But that is not the only door which is opening before medical science.

Doctors are beginning to realise the enormous value of the power of

mind in the treatment of disease. Along this line the way has been led

as usual by the great hosts of people who are banned as charlatans by

modern science—Christian Scientists, Mental Scientists, faith curers of

all sorts. These are the things that are leading the medical profession

slowly along sounder lines of cure, along safer methods of healing. Most

doctors will now admit that to get the mind of the patient with them is

to double the value of their drugs; most doctors will admit that the

use of the imagination by the patient is an immense help in the curing

of any disease. On every side you may see that these methods are being

taken up by medical men, and are being rendered more and more scientific.

What is the law that underlies them all? That the mind creates; that

the mind is the one great creative power in the universe, divine in the

universe, human in man; that as the mind can create, so can it restore;

that where there is injury, the mind can turn its forces to the healing

of the injury; that where harm has happened to the body, the mind can

bring a remedy and strengthen the action of the drugs that are given

by the physician. And I see now that in the Anglican Church there are

several guilds of healing by the action of prayer—which is concentrated

thought—by the touch of consecrated oil—which is a sacramental

function—and by the faith of the patient, which is the determination

of the mind to work in the direction which is desired by the sufferer.

Now there is nothing new in that, nothing that has not been known in

the world for thousands of years. It was pushed out of sight by a

science that depended only on material means; it is coming back with the

supremacy of mind over matter, and with the recognition which science

is now making, that it is life which is the evolver and the moulder of

matter. As medicine goes along that line instead of along the lines of

torture, the doctor will again become the healer instead of the poisoner

that he too often is to-day.

In psychology the same is true; new doors are opening there. These higher

bodies of man that I spoke of at the beginning, as they become organised,

bring us into touch with one region after another of the universe around

us, answer to vibrations from the outer world far away from our physical

globe, bring us into contact with the subtler regions, the regions of

thought as well as the regions of Spirit. As our consciousness makes its

vehicles more plastic, more useful, more keen, more subtle, we shall find

the consciousness far larger than we dreamed of, until at last we shall

realise that this human consciousness of ours is only like a vast body

touching delicately, as it were, the surface of the physical matter of

the globe, putting a little more of itself down into the physical brain

that is more sensitive, but ever transcending the physical, and using the

higher, finer matter for its keener instrument, until at last we shall

realise that genius of every kind is only the manifestation of a larger

consciousness that each of us possesses, only we are not able to make it

work through the denser matter of our brain. And we shall realise that

all that the Prophets have said, all that the great Mystics have told us,

all those things are only the fruits of a wider consciousness contacting

a wider world, and that before psychology is unfolding an enormous range

of possibilities, in which man will be in touch with other worlds than

this, and in which he will climb higher and higher, until he realises

that he is cosmic, not planetary, and belongs to a vaster system, and not

only to one tiny world. Along those lines, and along many another, then,

the finer sense is opening to science new doors, new avenues of knowledge.

III.—ART.

And what of Art? Here, again, these senses will be the builders of the

new art, the givers of the new ideals; and there are already signs, in

the world of painters more especially, of new powers which are opening,

new splendour of colour, and new wedding of emotion to colour also. A new

school of painters is beginning to grow up, some in this country, one at

least in Belgium, several in Hungary. I was looking at their paintings

only three or four days ago, in which new use of colour is being shown

to indicate the higher emotions of the mind, in which the painter is

throwing into forms of new beauty, glorious in new brilliancy of colour,

the higher thoughts and emotions which show themselves especially in

religious feelings. There was one painting that was hanging in the

hall in which we were holding our International Congress, which from

the further end of the hall seemed as though it were impossible as a

mere painting on opaque canvas. As you looked at it from a distance it

seemed as though the colour were transparent, as though the canvas were

transparent, as though there were a light beyond the painting shining

through the colours from behind. Now, there is something of that quality

in the paintings of Mr. Mortimer Menpes which he did in Japan. It shows

so strongly that I remember, in one exhibition of his paintings, that

people looking would hardly believe that a light had not been hidden

behind the painting, so extraordinary was the brilliance that seemed

to shine through; but if you talked to that great colourist, you would

find that he sees colours in quite a different way from you, or at least

I will say I found he saw them in quite a different way from my normal

sight, and in talking to him about the colours that he saw, I was able to

recognise, having unfolded some of the higher vision, that he was seeing

astral colours, and not physical, and that the effort to throw those upon

the canvas brought about the remarkable results which everyone wondered

over, though they did not understand. Now there are many artists who are

growing up along that line, who are groping after new possibilities of

colour as well as after new ideals which they seek to limn, and you will

find in the more modern paintings of that school, at present so small but

with the promise of the future in it, that they are seeking after new

forms of beauty; that they are trying to translate some of the higher

visions that belong to worlds of matter subtler and finer than our own;

