internally. But then I suppose I should hear
lots of things I didn’t want to. I should hate to be told to give up smoking;
I don’t believe I would though, as smoking is said to keep away the elementals,
and all occultists seem to smoke. I wonder if they are told to. I wish I had
some more of that Virginia tobacco, it was the best I ever smoked. I did enjoy
it last night after dinner. The dinner was pretty good, too, only the cook
always spoils the mutton. That currant jelly was out of our own garden. I
wish Thomas would grow more vegetables; they are so much better fresh than
from the stores. That reminds me that I must buy some collars. I wish I
had lots of money and then I would send someone to get me all the different
kinds and I would not have to take any trouble. It must be lovely to be so
rich that you do not have to think of these things. They are so degrading and
they take up time that you might be devoting to higher things. That reminds
me that I was getting a lecture from inside. I wonder where we were? Oh!
yes, he had just said something about a quotation from St. Paul,—or was it
Jesus? I don’t remember which, oh! yes— . At this point the wandering
attention of my brain was controlled and I resumed.
You have just given as fair an example of the way you spend most of your
leisure time as one could wish. You can never expect to succeed in occultism
or even in any worldly pursuit until you have better control of yourself and
have acquired some powers of concentration and attention. You would like
to hear internally. How can you expect to do so when you cannot keep your
attention on your own thoughts for two minutes consecutively, let alone listen
with the absorption and attention necessary to hear the still small voice of
the Silence. You may be sure the inner Powers will not waste their time with
you so long as you are likely to wander off in a perfectly aimless way ii ife
middle of their discourse. Of course I was assuming that you were sufficiently
purified to be able to reflect the things of the spirit at all. I do not believe
you are, so long as your untrammeled thoughts turn naturally to yourself, and
to your own comfort and aggrandizement, to being rich and prosperous. It
shows that you are far from that condition of spiritual unselfishness that will
alone enable you to communicate with higher planes.
But to return to the subject we were discussing before your attention wan¬
dered. I will tell you something you ought to know. After a period of rest
336
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
between two lives, I am projected, automatically as it were, into physical
existence. I am incarnated in the environment to which I am entitled on
account of my previous efforts; and you, my brain, are a part of my environ¬
ment. You are one of the conditions that circumscribe and limit me, and it
is my duty to endeavour to control and purify you. Only so can I wholly
express myself on the physical plane. You, in this life, are what you are, en¬
tirely owing to the use or misuse I made of my brains in previous lives, and
my brain in my next life will reflect the result of this. If, therefore, I maintain
a continual effort to reform and soften you; if I mould you to my higher will;
if I do my whole duty by you, you enter into my being as an integral part of
it, and when next bom anew my new brain will have that much less power to
limit me, and will of itself be a better and finer instrument.
Remember that I who am speaking to you now am not some external spiritual
force or entity, but a part of yourself to which you must try permanently to
join yourself. My consciousness now is the sum total of the imperishable
results of all my previous lives. Of course there is more in me than can express
itself to you, or through you, but only so much as can express itself through
you can be conscious on this plane. What I am on other planes you will never
know until you become pure enough to reflect those planes, and this can only
come about through long-continued and constantly sustained effort. Some day
I may explain to you the internal processes and changes that take place as a
result of these efforts, but even this most elementary fact in occultism you
could not yet fully understand. It is enough for me to say now that it has
to do with the formation of the body of the mind. At present, however, I want
you to understand the real relationship that exists between us, who are yet
but two parts of the same. I am so absolutely responsible for you, in such a
full sense of those words, that you can apprehend the idea but in part. You
do not think an idle thought, nor receive an impression, nor create an impulse
to action or to inaction, nor feel a desire, or the lack of a desire, that I am not
fully responsible for. Sooner or later I njust pay for your mistakes, for your
laziness, for your carelessness, and for your sins. You will readily see, there¬
fore, that your actions are of paramount importance to me, and never for one
instant will I relax my efforts to guide and control you. You may die before
this is completed, in fact you surely will before it is perfectly done, and then
I must begin the fight again with another brain, where we left off, until finally
the battle is won. And great will be the reward of the personality in which
this process is measurably completed, for it will become as one with the Divine,
will in fact be a divine man among men. You see, therefore, what is the situa¬
tion. Sooner or later, you, or some other brain that I shall obtain hereafter,
must complete this process of purification and self-abnegation. Nor must
you think that of you only, is required this sacrifice; I also in a higher sense
must some day kill out all idea of separateness, and must merge my conscious¬
ness in the Universal Consciousness. But before I can do this I must have
completed my evolution up to the plane where this is required; and until I
am master of all planes below, until I am clothed with all the powers of nature,
IALK WI in MY rSK 2 \li\
337
I may not knock at the door of the larger life. Do you wonder then that I am
incessant in my demands, and that my patience is as that of the gods; that
failure discourages me not, nor does success exhilarate? I have Eternity before
me for the task, and were it not for the urgings of suffering and the desire to
be able to help others, I might let the slow but sure processes of evolution
take their course, and not attempt to force the fighting. But the sorrow and
pain and evil in the world appeal to me. I have suffered too, and I know what
it is. I desire, therefore, with an intensity of desire of which your puny will
is incapable, to do something to help raise the burdens of the world. There
is no other way than this. Purify and elevate your own instrument, and then
assist the eternal Powers of good to purify and elevate all others. There is
your destiny, if you have the courage to grasp, and the endurance to hold on
to it. Choose, therefore! Will you seize your divine heritage as is your in¬
alienable right, or will you drift aimlessly down the stream of life, of no use
to yourself or to anyone else in the universe, to perish miserably at the end
of your allotted years?
The continued attention and sympathetic attitude of my brain had per¬
mitted a little gleam of spiritual fire to descend from higher planes, and I spoke
with an earnestness and force that were not without influence.
There does not seem to be much choice, answered my brain.
There is but one choice possible in the end, I replied, but many prefer to
postpone the choosing. All must some day begin the climbing of the ladder of
life, and the sooner it is begun the sooner the weary journey is ended. But
be not deceived. It is not a path of roses, but a dreary march, and for a long
time there will be no end in sight. But the summit is there and can be reached,
and then,—peace! We were silent for a time, each busy with his own thoughts,
and then my brain asked what it should do.
