Part I

Lectures to the Public

The Changing World

Lecture I

The Deadlock in Religion, Science, and Art

Friends: if you stand on the seashore when the tide is flowing inwards,

and if you watch the waves as they ripple up, one after another, each

coming a little further than its predecessor, each in turn breaking and

making way for its follower—in the inflowing tide you have a picture of

the evolving races of mankind. And if you watch the method of the flow,

you will notice that that which is the most prominent at the moment

is not the one which creeps furthest up the sands. The wave which is

breaking into foam, which is rippling over the pebbles, which throws

up the broken water, which falls back on to the land and makes music,

sound, melody as it breaks—that is the wave which is nearly over; it

is the wave whose course is run. But if you watch you will notice that

while your attention was caught by the noise of the breaking wave, by the

foam of the billow that was almost over, silently, imperceptibly almost,

visible only to the eye that watches, another wave is rising behind it,

silently, without break, without noise, without attracting attention;

but the wave that is rising silently behind the breaker—that is the wave

which will follow on the billow that has broken, and will run further up

the sands than the breaking wave had gone.

In that familiar picture, which every child who has gone to the seaside

knows so well, is a figure of the great tide of evolution, in which races

are waves and the ocean humanity itself. And each great wave—the great

wave that comes at intervals—is a race, and the smaller waves that come

between are the sub-races which the race bears. Just as with the water,

so with humanity: as one sub-wave is breaking, having reached its highest

point, another is rising silently behind it, which shall rule the world

when the breaking wave has spent its force. Then, from time to time, to

those who have eyes to see, on the crest of the breaking wave appears the

mighty angel that we call the Spirit of the Age, and his feet are on the

wave, and his locks mingle with the rays of the sun, and he cries out in

a voice of thunder: Behold I make a new heaven and a new earth in which

righteousness shall dwell.

In such a day, in such a time, we of the present age are living. The wave

of the sub-race to which we all belong, or nearly all of us, _that_ is

breaking on the shore of time; the wave behind it of the race that shall

be, to whom the new heaven and the new earth shall be a habitation—_that_

is the race which is coming to the birth, which, in its turn, shall

rule this changing earth. For many and many a century, nay, even for

millennia, the slow course of evolution goes on quietly without much

observation, and then suddenly comes a change—a change of a dying and

a birthing race, a transition stage, a transition age in which all

movement is rapid, in which catastrophes are frequent, in which sudden

changes make themselves felt, in which men grow in a year more than their

forefathers grew perhaps in a century. In such a transition age again

the world is standing at the present time. Behind us, the long centuries

through which the great Aryan race has been sending out wave after wave

of humanity in successive billows, sweeping over Asia and over Europe,

one after another rising, growing, ruling, and then passing to its fall.

During all the time of a sub-race, the world rolls down what have been

called the grooves of change, steadily, quietly, without much of jolt or

of trouble; the wheels running fairly smoothly, continuously, with little

of shock. And then, again, the time comes when a new sub-race must be

born, when another shall succeed and the old shall pass away.

If you look around you now, on every side you will see the signs of a

closing age; thoughts which have reached a point beyond which they cannot

continue on the old lines and in the old methods, that which I have

called a deadlock; in all the most important departments of human thought

and human activity, rapid, extraordinarily rapid, growth. The changes

which the elder amongst us have seen are marvellous exceedingly, change

succeeding change, and each change greater than the one before it, until

the whole of society seems to be rushing onwards swiftly without a pause,

and men wonder what the next thought will be, what the next development

will forebode.

It is not, of course, for the first time in human history that such a

period as this has come upon the world. Look back to the time when the

sub-race preceding the Teutonic was at the zenith of its power, and see

then how troubled were the minds of men. It was the time that was marked

by the birth of Him who is known in western lands as the Christ—a period

of swift transition like our own, of marked and sudden changes. And if to

the people of that day you had said, as I am now saying to you: “You are

in one of the great transition periods of the world’s history; the race

that is dominant and imperial is really reaching its zenith, and after

the zenith comes the slow descent, inevitable, sure”; if you had said to

the people of the time that among them would come a mighty Teacher who

should revolutionise the future world and change the very foundations of

civilisation; who should change the type of religion for the foremost

races of the world; who should lift up a different ethical code, and

make that virtuous which before had been despised, and that which had

been looked down upon the topmost crown of saintship—if to the people of

that day you had spoken such words, they would have laughed at you as

dreamer or threatened you as madman. For why should the world change on

its appointed ways, and why should the feet of the world seek to tread

new and untrodden paths? And yet there were many who felt a change was

coming; yet there were prophets and seers who spoke of a coming kingdom

and a coming Teacher, and changes which should alter the face of the

world. Of little use to look back to those far-off times if you repeat in

your own day the blindness of the people then; for surely in these two

thousand years men should have learned something more of wisdom, their

eyes should have gained something more of insight, and the signs of a

closing age should be more palpable to them than in the days of their

forerunners in the closing age of Rome.

Even at that time a future was spoken of where changes should again

occur, where a great Teacher should again appear, where a new age should

be born, a new heaven and a new earth should be seen. It is in that next

transition age, then, that you and I are standing; and although many

of you may say, as they would have said of old, that I am a dreamer or

am mad, none the less will I strive to tell you this evening, and the

Sundays that follow, something of the signs by which you may judge for

yourselves whether a great change is not coming over the world, whether

there is not coming a new kingdom and a mighty Teacher, whether in our

days again, as in the days of the past, the world is not to take on a new

form and a nobler type of humanity to live and rule on earth, for many

are the signs of the age that is closing, and many the signs also of the

day that is dawning upon earth. In this and in the following lecture we

shall be dealing with the dying, not the race which is to be born; and if

in some ways, therefore, these two lectures may seem a little gloomy or

a little grey, then I would remind you that the night must come before

the dawn, and the greyness of the sky before the sunrising. If we can see

behind the greyness the first faint gleams of the rose-tipped fingers

of the dawn, ah! then we need not mind that the night is still with us,

for the night is closing, and we, the children of the day, shall see the

rising of the sun.

I have taken for this evening three great departments of human

thought—Religion, Science, Art; and our task now is to see whether,

looking over the world of religion, of science, and of art, we can find

that the old methods have carried us as far as we can go, that they are

breaking in our hands, that we no longer can use them for opening up new

vistas of thought and hope for man. On every side there is a feeling of

uncertainty, a feeling, I might almost say, of distress; a questioning

what is truth, what is reliable? where can we find some rock on which we

may put our feet amid all the buffeting of various opinions, of doubt,

nay, of scepticism and unbelief?

I.—RELIGION.

What is the position of the religious world to-day? First of all,

there have been working in it now for many long years certain forces

undermining the religion of the time; and when I speak now of religion, I

mean the religion of the West, for I am speaking in the West; although I

might show you that in other parts of the world as well the same forces

are at work, though not quite so prominently, and have brought about

there to some extent the same results. Now, it is not from the mouth of

a Theosophist like myself that I would ask you to take the testimony as

to the difficulties in which the religious world finds itself to-day, and

on the most important points of which I shall touch, after drawing your

attention to the destructive forces that have been undermining religion,

I shall take my testimony from bishop and from clergyman in their

published writings, which all may read who will. The undermining forces

that I allude to are chiefly three, and each destructive; the absence

of construction is one of the signs of the day that is closing. First,

as you know well, the undermining which has been done by scholarship

in Christendom, in which what is called the higher criticism has been

tearing to pieces the documents on which historical Christianity has been

built up—taking one after another, examining, studying, scrutinising,

comparing one kind of language with another kind in the same document;

pointing out marks of different ages where a single writer was supposed

to have been speaking, and gradually collecting from all sides different

readings, placing them side by side, and finding them to a very great

extent mutually destructive. So far has that gone, as you know, that, not

so very long ago, the whole of this line of investigation was condemned

by the authoritative head of the great Roman Catholic communion. The

higher criticism, the historical dealing with Church teaching and Church

history, the analysing, scrutinising, investigating spirit of our own

time—the whole of that, with all its results, has been condemned and

forbidden to be taught within the teaching establishments of the great

Roman communion; the results of historical criticism have been banned,

and, most fatal of all policies, kept largely out of the knowledge of

those who are to become the teachers of the generations that are to be

born. Is there any wonder, if you look at it only from the outside point?

For where religion is a matter of authority, of books, of successions, of

historical events, there criticism must always destroy; the form changes,

and cannot remain stable in a transitory world, and we find the ancient

documents shorn of their ancient value; we find inspiration, limited and

fettered to words instead of the spirit, failing to hold its own against

the critical scholarship of the day. One defence after another is thrown

up, only to be abandoned before the approaching tide, as children throw

up castles in the sand, dreaming that sand castles can stop the flow

of waves. You know, on every side questions have arisen in regard to

documents; most disheartening and discouraging if religion were a matter

of books and words, and not a matter of the living and divine spirit in

man, which no criticism is able to destroy. For, out of it all, thought

arises and all criticism itself has birth. But, for the moment, in that

tearing to pieces of the documents, one great inroad is made on the

religion of the time.

Then, if you turn to another destructive force that has been undermining

popular religion, you find it in archæological research; you find it in

what is called comparative mythology, built up out of the results of

that research; unburied cities, unburied libraries, unburied tombs—they

have all given up their longhidden secrets, and those secrets have

been used as weapons against the religion of the West. Dates have been

thrown overboard, hundreds of years have been lengthened into millions;

archæology, geology, antiquarianism of every kind, researches into

long-dead races have all given the same result, shaking the very

foundations on which it was thought, however wrongly, that religion

must be built. Out of all this undermining, this destruction, from the

continuously critical spirit of man, have arisen doubt and question

and half-scepticism, and only a hope instead of a knowledge, only an

aspiration instead of a living faith. And beyond those minor questions

of religion which can be touched by this kind of destructive criticism,

beyond and above those, the central ideas of religion have been thrown

into the Crucible of Reason. The idea of God Himself has been under

discussion, argued about, reasoned about, and the conception of God

has changed. Who now dreams of troubling himself much about Butler’s

_Analogy_? Who now would spend his time poring over Paley’s _Evidence_?