that they are beginning to draw down from the ideal great thoughts, which

they are putting at present imperfectly into form and colour, but in

which is the promise of the Art of the Future, where larger worlds shall

be drawn upon, where a vaster Nature shall unfold herself to man, where

new colours and new possibilities of outline shall be found in every

direction, and where human genius shall have a wider range, because a

wider world and wider powers will come within the power of the painter.

And so we shall see it also in music. That is beginning to show signs

of the coming art—subtler harmonies, minuter distances between notes,

tendencies to quarter-notes as well as half-notes, quarter-tones; and

already there are one or two musicians who are beginning in their

melodies to play with these subtler kinds of tones, making strange new

music—music which the public ear is not yet accustomed to, which it

challenges when it hears it, but which is the Music of the Future, when

a vaster range of sound shall appeal to ears more finely organised than

ours, and when the ears of a new race shall demand from its musicians

greater delicacies of musical sound than have yet been mastered amongst

us; and there is a new possibility there. That has been seized in India,

although little put at present into music that the West would love. If

you go to India you will find some strange rules of music there: there is

music for the sunrising, and music for the high noon, and music for the

evening hours, and music for the stillness of the night. Nature has her

sounds in all the different times of her unfolding, from dawn to sunset,

and sunset to dawn, and these finer notes are attuned to these mysteries

of Nature, so that unheard melodies may be mirrored in the music of human

instruments. The Indian musician would not play to you a melody of the

dawn when the sun was setting; he would say it was against religion to do

it, for to him all things are religious. It is a subtler harmony between

man and Nature; and not without significance, again, was it that, at the

Congress I have just spoken of, a Russian lady teacher—for the Russian

is very sensitive, a young nation with possibilities of the future in

it—brought to us what she called “coloured sounds.” She had learned to

translate into musical sounds the colours of the sunset and the colours

of a forest, so that in music she could play sounds that made arise in

the mind the same emotions as would be aroused in the mind that looked at

the glory of the clouds in the sunset, or that sat in the wood and saw

the delicate shadings of the trees; the same emotions in the one case

seen in Nature, in the other heard in music, and both changeable the one

into the other, eye and ear, and ear and eye. Along those lines many new

possibilities lie—new melodies, new delicacies, new exquisite harmonies

in sound.

So art will go forward here, with these keener, subtler organs, further

even in one way than science along the line of observation, for art

reaches out by emotion where science is only observing, and so the poet

is very easily the prophet, and the artist very easily the seer; and as

these powers increase and multiply, a new race arises in which the powers

are inborn. Can you not dream some of the new possibilities in Religion,

in Science, and in Art?

You think it is all a dream, all a fancy! But to say that, you must be

making the preposterous claim that evolution is over, and that you are

the highest products which Nature is able to bring to birth. We are far

higher than the savages: should there not be races higher than we are?

Surely Nature’s power is not exhausted; surely she, who has gradually

builded up the exquisite mechanism of the human retina from the pigment

spot in the nervous ring of the medusa, surely she can evolve these eyes

further and further, to greater power of sight. It all grows out of the

Spirit, and of the Spirit there is no ending. If you see to-day with

your eye it is because the Spirit in you willed to see, and by that will

built up the organ which made the will effective in the material world;

and that same Spirit that evolved you in the past is living in you now,

and is your innermost Self; its powers are not exhausted, its inspiration

is not over, it is still the architect of the human body, as the divine

Spirit is the architect of the universe. Ever to higher and higher

forms of matter, ever to loftier and loftier stages of consciousness,

everlastingness stretches in front of us, as everlastingness stretches

behind us. As we have climbed, so we shall climb; as we have come upwards

from the dust, so shall we ascend to the stars; for the Spirit of God

within us knows no limitation either in time or space, and the evolution

of the future should be a millionfold more splendid than the evolution

which has made us what we are.