Obey me, I said. I am what some men call your conscience, what others call
your soul, and what the mystics of all ages have called by various names, divine
fire, inner light, intuition. I shall tell you to do many difficult things, the
chief of which will be your duty, but I shall not lead you astray for I am an
infallible guide. The more you obey me, the better can I help you. The better
you serve me, the more can I assist you. Remember always that in the words
of one of the Great Ones, the light is much more anxious to reach you than
you are anxious to reach the light. I will never desert you and will always
stand ready with all the advice and encouragement that can be given you.
I will be as tender and as loving as a mother with her first-bom, and as inflexible
as justice. You will suffer the torments of hell and you will have the reward
of the blessed. You must care neither for wealth nor poverty^pleasure nor
pain, happiness nor sorrow, praise nor blame, sickness nor lieajjh, and I will
teach you to read the hearts of men, and will lay open before'^u the inner¬
most secrets of nature. You may go down unknown to your grave, but you
will awake to eternal life. Your life will be one of anguished striving, but the
end is illimitable peace. Choose you, therefore, for the moment will pass, and
the opportunity be lost.
And my brain answered gravely, Do with me what you will.
G. Hijo (Clement A. Griscom).
Worship , by Evelyn Underhill; Harper & Brothers, New York, 1937; price,
S3.50.
Religion, to students of Theosophy, is, as has often been said, the greatest of
the experimental sciences. There is need for faith, else the experiments will
never be performed; but the saints—who became saints because they had a
love that commanded the needed faith and courage—all are at one in their
testimony of the results. Seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened
unto you. For no other single fact in the whole history of human conscious¬
ness, is the evidence more consistent than for the reality and transforming power
of mystical experience.
It is twenty-six years since Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism was first published,
calling attention, as The Theosophical Society had long done, to this unanimity
of testimony, and analyzing the experience upon which it was based. It was a
brilliant performance by a very able intellect. But in the intervening years,
Miss Underhill’s work has become more than that. She has sought stead¬
fastly. Year after year has seen the publication of some new study or series
of addresses, bearing its own evidence of a seeking heart as well as of a questing
mind; and as these are reviewed in sequence, they manifest a development
which, on its own plane and in its own way and degree, tells as surely of the
responsive action of the spirit as any argument she advances in her texts. Dry
bones have been breathed upon, and, in consequence, her later work expresses a
breadth of understanding sympathy, and carries an inspiration and incentive,
which the initial volume lacked. Her whole approach to her subject has become
more theosophic,—as witness the following passages, taken from the Preface
of the book before us:
Some of the friends and fellow-students who have read these chapters have been
inclined to blame me for giving too sympathetic and uncritical an account of types
of worship which were not their own. It has been pointed out to me that I have failed
to denounce the shortcomings of Judaism with Christian thoroughness, that I have
left almost unnoticed primitive and superstitious elements which survive in Catholic
and Orthodox worship, that I have not emphasized as I should the liturgic and sacra¬
mental shortcomings of the Protestant sects. But my wish has been to show all these
as chapels of various types in the one Cathedral of the Spirit; and dwell on the particular
structure of each, the love which has gone to their adornment, the shelter they can
offer to many different kinds of adoring souls, not on the shabby hassocks, the crude
pictures, or the paper flowers. Each great form of Christian cultus is here regarded, to
338
REVIEWS
339
use an Ignatian simile, as a “contemplation to procure the love of God": for its object
is to lead human souls, by different ways, to that act of pure adoration which is the
consummation of worship.
The fact that each of these types has its particular short-comings, that each tends
to exaggerate one element in the rich Christian complex at the expense of the rest, that
all are liable to degeneration and are seldom found in their classic purity, is merely
what our human contingency would lead us to expect. Yet in spite of all this, in every
form of worship—even the least adequate—the positive element, man’s upward and
outward movement of adoration, self-oblation and dependence, exceeds in importance
the negative element which is inevitably present with it. For the positive element is
always a response to some aspect of Reality, some incitement of God, however dimly
understood and imperfectly obeyed. The negative element is the effect of our creaturely
situation; immersed in the world of things, yet endowed with a certain capacity for
the world of eternity. 1 hus a certain confusion between the sensible signs by means
of which we worship, and the supra-sensible truths they represent, attends all man’s
efforts to embody the deep and delicate realities of his spiritual life. Therefore in each
type of worship here studied, I have tried to find these realities, and bring them into
relief; to interpret as much as I am able, and to criticize as little as I can. It is only too
easy to recognize and denounce the barbarous aspects of sacrifice, or the magical tenden¬
cies which dog sacramental religion; but this simple exercise tells us nothing worth
knowing about worship.
So far, we have the familiar attitude and approach of The Theosophical
Society; but then there follows a sentence which no student of Theosophy could
have written: “What matters is the fact that under these unpromising appearances
we can discern the humble beginnings of man's response to the attraction of God; the
birth of Faith , Hope and Charity
The publishers advertise this study of worship as Miss Underhill’s most
important work since Mysticism . It is not less noteworthy as an intellectual
achievement, for the whole range of Christian worship—ritual and symbol,
sacrament and sacrifice, liturgical and prophetic, personal and traditional—has
been unified within the purview of a consistent philosophy. The first part of
the book is devoted to making clear that philosophy; the second part to illus¬
trating it, through a review of Jewish and early Christian worship, and suc¬
cessive chapters devoted to the main Christian denominations, from the Ortho¬
dox and Catholic to the Society of Friends. Worship is defined, in its deepest
sense, as the response of man to the Eternal, or, since all natur^orships, as
the response of the creature to the Eternal. It is thus in all its fonflittheocentric,
not something which originates in man as a subjective development, but man’s
response to something which he perceives pre-existing above and beyond him.