These are out of date, and they do not deal with the questions of the

time; for the thought of Evolution has affected religion, and the central

conception of Deity has not been able to escape the corrosion of that

atmosphere of thought. Here, again, outward demonstrations are failing,

outward reasonings fail to satisfy. Reason, though piled upon reason,

can give no more than a reasonable probability, so long as you watch

for God only in the outer world, and not in His highest manifestation,

the Spirit which lives in yourself. The idea of an extra-cosmic God is

gradually disappearing from the world of thought. The idea of a God who

made the universe as a piece of machinery, and stood outside it while

the wheels were turning and the bands were working—that idea has almost

passed away; and instead of that a God immanent in everything, a God who

is a life and not a mechanician, a God who is an informing Spirit and

not an outside creator—that nobler, more exquisite idea is dawning on

the religious world to-day. But still, to see Him only immanent in the

universe, that is not the final answer of religion; there is something

more that is needed than the God who is found within the universe

and within man, that mighty truth which is spoken out in an Eastern

scripture: “I established this universe with a portion of Myself, and I

remain.” That is one of the new avenues of thought, of escape from the

destructive forces of the thought that we are considering.

Along another of the great Christian concepts there is much of trouble

and of difficulty to-day. I take here, for a moment, one of a series of

remarkable articles that appeared in the _Hibbert Journal_ for January

last, one perhaps of the finest numbers that have been issued, dealing

with this question of the time. One of these articles has a strange title

which marks out the crux of many a mind to-day; the title is, “Jesus or

Christ?”; not “Jesus Christ,” not “Jesus and Christ,” but “Jesus _or_

Christ?”; natural enough if it were written by a Theosophist, but this

is written by a minister of a Christian church, and he confesses, with

wonderful candour and boldness, the difficulties that all must face who

are dealing on the one side with a spiritual ideal and on the other with

a man. He asks whether the claims made are on behalf of a spiritual

ideal, to which provisionally the word “Christ” may be applied, or

are they predicated of Jesus; he then goes through a number of these

difficulties (many of you would do well to read the article at your

leisure), pointing out in how many cases in the New Testament you come

across limitations, acceptance of the thought of the time, and many

other difficulties which clash with the idea that this was Very God of

Very God. “No condemnation,” he points out, “in the Sermon on the Mount

is passed on the harsh and cruel law of debtor and creditor, nor would

efforts for legal reform find any encouragement from the words attributed

to the Master here. On non-resistance and oath-taking the rule attributed

to Jesus is absolute. Yet, as a whole, Christendom has openly violated

it throughout its history.” He then speaks of the view which is taken of

man in relation to woman, of the “iniquitous principle of sex-inferiority

as against woman,” a principle that “has inflicted infinite suffering

on half of the human race.” And so he goes on, taking up point after

point, and declaring that this conclusion can no longer be avoided—that

to identify Jesus with Christ is to “make God a Being who is omnipotent,

yet limited in power; omniscient, yet defective in knowledge; infinitely

good, yet One who declines ‘to turn any part of His knowledge as God into

science for man.’ … It would be an abuse of language to say that this is

a mystery. It is flat contradiction.” Now when a clergyman can write like

that in a publication that goes almost exclusively among the educated

classes, you can realise how great is the difficulty which is confronting

modern thought with regard to the personality of Jesus and the larger

revelation of the Christ.

It is not possible that questions like this can remain always unanswered,

that they should ever be asked and no reply be found; Christendom

inevitably must work its way to some reasonable solution, and find how

in that marvellous personality there was a divine revelation as men have

hoped and believed, and how there is an answer, although orthodoxy as yet

may not be prepared to give it. And if you pass from religion proper,

as we may say, to the great domain of morals which is so closely bound

up with it, see how difficult is the position at the present time. Now,

since I was last here in London, you have had a Moral Education Congress,

to which no less than twenty-two of the European Governments sent their

best representatives. Intense interest was felt in the question of

education as part of religion or apart from it. It is one of the most

serious social questions of the day, one which society must answer: Shall

morals be based on religion and sanctioned by religion, or can they find

standing ground apart from, separate from it? Now, the ordinary popular

answer of the day is rather in favour of the second—that morals should

find an independent ground apart from the sanction of religion. And

that is not unnatural, because the quarrels of religious bodies, their

disputes over the question of education, have practically wearied the

mind of England, and men and women get impatient with the struggles over

trivialities where the moral training of tens of thousands of boys and

girls, the future citizens of the country, is concerned. If you take

that Moral Education Congress, the point was put very strongly and very

plainly. Here, again, in this number of the _Hibbert_ that I am dealing

with, we find a very brief article speaking of that and of the relation

of education to religion; and the writer speaks of one remarkable speech

at the Education Congress, in which it was declared that while children

should be taught “the respect due to the idea of religion … they are to

be taught that the chief mode of honouring God consists in each doing

his duty according to his conscience and his reason.” Now that is a

statement that would find very wide acceptance at the present day, and

yet its value or its lack of value depends on two words, “conscience”

and “reason.” If the conscience be unenlightened, there will be very

little useful service done to man by the boys and girls who follow that

conscience as men and women. The enlightened conscience is truly the

foundation of a State, but the unenlightened may lead men into every

kind of crime. The inquisitor followed his conscience when he racked the

heretic and sent him to the stake. Laud followed his conscience when

he persecuted, tortured, mutilated Puritans who would not bow before

him. Conscience has committed the greatest crimes against nations and

against individuals; conscience must be enlightened before it is a safe

guide. And so also with reason. If the reason is developed, illuminated,

cultured, trained, that reason might indeed, be followed along the path

of life; but a reason that is not exercised according to the laws of

logic and right thinking may be as irrational as though the name of

reason were not applied to it. It is not enough to teach that men should

follow conscience and reason unless you train the reason and illuminate

the conscience.

Now, how is that to be done? It has been done in the past by religion

to a very great extent. Can society afford to try to teach morals apart

from religion? Difficulties naturally arise here, and the Bishop of

Tasmania has very bravely drawn the attention of the empire to the

difficulty which is in the face of religious teaching. He points out that

the Old Testament is not a book which, as a whole, can be used for the

instruction in morals of the Christian child. Can the Old Testament, he

asks, be used in that way? and the answer is in the negative. He points

out that you can find in the Old Testament magnificent moral passages

and splendid moral inspiration, but that is by a process of selection,

in which you apply the moral conscience to discrimination in ancient

writings. Bishop as he is, he is brave enough to declare that the Old

Testament as a whole ought not to find its place in the education of

the child. Now, suppose that we admit—and most thoughtful people would

admit—that you must select and choose carefully, that is not a sufficient

answer to the question. Can you effectively teach the child morals

without falling back upon religion? Are you prepared to admit that you

can teach a certain class of virtues without religious sanction; not

those which are the favourite virtues, we may say, of the present day

of competition and of struggle? You can teach a child to be prudent,

thrifty, cautious; you can teach him the value of acquisitiveness, and

the duty of providing for the future. All that kind of virtue you may be

able to teach on a purely utilitarian ground, as it is called, but, as is

again pointed out in a remarkably able article on “The Social Conscience

of the Future,” certain old-fashioned traits, once considered to be

virtues, are now commonly accounted to men for vices. Non-resistance, for

example, “is now considered cowardice; meekness to-day is usually spelt

weakness; taking no thought for the morrow is known as improvidence;

unworldliness is generally viewed as a phase of sentimentality.” That

is all quite true. But how are you going to teach the virtues that

hitherto have been rooted in religion—virtues without which no State can

endure? For you cannot teach the civic virtues on a basis of enlightened

selfishness. That is a point that all educators of the young must

remember. Self-sacrifice, compassion, the willingness to endure for the

sake of others, the taking of the burden of the weak on the shoulders

that are strong, the realisation that duty is greater than rights, and

responsibility more vital than self-protection—how are you going to teach

those virtues on the basis of selfishness? Now I have argued that in the

old days, and have tried to show, in the time when I was a sceptic, that

you might train people to self-sacrifice and self-surrender by an appeal

to the humanity within them, and the sense of duty to the race; but that

appeal fails the most readily in the cases where the virtues are most

required.

It appeals to the noble, but the majority are not noble; it appeals to

the unselfish and the heroic, but the majority are of mediocre courage

and of very limited unselfishness; it appeals to those who do not need

it, and it leaves cold and unmoved those who need it most. Will you go

to the millionaire who has built up his vast fortune by the ruin of

hundreds of families, and speak to him of the beauty of self-sacrifice

and the splendour of self-surrender? The answer of people of the selfish

type is: Why should I sacrifice myself for the future? or, as the

witty Frenchman put it: “What has posterity done for me that I should

sacrifice myself for posterity?” You may say that is very mean, very

selfish. It is; but then, those are the people who want the compulsory

force of moral strength applied to them. Where are you going to find it?

For without self-sacrifice no society is secure; without self-surrender

of the small to the great, of the individual to the social self, there

is no possibility of national life, no stability in the social system;

and those are virtues that grow out of religion, not out of what is

falsely called utility. The greatest utility for the nation is that which

understands the relationship between the part and the whole, and that is

only taught by religion which knows the larger Self, which knits man to

the whole, makes him realise relationships, makes him know he is not a

creature of one little globe, but a creature of the universe; that he is

a cosmic life, and not a planetary. That is learned by religion only, and

by the deathless immortality of the divine Spirit in man; without that,

no morality will endure; and you will make a fatal blunder if, because of

the passing follies of religionists, you throw religion out of its place

in education, of which it is the inspiration and the strength.

These are some of the problems you have to deal with in this deadlock,

as I have called it, of religion. In fact, you want a new religious and

moral synthesis; and you cannot find that without the higher inspiration

for which man is groping now.

II.—SCIENCE.

Let us leave that deadlock—(I will try to solve it in another

lecture)—and let us take the deadlock in science. Now that is very

curious at the present time. Science is essentially in the West, as it

is everywhere, a matter of observation, of measurement, of estimating

quantities and understanding relations. But our science is coming to the

end of its powers along these lines in a very curious and marked way. It

cannot get its apparatus more delicate than it has got it; its balances

are marvels, measuring inappreciable parts of an almost inappreciable

grain. Nothing more exquisite than the delicacy of scientific apparatus,

nothing more a testimony to the accuracy of the scientific mind. And

yet how the apparatus is failing the scientist! how his observations

are becoming increasingly difficult! What can he do with the atom? The

chemist, the physicist, can he follow the atom and make that still a

matter of observation, or does it wholly escape him? is the chemist,

the physicist, now obliged to turn to the mathematician to make for him

an atom which will answer the demands of the science which is unable

to discover it for itself? All the later arguments on the atom, if you

notice, are based on mathematical formulæ; they cannot observe; it is too

fine, delicate, minute—it escapes them. Even the chemical atom, which is

four degrees below the ultimate physical atom, is a matter on which they

are compelled to reason because they cannot observe. But a science which

reasons without those reasons being based on observations is no science

as the West has known it up to the present time. All scientific reasoning

is supposed to be based on observation; and if, instead of that,

scientists have to fall back on reason where observation fails them,

then a new method must be discovered, and new ways must be trodden. I

do not say there is no new method; I do not say there are not new ways;

but they are not the methods and the ways of the science of our own time.

