To the savage, matter appears in two forms--solid and liquid.
As he advances a step he learns it has three forms--solid,
liquid and gas. He cannot see the gas, but he knows it is there.
A little further on he learns that matter as he knows it is only
a minute portion of the great universe of matter--the few chords
that can be struck on the five strings of his senses, and limited
to one octave or key.
Whether the particular matter he investigates has a solid, a
liquid, or a gaseous form depends upon its rate of vibration. If
it is a liquid, by raising its rate of vibration one third it
becomes a gas; by reducing it one third it becomes a solid.
Each kind of matter has vibration only through one octave. It is
known to us only by its vibration in that octave. Each kind of
matter has a different octave--is set on a higher or lower key,
so to speak, but all octaves of vibration are between the highest
of hydrogen gas and the lowest of carbon.
In mechanical compounds, such as air or brass, the rate of
vibration of the compound is the least common multiple of the two
or more rates. In chemical compounds, such as water or alcohol,
the rate is that of the highest, the others uniting in harmonic
fractions.
All matter as we know it through our senses--prakriti, as it is
called in the Secret Doctrine to distinguish it from non-sensual
matter--is the vibration of an universal Something, we do not
know what, through these different octaves. The elementary
substances (so-called) are one and the same thing--this
Something--in different keys and chords of vibration; keys that
run into one another, producing all sorts of beautiful harmonies.
Taking any one of these elements, or any of their compounds, all
we know of it is limited strictly to its changes during vibration
through one octave. What happens when the vibration goes above
or below the octave has not yet been treated hypothetically.
While some elements are vibrating on higher and some on lower
keys, we can consider them all as vibrating within one great
octave, that octave of the universal Something which produces
sensual matter, or prakriti.
But matter is not confined, we know, to this great octave,
although our sensual knowledge of it is strictly confined to it.
How do we know it?
Knowledge comes to us in two ways, and there are two kinds of
knowledge.
1. That which comes through our senses, by observation and
experience. This includes reasoning from relation.
2. That which comes through intuition--or, as some writers
inaccurately say, "through the formal laws of thought."
All the observation and experience of the rising and the setting
of the sun for a thousand centuries could only have confirmed the
first natural belief that it revolved daily around the earth;
nor by joining this experience with other experiences could any
deduction have come from our reason that would have opposed it.
Not our reason but our intuition said that the sun stood still
and the earth revolved daily. The oldest books in existence tell
us that this axial revolution of the earth was not only known in
the very dawn of time but that it has been known to every race
(except our own of European savages) from before the time thought
was first transmitted by writing.
Ask the ablest living geographer or physicist to prove to you
that the earth revolves daily and he will reply that it would be
the job of his life. It can be done at great expense and great
labor, but that is because we know the answer and can invent a
way of showing it, not because there are any observations from
which a deduction would naturally follow.
Nearly if not all our great discoveries have come to us through
intuition and not from observation and experience. When we know
the lines on which to work, when intuition has given us the KEY,
then the observation and experience men prize so highly, and the
reason they worship so devoutly, will fill in the details. The
knowledge that flows from observation and the reasoning from the
facts it records, is never more than relatively true, it is
always limited by the facts, and any addition to the facts
requires the whole thing to be restated. We never know all the
facts; seldom even the more important; and reason grasps only
details.
Lamarck's theory of evolution, known to all Asiatic races from
time immemorial, was the intuitional and absolute knowledge that
comes to all men when they reach a certain stage of development.
Reason could never have furnished it from the facts, as Cuvier
proved in the great debate in the French Academy in 1842, when he
knocked Lamarck out, for the time being, because "it did not
conform to the facts, and did not follow from any relation of the
facts."
Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest in the struggle
for existence, as an explanation of the origin of species, was
from observation and experience. It was based on observed facts.
