Theos-Talk Archives (July 2005 Message tt00052)

July 6 2005

Reed rote:

Sent: Sunday, July 03, 2005 3:11 PM
Subject: Blavatsky Net Newsletter July 1, 2005


"My real intent in writing this newsletter was to prepare a sound
foundation of Blavatsky's views as a basis for discussing in the
light of Theosophy the current debate on "intelligent design" (ID)."

----------------------------------------

I found HPB had offered a survey of this in her article:


KOSMIC MIND

H. P. Blavatsky

Whatsoever quits the Laya (homogeneous) state, becomes
active conscious life. Individual consciousness emanates
from, and returns into Absolute consciousness, which
is eternal MOTION. (Esoteric Axioms.)

Whatever that be which thinks, which understands,
which wills, which acts, it is something celestial
and divine, and upon that account must necessarily be eternal.

--CICERO


EDISON'S conception of matter was quoted in our March editorial article. The
great American electrician is reported by Mr. G. Parsons Lathrop in Harper's
Magazine as giving out his personal belief about the atoms being "possessed
by a certain amount of intelligence," and shown indulging in other reveries
of this kind. For this flight of fancy the February Review of Reviews takes
the inventor of the phonograph to task and critically remarks that "Edison
is much given to dreaming," his "scientific imagination" being constantly at
work. 

Would to goodness the men of science exercised their "scientific
imagination" a little more and their dogmatic and cold negations a little
less. Dreams differ. In that strange state of being which, as Byron has it,
puts us in a position "with seal'd eyes to see," one often perceives more
real facts than when awake. Imagination is, again, one of the strongest
elements in human nature, or in the words of Dugald Stewart it "is the great
spring of human activity, and the principal source of human improvement. . .
. Destroy the faculty, and the condition of men will become as stationary as
that of brutes." It is the best guide of our blind senses, without which the
latter could never lead us beyond matter and its illusions. The greatest
discoveries of modern science are due to the imaginative faculty of the
discoverers. But when has anything new been postulated, when a theory
clashing with and contradicting a comfortably settled predecessor put forth,
without orthodox science first sitting on it, and trying to crush it out of
existence? Harvey was also regarded at first as a "dreamer and a madman to
boot. Finally, the whole of modem science is formed of "working hypotheses,"
the fruits of "scientific imagination" as Mr. Tyndall felicitously called
it. 

Is it then, because consciousness in every universal atom and the
possibility of a complete control over the cells and atoms of his body by
man, have not been honored so far with the imprimatur of the Popes of exact
science, that the idea is to be dismissed as a dream? Occultism gives the
same teaching. Occultism tells us that every atom, like the monad of
Leibnitz, is a little universe in itself; and that every organ and cell in
the human body is endowed with a brain of its own, with memory, therefore,
experience and discriminative powers. The idea of Universal Life composed of
individual atomic lives is one of the oldest teachings of esoteric
philosophy, and the very modern hypothesis of modern science, that of
crystalline life, is the first ray from the ancient luminary of knowledge
that has reached our scholars. If plants can be shown to have nerves and
sensations and instinct (but another word for consciousness), why not allow
the same in the cells of the human body? Science divides matter into organic
and inorganic bodies, only because it rejects the idea of absolute life and
a life-principle as an entity: otherwise it would be the first to see that
absolute life cannot produce even a geometrical point, or an atom inorganic
in its essence. But Occultism, you see, "teaches mysteries" they say; and
mystery is the negation of common sense, just as again metaphysics is but a
kind of poetry, according to Mr. Tyndall. There is no such thing for science
as mystery; and therefore, as a Life Principle is, and must remain for the
intellects of our civilized races for ever a mystery on physical lines--they
who deal in this question have to be of necessity either fools or knaves. 

Dixit. Nevertheless, we may repeat with a French preacher: "mystery is the
fatality of science." Official science is surrounded on every side and
hedged in by unapproachable, for ever impenetrable mysteries. And why?
Simply because physical science is self-doomed to a squirrel-like progress
around a wheel of matter limited by our five senses. And though it is as
confessedly ignorant of the formation of matter, as of the generation of a
simple cell; though it is as powerless to explain what is this, that, or the
other, it will yet dogmatize and insist on what life, matter and the rest
are not. It comes to this: the words of Father Felix addressed fifty years
ago to the French academicians have nearly become immortal as a truism.
"Gentlemen," he said, "you throw into our teeth the reproach that we teach
mysteries. But imagine whatever science you will; follow the magnificent
sweep of its deductions. . . . and when you arrive at its parent source you
come face to face with the unknown!" 