Lecture IV

Brotherhood Applied to Social Conditions

Friends: I wish to deal to-night with the question of the principle of

Brotherhood as applied to human life; how we may use it to solve some

of the problems that we find around us at the present day, how we may

use it to make possible the transition from one stage of civilisation

to another, so that the transition may come in peace and goodwill,

and thereby may last, rather than in anger and revolution, which can

only mean a brief period of the new order, and then another struggle,

prolonged ill-will, and misery. But if Brotherhood is to be applied to

the solution of our difficulties, the first thing that is necessary is

to try to understand what is meant by Brotherhood, and what it implies.

Now, Brotherhood by no means implies what is called equality, for just

as you do find Brotherhood in nature, so do you not find equality; in

fact, the very name Brotherhood carries our thoughts to the constitution

of the family, implies at once the inequality of elder and younger, of

wiser and more ignorant, of those who guide and those who obey; so that

if man is to aim at a society in which equality is to be the watchword,

then the principle of Brotherhood must be entirely thrown on one side.

The disadvantage of taking the war-cry of equality in trying to make a

social system, or even to fight a social battle, is that natural law is

against you, and that you are dealing with a fiction, not with a fact.

There is nothing more obvious throughout the whole realm of nature

than the inequalities of which natural order consists; and if you turn

aside from the vaster order of the various grades of living things, and

confine yourselves only to the study of man, there the same principle of

inequality is perpetually asserting itself. It is not only the difference

of age which always comes in, in the question of a family; it is the

difference of capacity, of power, of characteristics, of qualifications.

What sort of equality is possible between the strong and healthy man

and the cripple or the invalid? what sort of equality between the man

with eyes and the blind? between the man who is dowered with genius and

the man who is weighted by dulness and stupidity? Inequality is the law

of nature, not equality; and it is of no use to try to build a social

system on that which is only a fiction, thought out in the study of

doctrinaires, but breaking down the very moment it comes to be applied

to human life. That famous declaration of the American Republic: “Man is

born free,” and on that freedom basing equality, is denied by every fact

of human life. Man is born a babe, helpless and dependent; and if the

babe were left to the enjoyment of freedom, he would have very little

chance of growing into youth and maturity. A babe is not born free, but

dependent on all those around him for the possible continuance of his

life; and if it were not that he is born into a system of affection and

obligation, there would be no chance for the human babe to survive the

first hours of his infancy.

It is a remarkable fact, one full of significance, that the two societies

in the world which recognise Universal Brotherhood both also recognise

a hierarchical order. Take the great fraternity of Masons. They lay

down the principle of Universal Brotherhood over the whole surface of

the globe, but there is nothing more rigid in its order and in the

authority committed to the officers than a Masonic Lodge. Hierarchy is

there recognised as the very condition of liberty. If you turn from

that proclamation of Universal Brotherhood to the Theosophical Society,

exactly the same thing is seen. You have there the recognition of a

hierarchy that guides the destinies of humanity, and presides over the

evolving growth of man—a mighty hierarchy, where wisdom only gives the

right to rule, and where the commands of wisdom are gladly carried

out by the less wise, who recognise the authority of those wiser than

themselves. And that, in truth, is the condition of liberty. For without

that hierarchical order, where wisdom rules and ignorance obeys, there

is no possibility of anything that is worthy to be called by the name

of liberty. As I shall want to put to you at the close of what I have

to say to-night, we have never yet seen liberty upon earth outside the

ranks of that great human hierarchy; we have only seen the rule of

different classes, the rule of one group over another; but never have we

seen liberty, for man is not yet sufficiently evolved to understand the

conditions under which alone liberty can exist.