And there comes in this difficulty: the minute is escaping science by

its minuteness, the subtle is too subtle for its investigation. If that

be true—and it is true of chemistry and physics, and true also to a very

great extent of electricity—we find that all the sciences are coming up

to the borderland in which their methods fail them, and their senses no

longer answer to the delicacy of the waves that beat upon them from the

outer world. They are leaving behind them the gross and the dense; that

is conquered, it is theirs; the subtle and the rare, those escape them;

and the instruments of brass, of glass, nay, even of sensitive needles,

they are not fine enough nor subtle enough to carry investigation further.

In other realms of science the same difficulties are arriving.

Psychology—where have all the facts of the new psychology come from?

From scientific men? Not a bit of it! From frauds and charlatans, from

mesmerists and spiritualists and theosophists, and all these “ists”

that popular science looks down upon and says are entirely outside the

pale of scientific respect. And yet from these they gather their facts,

from these they are obliged to take the strange new psychological facts

that are revolutionising all the ideas of consciousness and the powers

which lie hidden in the human mind. Those facts are accumulating from

the hands of all these improper people, and when science gets them it

cannot explain them. It can only rearrange them and rename them, and

call mesmerism “hypnotism,” and clairvoyance “autoscopy.” But all that

relabelling and all that rearranging cannot veil the fundamental fact

that it has no theory into which these facts can fit, and no explanation

which arranges them in a rational order. In psychology, as in chemistry,

physics, and electricity, there is a deadlock.

And medicine, what about that? Doctors are beginning to think less and

less of drugs. In my young days an honest doctor once told me that he

sometimes gave coloured water and bread pills to people whom he knew

would get on much better if they did not have drugs, but they were so

determined to have them that he was obliged to give them something so

he gave them harmless things. That idea has grown. Doctors have less

and less faith in drugs, and they admit more and more widely that their

medical science is very largely a hand-to-mouth thing, empirical, based

on no true theory—experimental, as they say. But, in despair of finding

the right road to health, they have gone down the terrible byway of

Vivisection, trying to wring from Nature, by the torture of her more

helpless children, the secrets which otherwise they were unable to find.

But that is a fatal road; it is leading medicine further and further

away from any true science of healing, and is turning it into a science

of poisoning instead; medicine is becoming a matter of balancing one

poison against another, so that in the middle of the balanced poisons

you may be able to get some miserable remnant of health. When doctors

find something they do not understand, they say: “Oh, let us try it on an

animal; better try it on an animal than a man.” Yes; but if the animal

does not give the same result, and if that which is poison to man is

not poison to the animal, then the results of your experiment may be a

widespread, unintentional poisoning added to the intentional poisonings

of the day. There comes in one danger, that perhaps may make people

rather less ready to take the results of vivisection. Take henbane: goats

feed quite comfortably on henbane; it would kill you. If, when people

wanted to know the effects of henbane on the human system, they tried it

on goats, many human deaths would have followed on the result of that

particular use of the experimental method. What is being done with all

these miserable results of this mistaken and blinded science, all these

serums and toxins, and all the rest of the things which they are now

pouring into the human body? They are lowering the vitality of the race;

they are diminishing the disease-resisting power of the man. I do not say

that you cannot make a man immune for a time by slowly poisoning him,

so that when a dose of the poison comes it will have no effect. You can

do it with arsenic; you can put so much arsenic into a human body that

the arsenic-poisoned person can take a dose of arsenic without death.

Do you tell me that is health? I say it is disease, and that all these

miserable methods are lowering the vitality of the human body, and making

it a prey to innumerable diseases under the pretence of saving it from a

few. Health is not got by poisonings, however carefully graduated. Health

is brought about by pure living, pure food, moral self-control, and by

becoming the master and not the slave of your appetites and passions. It

is a road that leads to death, and not to life, when you want to live

evilly, and be cured of the results of evil living out of the things

which are wrung from the tortured bodies of the animal kingdom. And

so there again there is a deadlock, for even the vivisectionists are

beginning to be a little afraid of the results that they have drawn from

their investigations. There are answers to the problems of disease, but

they do not lie along this line.

III.—ART.

What of art? Now, very many people, I am afraid, in this and other

countries, do not realise that beauty is a necessity of daily life for

the human being, and when he does not get it he is less man, less woman,

than he ought to be. It is not a question as to whether you should have

a beautiful thing as a luxury; it is a necessity, and it should be the

daily bread of life. Nations which knew the value of beauty made their

towns beautiful; their works of art were made common property, their

buildings were exquisitely proportioned, their architecture magnificent,

and out of all that, open always to the masses of the people, grew a

beauty of form and a beauty of mind that cannot possibly grow up in

a nation where the towns are allowed to be hideous, where the air is

poisoned, and where all the common things of life are ugly instead of

beautiful. There is one thing in India that I have often complained of;

it will not strike you here so much as it would inevitably strike you

there. The old Indian life was a life full of beauty. Even now, out in

the villages, life is beautiful. The garments of men and women alike are

graceful, flowing, exquisite in colour. If you see an Indian peasant

woman working in the fields she is a picture to paint, for the grace

of her drapery, for the beauty of the colours that she wears; and if

you see her going to the village well to draw water, she will carry on

her head some vessel, it may be of beaten bronze or copper, it may be

of kneaded clay, it will always be beautiful in form and exquisite in

colour, Nowadays, since our civilisation has spread its power through

India, things are changing; aniline dyes are replacing vegetable dyes;

kerosene oil tins are replacing the exquisite vessels of the older days.

In the old days in a village, when there was a wedding, every house

contributed some of its beautiful vessels for the village festival; but

now those have been cast aside, and miserable tin vessels take their

place. It is only a small thing, you may say; I assure you it is a very

great thing; for to kill out the sense of beauty which comes by living

in contact with Nature—for Nature is beautiful everywhere, and contact

with her beautifies the human face and form and mind—the killing-out of

that sense of beauty which grows out of the mountains and the rivers,

and the meadows and the groves, that is a national loss, and spells

national decay. The garden cities you are beginning to build, those

are not mere fancies of fanciful people, but a wise attempt to get the

people out of the hideousness of bricks and mortar as they are used in

England, into the country, where life still is fair, and where sunshine

and colour are supreme. The life is poor where there is no beauty, and

life itself grows common, vulgar, where beauty is not a dominating force.

It is one of the great revelations of God Himself, for beauty lies in

perfection of harmony, in exquisiteness of outline, in loveliness of

colour, and all those things are characteristics of the Divine Workman,

whose manifestation is always in beauty, while wisdom and power underlie

it. You may see it in your own works of art. They are not creative but

imitative, and that is the sign that art along that line has reached its

ending and must find a new inspiration. Sometimes people say you cannot

improve upon Nature; but you can show them what there is in Nature which

the blinded eyes of ordinary people do not see. Take a flower: true, the

flower is beautiful; a little nature-spirit made it, and caught as much

of the divine thought of beauty as that small intelligence was able to

conceive; do you tell me that when the artist comes the divine life is

not far more largely evolved in him than in that little nature-spirit,

that he cannot catch more of God’s thought in the flower than the

nature-spirit was able to express? And that is what the great painter,

poet, musician does; he hears and sees and tells the thoughts of God more

fully than you and I can do with our dull ears and our limited vision and

our clumsy tongues. It is there, but we cannot see it. The artist is the

revealer of the divine beauty in form, and unless he can do that he is no

true artist at all. The artist has yet to come to this civilisation—the

man who can see through the forms of the present the divine idea which is

striving to express itself in new ideals, new hopes, new powers. These

are wanted for art, and these shall come in the days that are dawning;

and a new art shall be found in the new heavens and the new earth.

So, although I have taken you to-day along a dreary path—for I have been

speaking of the passing, and not the coming—it is because I want you to

realise in the signs of the world around you that you are in the midst

of a closing age; not only that you may know it—that is little—but that

out of the knowledge of the closing you may prepare for the race which

is to be born. For unless you understand, you cannot guide your steps

aright; unless you understand, the world will be a mere puzzle, and not

an expression of the divine thought. The age that is closing has done its

work, has trained the concrete mind, has trained the scientific thought,

has developed power and strength and energy—all good gifts of God, to be

used for nobler purposes than they are used for to-day. There is nothing

to regret, nothing to be sorry for, nothing to wish otherwise in the

world that is dying. It has done its work; but it is ours to come out of

the dying world into a world that is new, and it is out of the dying into

the coming world that I would fain try to lead your thoughts, and perhaps

your lives as well.

Lecture II

The Deadlock in Social Conditions: Luxury and Want Face to Face

Friends: I am to speak to you to-night on a subject which is a little

outside our ordinary theosophical lectures. The Theosophist, as a rule,

studies and talks about causes more than effects, concerning himself

more with the getting rid of the causes of misery than with the effects

that grow out of those causes and show themselves as particular forms

of misery. Because of that he is sometimes called unpractical. But that

is a misuse of words; for to understand the causes of misery and to

remove them is far more practical than cutting off the tops of the weeds

while you allow the roots to remain underground to reproduce new weeds

to-morrow. To say that study with the discussion which grows out of it is

unpractical is very much as though you declared that it was a practical

thing to send out nurses and doctors to a field of battle to cut off

limbs that had been shattered and to nurse the cripples back to health,

and denied that to try to remove the causes of war was practical. Now,

I admit that sending out nurses and doctors is a practical thing, but

I allege that to work for the substitution of arbitration for war is a

great deal more practical. So with the particular things with which I am

to deal to-night. I am dealing with effects, but only with a view to lead

you on to the study of causes, and to the fundamental changes that will

have to be made in the building up of a greater and nobler civilisation.