Now to lay at rest once for all in the minds of Theosophists this vexed
question, we intend to prove that modern science, owing to physiology, is
itself on the eve of discovering that consciousness is universal--thus
justifying Edison's "dreams." But before we do this, we mean also to show
that though many a man of science is soaked through and through with such
belief, very few are brave enough to openly admit it, as the late Dr.
Pirogoff of St. Petersburg has done in his posthumous Memoirs. Indeed that
great surgeon and pathologist raised by their publication quite a howl of
indignation among his colleagues. How then? the public asked: He, Dr.
Pirogoff, whom we regarded as almost the embodiment of European learning,
believing in the superstitions of crazy alchemists? He, who in the words of
a contemporary:-- 

was the very incarnation of exact science and methods of thought; who had
dissected hundreds and thousands of human organs, making himself as
acquainted with all the mysteries of surgery and anatomy as we are with our
familiar furniture; the savant for whom physiology had no secrets and who,
above all men was one to whom Voltaire might have ironically asked whether
he had not found immortal soul between the bladder and the blind gut,--that
same Pirogoff is found after his death devoting whole chapters in his
literary Will to the scientific demonstration. . . . Novoye Vremya of 1887. 

--Of what? Why, of the existence in every organism of a distinct "VITAL
FORCE" independent of any physical or chemical process. Like Liebig he
accepted the derided and tabooed homogeneity of nature--a Life
Principle--that persecuted and hapless teleology, or the science of the
final causes of things, which is as philosophical as it is unscientific, if
we have to believe imperial and royal academies. His unpardonable sin in the
eyes of dogmatic modern science, however, was this: The great anatomist and
surgeon, had the "hardihood" to declare in his Memoirs, that:-- 

We have no cause to reject the possibility of the existence of organisms
endowed with such properties that would make of them--the direct embodiment
of the universal mind--a perfection inaccessible to our own (human) mind. .
. . Because, we have no right to maintain that man is the last expression of
the divine creative thought. 

Such are the chief features of the heresy of one, who ranked high among the
men of exact science of this age. His Memoirs show plainly that not only he
believed in Universal Deity, divine Ideation, or the Hermetic "Thought
divine," and a Vital Principle, but taught all this, and tried to
demonstrate it scientifically. Thus he argues that Universal Mind needs no
physico-chemical, or mechanical brain as an organ of transmission. He even
goes so far as to admit it in these suggestive words:-- 

Our reason must accept in all necessity an infinite and eternal Mind which
rules and governs the ocean of life. . . . Thought and creative ideation, in
full agreement with the laws of unity and causation, manifest themselves
plainly enough in universal life without the participation of brain-slush. .
. . Directing the forces and elements toward the formation of organisms,
this organizing life-principle becomes self-sentient, self-conscious, racial
or individual. Substance, ruled and directed by the life-principle, is
organised according to a general defined plan into certain types. . . . 

He explains this belief by confessing that never, during his long life so
full of study, observation, and experiments, could he-- acquire the
conviction, that our brain could be the only organ of thought in the whole
universe, that everything in this world, save that organ, should be
unconditioned and senseless, and that human thought alone should impart to
the universe a meaning and a reasonable harmony in its integrity. 

And he adds ą propos of Moleschott's materialism:-- 

Howsoever much fish and peas I may eat, never shall I consent to give away
my Ego into durance vile of a product casually extracted by modern alchemy
from the urine. If, in our conceptions of the Universe it be our fate to
fall into illusions, then my "illusion" has, at least, the advantage of
being very consoling. For, it shows to me an intelligent Universe and the
activity of Forces working in it harmoniously and intelligently; and that my
"I" is not the product of chemical and histological elements but an
embodiment of a common universal Mind. The latter, I sense and represent to
myself as acting in free will and consciousness in accordance with the same
laws which are traced for the guidance of my own mind, but only exempt from
that restraint which trammels our human conscious individuality. 

For, as remarks elsewhere this great and philosophic man of Science:-- 

The limitless and the eternal, is not only a postulate of our mind and
reason, but also a gigantic fact, in itself. What would become of our
ethical or moral principle were not the everlasting and integral truth to
serve it as a foundation! 
The above selections translated verbatim from the confessions of one who was
during his long life a star of the first magnitude in the fields of
pathology and surgery, show him imbued and soaked through with the
philosophy of a reasoned and scientific mysticism. In reading the Memoirs of
that man of scientific fame, we feel proud of finding him accepting, almost
wholesale, the fundamental doctrines and beliefs of Theosophy. With such an
exceptionally scientific mind in the ranks of mystics, the idiotic grins,
the cheap satires and flings at our great Philosophy by some European and
American "Freethinkers," become almost a compliment. More than ever do they
appear to us like the frightened discordant cry of the night-owl hurrying to
hide in its dark ruins before the light of the morning Sun. 