Miss Underhill insists upon this throughout the book—as, indeed, through all
her books. Thus she writes:
That awed conviction of the reality of the Eternal over against us, that awareness of
the Absolute, that sense of God, which in one form or another is the beginning of all
worship, whether it seems to break in from without, or to arise within the soul, does
not and cannot originate in man. It comes to him where he is, a message from another
order; God disclosing Himself to and in His creation “by diverse portions and in diverse
manners’’ conditioned by the limitations of the humble creature He has made. It is
in fact a Revelation, proportioned to the capacity of the creature, of something wholly
340
THE0S0PHICAL QUARTERLY
other than our finite selves, and not deducible from our finite experience: the splendour
and distinctness of God. Therefore the easy talk of the pious naturalist about man's
approach to God, is both irrational—indeed plainly impudent—and irreverent; unless
the priority of God’s approach to man be kept in mind.
This throws into sharp contrast the assumption, implicit in the sentence we
italicized in the passage quoted earlier, that religion evolves from the false
to the true, that magic and sacrifice mark the birth and childhood of religion,
rather than its degeneracy, and that from them are bom Faith, Hope and
Charity. This is the fallacy of The Golden Bough , and for it no evidence of any
kind is anywhere adduced. However well established the doctrine of evolution
may be held to be, as applying to our natural bodies, we cannot argue from
the body to the spirit; and even of the evolution of the body it is falsified, and
far too greatly simplified, when it is viewed as proceeding in one continuous,
unbroken ascent, unmarked by cyclic tides that rise and fall and rise again.
Writers on religion, ignorant of the theosophic teaching of the law of cycles,
have been far too uncritical in their acceptance of evolutionary theory; and
Miss Underhill’s lapses in this constitute one of the few false notes that jar us
in her work. There is nothing in the flesh which can explain or give birth to
the spirit; nor is there that in falsity which can explain or give birth to truth.
In the things of religion, the current flows the other way. Miss Underhill
would, we believe, be prompt to agree to this, yet often, as we have seen, she
permits herself expressions that tacitly assume the contrary. It is the kind of
error from which Theosophy would have saved her. B.
My Horse Warrior, by Lord Mottistone; Hodder and Stoughton, Ltd., Lon¬
don; price, 55.
Lord Mottistone is better known as General Jack Seely, the ever popular
commander of the Canadian cavalry during the Great War; author of Fear and
Be Slain.
If anyone loves horses, he should read My Horse Warrior, for he will then
appreciate and love horses as he never did before. If anyone has had no oppor¬
tunity to love horses, for lack of acquaintance with them, he should read this
book to fill his soul with a new vision of nobility, courage, devotion. General
Seely rode Warrior all through the War, and really loved him—a love which the
horse returned a hundred-fold, with an intelligent valour such as any human
might envy.
A magnificent character , is one way to sum it up; with the charm, the vivid
personality, of a horse who will go down to history as a Prince among his kind.
The author concludes: “It is my dream that those who read this book may
vow never to beat a willing horse. . . . Let there be one cruel blow from a
grown-up man, and you have ruined the horse’s fine soul and spirit for ever.”
A purpose and a principle with which every Theosophist will sympathize with
all his heart.
But now, having praised the book as it deserves, there is all the more reason
REVIEWS
34i
to protest against the author’s habit of whitewashing and praising the Germans
on every possible occasion. He speaks of Richthofen, the famous German air¬
man, as “perhaps the bravest on either side of that most gallant band of flying
men”. Comparisons in any case are odious; but, apart from that, why give the
palm to Richthofen rather than to the Frenchman, Guynemer, or to any one of
a dozen English airmen who, in terms of bravery—perhaps not of skill—could
not have been surpassed? We know the answer to our question,—otherwise we
should not have asked it: the author is a victim of that deplorable convention¬
ality (sentimentality and vanity are at the root of it), peculiar to many Eng¬
lishmen, which leads them to suppose that the “decent” thing to do, after you
have thrashed a burglar, is to offer him a drink; later, to speak of him as a
“plucky chap and first-class scrapper”; and, perhaps, finally—especially if you
nearly got the worst of it—to turn him loose, regardless of your neighbours. Spur¬
ious “good sportsmanship”,—and vicious, because it cloaks itself in that guise.
Some time after the war, says the author, he met Prince Rupprecht of Ba¬
varia, and learned that this ruthless agent of “frightfulness”, who was respon¬
sible for some of the worst atrocities committed in France during the German
invasion, had on one occasion noticed a group of horsemen galloping toward
him on reconnaissance. The author, on Warrior, had led them, and, because
Prince Rupprecht “remembered the episode”, and because “good sportsman¬
ship”, when referring to a defeated(?) enemy, is interpreted as calling for the
“Have a drink” attitude,—the author concludes: “Some day I hope he will
come here and renew acquaintance with my old horse” (“here”, meaning the
author’s home!).
This sort of thing is direct encouragement of evil; it invites men like Prince
Rupprecht—and there are plenty of him in Germany—to do “next time” as
they did before, and worse if that be possible. If no one cares, if no one remem¬
bers, if unrepented “frightfulness” is disregarded by men like Lord Mottistone,
what chance have the Germans to learn that such conduct does not pay? It is
worse than that: how can a man with any depth to him—by which we mean,
with any real love of what is noble and hatred of what is brutal and vile—how
can that man be willing so much as to touch the hand of a Pru^e Rupprecht?
German soldiers, in many cases, were carrying out orders; bd^the men who
gave those orders, the men, like Prince Rupprecht, who commanded German
armies, have no such excuse, and ought to be ostracized by all “good sportsmen”
to the end of time, unless and until they repent of the evil that is in them and of
which they were notoriously guilty. T.
Le Crtpuscule de la Monarchie—Louis XVI et Marie Antoinette , by Louis
Madelin; Librairie Plon, Paris, 1936; price, Fes. 18.
M. Madelin’s earlier publications on the period of the French Revolution
have won for their author a name needing no introduction. The present volume
is noteworthy for the skill with which it gathers together the very numerous
causes of the Revolution, weighs the relative importance of each, and presents
342
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
the whole picture of the last years of the monarchy in illuminating perspective.