In looking at this strange fact, that the only two societies that

proclaim Universal Brotherhood also admit a hierarchical order, let us

see how far in the great Brotherhood of man there are any foundations on

which a hierarchy can be based. I am coming, now, away from that great

occult hierarchy of which I spoke into the ordinary humanity known to us

all. In the family, where the principle of Brotherhood is recognised,

and where duty and responsibility go with age and knowledge, there we

have, as it were, a rough outline as to what a State should be. But how

does the principle of age come in as regards mankind? For unless there

be something in the human race which bears an analogy, at least, to the

principle of age within a family, we shall find it difficult to vindicate

Brotherhood, much less to make it the foundation-stone of society in

the centuries to come. Now, it is as true of humanity as it is true of

the members of a family that there is a difference of age. Exactly on

the same lines by which the members of a family are born one after the

other, and in all those different ages make up the family circle, so is

it with the great family of man. The human and intelligent Spirits that

make up that vast family are not of the same age, have not all been born

into individual existence at the same time. Side by side with the idea

of Brotherhood comes out the natural law of reincarnation—that there is

a difference of age in the individualised human Spirits, and that there

are elders and youngers in the great human family. These differences

of age do not go necessarily with any of the distinctions of castes

or classes that you find in modern society, although the great caste

system of India was founded upon this principle of the different ages

of the reincarnating Egos. Long ago, however, has that passed away, and

you have not now manifest on earth that same definite order as in the

earlier days of our Aryan ancestors in India. Still, you can tell the

younger or the older soul by examining the characteristics that the man

or the woman brings into the world at birth; by looking at the character,

the marks of the being older or younger leap into sight. The younger

soul, unable to acquire any large amount of knowledge, with very little

moral faculty showing itself, very selfish and desirous to grasp the

pleasure of the moment without any care for what may be the result of

grasping it in the time that follows, the trivial, shallow, easy-going

way of life, the being carried away by the ever-changing fancy, and

with no strong underlying thought or principle or will on which you can

reckon, very changeable, very frivolous, easily carried away by every

passing whim of the moment—those are marked out as the younger souls,

who have little experience of life behind them in which character has

been builded, in which will has been evolved. And when you come across

those of calm judgment, great capacity for acquiring knowledge, power to

turn knowledge into wisdom, steadfast in will, steadfast in principle

ready to look to the future beyond the passing attractions of the moment,

ready to sacrifice a temporary gain for a larger happiness—in such men

and women you have the marks of the older souls, whose past experiences

have gradually developed capacities, and who have brought with them into

the world the fruits of long-reaped harvests. That great principle of

Reincarnation must ever go hand in hand with Brotherhood if Brotherhood

is to be applied, if it is to be made a working principle of ordinary

life. For it is out of these differences of age between us that grow up

all the possibilities of an ordered and happy society amongst ourselves.

When the young souls come into places of power and wealth, then ill is

it for the nation, for then children rule instead of men. But well is it

for a people where wisdom is the test of weight and authority, where the

wise and the thoughtful and the learned are those who are held to have

the greatest claim to social distinction, where knowledge and power go

hand in hand, and where experience is the guide of righteousness, the

standard of honour. Only as those facts are recognised—and they grow out

of the knowledge of reincarnation—only on that stable law in nature can

you build securely and strongly the society that shall endure.

But it is sometimes said: If you are going to build a society on these

great principles, then you have to change human nature, because human

nature is selfish, superficial, readily swayed, and you cannot build

a society which is truly great out of trivial and superficial people.