The progress of physiology itself, as we have just said, is a sure warrant
that the dawn of that day when a full recognition of a universally diffused
mind will be an accomplished fact, is not far off. It is only a question of
time. 

For, notwithstanding the boast of physiology, that the aim of its researches
is only the summing up of every vital function in order to bring them into a
definite order by showing their mutual relations to, and connection with,
the laws of physics and chemistry, hence, in their final form with
mechanical laws--we fear there is a good deal of contradiction between the
confessed object and the speculations of some of the best of our modern
physiologists. While few of them would dare to return as openly as did Dr.
Pirogoff to the "exploded superstition" of vitalism and the severely exiled
life principle, the principium vitę of Paracelsus--yet physiology stands
sorely perplexed in the face of its ablest representatives before certain
facts. Unfortunately for us, this age of ours is not conducive to the
development of moral courage. The time for most to act on the noble idea of
" principia non homines," has not yet come. And yet there are exceptions to
the general rule, and physiology--whose destiny it is to become the
hand-maiden of Occult truths--has not let the latter remain without their
witnesses. There are those who are already stoutly protesting against
certain hitherto favorite propositions. For instance, some physiologists are
already denying that it is the forces and substances of so-called
"inanimate" nature, which are acting exclusively in living beings. For, as
they well argue:-- 

The fact that we reject the interference of other forces in living things,
depends entirely on the limitations of our senses. We use, indeed, the same
organs for our observations of both animate and inanimate nature; and these
organs can receive manifestations of only a limited realm of motion.
Vibrations passed along the fibres of our optic nerves to the brain reach
our perceptions through our consciousness as sensations of light and color;
vibrations affecting our consciousness through our auditory organs strike us
as sounds; all our feelings, through whichever of our senses, are due to
nothing but motions. 
Such are the teachings of physical Science, and such were in their roughest
outlines those of Occultism, ęons and millenniums back. The difference,
however, and most vital distinction between the two teachings, is this:
official science sees in motion simply a blind, unreasoning force or law;
Occultism, tracing motion to its origin, identifies it with the Universal
Deity, and calls this eternal ceaseless motion--the "Great Breath." 1 

Nevertheless, however limited the conception of Modern Science about the
said Force, still it is suggestive enough to have forced the following
remark from a great Scientist, the present professor of physiology at the
University of Basle, 2 who speaks like an Occultist. 

It would be folly in us to expect to be ever able to discover, with the
assistance only of our external senses, in animate nature that something
which we are unable to find in the inanimate. 

And forthwith the lecturer adds that man being endowed "in addition to his
physical senses with an inner sense," a perception which gives him the
possibility of observing the states and phenomena of his own consciousness,
"he has to use that in dealing with animate nature"--a profession of faith
verging suspiciously on the borders of Occultism. He denies, moreover, the
assumption, that the states and phenomena of consciousness represent in
substance the same manifestations of motion as in the external world, and
bases his denial by the reminder that not all of such states and
manifestations have necessarily a spatial extension. According to him that
only is connected with our conception of space which has reached our
consciousness through sight, touch, and the muscular sense, while all the
other senses, all the effects, tendencies, as all the interminable series of
representations, have no extension in space but only in time. 

Thus he asks:-- 

Where then is there room in this for a mechanical theory? Objectors might
argue that this is so only in appearance, while in reality all these have a
spatial extension. But such an argument would be entirely erroneous. Our
sole reason for believing that objects perceived by the senses have such
extension in the external world, rests on the idea that they seem to do so,
as far as they can be watched and observed through the senses of sight and
touch. With regard, however, to the realm of our inner senses even that
supposed foundation loses its force and there is no ground for admitting it.


The winding up argument of the lecturer is most interesting to Theosophists.
Says this physiologist of the modern school of Materialism-- 

Thus, a deeper and more direct acquaintance with our inner nature unveils to
us a world entirely unlike the world represented to us by our external
senses, and reveals the most heterogeneous faculties, shows objects having
nought to do with spatial extension, and phenomena absolutely disconnected
with those that fall under mechanical laws. 

Hitherto the opponents of vitalism and "life-principle," as well as the
followers of the mechanical theory of life, based their views on the
supposed fact, that, as physiology was progressing forward, its students
succeeded more and more in connecting its functions with the laws of blind
matter. All those manifestations that used to be attributed to a "mystical
life-force," they said, may be brought now under physical and chemical laws.
And they were, and still are loudly clamoring for the recognition of the
fact that it is only a question of time when it will be triumphantly
demonstrated that the whole vital process, in its grand totality, represents
nothing more mysterious than a very complicated phenomenon of motion,
exclusively governed by the forces of inanimate nature. 