The present-day group of historians in France is doing much to eliminate mis¬
understandings caused by those of the older school whose practice it was to
stress some one aspect of the great whole at the expense of all else, leaving the
impression that except for one “chief” cause or another, the Revolution would
never have occurred. M. Madelin weaves together the complicated network
of causes with a sense of balance and proportion which gives the reader increas¬
ing confidence in his judgment.
An unusual approach is adopted, in that the period just prior to the Revolution
is presented through the lives of its principal actors—Turgot, Necker, the King,
the Queen. Valuable analyses of character, and of the interests, motives, theories
and weaknesses which comprised the lives of these four persons, throw much
light on the frenzied time leading up to the crisis.
Another outstanding feature of the book is its recognition of the inherent
necessity of discipline and authority as the basis for national life. To-day’s
popular fallacy that a world free from restraint or repression would proceed to
evolve in blissful peace, finds no place in this author’s thought. Turning to the
reign of le Roi Soleil , he sees its power based on the tacit recognition, from mon¬
arch to humblest plowman, of the truth enunciated by Descartes that all order
is bom of the triumph of will over passion, and of reason over nature. With
the Regency, of course, came the inevitable swing of the pendulum—an extreme
and far-reaching reaction—and under Louis XV, the expulsion of the Jesuits
(to whom the author refers as “those resolute defenders of the principles of dis¬
cipline”, and one of the last forces of resistance to the pressure of intellectual
and moral disorder), marked what some keen observers, even then, recognized
as the beginning of revolution.
Together with other contemporary historians, Madelin regards the long¬
standing abuses of the Government and the “oppression” of the people, much
decried by writers of the past, as not so serious in kind or degree but what they
could have been, under a strong sovereign, readily corrected by gradual reforms,
—providing philosophy (which in that day had no other aim or meaning than
to throw off the yoke of authority) had not already sapped the nation and, in
weakening all authority, struck at the throne itself. The mass of the French
people, he claims—and he is not alone in this view—were devoted whole-heart¬
edly both to the monarchy and the monarch, with no thought of their over¬
throw, but Louis XVI was unable and unwilling to exert authority, and that
alone could have averted catastrophe. To Louis, the King of France was the
father of his people, full of solicitude and forbearance, rather than a leader or a
commander. “God forbid”, he said, when the Revolution was upon him, “that
a single man perish for my quarrel”. It was not “his quarrel”, observes Mad¬
elin—it was the royal authority which he was called upon to vindicate. Else¬
where, in speaking of the vital need in that day for a really great man as King,
he adds, “but it would have been necessary in addition that this King should be
able to rely upon a nation as respectful of the throne and of the authority of
the sovereign as had been the France of Louis XIV”. J.C.
REVIEWS
343
The Menace of Japan , by T. O’Conroy; H. C. Kinsey & Company, New York;
price, $3.00.
Professor O’Conroy spent fifteen years in Japan as a teacher. He married a
Japanese woman. His publishers say: “During his long stay in the country,
Professor O’Conroy lived in a circle almost exclusively Japanese. To all out¬
ward appearances he adopted their way of living. He became a 100 per cent
Shintoist and Japanese. Indeed, even to-day, he has been unable to throw off
completely the cloak of Orientalism that he assumed for the purposes of his
work.” Professor O’Conroy writes of himself: “I claim to be the greatest living
authority on Japan in either hemisphere. I am not boasting. I know the
Japanese as no other ‘barbarian’ on earth.” His book has been banned in Japan,
and if for no other reason than one of good taste, this would seem justifiable.
His “100 per cent” Shintoism was indeed a cloak, a borrowed and ill-fitting gar¬
ment. He is unable to understand the nature of Japanese patriotism, despite
his cheerful announcement that, during the Great War, “Patriotism got even
me!” If it did, it soon dropped him.
Professor O’Conroy sees clearly that the racial consciousness and life of the
Japanese are inseparable from their age-long tradition of Shinto thought, and
that their awareness of this has been developed since 1868. He seems to think,
however, that the basic beliefs of Shinto are superstitions, and that the “Neo-
Shintoism” of to-day fosters a self-satisfied and aggressive spirit which is a
menace to the world. As a matter of fact, all Japanese are Shintoists by birth,
but Shinto is declared not to be a religion. A Shintoist can be a Christian, a
Buddhist or a Confucianist, and some find it possible to be all of these at once.
Shinto is the veneration of the Supreme Spirit, of the Gods, of the Emperor as
their descendant and representative, and of the spirits of the ancestors. Per¬
haps one might say that it is the veneration of all spirit wherever found, as
part of the Supreme Being.
The Menace of Japan opens with a quotation from a lecture by Mr. Bunichi
Horioka:
Now it is our oldest and strongest belief that the Empire of Japan was originally en¬
trusted by Ameterasu-O-Mi-Kami, who is known as the Sun Goddess, to her descendants,
with the words: ‘‘My children, in their capacities of Deities, shall rule it.” Th^^as the
origin of the Imperial Family.
The Emperor has always remained the embodiment of the nation’s relation¬
ship with the Gods. This conception of the King as the incarnation of the
national consciousness, and the bridge to its Divine Rulers, is as old as the history
of man. According to the traditions of all the races, men were first ruled by Divine
Kings, then by Heroes, and finally by men. But these men ruled because they
were the agents of the Gods. The Pharaohs of Egypt descended, theoretically,
from the Gods. The Emperor of China was the Son of Heaven. The Kings of
Europe were such by Divine Right, a doctrine whose meaning is now completely
misunderstood in Europe. If this doctrine is preserved by the Japanese, they
may well be proud of their superiority, for it has almost disappeared from the
rest of the world because of the materialism of the age. Men no longer desire to
344
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
discipline their wills to a higher law. They refuse to recognize any superior to
themselves among men, or any connection with a spiritual hierarchy. The masses
of men are always ruled by someone, and when they evoke a leader from their
own level they are ground into a race of slaves. If they had any recognition of
the spiritual hierarchy or reverence for it, the Divine Kings could begin to rule
them again by fostering in them the free development of their own higher natures.