The wise are always in the minority; how, then, will you gain for them

the right and the power to rule? It is true that human nature will have

to change very much from what it is to-day, but then it is changing

all the time—it is no new thing to change human nature. Human nature

is perpetually changing as century succeeds century and civilisation

succeeds civilisation; and when we once understand the law of life, and

realise the mighty power of thought in the building of character, and

understand that law of inviolable sequence which Theosophists call karma,

working in every department of human life and not only in non-intelligent

nature, when we realise the time that reincarnation gives us, and the

certainty that that law of inviolable sequence gives us, then we begin

to understand that human nature is a very malleable thing; and just in

proportion as we understand the law, so shall be the rapidity of the

changing. Do you think that human thought is weak as a force to change

human nature? Is it not rather true that thought is the power which

brings about all mighty changes?—first the ideal, then the action. Let

me give you two striking examples of the only two nations in Europe that

have attained national unity during our own lifetime; one Italy, the

other Germany. I only take them as examples of nations that out of many

States and warring interests have reached unity as a nation; and how was

it done? It was done by the holding up of the ideal in both cases, the

ideal of national unity. Not until German poets had sung of the German

Fatherland for many and many a long year, not until that ideal of the

Fatherland rose strongly and clearly in the minds of the young, not until

the poet had made the ideal was it possible for the soldier to come

forward with the statesman and build those States into one. And so also

with Italy. Long before there was any talk of revolution or war, long

before there was any idea of appealing to the sword, Italian thinkers

had spoken of Italian unity, Italian patriots had held up the ideal of

a united Italy; and it was only when the ideal had fired the hearts of

the young that there was strength enough for the self-sacrifice that

followed the sword of Garibaldi, and made it possible for Italy to become

a united people. For it is out of the ideal that enthusiasm grows, out of

the ideal and the longing to realise it that the power of self-sacrifice

is generated. What we need to do, then, to change human nature, is to

hold up great ideals before the young of our time, and those ideals

shall fire their hearts to passionate enthusiasm, until self-sacrifice

shall be a joy and not a sacrifice at all, in order that the ideal they

worship may become realised upon earth. Along those lines human nature

will change; for, never forget that Human Nature is divine, not devilish;

that a God is at the heart of every man, unfolding the power of divinity;

hence the power of the ideal to fire and the power of thought to mould

the lines of character.

Let us pass on from principles to practice, and see which of the social

problems shows good hope of resolution by applying this principle of

Brotherhood, with its corollaries of reincarnation and karma. Evidently

our first tool is education. In the plastic bodies and brains of the

young there lies the greatest possibility of a speedy upbuilding of

a noble social feeling. As I pointed out in the first of this course

of lectures, the attempt that is being made in many directions now

to separate religion and morals, and to give an education from which

religion shall be excluded—that, for the reasons which I then gave you,

and need not repeat, is foredoomed to failure. Now, it is quite clear why

politicians and the public, impatient of the quarrels of many sectarians

and denominations, want to throw religion aside altogether, and not bring

religious controversies into the schools. But if you apply the principle

of Brotherhood to religion, it surely is not too much to hope that in a

country where the vast majority are at least nominally Christian, some

sort of agreement might be come to on essentials for the teaching of the

young. In India you have sectarian religions as you have here, great

divisions in the schools of religious thought; and it was said some

dozen years ago in India, quite as strongly as you hear it said now in

England: It is impossible to teach religion to Indian boys and girls, for

the strife of sects makes unity impossible, and how should you teach the

children without deciding on what to teach them? That seemed, as it seems

over here, a great obstacle in the way of religious teaching, and yet in

four or five years that question was solved in India so far as concerns

Hindūism, the religion of the enormous majority of the people. What was

done? The principle of Brotherhood was applied. Some of us, in concert

with some theosophical Hindūs, gathered together a small committee to

mark out what were the essential doctrines of Hindūism, and what were

unessential and sectarian. After that sketch had been made, we set to

work to get scholars to collect from Indian scriptures passages which

bore upon these doctrines characteristic of Hindūism, and, with that

material gathered together, a Theosophist sat down and wrote a text-book

of Hindūism. Having written it, a hundred copies were drawn in proof, and

sent to the heads of all the great Hindū sects and schools of philosophy.