But here we have a professor of physiology who asserts that the history of
physiology proves, unfortunately for them, quite the contrary; and he
pronounces these ominous words:-- 

I maintain that the more our experiments and observations are exact and
many-sided, the deeper we penetrate into facts, the more we try to fathom
and speculate on the phenomena of life, the more we acquire the conviction,
that even those phenomena that we had hoped to be already able to explain by
physical and chemical laws, are in reality unfathomable. They are vastly
more complicated, in fact; and as we stand at present, they will not yield
to any mechanical explanation. 

This is a terrible blow at the puffed-up bladder known as Materialism, which
is as empty as it is dilated. A Judas in the camp of the apostles of
negation--the "animalists"! But the Basle professor is no solitary
exception, as we have just shown; and there are several physiologists who
are of his way of thinking; indeed some of them going so far as to almost
accept free-will and consciousness, in the simplest monadic protoplasms! 

One discovery after the other tends in this direction. The works of some
German physiologists are especially interesting with regard to cases of
consciousness and positive discrimination--one is almost inclined to say
thought--in the Amœbas. Now the Amœbas or animalculę are, as all know,
microscopical protoplasms--as the Vampyrella Sirogyra for instance, a most
simple elementary cell, a protoplasmic drop, formless and almost
structureless. And yet it shows in its behavior something for which
zoologists, if they do not call it mind and power of reasoning, will have to
find some other qualification, and coin a new term. For see what Cienkowsky
3 says of it. Speaking of this microscopical, bare, reddish cell he
describes the way in which it hunts for and finds among a number of other
aquatic plants one called Spirogyra, rejecting every other food. Examining
its peregrinations under a powerful microscope, he found it when moved by
hunger, first projecting its pseudopodię (false feet) by the help of which
it crawls. Then it commences moving about until among a great variety of
plants it comes across a Spirogyra, after which it proceeds toward the
cellulated portion of one of the cells of the latter, and placing itself on
it, it bursts the tissue, sucks the contents of one cell and then passes on
to another, repeating the same process. This naturalist never saw it take
any other food, and it never touched any of the numerous plants placed by
Cienkowsky in its way. Mentioning another Amœba--the Colpadella Pugnax--he
says that he found it showing the same predilection for the Chlamydomonas on
which it feeds exclusively; "having made a puncture in the body of the
Chlamydomonas it sucks its chlorophyl and then goes away," he writes, adding
these significant words: "The way of acting of these monads during their
search for and reception of food, is so amazing that one is almost inclined
to see in them consciously acting beings!" 

Not less suggestive are the observations of Th. W. Engelman (Beitraege zur
Physiologie des Protoplasm), on the Arcella, another unicellular organism
only a trifle more complex than the Vampyrella. He shows them in a drop of
water under a microscope on a piece of glass, lying so to speak, on their
backs, i.e., on their convex side, so that the pseudopodię, projected from
the edge of the shell, find no hold in space and leave the Amœba helpless.
Under these circumstances the following curious fact is observed. Under the
very edge of one of the sides of the protoplasm gas-bubbles begin
immediately to form, which, making that side lighter, allow it to be raised,
bringing at the same time the opposite side of the creature into contact
with the glass, thus furnishing its pseudo or false feet means to get hold
of the surface and thereby turning over its body to raise itself on all its
pseudopodię. After this, the Amœba proceeds to suck back into itself the
gas-bubbles and begins to move. If a like drop of water is placed on the
lower extremity of the glass, then, following the law of gravity the Amœbę
will find themselves at first at the lower end of the drop of water. Failing
to find there a point of support, they proceed to generate large bubbles of
gas, when, becoming lighter than the water, they are raised up to the
surface of the drop. 

In the words of Engelman:-- 

If having reached the surface of the glass they find no more support for
their feet than before, forthwith one sees the gas-globules diminishing on
one side and increasing in size and number on the other, or both, until the
creatures touch with the edge of their shell the surface of the glass, and
are enabled to turn over. No sooner is this done than the gas-globules
disappear and the Arcellae begin crawling. Detach them carefully by means of
a fine needle from the surface of the glass and thus bring them down once
more to the lower surface of the drop of water; and forthwith they will
repeat the same process, varying its details according to necessity and
devising new means to reach their desired aim. Try as much as you will to
place them in uncomfortable positions, and they find means to extricate
themselves from them, each time, by one device or the other; and no sooner
have they succeeded than the gas-bubbles disappear! It is impossible not to
admit that such facts as these point to the presence of some PSYCHIC process
in the protoplasm. 4 

-----------------	end Part I
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Dallas