If Professor O’Conroy is incapable of understanding the basic ideas of Shinto,
his comments on Buddhism are equally unillumined. He concedes that “Bud¬
dhism has left many foot-prints on the path of time, spiritual ( sic ), art, poetry,
and above all the recognition that the higher animal, the human being, is different
from a dog, in that it has the thing called soul.” We should have thought that
Buddhism recognized the soul in every atom of being. He has this to say of
Zen Buddhism:
Zen has fed the military mind since the Komakura (sic) period when the usurper
Yoritomo was in power. . . . The sect asks that its believers spend certain times in
concentration. This is achieved by sitting in small cold rooms bare of any furniture.
The concentrator sits on the ground in orthodox Buddhist fashion, with his right toes
high up on his left thigh and his left toes high up on his right thigh; the hands are folded
deeply. He takes up this position opposite a blank wall and stares at this for some hours.
Gradually in this manner his mind is relieved of all thought, and after repeating this
process, involving the eradication of the imaginative faculty, for several years, on and
off that is, he presumably develops into a fairly good soldier. Here I should point out
that although the modern Japanese army was fashioned by German and French officers,
they can fairly claim to have perceived this necessary adjunct, or rather subjunct, to
the mental equipment of a soldier before the nations of the West.
It seems scarcely necessary to give any further example of Professor O’Con¬
roy’s abysmal ignorance and prejudice. His chapter on the position of women
in Japan is appalling. All who know the Japanese women speak of them with
unqualified admiration. They have become saints, apparently, without reform¬
ing the men. Perhaps that is the best way to start. Western women for a long
time have tried to reform the men first, and neither sex, so far, has an over¬
whelming majority of saints.
We leave his book with the unhappy feeling that Western materialism is more
menacing to the world than Japanese Jingoism. St.C.LaD.
Mother Marianne of Molokai, by L. V. Jacks; The Macmillan Company,
New York; price, $2.00.
This is the life-history of a noble-hearted woman, who dedicated herself, in
company with others of her Order, to the service of the lepers of Molokai.
The book is not only a record of what she herself accomplished, but is also a
monument to the Franciscan Sisters of Syracuse, New York, who took part
(and still take part) in her work. Readers of the Quarterly, always inter¬
ested in genuine and sincere efforts to ameliorate the sufferings of humanity,
are sure to regard this book with sympathy. The first part of it tells us briefly
about Mother Marianne’s youth, about the early years of her religious life,
REVIEWS
345
and the beginnings of her volunteer work among the lepers of Honolulu. The
remainder is given to an account of her life on Molokai Ahina itself—on deso¬
late “grey” Molokai where, after thirty years of hard and devoted labour, she
died, in 1918, at the age of eighty-three.
It is now close upon half a century since the world in general first began to
hear (chiefly through the sympathetic pen of Robert Louis Stevenson), of
Father Damien’s heroic struggles there; but we do not know so much about
Mother Marianne. Her first arrival on Molokai was a few months only before
Father Damien’s death, after which, much of the responsibility for his work
among the leper men and boys fell upon her capable shoulders, in addition to
her own work among the leper women and children. It is hard to imagine
what life on Molokai must have been like in those early days, before the work
of the Missions had been well organized. Most of us think of the lepers exiled
by the Hawaiian government to that dreary, nightmare spot, as pathetically
eager for help of any kind—eager to be nursed, cheered, guided. This was by
no means the universal attitude, often quite the reverse. Many of them had
for long been living “in grisly silence,” up on the mountainsides, in ruinous,
ill-kept shanties set in lonely little clearings. In the rank vegetation, hot and
motionless under a tropic sun, these poor creatures had become “as wild as
panthers”. They shunned all religious and civilizing influences, and violently
resented efforts to help them, preferring to continue the old habits of vice of
every kind into which they had fallen. Many were the conspiracies for the
murder of their would-be benefactors. But Mother Marianne was an un¬
usually energetic and forceful woman, and she managed the difficulties of her
position with great tact and wisdom; her quiet, firm voice brought instant
order and discipline into any precarious situation; the most turbulent, the
most rebellious were immediately brought into line by her “icy sternness” in
moments of danger, and she smilingly faced the ingratitude of those whom she
tried so faithfully to help. In reading the accounts of the plots hatched by
the unhappy victims of this terrible disease, we get the impression that in¬
gratitude may, perhaps, be one of its not uncommon symptoms. Many of us
will remember the Bible story of the amazing ingratitude shown to the Master
Christ when he healed ten lepers at the same time, and when one only returned
to express gratitude for his release.
The book seems to us somewhat fragmentary in form, and at times almost
disjointed, as though the author had had difficulty in getting together and in
arranging his data in a convincing manner; but as a record of human fortitude,^®
wide-reaching charity, homely good sense and unfailing intelligence, it is deeply ^
interesting. T.D.
Thoughts on Death and Life , by William Ernest Hocking; Harper and Brothers,
New York and London, 1937; price, $3.00.
Professor Hocking explains that his purpose is “not to prove immortality,
nor to disprove it”, but “to shake ourselves out of sophistication about it”. In
346
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
spite of this somewhat negative aim, his work may actually have a more posi¬
tive and beneficial effect upon many minds than would be the case if it were a
simple and uncompromising statement of faith. It is a fact that many, per¬
haps most, people to-day think of immortality, when they think of it at all,
as impossible, because “science” has proved it to be impossible. With admir¬
able clarity, Professor Hocking exposes the complete inadequacy of materialis¬
tic arguments against the existence and the survival of the soul. There is no
reason in the nature of things, as he shows, for the dogmatic assumption that
“to one mind there is one and only one body”; nor are we obliged to postulate
that the physical world to which our bodies belong is the only possible world in
the great Universe. Professor Hocking has performed an invaluable service in
showing that it is a sign of intellectual weakness to deny any possibility of
immortality for the human being.