They were asked to read it through, to strike out anything they objected

to, to mark in anything they thought essential; and when these books had

travelled round in that way the whole circle of the quarrelling Hindū

sects, they came back again into our hands with all the emendations and

suggestions. Once more we sat round the book, examined the criticisms,

adopted the widely supported suggestions, with such success that, when

the elementary and the advanced text-books on Hindūism were issued,

they were taken up by all the sects over India and adopted as a fair

presentment of the fundamental doctrines of Hindūism. They have been

taken up in school after school, adopted by prince after prince, so that

when the great Mussulmān ruler of Hyderabad in the Deccan wanted to give

his Hindū subjects Hindū education in the whole of the State schools,

he simply took these books and placed them in every school, so that the

Hindūs among his people might be instructed in their own faith. The same

thing was done by the English Government in the Princes’ College in

Rājputāna, because they found that secular education made princes who

were immoral and unfit to rule. During the last eight years these books

have spread everywhere, everywhere accepted and everywhere used. Do you

mean to tell me that the divisions among Christians are so much deeper

that they cannot do what the Hindūs have done, or that you have not more

on which you agree than on which you disagree; and that you could not

teach the children that in which you are united, and leave them in their

manhood or their womanhood to add the sectarian parts of the doctrines

for themselves? In India, to show you the effect of this, one of the

directors of public education asked me: “Cannot you write, Mrs. Besant,

a text-book for the Christians?” My answer was: “Yes, I could write it,

but I don’t think they would use it.” It must come from so recognised

Christian authority. I quite grant that a Theosophist would do it better

than anybody else, because the Theosophist has no quarrel with any form

of religious belief, and because the whole of his study leads him along

the lines of recognising the points of union rather than the points of

divergence; but it need not be done by a Theosophist, only by some one

with the spirit of Theosophy in him, and that only means the spirit of

the Divine Wisdom, of which every separate religion is an expression, so

that there ought to be no quarrel with any.

Supposing that to be done for the whole of the Empire wherever Christians

are found, see how enormous would be the gain; and it would not be

so difficult. There are certain doctrines you all accept if you are

Christian at all: you would only have to put those into a rational,

intelligible form, and then gather from your own Scriptures the verses

which support and give them authority to all who look on those Scriptures

as authoritative. I have had in my mind an idea that may possibly

be carried out, of trying whether it would not be possible to write

a Universal Text-Book of Religion and Morals, with texts from every

Scripture of the great religions, from all the Bibles of mankind, drawing

the authority in support of the universal doctrine, and in that way

making a book that Christian and Hindū, Parsī, Buddhist and Mussulmān

could use; for all their Scriptures might be quoted in support of the

general doctrine, and each might then add its own specific teachings to

that great broad foundation, showing the real Brotherhood of faiths.

That is a dream, but I think it may become a reality.

Along that line, then, in our education we must have religious teaching,

in order that we may have a firm foundation for morals. With regard to

other teaching, what would grow out of the principle of the State being

a great family, with children of many ages and varying capacities that

ought to be equally trained? There would grow up a system of education

in which one broad common basis would be given to every child alike up

to about the age of ten or eleven years, and then there would come a

differentiation according to the capacities of the children. You would

no longer, when a child has musical capacity, insist that that child

shall get a smattering of three or four other arts, so that he is not

good in any one, but only superficial in all. If you saw musical ability

you would let the other points go, and music would form the predominant

part of the education of such a child. If you found power of colour,

power of form, then along the plastic or the painting art the child would

have developed his natural capacity; and slowly and gradually you would

learn that the power of art must pass into the handicrafts of the nation,

and that large numbers of your boys and girls should be trained to the

handicraft as against the machine-made product; because there you have

the possibility of general beauty coming back to life, and there alone

will the sense of beauty be cultivated throughout the nation. Where you

see the tendency is literary, there you should not insist, especially as

you do with girls still, that they should all play a little music, and

all do a little drawing, and all learn a little singing; you would let

all that go, and you would cultivate the literary faculty where you found

it, and make that the special point of this more specialised education.

Where you found the scientific faculty, there you would make that the

most important part of the educational curriculum, remembering only that

you must add to scientific training something of literature and the

ideal, otherwise your science will tend to produce vulgarity and lack of

the wider understanding of human life. Where you find mechanical power,

there you will cultivate that especially, always remembering that no boy

should leave school until he has learned some method of being useful to

the State while earning his own livelihood. Unskilled labour should be a

thing of the past in every department of human life. It is necessary that

you specialise at an age which is early enough to enable a boy to learn

effectively that which is to be his livelihood in later life. A good deal

of mistake is being made in the education of the day, where, when the

boy has to earn his livelihood along some line of manual work, too much

of the literary is given to the sacrifice of manual dexterity. You want

far more practical training in your schools than you have to-day, and the

continual pointing-out that one form of human activity is not inherently

nobler than any other form; that the man who uses his hands well is as

honourable in the use of them as the man who uses his brain well. What is

dishonourable is that either brain work or manual work should be badly

done. Your really destructive spirit along all these lines is: “Oh, it

is good enough; it will do.” There is nothing that will do unless it

is done as well as you are able to do it; otherwise it is slop work,

and degrading in itself. It is not the kind of work you do that makes

you either honourable or dishonourable; it is the spirit in which you

do it, and the quality of the work that you turn out. Until you can get

that through the nation, as it is not to-day—until you can give back to

the workman the dignity of the artist, and not want every carpenter to

educate his boy superficially so that he may be a clerk instead of a

handicraftsman, spoiling your crafts and overloading your offices—until

you can bring back that balance of human duty and human labour, there is

little hope of a sane and healthy society amongst you.