But Darwin was an evolutionist--a disciple of Lamarck. He held
the Key. He used the Key. The value of Darwin's work does not
lie in his discovering that some bugs have been derived from
other bugs and that the intermediate bugs have died off. Its
overwhelming value to mankind was in showing that work on the
theory of evolution was correct work and that the theory was
true. When the intuition of man points out the way the reason of
man can follow the path and macadam the road. It usually does
and claims all the credit for itself as the original discoverer.
This knowledge through intuition is absolute and exact. It is
not relatively true. It is absolutely and invariably true. No
additional facts will ever modify it, or require a restatement.
When Sir William Hamilton based his Logic on the dictum that "All
knowledge is relative, and only relatively true," the proposition
was self-evidently false. It was in itself a statement of
absolute knowledge about a certain thing. It was in itself
knowledge that was not relative. All knowledge could not be
relative if this knowledge was not. This knowledge could not
be either absolute or relative without upsetting his whole
proposition, for, if relative, then it was not always true;
and if absolute, then it was never true.
Sir William did not know the distinction between the two kinds of
knowledge, and what he meant to say was that "All knowledge
obtained by observation and experience is relative, and only
relatively true."
His knowledge of this relativity was not obtained by observation
or from reason. It could not possibly have been obtained in that
way. It came from intuition, and it was absolute and exact. A
man may have absolute and exact knowledge and yet not be able to
put it into words that exactly express it to another. Hamilton
had this knowledge. But it was not clearly formulated even in
his own mind. He had two separate and distinct meanings for the
word "knowledge," without being conscious of it.
We have yet to coin a proper word to express what comes to us
through intuition. The old English word "wisdom" originally did.
The old verb "wis" was meant what a man knew without being told
it, as "ken" meant knowledge by experience. Try and prove by
reason that a straight line is the shortest distance between two
points, or that a part can never be greater than the whole, and
your reason has an impossible task. "You must take them for
axioms," it says. You must take them because you wis them, not
because you know (ken) them.
Intuitional knowledge must not be confounded with the relative
knowledge that flows through the reason: that "If the sum of two
numbers is one and their difference is five," the numbers are
minus two and plus three.
The point cannot be too strongly enforced that there is a
distinction between the sources of what we know, and that while
all we know through our sensations is only relatively true, that
which we know from intuition is invariably and absolutely true.
This is seen through a glass darkly, in theology, where intuition
is called inspiration and not differentiated from reason.
The false notion that we can only learn by observation and
experience, that the concept can never transcend the observation,
that we can only know what we can prove to our senses, has
wrought incalculable injury to progress in philosophy.
Because our sensual knowledge of matter begins and ends with
vibration in one octave it does not follow that this ends our
knowledge of it. We may have intuitional knowledge, and this
intuitional knowledge is as susceptible to reason as if we had
obtained it by observation.
The knowledge that comes through intuition tells us of matter
vibrating in another great octave just beyond our own, which
Science has chosen to name the etheric octave, or plane. The
instant our intuition reveals the cause of phenomena our reason
drops in and tells us it is the chording vibration of the matter
of the two planes--the physical and etheric--that produces all
physical phenomena. It goes further and explains its variations.
This knowledge of another octave or plane of matter comes from
the logical relations of matter and its physical phenomena; but
there was nothing in the observation or experience of mankind
that would have led us to infer from reason an etheric plane of
matter. It was "revealed" truth. But the flash of revelation
having once made the path apparent, the light of reason carries
us through all the winding ways. Our knowledge of the ether is
not guess-work or fancy, any more than our geometry is, because
it is based on axioms our reason cannot prove. In both cases the
basic axioms are obtained from intuition; the structural work
from reason. Our knowledge of the ether may be as absolute and
exact as our knowledge of prakriti, working on physical as we
work on geometrical axioms.
The recognition of the two sources of knowledge, the work of the
spirit within us and of the mind within us, is absolutely
necessary to correctly comprehend the true significance of the
results of modern science and to accept the ancient.