Part of the way to turn men’s minds in that direction, and to give them

the necessary impulse of working for the higher and the greater, is to

show them the intolerable nature of conditions among which we are living

to-day. In doing that, I am by no means going astray from the teaching

and the example of that great and misunderstood woman to whom I owe all

that is happiest and best in my life, H. P. Blavatsky. Some of you who

are students of Theosophy may remember that in her _Key to Theosophy_

she speaks about the misery of the East End of London, and utters words

of praise for the attempts which were being made to change it. She did a

good deal more than speak words of praise; for one day, after I had been

telling her of some of the piteous sights that I was seeing day by day as

member of the London School Board, as it was then, for the East End of

London, I had on the following morning a little characteristic note, in

which she enclosed a couple of sovereigns, saying: “You know I am only

a pauper, but give these to the little children who asked you yesterday

for a flower.” Similarly, that quick sympathy with human suffering came

out in an instance in which very few of us, perhaps, would be prepared

to follow her example. She was going to America, and only had just money

enough to buy her ticket across; she bought it, and on the wharf she

saw a crying woman with some little children. She asked why they were

distressed, and the woman told how she had bought bogus tickets from some

scamp, and so could not go across the ocean to join her husband. H. P.

B. walked back to the ticket office, got her first-class ticket changed

for steerage tickets for herself and that unfortunate woman and children,

and passed the voyage in the steerage part of an Atlantic liner—a very

practical proof of the brotherhood which she proclaimed. So that, after

all, I am not really going very far apart in taking up this particular

subject of human misery and human suffering, showing you, what I dare say

you know well enough, some of the cases which should stimulate to action.

And if you say to me: It is an old story that you are telling us; then my

answer to you will be that until the evils are remedied it is necessary

to repeat the story over and over again.

Now let us look over this great civilisation, and see what I have called

“The Deadlock in Social Conditions.” First let us remember, as a kind of

preliminary atmosphere, that the great civilisations of the past have

perished from this startling contrast of luxury and misery, and that what

has happened over and over again in the past might quite well repeat

itself amongst us to-day. For we are no stronger in our civilisation

than were the civilisations of Rome, of Assyria, of Egypt; and we find

in the Egyptian civilisation just the same sort of questions arising

then as arise now, as though the world really had not progressed in

this respect. In some of the unburied tablets and sculptures we find an

edict about the wages of the workpeople, and how they were to be told

not to be discontented, and not to refuse to work because they were

dissatisfied with the amount of wage that they obtained; and in another

case we find directions being sent in order to meet the difficulties

that had been caused by what we in our own time should call a strike of

working people. The difficulties are very old, and the world has not yet

solved them. It is in the hope that the coming civilisation will solve

them that I am drawing your attention again to them to-night. Now even

here we have what we call our submerged classes, and those form one-tenth

part of the population—a terrible proportion if you come to think of

it. Sometimes, when there has been a mutiny in an army, a regiment is

drawn up rank after rank, and every tenth man is marked out to be shot

while the others go free. That is the condition of our civilisation

now—every tenth person is marked out to misery. In India the proportion

is even larger. The submerged classes there amount to one-sixth of the

population, but, on the other hand, they are not nearly as miserable as

are the corresponding classes here: they are more despised, but they are

far happier, partly because the belief in which they have grown up, under

the thousands of years that lie behind them in that civilisation, has

ever been that a man’s condition in the present is due to causes that

he himself has set going in the past. So that those people, instead of

blaming their neighbours, blame themselves for the discomfort of their

own position, and sometimes determine that their next birth shall be a

happier one by making the very best they can of the disadvantages here.

Then again, poverty there is really not as terrible as here; you read of

a famine that sweeps away hundreds of thousands of the people, but is

that really so very much more terrible than the continual condition of

underfeeding in which our submerged classes live? The Registrar-General

does not mark them down “Died of Starvation”—that would be shocking the

public taste; but if you look into the matter you will see that when the

starved sempstress going home carrying her work is struck by an east

wind that whistles through her thin clothing and strikes on her underfed

body, she is put down in the report as “Died of pneumonia, bronchitis,

or consumption,” but in karma’s record she is marked down “Died of

starvation,” for it is the perennial underfeeding that brings about the

great mortality among the poor. I need only take a very few cases as

examples in order to show you what this poverty means. I have taken them

out of casual papers during the last week: from my own experience of the

past I know them not to be exaggerated, but these particular cases happen

to be going on just now. One of them is the case of the women who sew on

cards the hooks and eyes which we buy very cheaply in the shops. Such a

woman sews nearly 47,000 hooks and eyes for 1s. 2½d.—a thousand almost

per farthing. Think what it means. Naturally she pulls in her children

to help her; and so the children, who are obliged to go to school, for

we have compulsory education, when they come back from learning their

lessons have to sit down and set to work linking the hooks and the eyes

together so as to save a little of the mother’s time, and the children,

who ought to be playing and building up strong and healthy bodies, are

kept there hour after hour preparing the hooks and eyes for which the

mother is to receive the princely payment that I have mentioned. Take

another case that everybody knows—shirt-making: 1s. a dozen for men’s

shirts, and there is a fair amount of work in those; even that is not

the lowest depth, for the woman who takes them out to make at 1s. per

dozen lets them out again at 8d. per dozen to a woman more miserable

than herself. And so the thing goes on, home after home, person after

person. This and the preceding case I am taking from the last issue of

_The Christian Commonwealth_. Another case is mentioned there of a woman

who had been working along these lines; her particular work, I think,

was 5d. per dozen for collars, and find your own thread. She was brought

up as a typical case before the Royal Commission. We are always ready to

appoint Royal Commissions, but not very much comes out of them after they

have taken evidence. She was asked by a Member of Parliament: “How do you

and your children live on what you get in this way?” “We don’t live,”

was the answer of the woman, and she spoke truly. She worked sometimes

twenty hours a day, from six o’clock in the morning till two o’clock next

morning, in order to get enough to feed her children and herself. I could

go on for hours giving you cases like this, but I only want typical ones,

in order that you may realise the conditions in which so many are living

while we are comfortable and at ease.

Pass on from that part of this terrible poverty which nothing apparently

is able to touch to the next question that links itself very easily to

what I have been saying—woman labour in general, and especially in many

of the manufacturing industries. When women began to work at mills, and

so on, it was looked upon as a good way for the women to add something

to the comfort of the home. How has it worked? It has worked to drive

down the wages of the men, and make the home more miserable even in money

matters than it was before; and then the home has ceased to be a home,

for there is no home where the mother leaves the children behind her,

and goes out into the mill to earn the pence or the shillings wherewith

those children are to be fed. It has been encouraged for the reason

that a manufacturer gave very honestly and frankly before another Royal

Commission. “Oh,” he said, “I prefer to employ married women because

they are more docile.” That is true. The married woman is very much more

docile because, when the question of any resistance comes, she thinks

of the children who need food in the home. The baby hands are the hands

that make her docile; it is the baby fingers feeling her bosom for the

milk that will not come that makes the mother’s heart docile, yielding

to everything for the sake of the little child. It has only made the

complications of the labour market worse; it has only driven the men out

to be unemployed in the streets, while they who ought to be mothers in

the home are working in the factory instead. So the labour market only

becomes more choked, the wages are rendered yet more miserable, and the

men are thrown out while the women are employed, though the men cannot

take the woman’s place in the home, and take care of the babies and look

after the little ones; only a mother can do that, for nature has made

mothers for that work, and the father cannot take their place, however

gentle and loving he may be. So you get another problem there, hard to

solve, difficult to set right, and one that is ever growing more and more

pressing for solution, that is ever intensifying the misery of large

numbers of the working population.

Pass on, again, from that—you see I am only touching each point—and

take a question of national import, the deterioration of the physique

of the people who live in our large cities. That has been going on now

for generations, and it has been shown very plainly in the lowering

standard of height for enlistment in the Army. On the other hand, if

you look at the well-to-do classes you will find rather an increase

in strength and physique amongst them, especially amongst the women,

because these take so much more part in outdoor life than they did in

the past, and so you find they are growing taller and stronger, but the

great mass of the population is growing shorter and weaker. But it is

that great mass of the population from which the majority of your nation

comes. They reproduce most rapidly; they are the people who swell the

Registrar-General’s returns; from them the future nation is most largely

produced; and it is no good to have upper classes strong and vigorous

and well-fed if the mass of your population is deteriorating in strength

and vigour. There, again, you have one of these pressing problems which

it is necessary to answer; for these problems are like the questions

of the Sphinx: the Sphinx put the question, and if the man could not

answer it, the Sphinx devoured him. And so with these problems in social

organisation; the question is put, and the penalty for not answering is

to be devoured, and for the civilisation to pass away.

Remedies of sorts are being put forward by doctors and sociologists;

sterilisation of the unfit is one of the favourite nostrums or quack

remedies of the day. But such remedies are worse than the disease, for

they are brutal, and lead to deterioration of _morale_ as well as of

physique. You must go down to the root of the causes that make these

the unfit, and not bring them forth from the social organisation by the

myriad, and then try to find means to check their numbers; and so on that

side, again, this insoluble difficulty is facing us.

Even these are not all the problems which are set for us by our Sphinx

for which solution is demanded. We have seen terrible poverty, we have

seen the question of woman employment, we have seen the question of

deterioration of physique and swift multiplication of the unfit: what

about the criminal population? We manufacture habitual criminals at a

very rapid rate. We take up young men or young women, and we send them

to jail for a week, a month, a year, five years, ten years. It goes

on accumulating until the habitual offender gets sentences which will

outlast his physical life. But that has done nothing to cure the man,

that has done nothing to turn him into a good and useful citizen. The

law, when it grips him, ought to turn him into a better type of man.

Instead of that, he comes back over and over again, until the very

habitual criminality that the law has very largely made is brought up as

a reason for the magistrate to inflict upon him a heavier penalty. But

that is not wisdom; it is folly. Very often a bright, clever lad, full

of spirit, falls into crime. It is only one chance in a hundred if he

is rescued, and does not gradually drift into the ranks of the habitual

criminal. Surely at this stage of civilisation there must be some better

way; and there is a better way, as I shall try to show you when I come to

deal with brotherhood applied to social life.