However, faith is a positive expression of the will, and cannot be generated
in consciousness merely by intellectual argument. It must rest upon some
intuition of reality, however dim and however confused. We agree with Pro¬
fessor Hocking that the experiments of spiritualism are valueless as evidence,
but we do not agree that “the problem of the survival of death by human per¬
sons is an empirical problem for which we have no empirical evidence”. There
is testimony in all the great scriptures of the world-religions that certain indi¬
viduals, like the Christ and the Buddha, have experienced and proved the fact
of immortality in their own persons. “We feel and know that we are eternal”,
said a great philosopher, and there is no human soul which is incapable of
realizing that feeling and that knowledge for himself. Otherwise the age-long
faith in immortality would be unintelligible. Professor Hocking himself tacitly
recognizes this fact in his illuminating distinction between “the self within the
world” and “the self which hovers over experience, the inclusive, observing and
judging self”.
For the sake of brevity, we may refer to these two aspects of the self ... as two
selves: the self which is within the world, and the self which contemplates the world
from a point not within the world, and in this sense includes the world. We might desig¬
nate these two selves (invidiously) as the selves of the lower level and of the upper level,
or (inaccurately) as the observed and the observing selves. We might better call them
the “excursive” and the “reflective” selves. The word “excursive” simply implies that
the self-within-the-world is a self of behaviour, entangled in affairs; and that these affairs
have the value of excursions, in the sense that they report their results back again to the
centre from which the foray issued. If consciousness were a stream, it would go on and
on with no attachments and no re-issuings; but as a series or system of excursions, each
one launched under a working hypothesis subject to revision, we understand that it has
its returns, its incessant new beginnings with equally incessant accumulation of mean¬
ing. The reflective self, behind scenes, is the constant judge, guide, initiator of this
excursive activity. . . . Thus the reflective self, drawing its hints from the experience
of a multitude of excursions, gives back to history always more than it receives. And
the self which it makes is a self which it alone has conceived. If this account of decision
is true, the terms freedom and creativity applied to human action have a certain literal
force. The self gives actuality to possibilities; and it has first made these possibilities.
... It would presumably remain something, and viable, even if the dated self it had
built were obliterated. Death would then have a further meaning. Death would mean,
REVIEWS
347
for the reflective self . . . separation from it [the dated self]—release from its growing
burden. . . . Death would also mean the persistence of the maternal prowess of the
reflective self within which lie germs of other gestations. Hence it would not neces¬
sarily mean loss of individuality, nor of sensation, nor of body, nor of objects.
Although Professor Hocking may be unaware of the fact, he has actually
provided a text which might serve for a discussion of the theosophical doctrines
of Karma and Reincarnation. Why should the “reflective self”—the Reincar¬
nating Ego, as we may call it—send forth a new “excursive self”, a new “per¬
sonality”, into another, presumably “higher” world, until it has exhausted
the possibilities of constructive experience here upon this earth? It is indeed
the theosophical tradition that there are higher worlds or planes inhabited by
subtiler bodies than the gross envelopes which we know; but the path to these
superior levels of experience can only be entered when the lessons of our present
order of physical existence are thoroughly learned. Incidentally, in the theo¬
sophical teaching, there is no implication that individual consciousness, more or
less active, does not exist between incarnations.
It is impossible to mention all the excellent features of this book. For ex¬
ample, a broad field for meditation is suggested by Professor Hocking’s state¬
ment that “the immediate feeling of life touches no limit either of beginning or
end”. There is also deep significance in his conclusion:
It appears then that the meaning of human life suggested by biology lies outside the
sphere of biology. 1 he “ends of Nature” which mentality must somehow aid, if it is
to have any place in biological theory, are pseudo-ends so long as Nature is assumed to
be unconscious.The metaphysics which we have been using is not that of emergent
evolution, but more nearly that of Aristotle in his dictum that the nature of things is
best seen in their completion, rather than in their apparent origins. From which follows
an ancient intuition, that in the nature of things life is deeper than matter, and mind
deeper than life. c t
Beyond Normal Cognition , by John F. Thomas, with foreword by Professor
Wm. McDougall; Bruce Humphries, Boston; price, $3.50.
We mention this book for the benefit of those who doubt, or who wish to
convince others, that telepathy and clairvoyance are scientifically verified nat¬
ural phenomena. The work on which the study is based was carried on at
Duke University under university supervision. Most of the records analyzed
were “absent sittings”, that is, were taken when the person who alone knpr
the facts was some thousands of miles distant. The Scientific American , itWs
review of the book, says: “Telepathy and clairvoyance hypotheses seem by
these studies to be validated”. We are duly grateful for the concession; but
why “hypotheses”? This “research” either established certain facts, or it did
not. If it did, an attempted explanation of the facts might properly be de¬
scribed as hypothetical: not the facts themselves. But modem psychology is
incapable of an explanation, and always will be,—until it condescends to adopt,
as working hypotheses, the explanations advanced by Madame Blavatsky,
which she derived from the present-day custodians of the Hermetic and Oriental
348
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
secret teaching. In brief, when it comes to explanation, more was known on
these subjects in ancient Egypt than all the scientific psychologists in Europe
and America combined will learn in a hundred years,—and their laughter at such
a suggestion will be proof of their present ignorance. None the less, we welcome
this book, and admire the courage of its authors in braving the contempt of all
the smaller minds among their scientific confreres. They dare to go on record
for the facts. X.Y.Z.
Miracles and Adventures: An Autobiography, by M. A. St. Clair Stobart; Rider
and Co., London; price, 8s. 6d.
We found this book tiresome, for more reasons than one. It was advertized
as a wonderful account of the Serbian Retreat during the Great War. It is
nothing of the sort. It is an over-detailed account of what the author did, day
by day, during that retreat, and while she undoubtedly showed splendid cour¬
age and extraordinary endurance, her avowed motive in large measure was to
demonstrate that she (a suffragette) was in many manly ways, better than
most men; and as she, a married woman, was the mother of two children, and
had thus performed a feat of which no man is capable, it seems to the reviewer
that she might have been content to let it go at that. We have yet to hear of a
man, outside of an asylum, who thought he had a mission to prove himself as
good as, or better than, women in womanly occupations; but while that remark
has point, it is a point which women of Mrs. Stobart’s type, do not seem able
to appreciate.