If we go beyond these extreme cases, and look at the ordinary questions

of supply and demand, of production and distribution, notice how society

is gradually coming to a point where things cannot go on as they

are, and yet where to change them means the dislocation of our whole

productive and distributive system. We can see it best, perhaps, if we

go to America, because in America there are not the softening influences

which to some extent at least still prevail here, where society was once

based on a more human foundation, instead of merely on the question of

cash. We see what our systems are if we go over the water to America,

where they have full play, without anything to prevent their complete

development. There are one or two things that strike us in America of a

rather remarkable character. First, the growth of the man who builds his

own enormous fortune on the deliberate wrecking of the small fortunes of

others. Let me give an example. A large number of people, mostly rather

poor, gather together into a company in order to build a railway that

is wanted for the development of the country where they are. They want

quicker communication, they want better carriage of grain, of goods, and

they build a railway. It is working fairly well, it is paying, perhaps

not very largely, but still fairly satisfactorily. A much cleverer

man than those people comes along, and he sees that that particular

district is one that is likely to open up to a very large extent—one

where railways will become most valuable property. He sets to work to

build another railway that runs over the same ground as the first; it

is not wanted except to make him rich. He then begins to destroy the

other railway by charging smaller fares and lower freightage; he goes on

doing that, putting in his capital, because his rates do not pay, until

the other railway is driven down to the impossible level at which he

has fixed prices and fares: when the shares of that other railway have

sunk down to nearly nothing in the market, he steps in and buys them

all up; when he has bought them all up he lets his sham railway go to

pieces, and the whole of the district is in his hands, and he piles up an

enormous fortune. On the other side of his fortune is the loss to all the

shareholders who put their money into that railway in order to improve

the means of communication in the place where they were living. They have

been sacrificed that he might make enormous wealth. Such men are called

“wreckers” in America, but they are honoured in society; they build

hospitals, and even churches; they do all kinds of things with fragments

of the wealth that they have taken; but I tell you that, although not by

the law of the country, yet by the law of righteousness, these men are

worse and more to be condemned than the burglar who steals the jewels of

a lady or the gold plate of a millionaire. He is punished heavily when he

is caught, and he deserves to be punished; burglary is obviously wrong;

but worse than that open burglary that the law punishes is the hidden

burglary of the brilliant brain against the stupid brain, which robs

people of the result of their labour in order to accumulate it within the

wrecker’s store.

Other forms of this robbery are what are called “trusts” and “corners.”

They have been trying, I see, to make a corner in wheat, and another

speculator has been able to checkmate the original speculator by pouring

in millions of bushels of wheat. But people are not fed any better

whichever speculator wins; it is only a problem as to which of the two

should be able to make the largest profits; and then the trusts are built

up, whereby a few men are able to make enormous fortunes and kill out all

the smaller men. Now our American brethren are getting a little tired of

that, and they are trying to find out some way in which they can prevent

it—some Act of Congress, some law which should prevent the trust. But

what law can you possibly pass to prevent the trust, which is only the

natural outcome of competition gone mad? What can you do to prevent that

without crippling also every one of your industrial concerns which are

based on the same principle of cut-throat competition? There is where

the deadlock comes in again. The whole thing is built up on one man

fighting against another, one man trying to overreach another, one man

trying to make better bargains for himself, no matter what happens to his

neighbour—that is the whole method of what we call our commercial system.

If that be so, how are you going to interfere with its natural outcome,

with the inevitable result which grows out of it?—the same principle,

only carried a little to excess, and so shocking the conscience that

was not shocked when people were ruined piecemeal, but is shocked when

they are ruined by hundreds and by thousands; yet each one of those who

were ruined piecemeal suffered as much, his lot was as unfortunate. How,

then, can you cripple the excess without undermining the whole? There is

another of the problems which are set, and yet in the very midst of it

there is a gleam of a brighter future, for in that great alchemy with

which the mighty Chemist of the world’s laboratory changes the forces

that destroy into forces that construct, there are signs that these

trusts which have grown out of the greed and selfishness of men will

really be organisations of industry which will be useful to the community

in the future, when Brotherhood has replaced competition, and when

thought for others takes the place of only thinking for oneself. And so

we see possibilities even in the midst of the troubles.

Let us glance at another side of this problem—the attempts which are

being made to improve social conditions in newer countries, as they

are called, say, Australia. In Australia the working classes have got

everything that they are asking for here; it is called the working-man’s

paradise. Every boy of twenty-one can vote; think of the magnificent

freedom of it! Every girl of twenty-one can vote; what more would you

have? No need of agitation there. But, unluckily, the boys care much

more about football than they do about questions in Parliament, and

the girls, perhaps, are thinking more of bonnets and hats than of the

way in which their votes ought to be cast. They have all got the vote

and they do not know what to do with it, and that is a very common

thing. It does not occur only in Australia. Has it ever struck you that

you are paying in happiness for what you call liberty, if you mean by

liberty the right to cast a vote? No matter what your qualifications,

that is quite outside the question; no matter whether you know anything

about the questions, that is not of the least importance; no matter if

your head is as empty as ever it can be, it counts just as much at the

polling-booth as the head of the wisest statesman, thinker, most highly

trained economist or historian. It is an admirable way of governing when

you come to look at it from the outside standpoint. Let us see how it

works in Australia where they have it: you have not got it yet; you are

on the way to it. All these people have votes, and the great majority, as

is always the case, are ignorant. There has been class legislation over

here, and they have class legislation over there—it is not a good thing,

only there it is just the other way up; and the effect of ignorant class

legislation is even worse than the effect of educated class legislation.

Let us see how it works. First, it works for a gradual diminution of

efficiency along the ordinary lines of work, on which, remember, the

whole prosperity of the country depends. The boy who is a free man does

not care to be an apprentice, and it does not to do tell the boy he has

done his work badly, because he is a free Australian, and off he goes,

and he won’t work any more if you tell him he has not worked well. But,

you know, nature is a very awkward thing to come striking up against in

your political and social life, and her laws do not get modified as you

might think they should. The boy who won’t learn becomes the workman

who is wanting in skill, and so the level of efficiency in production is

getting lower and lower. If they want a piece of good machinery they have

to send over here to get it—although there is a very heavy price put upon

importing it into Australia—because the work there is so badly done that

the machines won’t work properly after they are made, and that is one of

the results that we are seeing at the present time. Another one is, that

unemployment is increasing. There are men in the streets there just as

there are here, clamouring for work, and asking the Government to give it

to them; and how do they get there? Very many of them because they must

not work under a certain wage, which is not a possible wage to pay for

the kind of work that they can do. Suppose you happen to have a little

garden; you want to have your paths weeded and your grass cut. That is

gardener’s work. Now a gardener must not work under 10s. a day, and your

poor professional man who is at a discount in the matter of votes, and

has a fixed income, cannot afford to pay 10s. a day to have his paths

weeded, so he goes to weed them himself, and the would-be gardener goes

out, and is unemployed in the streets, and calls on the Government to

find him work. There is a very serious side to that beyond the question

of unemployment. If you are going to make the men who should give better

work to the country than the weeding of paths weed their own paths for

themselves, then you are putting a check on the whole of the higher kinds

of labour on which the nobler national life depends, for it is as true

now as it ever was that man does not live by bread alone. If you are

going to make every man do manual labour, you can get nothing more than

the kind of paradise that you find in “Looking Backward,” which is more

a paradise for the respectable suburb than for a nation that needs art

and beauty, music and literature. Those things want leisure to produce

and time to perfect. There must be education behind them before they can

be produced, and it is a very bad arrangement to press all your nation

down to a low level of comfortable eating and drinking and amusement,

and forget the mightier things that make a national life—the products of

genius, the creative exertions of thought. There is one of the greater

dangers. You cannot blame the poor people. ‘As long as a man is hungry,

a good meal is the one thing he wants, and that must be his ideal. But

nations ought not to be built up on the crude ideas of the ignorant

and the hungry. That is the duty of wisdom. But see how difficult this

question becomes; see how it is even in this country, where still

education is a very great weight in popular affairs, even though the vote

ignores it. A man may know his own trade, and be able to give very good

counsel and advice as to what is necessary for that one particular trade

in which he is working; but a nation is not made up of one trade; it is

made up of a hundred different occupations, every one interlinked and

interrelated with all the others, and you cannot legislate nationally by

simply looking at a single occupation or a single class. You must see

how your law reacts on the whole of the complicated organism; otherwise

you ruin your nation while you lift up a single trade, and that is what

is happening in Australia. Certainly some of the trades are very well

provided and arranged for, but the rest of the elements that ought to

make a nation are disregarded, and life for them is made impossible; and

even within the limits of a trade, sometimes things are marvellously

stupid. Let me give you one example. Melbourne is a large city, and

occasionally it has very hot weather. The trades unions there have made

a law that milk shall not be delivered more than once a day on Sunday;

the poor man wants his holiday, and it is very selfish of you if you

want to make him work on Sunday, so that milk may only be delivered in

the morning. Now the difficulty is that the cows have not yet come into

the trades unions; they do not realise that on Sunday they are only to

give milk once a day and not twice. Without the slightest regard for the

beauty of social arrangements, they wilfully persist in giving milk in

the afternoon as well as in the morning. But the unfortunate milkman must

not sell it, because if he did he would be turned out of his trade union,

and that would mean destruction. So he has to keep it; and if the weather

is hot it is not quite so good in the morning, in spite of the boracic

acid, as it was the night before. So he mixes up the fresh milk of the

morning and the stale milk of the night before, and sells it all as

fresh milk: and though you may not discover it in the milk-can, the baby

discovers it in the milk-bottle, and the death-rate of the children goes

up in the summer because of this admirable arrangement which has been

made with regard to the distribution of milk. That is not the way that

nations can really be governed; and there are all sorts of restrictions

of that kind which constantly come up against you in the home, and make

you feel that life is not in any sense free. Things of this sort can

only succeed if certain conditions are willingly accepted by all the

people who have to work under them, and not when they are imposed for the

benefit of a particular trade or an unwilling and reluctant population.

Let us go one step further; we need not go out to Australia now. We

have to replace competition by co-operation. You may say that is being

very largely done. Certainly very much has been done in co-operative

distribution; Lancashire and Yorkshire are full of successful

co-operative works. How many are there of co-operative productive works?

The idea has been tried a good many times, but it has always broken down

for two reasons: first, that in production you want one clear, strong

brain which is a despot over the production; you cannot do it by boards

and committees and popular votes, and all the rest of it, because in

that commercial production there are many things to think of; very swift

changes may come about, and the one able man is able to seize the right

moment and to lead his affair to success, where divided councils and

delay and discussion spell bankruptcy. That is one of the difficulties

with regard to this production. There is something still more serious—the

want of trust. The people don’t trust each other; they are suspicious

of each other. They suspect each other of personal ends, instead of

honestly co-operating for the public good. So they change their officers

continually, and there is no continuity of policy. That fault of want of

trust, want of confidence, imputation of bad motives, is fatal and must

remain fatal until people can grow out of it into Brotherhood. At the

present time, when one man born among the working classes, as they are

called, by ability and skill, eloquence and application, rises into the

higher social ranks, his bitterest opponents are to be found in the class

which he has quitted; and when he finds, as he must find—because again he

strikes up against great natural laws—when he finds that Trafalgar Square

remedies are not workable when you come to put them within the four

corners of an Act of Parliament, then people call him traitor, deserter,

renegade, and the best he can do will not win him trust and confidence.

How is that to be dealt with?

Oh, you say, you will have to change human nature before your plans

will work. Exactly; that is precisely what has to be done. Do you think

it is impossible? Human nature is changing every day; human nature is

continually in a state of flux. The human nature of the Middle Ages is

not the same as the human nature of our own time. When knight-errants

went plunging about, fighting and the rest of it, it might very well

have been said: “Oh, you have to change human nature before you can get

people to sit quietly down and submit to the law, instead of knocking

their oppressor on the head.” Quite true; but human nature has been

changing through those centuries, so that instead of riding out to right

your own wrong, you call in the nearest policeman and submit it to the

arbitration of the law. Why should not human nature go on changing? As a

matter of fact it is changing before our eyes, and the changes that are

coming in it are the unfolding of the divine Spirit in man; the outer

forms change to embody the unfolding Spirit, and the lower human nature

is always changing, and gradually producing itself in higher and higher

forms. In the very midst of this struggle and competition, this misery

and conflict, you can see, if you will open your eyes, the germs of a

nobler, higher, more brotherly civilisation. How different is the social

conscience from what it was even a century ago; how different the common

feeling of responsibility when wrong things are done and misery is left

unalleviated! How many more of the classes that are called comfortable

cannot remain comfortable while they know misery is outside their doors;

how many are beginning to recognise the great fact that whatever one has

earned one holds as a steward, and not as an owner, in a world where all

men are brothers, and where the duty of the family is the duty of each!

That thought is spreading further and further, wider and wider; but the

great change must come from above, not from below. Starving, ignorant men

can make riots, sometime even revolutions; but only wisdom and love can

build up a new civilisation that shall endure. I remember that one day,

when H. P. Blavatsky was asked: “Are you a Socialist?” her answer was, “I

believe in the Socialism that gives; I do not believe in the Socialism

that takes.” There lies the keynote of the future. When those who have

are ready to sacrifice, then the dawning of the new era will be seen in

the sky that is over our earth; when wealth and education and power are

held as trusts for the common good, ah! then will come the laying of

the foundations of a better and a nobler State. When the educated man

and woman remember: “This education of mine, bought by the ignorance of

thousands who have laboured in order that I might be educated, really

belongs to them, and I must give it back to them in service, in order

to pay the debt that I have contracted to them”; when the wealthy man

feels: “I am a steward, not an owner of this wealth which has come out

of the labour of thousands; let it help the uplifting of thousands”—then

Brotherhood is beginning to show itself upon earth. When the gentle

and the refined realise that gentleness and refinement are meant to be

shared, and not shut up away in drawing-rooms to guard them as though

they were delicate Dresden china that must not be used for fear it should

be broken—when that day comes, we shall be nearer the beginning of a

great social change. It must be by renunciation, by self-abnegation, that

the foundations of that great brotherly civilisation will be laid. In a

family, the elders think of the youngers; and when food is short, it is

the elders who go without it in order that the little ones may be fed. So

in every social movement the note of the higher is renunciation, the note

of the lower is love and co-operation; then they will blend together,

and each will bring what he has to give, none will despise another, for

everything is equally necessary for the building up of a nation. The

strength of the navy, the genius of the philosopher, the skill of the

worker, the keen brain of the organiser—the whole of these must make a

common work; and none should either despise or envy, for it is one work

which is being made by all for the good of everyone.

If you say to me: “That hope can but be a dream,” my answer to you is,

that as man is divine there is nothing too great for him to imagine or

too exquisite for him to achieve. Think highly of yourselves, highly of

your divine possibilities; realise that you are Gods in the making,

and that you can build anything to which you can aspire. Thought is the

mightiest power; the thought-image first, and then its materialisation in

the physical world. But it is not enough to think; the materialisation

here has to be made; and there are signs of that in the great Christian

civilisation which is still the dominant power in Christendom. For men

are beginning to talk now not of heaven away beyond the clouds, but of

heaven here on earth; of the kingdom of Christ on earth that shall surely

come, not only in the ideal but in the actual; a civilisation based on

brotherhood, wisdom, love. That is what is going to be done in the world

just now opening up before us. Men are no longer content to be happy

after death, they want to be happy on this side of death as well; and

they shall be, unless the prayer that you who are Christians utter day by

day is only a lip worship and not a reality: “Thy will be done on earth,

even as it is done in heaven.” It is on earth the new great civilisation

is to come, that Brotherhood is to be realised, that the nations of the

future are to be built on the type of the family, and not on a type of a

struggle of wild beasts in the jungle. That is the future to which we are

looking; and if on this Sunday and last Sunday I have drawn the darker

side, it is to show that because things are at a deadlock, therefore He

who holds the key of every lock is near to His return on earth. In the

Sundays that lie before us I hope to work out that second side of the

subject, to show you how these things are passing away, and how it has

been declared in the higher world, and the cry is echoing in the lower:

“Behold, I make all things new!”

Lecture III

The New Doors Opening In Religion, Science, and Art

Friends: On the preceding evenings on which I have addressed you we have

had our attention turned backwards to the past, or we were glancing at

the present. We are now to turn our eyes to the future, and, starting

from the basis of the present and of certain facts which are already

showing themselves amongst us, to consider what new doors are opening

in Religion, in Science, and in Art; what new avenues of knowledge are

beginning to show themselves stretching to far-off horizons—horizons, in

fact, which are not really the limit of those avenues, but only the limit

to which we can at present pierce. I am chiefly concerned to endeavour

to show you that this promise of the opening of new doors is a great

reality; that the sounds are around us; that, as it were, the doors are

already a little open, and we have the right to think that as man evolves

a little further those doors will open wider and wider, so that the race

may pass through them to a wiser and a happier future. In order to make

this intelligible and clear, I shall have to ask you for a few moments

to consider with me a certain view of man’s nature and constitution, a

view which was practically universal among the ancient religions of the

world, which is indicated, although not fully carried out perhaps in

detail, in the more modern faith of Christendom, which is revived amongst

us, and is being taught all over the world by means of the Theosophical

Society; not a new view, but a very old one, clothed only in new garments

in deference to the advancing mind of man. Now this view I must put

roughly, but without that statement the method of the opening of the new

doors would remain unintelligible. It is briefly this: That every human

being is fundamentally a spiritual intelligence, appropriating to himself

portions of matter in the various types of worlds in which he lives; that

that spiritual intelligence commences the great world-cycle as a germ

or seed of divinity; and just as if, where you had an ordinary seed, a

grain of corn, that grain would not grow and develop the powers within

it unless it were planted in the soil, the soil whose juices nourish

it, unless it were rained upon, and unless the sun shone upon it, so is

it with the divine germ, the human Spirit. It is planted in the soil

of human experience, whose juices shall gradually enable it to unfold

its divine possibilities. It is watered with the rain of human tears,

the tears of sorrow and of pain; it is vivified, strengthened, enabled

to grow by the sunshine of human joy and human delight; and out of the

contact of experience, out of the rain of sorrow and the sunshine of joy,

gradually, generation after generation, century after century, millennium

after millennium, the divine germ becomes a divine man, perfect in the

manifested powers of Deity enfolded within him from the first.

But in order that that æonian evolution and unfolding may go forward,

it is necessary that this divine germ should come into contact with

matter. Hence veil after veil of matter enwraps, is appropriated by, this

divine germ, and he draws around himself—as he descends from the highest

heavens down to the earth, through region after region of ever-densifying

matter—and appropriates veil after veil, in order that by contact with

that matter, which alone can give him experience, the powers within him

may unfold and the matter that he appropriates may become his servant,

his instrument of manifestation. So when we look at any one of ourselves

at the stage that we have reached to-day, we find a spiritual being many

of whose powers have unfolded, but some of whose powers remain not yet

unfolded into manifestation, and we find, clothing, as it were, that

unfolding Spirit, the veils of matter of which I spoke, no longer mere

inchoate veils, but bodies more or less definitely organised for the

purposes of the unfolding life. On our physical plane, in the world in

which we are to-day, that appropriated matter is now highly organised,

and has become the servant of the intelligence of the Spirit to a very

large extent in the more highly developed human beings. It has had

developed in it, age after age, those organs of knowledge that we call

the senses; five in number at the present time, as mankind has passed

through five of those great Races that I likened to the waves of the

human ocean when I first addressed you on this subject. You may remember

that then I spoke of ourselves as being in the fifth of those great

waves, and also in the fifth sub-wave, as we may say, into which the

larger wave divides itself. Even looking back along our experience in

the present cycle of human growth, we can see these senses developing

from their earliest inception up to the present point of keenness that

they have reached, one sense developing in all its stages through one of

the great Races.

In order that you may not think that that is quite removed from

experience, let me ask you for a moment to look at a fairly prominent

family of the fourth race, the one that preceded our own, which is now

living in Burma, part of the Indian empire. In that fourth race as a

whole the sense of taste was the one that was gradually evolving, the

sense of smell being only germinal and rudimentary, not developed. Now

if you go among the Burmans to-day and inquire into their diet, you will

find that one favourite article of diet is fish; but not fish freshly

drawn from sea or river, but fish that has been caught for some time,

buried in the ground until it has become fairly aged, and then unburied,

to form a delightful dish on the Burmese table. Certainly you can well

realise the fact that in that fourth Race people the sense of taste is

very different from what it is amongst yourselves, with perhaps one

exception that I ought to make, that I believe even now in the sense of

taste in some people finds gratification in game and venison that are

euphemistically called “high.” Well, the fish that the Burman eats is

very high; one might almost, if it were not rude, perhaps apply to it a

word more like calling a spade a spade, and call it rotten. Now no one

could eat such food as that and find it pleasant if the sense of smell,

which has so much to do with the more delicate savours of taste, were

already well developed among the people; and I take that as a striking

illustration, one that has come also under my own observation, in order

to make clear what I mean when I say to you that with each race one sense

is developed and the next sense to it is only germinal, and shows itself

out in the following race, through which it grows to higher and higher

perfection. So that the mere fact of the five senses of the present is an

indication of the point at which humanity is standing, and a proverb—and

there is often much truth in proverbs—about a man being frightened out

of his seven senses, although at present he has only five, may serve

as an indication of the widespread and ancient tradition that man has

two races still through which he will evolve, and senses which will be

developed as those races gradually develop upon earth; so that in the

sixth Race, with which I shall have to deal in these lectures this day

fortnight, “The Coming Race,” we shall be looking for the development of

a new sense, the sense which will make the next world on the other side

of death as palpable to us in the physical body as the physical world

is palpable at the present time. For in man that form of vision will be

the next to develop; and as his next higher body, the astral, becomes

rightly organised, then in the physical brain will develop _pari passu_

the organ whereby the knowledge of that world will come into the physical

consciousness, and thus enormously widen our outlook, and make palpable

what now is hidden from the eyes of most.