It was suggested also in the advertisement that this autobiography contained
much of occult experience. It contains none. The author is a Spiritualist.
Spiritualism, she says, is “clearly authorized by the Bible. . . . The prophet
Samuel, who was called a prophet of the Lord, had appeared at the stance held
by King Saul with the medium of Endor. Jesus himself had communicated
with the spirits of Moses and Elijah, and but for the psychic vision of Paul on
the road to Damascus, it is doubtful whether the world would ever have heard
of the Christian religion.” This levelling-down of Masters and Initiates to the
status of mediums, will not, we are thankful to say, appeal to students of The¬
osophy. On the contrary, it will tend further to convince them that Spiritual¬
ism, as H.P.B. said, is a degradation of occultism, and that mediumism throws
the door wide open to witchcraft, to black magic, and to other prostitutions of
spiritual realities. S.M.A.
QUESTIONS
*wssmS
ANSWERS
Question No. 404 .—Is it possible for anyone to develop any talent? Is not the total absence
of a given talent an indication of a definite limitation?
Answer. —It is a question of what we want, and of how much we want it and why, and of
whether we take sufficiently long views. The total absence of a given talent might well be a
definite limitation, as far as this life is concerned. But we have all seen qualities of character
develop, in one lifetime, to an astonishing extent. Assume that talents are the result of de¬
velopment of character, and that we desire some particular talent, not for our own use, but
for the service of the Masters. It should be possible for us, through our effort and through
the help which we might receive because of our motive, to possess, in a future life, that talent
which we desire and which we now lack. C.R.A.
Answer. —We do not realize the efficacy of the power available to us, for we pervert, scatter
and waste it. If we would marshal our forces, properly direct and concentrate them, we could
develop any talent, in shorter or longer time and to a degree. There is ample proof of this in
the world about us. For example, may we not have heard, or perhaps have met, some person
who delights us because of his diction and enunciation, and have learned how lacking in those
faculties he was previously? In a real sense, there is no such thing as the total absence of a
talent. Potentially, all talents are available to all men; but, by continued misuse of force,
originally Divine, and by frittering away energy, talents have become atrophied. It is we who
have placed limitations upon ourselves. Speaking from a higher and truer point of view, the
absence, so-called, of a talent, is a finite limitation only. In the infinite, there are no limitations.
It is our task to enter the Eternal and to dwell there, not losing hold “on the calm Spirit that
dwells within”. When we shall have obtained and held that position, the infinite gifts of the
Eternal will be offered to us, gifts which must include any and every talent we may need in
serving the behests of Spirit. G.M.W.K.
Answer.— The question seems to ignore Reincarnation. Man is potentially divine, and is
capable of infinite development. “There are the powers of all Nature before you; take wh^
you can.” The possession of any given talent in one incarnation is the fruit of effort to devejjl
it, not in one, but, perhaps, in many previous incarnations. The motive behind developnSm
of any talent is love for what it expresses, and an ardent desire to possess it, which in turn has
resulted in intense effort and sheer hard work to develop it. The lack of a talent is evidence of
failure to employ the means necessary to acquire it, and should be acknowledged as such. It
should not be viewed negatively as a limitation which one is compelled to accept; neither
should one conclude that there is nothing that one can do about it. Man’s limitations are
self-imposed, self-created. An earnest student of Theosophy would do well to waste no time
in vain regrets over the lack of any talent, but rather to examine himself as to his motives—
whether they are prompted by vanity or envy of others—and to use this means of self-study in
order to promote development of character, and thus to try to discover what is the lesson
which the Masters wish him to learn in this particular incarnation. G.H.M.
349
35 °
THEOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
Answer. —It is possible for anyone to develop any talent in timegivensufficientdesire
and willingness to sacrifice for it. The time, however, may be several Ufe-times. There are
no limits to the potentialities of the soul, and it has often been said that there are no powers
in the universe that we are not destined ultimately to wield. There are, however, obvious
limitations to any particular personality. A blind man, for example, cannot lean.to paint m
that incarnation. He must wait to develop a new instrument that can see. We shall be wise
to study ourselves, and to realize our limitations as they exist at any given moment We
shall be most unwise to accept any existing limitation as permanent Qualit.es and abihties
which have been developed in former lives and which are unknown to us may be brought to
manifestation by effort, or by a comparatively slight spiritual advance. If the proper per-
tormance of ourduties, or the need of others, call for the development of .particularquality
we may be sure that we have the power to develop it. We must also have developed sufficient
understanding to be trusted to use wisely any quality which will enhance our ability to serve.
To accept a limitation as permanent, is self-indulgent laziness To maintain a constant
struggle to surmount it, is a victory in itself, no matter how little progress we may seem to
make.
Answer.-A11 powers and talents are inherent in the Soul and can be developed but not
necessarily in this life. The apparent absence of a talent is due to Karma, probably to neg
or misuse in a past life. Also, we share the Karma of the family into which we are born which
may mean certain pronounced traits, or lack of them. We have the talents we need for th.s
life. What use are we making of them? That is the mam question. C.M.b.
Answer— Rajas (desire or passion) having dwindled in “Anglo-Saxons" to attacks of the
fidgets, the dominant characteristic of most of us is (amor,-inertia, laziness I have no talent
for that”, usually means that we have not really tried and do not want to take pains Amiel
said: “Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for latent, is
eenius ” Yet even genius is said to be “an infinite capacity for taking pains .
B i n brief- do not let “lack of talent" serve as an excuse for laziness. If it be your duty to draw,
or write, or speak in public, or drive an automobile, you can learn to do it, and can learn to
do it well if prepared to pay the price of taking pains.
Answer.— There is a difference between old souls, and what H.P.B. called “baby egos|'.
Dire need in previous incarnations has usually compelled the former to exert themselves in
widely diversified directions,-which means latent capacities in all those directions Its; «
will evoke the capacity. The limitations of “baby egos', on the other hand, are real though
this is no excuse either for laziness or discouragement: there is the cheering thought tha^ even
a pig can be taught to dance.