Taking this view of man, that he is an unfolding spiritual

consciousness, we find that he creates for himself, as he unfolds,

more highly organised bodies of matter, so that the double growth is

going on in every one of us, higher stages of unfolding consciousness,

subtler bodies of matter by which that consciousness can express itself

clearly and definitely; to every change in consciousness a vibration in

matter answering; to every vibration in matter a change in consciousness

responding; so that there are side by side the unfolding of the Spirit

and the development of a more delicate and more highly organised body,

the difference showing itself in the nervous system as well as in the

mere outer configuration of the body. Glance again at that fourth Race,

study its nervous system, and you will find it very different from your

own. While like your own in outer configuration, while the differences

between the brain and the general distribution of the nerves to the body

are not great, if you go into the question of the organisation of that

nervous system you will find that an enormous gulf divides the fourth and

the fifth great Races of mankind. Again, if you want a proof, look at the

amount of pain or the amount of physical injury which can be endured,

say, by the Chinaman, in comparison with what you can bear. Notice that

an enormous laceration inflicted on the body of the Chinaman leaves him

ready to recover rapidly, while a similar injury to you would kill you

by nervous shock. It is not the question of the mutilation—that and the

loss of blood might be the same in each—but the fifth Race man dies from

nervous shock, where the fourth Race man with the coarser nervous system

is able to recover, is able to re-establish the nervous equilibrium.

Another point you may notice among yourselves to-day, emphasising as

you do in your own Teutonic sub-race the characteristics of the great

Aryan Race to which all these branches that are spread over the West as

well as in India belong. Looking at that, you will find, as you come

into your own Teutonic sub-race, that nervous diseases increase; and

they are increasing very rapidly at the present time, far more rapidly

apparently than at any other period in human history. The strain on

your present nervous system is beginning to be too great, for it is

evolving a little more rapidly than the outer world is evolving to meet

it; and hence, in order that you may not suffer from continual nervous

diseases, it is necessary to begin to refine and to purify your lives,

leaving the grosser passions behind you which in the course of evolution

you now ought to have outgrown. As the next sub-race is born—and it

is beginning at the present time—the nervous system will become more

and more delicate, and keener sense-organs will appear in the children

in larger and larger numbers. Our present organs of sense will first

become intensified. Then, after much intensification, the newer organs

will begin to show themselves—those which will unfold to us the world

on the other side of death. To this world our astral bodies belong,

and our nervous system will become finer, and thus make it possible to

register our investigations more completely in our physical bodies. That

will be one point that we shall have to bear in mind in looking for the

new doors that are opening. But not only the physical body is growing

finer, but in addition to that our next body is organising itself and

gradually unfolding its powers, the body that we shall wear on the other

side of death as well, the body that we are wearing now through which

our emotions are showing. For when we pass through death we do not pass

unclothed into another world; we throw off this denser garment of the

physical body, but penetrating that, interfused with that, intermingling

with that now is the finer matter of the world on the other side of

death, growing ready for our use in that further world, and organising

itself gradually for the experiences that there we shall meet. And in

the next race, as I shall try to show you more fully hereafter, that

body will become highly organised, greatly developed, a thorough vehicle

of consciousness as the physical body is to-day, and by the growth and

organisation of that the new doors will open before us in Religion, in

Science, and in Art.

I.—RELIGION.

Let us see, first, how this will affect Religion. The unfolding of the

deeper strata of consciousness will bring our inner selves, the Spirit,

into more and more direct touch with the spiritual regions of our

universe. I am now not dealing with the finer worlds of matter, but with

the spiritual realities which belong to the spiritual life. The nature of

God, the consciousness of His presence everywhere, the recognition of His

life as an indwelling power—all these will become fundamental realities

for the unfolding Spirit in man. I pointed out to you, when dealing with

the deadlock in religion, with regard to the idea of God, that no amount

of reasons addressed to the intellect could ever lead us to an absolute

demonstration of the existence, the reality of God. Probability, yes;

cumulative evidence, yes; but demonstration, no. When a thing is once

demonstrated, no further challenge arises about it; when once a fact is

demonstrated, no one any longer asks: Does that fact exist? and we have

been in the region of arguments about God, and not of that spiritual

knowledge of God which is eternal life. How is that to be reached? Not

by any effort of the reasoning intelligence, not by any upreaching of

the merely emotional nature, but by the unfolding in man himself of that

Spirit which is divine in its essential quality, which, because itself

divine, can respond to divinity without, and, because itself is God,

knows that God of which it is the offspring. This is the ultimate truth

of religion, the human experience of communion with God in the depths

of the human Spirit; for religion is only a groping after God, a search

after God; ceremonies and rites, churches and scriptures, they are all

external; they can never reveal God to the Spirit, which is of His own

likeness and image.

Only the Spirit can know Him, only the Spirit can find Him; while it

searches through matter it can only hope He is, but the unveiled Spirit

can feel the unveiled Godhead, and by the identity of nature can know

that God is, and is itself. And as this inner spiritual life more and

more awakens in the religions of the world, man will know the truth of

that great saying of the Christ: “The Kingdom of God is within you.”

As you go down into the depths of your own being, there shall you

find Deity, the conviction that God is and must be. For you can strip

away from yourself everything that is not He, until only He, the one

Self of all, remains. You can mutilate your body and lose your limbs,

but _you_ remain. Your emotions can grow worn out and be withered, but

behind your emotions _you_ still are there. Your mind may grow weaker,

feebler, may become, as it were, paralysed for reasoning, and yet _you_

are there, behind the failing mind; and if you are willing to pass on

into spiritual experience, to let your emotions be quieted, to let your

mind be still, then in the silence of the emotions, in the tranquillity

of the mind, you shall find a deeper consciousness, a deeper life, a

more real individuality; and as the emotions are still and the mind is

silent, in the innermost depths of the Spirit you shall find yourself

and God. And then, contemplating that mighty and eternal life, you

shall feel that you share it, that you are part of it, that you cannot

be separated from it, and, in a great gush of experience that never

again you can doubt, you shall know the reality of Deity in finding the

reality of yourself. That is the ultimate conviction that nothing can

shake—that the human experience that many a man has had, that for him has

transformed the world; that is the sure ground of the religion of the

future, that the rock on which a true faith alone can be based; and it

is written, and truly written, in an ancient Hindū scripture, that the

only proof of God lies in the witness of the Self. On that rock religion

will base itself, fearless of all attack, of all assault. No question

of chronology can move it, for every man can gain that experience for

himself; no criticism and destruction of scriptures can tear this in

pieces, for it is ever renewing in the perennial life of the Eternal

Spirit; no churches, in failing, can shake it, for it is this that made

churches, to help in its own searching; nothing outside can touch it,

for it lives in the innermost heart of man. And in that, ever-opening

new experiences, fuller knowledge, deeper understanding, more abounding

love, and unchanging peace and bliss. Everything else may go, but this

remains unchanging; and as out of this all has come, the perishing of the

transient matters not, for the Eternal Source remains.

But that is not the only new door, though the most important one, which

opens to religion. You remember that I said, that with the unfolding

consciousness a more delicately organised body was evolved. And so we

find that new senses, new powers awake in the material tabernacle with

this unfolding of the divine Spirit in man. The senses which belong to

the higher worlds are very near to the opening in every one of you; and

if you ask me why I say it, my answer is very simple, because, taking,

say, any dozen of you, dulling the physical senses by what is called

mesmerism, or hypnotism if you will, so that you cannot see physical

things, cannot hear physical sounds, cannot taste or smell or touch so

that the senses answer to objects outside—under those conditions in about

ten out of every dozen these inner senses are able to make themselves

manifest, are able to bear witness to the existence of a subtler world.

Now when you find that by an artificial process of that kind an ordinary

man or woman can be made what is called clairvoyant or clairaudient, or

able to touch and feel things that the ordinary physical touch does not

reveal; when you find that by stilling the physical these rudimentary

senses are able to work—within limitations, but still to work—it is a

fairly clear proof that man is on the threshold of unfolding those senses

that now are rudimentary, and that need an artificial condition in order

to show themselves. But they do show themselves under that artificial

condition. If they were not there they could not show themselves, no

matter how much you might paralyse the dense physical body; it is only

because they are there that they can function. But when the rougher

senses are active, those stronger vibrations dull the delicate vibrations

of the rudimentary and dawning senses. It is only because they are

present, but only partly developed that you are able to make them

manifest in the great majority which might be taken from a meeting such

as this.

Now, not only is that true—and I mention that first because that is

practically universally recognised by science now—but they may be

artificially stimulated without the help of mesmerism at all. While

that is a rough-and-ready way of doing it with anybody, the other means

requires a consciousness unfolded to the point where the fact of these

senses is recognised as probable, and then a deliberate and sustained

effort to bring these senses into working order. Now that is done by what

is known generally as meditation, and meditation is only concentrated

thinking. Anyone who is able to pay attention, any one who is able to

think steadily on one subject for a little time without letting the mind

wander, is ready to begin meditation; and most of all are those ready

to begin it, although at first sight they might not look promising, who

are capable of being seized upon by a single idea of a high and lofty

character; which, as it were, takes possession of them, obsesses them

if you will, so that they become martyrs, heroes for the idea which has

gripped them. I do not say that is the highest state—it is not; it is not

best to be possessed by the idea, but to possess the idea—that is a stage

higher still. But the power of being possessed by an idea shows that you

are climbing upwards towards the realms of the ideal; and many a man or

woman who is marked out as a fanatic, as unwilling to be reasoned out

of their foolish ideals, the dreamers of the world, the Utopians, the

poets who dream of a coming golden age, those men and women who despise

the present, sometimes irrationally, in the wild enthusiasm of the idea

that has possessed them, they are treading on the threshold of that

power of concentration of the mind which, when they have mastered their

ideas, should carry them far on—on to the next stage in human progress.

It is by meditation that these senses are artificially awakened; that

is, you quicken the normal workings of evolution by knowing the laws

of thought, and utilising them to bring about that which you desire.

It is only artificial in the same sense that a cattle-breeder, when he

wants to breed a particular type, uses those laws of nature that help

him, and avoids or evades those that would hinder him. He clears out of

his way all the opposing forces and energies, so that those he wants

may have free play. So with the laws of mind; if you know the laws of

mind, the laws by which consciousness evolves, then you can use them

scientifically to develop in yourselves the highest powers of the mind,

and use those powers of the mind to organise your subtler body, so that

it may become a vehicle of consciousness, may be obedient to your will

to know. That is already stirring within you; hence the nervous troubles

that you have; but when you understand the law, you can evolve the finer

nervous system without peril to health. Only this demands rules which

many people kick against, a physical self-mastery that is not popular

in the luxurious and ease-seeking civilisation of our time; to make

your physical body only an instrument, to allow it to eat only what you

choose for it as best suited to your purpose, to allow it to drink that

alone which suits your aim, to allow it to sleep just as long as, and no

longer than, conduces to that object that you have set before yourself—to

make the body the servant, and not the master, or even the equal, of the

Spirit—that is the regimen which has to go with the quicker evolution of

the astral body and the keener senses which belong to it. Many are doing

it amongst us now; nature is doing it, but not so rapidly as man can do

it by working with nature.

On the western coast of America, along the Californian district, where

the electric conditions are very peculiar, one of the games the children

like is to run along the carpet, rubbing their feet along the carpet as

they go. This charges them so highly with electricity that if you turn on

a gas-jet they can put a finger to it and light it. These are things that

are well known over there, and with that peculiar electrical condition

the tension of the nervous system is higher, and so these senses

are very much more common there than they are in our damper and less

brilliant electrical atmosphere. That, however, is coming for all; there

partly by natural conditions; here, if you choose to do it, by deliberate

working with nature along the line of evolution.

Now, what will be the effect of evolving those astral senses? That the

next world will form part of this world to you, so that in religion a

large number of things that now are matters of faith will become matters

of everyday knowledge. There will be no need then to talk about human

personality persisting on the other side of death, for you will see your

dead all around you, as some are able to see them even now. Death will

be only going into another room in the house that we are all living in,

and even the walls will become transparent, so there will be no real

separation; it will no longer be necessary for the clergy to preach about

the life on the other side of death, for all the congregation will see

that it exists; it will be no longer necessary to talk about the results

in that life of what we are doing here, for the results will be open

before our eyes, as they are open to the eyes of the seers of to-day;

there will be no need then to say that death cannot divide, for all will

know that their beloved are with them—tangible, visible, audible.

Now, these things are so to an ever-increasing number of our own race at

the present time; they will become general as evolution proceeds. And

the result of that will be that very many of the secondary teachings of

religion will become palpably true to the great majority; not only the

question of the life after death and the conditions that rule there, but

also the value of many church rites and ceremonies that the sceptical

and materialistic mind of the moment looks on with scorn and contempt as

ancient superstitions. There is such a thing as the sacramental life;

there is a bridge between this world and the next in those sacraments

of the Churches possessed by every great religion, and not by the

Christian alone. Much of that has been lost to western Christendom by

the Reformation, which rejected the occult because it had been abused,

and superstition believed without understanding. But, none the less, in

the great sacraments of the Church there remains a potency which without

that sacrament you cannot reach, a real communication of the spiritual

to the material, a real down-flowing of the higher life: a thing which

is visible to the eye of the seer, although invisible to the normal

worshippers in the churches. And gradually, as these senses become

common, those ancient traditions will again be justified in the minds

of all, and men will again know that in those divinely given offices of

religion there is a mighty potency, a living spiritual reality. You do

not need them when you have opened up your Spirit to the higher realities

of the spiritual world, but how few there are who are really open to

these in their daily lives; the sacraments are the bridges that unite

the worlds, and it is foolish to throw them aside until you have built a

perpetual bridge within yourself.

All along those lines you will readily see how many doors will open

in religion where knowledge will justify what humility and faith

have received. And along those lines religion, without ceasing to be

spiritual, will be rational and scientific as well, and you will realise

that Occult Science justifies religion, and can make a rational and

scientific defence for many of its rites and ceremonies, for many of

its teachings that now rest on authority and tradition. I have not time

to go further along that line; I have indicated to you the ways along

which the doors are opening both in the spiritual unfolding to the higher

realities, and the unfolding of the higher senses which will gradually

bring the next world within man’s ken.

II.—SCIENCE.

Let us turn to Science, and see how far similar doors are opening there

for the science of our day. You may remember that I pointed out to you

that science was now rather at its wits’ end as regards observation. It

seems to have reached the limit of the delicacy of its outer apparatus.

How shall it continue to observe? By means of those same senses that

I have been speaking of in relation to the verification of religious

teachings, but in science you can begin a little lower down. In the

physical world of matter, our own world, science is now recognising not

only solid, liquid, gas, but also ether, and beyond ether, possible

finenesses arising, so that there may be many ethers, as indeed was

suggested in that famous classification of vibrations which Sir William

Crookes gave in one of his addresses a few years ago. Let it stand for

the moment as a matter of observation of higher sight that there are

more ethers than one that science will gradually conquer. But science

is not yet able to see even the chemical atom, and that is only on the

plane of the gas, the third fineness of matter. The atom escapes by its

subtlety, by its minuteness, and yet it would not be a very difficult

thing for most of you to develop in yourselves the power of seeing as

far as that, for it is only physical matter. It is not now the seeing

of another kind of matter altogether, like that of the astral world; it

is only the making a little keener of your present physical sight. Now

I wonder how many of you, if you were on board ship, quiet, with the

air very pure, if you looked into the atmosphere around you, would see

dancing in that atmosphere a number of tiny brilliant sparks. Probably a

large number of you. Try it next time you happen to be out on the sea.

Sit with your back to the sun, otherwise your eyes will become dazzled;

fix your gaze at the distance at which you can see an object clearly, so

as not to strain the eyes; focus your eyes, say at a distance of four or

five yards away, not near enough to cause any strain by the crossing of

the eyes; you must not cross the axes of the eyes, that is, you must not

squint; that, prolonged, will injure the eyes. Let them look quite easily

out a few yards away from you into the empty air, and stay quite quietly

looking at that point. Probably most of you presently would begin to see

a number of brilliant little sparks dancing like motes in a sunbeam.

One word of warning I must give you: if, in fixing your attention on

one of those, it slowly glides away out of sight, round the corner as

it were, then it is only something in the retina, and the humour of the

eyes carries that gradually away; anything that gradually slides out

of sight belongs to the physical retina of the eye, and is not outside

yourself. But if they dance up and down in every direction, exactly as

the dust in a ray of light coming through a shutter, then you may be sure

that you are seeing something in the air beyond your ordinary vision.

Look at them easily, not straining your vision, but with the will to

see—every organ of sense is evolved by the will of the Spirit behind

it—the will to see more plainly, and gradually you will find that those

dancing sparks of light can be stopped by your will to look at them,

until they will, as it were, hang in the air like minute sparks without

the rapid motion. You have begun then to develop etheric sight, and going

on steadily along similar lines you would find that before very long

the atom of the chemist would become visible to you. Of course, this is

possible to any clairvoyant who possesses real clairvoyance, and not

only a dim response to vibrations outside that are not understood. Two

years ago, under favourable conditions, two of us who had developed some

of these higher kinds of sight set to work on the atoms of the chemist.

We examined some fifty-five or fifty-six of them, drew the forms, and

since then have examined all the rest that are known to science. Those

forms fall into classes; they can be drawn so that anyone who is now

able to see them can test his own vision if he pleases by that which we

have put on record; and you will find in that work, which we published

under the name of _Occult Chemistry_, pictures of the chemical elements,

observations as to their breakings up into finer and finer forms of

ether, and possibly to the trained chemist suggestions of experiments

by which he may guide his own investigations, and by utilising what we

have seen as scientific hypotheses to him, although facts to us, may

be able to follow these subtle and elusive particles of matter further

than he has been able to follow them by any instrument that he is able

to manufacture. For when a thing is once done, it is possible then to

verify it over and over again; when once the pictures have been made, it

is easy for others to see them and verify their details; and along that

line opens up a whole vast series of new observations by man developing

within himself instruments of observation keener than those he possesses

by his apparatus and his machinery. Along that line physical research

may go. As these senses become commoner and commoner, investigations may

be carried on by scientists into the subtler worlds on whose thresholds

they now are standing, until we shall be able to have a chemistry founded

on direct observation which shall carry us right up to the ultimate atom

of the physical plane, and make practicable those so-called dreams of

the Alchemist, which are only practicable by bringing together atoms

of a finer kind than the gaseous, and so leading to aggregations that

make the elements along the lines that the chemist desires, he doing in

his laboratory what nature has done outside. And so along that line to

chemistry, to electricity, new powers of observation will extend the

bounds of science.

And in medicine the same is true. Now medicine is to some extent,

especially on the Continent, profiting by this clear seeing. It is not an

uncommon thing in a Paris hospital for the doctors to look for someone

who is sensitive, to hypnotise that sensitive person, to half awaken

him, so that he is what is called “lucid” or “clairvoyant,” to take him

then to the bedside of the patient and get him to describe the inner

condition of the organs of that patient. Diagnoses are being made in that

way now in several of the Paris hospitals, enormously facilitating the

work of the physician, and even of the surgeon. It is only seeing by what

you call the Röntgen rays. The human eye can develop the power to see

by those rays, and then you don’t want your screens and all the rest of

your apparatus, for direct vision will do what is now done imperfectly

by apparatus. Once, in speaking about this, I pointed out that all that

the doctors had done was to give a new label to a power that had been

recognised by many right back in the last century. They don’t call it

clairvoyance—I use that word—they call it internal autoscopy. After all,

a rose by any other name smells as sweet. Clairvoyance is just as useful

when it is described in seven syllables as when it is described in three

the power is the same; and that is now being used, as I say, for medical

purposes. As that extends, as the action of drugs can be watched, as the

physician can see what he is doing instead of groping, then medicine

will become what it ought to be—a science of healing; and instead of the

miserable practice of vivisection you will have the clairvoyant vision,

which directs alike the scalpel of the surgeon or the prescriptions of

the physician.