NOTICE
The regular meetings of the New York Branch of The Theosophical Society will be held
throughout the winter and spring at 64, Washington Mews (between Washington Square and
East Eighth Street), on alternate Saturday evenings, beginning at half-past eight and closing
at ten o’clock. Branch members will receive a printed announcement giving the dates. I he
same announcement will also be mailed to non-members who send their names to the Secre¬
tary T S P O Box 64, Station O, New York. Out-of-town members of the Society are in¬
vited to attend these meetings whenever they are in New York, and visitors who may be
interested in Theosophy are always welcome.
INDEX TO VOLUME XXXIV
Appeal of Theosophy; G.M.W.K .
E. A .
Beatrice of Dante, The; Katharine Hillard .
H.P.B .
Cav6 .
Centurion .
Coronation, The.
Correspondence.
. .
Miles . .
Education Through the Arts in Secondary Schools; 1
English Way to the Goal, The, J. C .
Esoteric Discipleship; H.C.B .
Follow Up!; Miles C .
Fragments; Cavt .
Frfoe servant .
Gris com, Clement A. ( G . Hijo t ) .
. .
. .
Hillard , Katharine .
Imperial Heredity, An; J. F. B. Mitchell .
In Memoriam.
G.M.W.K .
S.V.L .
. 3 i 5
. 3° 8
. i 54
. 68
. . . 15, 100, 191, 280
.52, 124, 294
. i 93
.83, 171
. 42
. 212
. 13 6
. 42
. 115
. 212
. ... 15, 100, 191, 280
. i 97
. 333
. 209
. i 7
. 154
. 24
. 88
. 315
. 200
“Man, Know Thyself”; H.G .
Man, the Measure of All Things; 5. V. L
Mitchell , Henry Bedinger .
Mitchell , J. F. B .
Notes and Comments.
On the Screen of Time; T .
209
200
5, 91, 179, 267
.142, 319
Answers. 86 ' U4. 2631 349
.65, 121
Re'prints": ""Beatrice of Dante, The; Katharine Hillard..
Talk With My Brain, A; G. Hijo (Clement A
What Are The Theosophists?; H.P.B .
Questions and
Remarks by the Way
. i54
Griscom ). 333
. 68
35i
3
3$2 INDEX TO VOLUME XXXIV
. .. 33
^Ancient Life in Mexico and Central America; Edgar L. Hewett . 82
Beyond Normal Cognition; John F. Thomas. .. . 347
Contendings of the Apostles; trans. by Sir E. A. Walks Budge . 7
Cr^puscule de la Monarchic, Le; Louis Madelin . 3^
Damien The Leper; John Farrow .'
Dhammapada, The; irons, by Irving Babbitt . 7 *
Diversity in Holiness; R . H. J. Steuart , S. J .
Emerson Today; Bliss Perry .
Faiths and Fellowship. , fi7
Marie Antoinette: A Slandered Queen; Nesta H_ Webster .
Mathematics for the Million; Lancelot Hogben , F.R.S . 20
Mediaeval Legends of Christ; A. S. Rappoport, Ph .
Menace of Japan, The; T. O’Conroy -. ■■■ . 343
Miracles and Adventures; M. A. St. Clair Stobart . ^
Modem Alchemy; Dorothy M. Fisk .
Mother Marianne of Molokai; L. V. Jacks . 344
My Horse Warrior; Lord Mottistone . 34
New Bible Evidence; Sir Charles Marston, F.S.A . 5
Orpheus and Greek Religion; W. K. C. Guthrie . *
Pascal: The Life of Genius; Morris Bishop .
Pensife et le Mouvant, La; Henri Bergson .
Return to Religion, The; Henry C. Link, Ph.D . 55
Speak to the Earth; Vivienne de Watteville -• • ■■■ .
Thoughts on Death and Life; William Ernest Hocking . 345
Worship; Evelyn Underhill . ^
Septenary Man in Ancient Egypt; Hetep-en-Neter . *7
Stone of Destiny, The; Frkre servant .
L.S ...
Talk With My Brain, A; G. Hijo (Clement A. Griscom) . 333
Theosophy 1 and Democracy '; Henry Bedinger Mitchell .. • •
Theosophy and Its Critics; . . .'.'.'. 88 , ' 176 ,' « S , 35 °
T. S. Activities . I42> 3ip
. .
_ . .... 308
Van Gogh, Vincent; E. A . 6
. .
68
What Are The Theosophists?; H.P.B .. • • • •'
Without Censor, VIII, IX, X; Centurion .52. 124 . 294
You; Henry Bedinger Mitchell . 2
STANDARD BOOKS
Blavalsky, H. P. 1m J»|^ “"".V.:::
KKcnoS of°toe R Blavatsky Lodge.•<*«>, 2.50
Voice of tee Silence . "“WHSi JS
Cave. Fragments. Volume I . bM i.bo
Volume III .
ssa
Johnston, Charles. Bhagavad Gita .Trandatad,
Crest Jewel op Wisdom, The....
Great Upanishads, The, Volume I.’ 0
Parables of the Kingdom, The.—
Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras .TnuwUted, “ aotated: ^ i “
judfi S e W wliliam n Q. Bhagavad Gita. V..'. Edited-, doth. l.», leath«. i.bo
Culture of Concentration.
Letters F ^ia/Have Helped Me, Volume I and II, each. .doth. 1.00
Keightley. 1 Archibald. Theosophy as an Influence in Life papa, .20
Mitchell S Henry Bedinge™ Meditation ! Sp^iai edition, .ao, papa, .bo
1 Theosophical Society and Theosophy, The .....papa, .
Mitchell, J. F. B. Collegiate Education and Standards of
Value ..... ..»•••••• • — .” * * *' 7.7.7 * doth! 2.M
Sinnett, A. P. Esoteric Buddhism "-y/.Z’SSi
TorreSTay E.* L Science and'it's Function in Education. .. .paper, .50
Walker, E. D. Reincarnation .V.V.’.V.dS i”
Idyll of the White Lotus. ' ".leather, .85
Light on the Path.. . ...doth, 1.20
Through the Gates of Gold.
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