Pass, again, from that to another thing that is badly wanted in

education; but I think that is learned more in the playground than in

the classroom—discipline, the sense of duty to a larger life. That may

sound rather a grand sort of description to give of the effect of a game

on a boy, but it is true. Where a boy is a member of a team—cricket,

football, hockey, what you like—that boy will never be a success unless

he learns to think of his side and not of himself, and that is a larger

self than his own personal claims. It is in the playground that the

boys and girls learn many a lesson which makes them better citizens in

later life—the sense of order, the sense of discipline, the doing your

work in your place, wherever you are put in the field. You may have one

place or another in the cricket field or the football field, but the

test of the boy is that he does his work well in the place where he is,

and does not want to be somewhere else when his captain has placed him

there. That moral discipline of the playground is more valuable than

the discipline of the classroom, for it is voluntary, gladly obeyed,

and it is stimulated by an ideal, unalloyed by fear. Hence the value of

the playground, and the value of teaching boys really to play. For the

greatest danger of these so-called democratic nations is that they have

no sense of discipline, no sense of order, no sense of obedience; without

these no nation can be great. When you get, as you sometimes do get, a

thing that happened last time I was in Australia, that an apprentice

boy at a mine, because he was reproved for not doing his work rightly,

at once left work, and then the whole mine struck in order to defend

this young scamp’s liberty—there is not much chance of building a nation

out of materials like that; you have only got a heap of marbles with no

cohesion, with no binding sense of duty nor sense of responsibility, and

out of those materials you can never make a State. Without discipline,

order, obedience, no possibility of greatness. But all that has to grow

out of the education definitely based on these ideas of Brotherhood, of

reincarnation, and law.

Pass from that department of life, and turn to a very important

question—Penology, the treatment of criminals. What is the criminal?

Criminals fall into two great classes: one class of young souls, and

they need to be educated; another class of souls whose development has

been lopsided, so that the intellect has grown, but the conscience has

not developed side by side with it—by far the more dangerous criminals

those, and far more difficult to deal with. Now, the young soul is very

largely a savage, the man at so low a stage of human evolution that

earlier in the evolution of our race he would have been guided into some

savage tribe in some island or desert, where the rough discipline of that

savage life would have begun the hewing of him into shape—rough, hard,

cruel, but gradually building up that young soul into a sense of duty

to his tribe. Now, as things have changed, and human evolution has gone

forward rapidly, there are not places enough in the world where those

conditions are available for the gradual training of these younger souls.

The civilised nations, as we call them, have been spreading everywhere

over the world’s surface, have been driving these miserable people out of

their possessions, have taken their lands, largely murdered them, have

appropriated the land and dispossessed the earlier possessors into the

next world. What has become of all those? They have got to come back,

and they tend by natural law to come to the nations who have been most

active in sending them out of their possessions. It is quite natural, if

you think that we live under law, not by chance; and it is not, perhaps,

if I may say it with all respect, very wonderful that the people of Great

Britain have a rather extra share of those unfortunate savages to look

after. They come into the slum, and there they are born really savages.

If you look at them you call them congenital criminals. But they are

really young souls, without morality, without much brains, with a certain

craft and cunning and cleverness, but fundamentally young. Then you find

others who have come out of that lowest condition of savagery, but who

are not yet at the point where the restraints of the society that suits

the older souls are tolerable to them. And so you get a great crop

of occasional criminals, with the tendency to turn them into habitual

criminals. Then you have that other class I spoke of, the lopsided

people, whom I said were the most difficult to deal with; men who are

really clever, but turn their cleverness to plundering their fellows

instead of using it within the limitations of the law. That is a large

class. Sometimes they just go over the edge of the law, sometimes they

just keep within it, but from the social standpoint, remember, there are

many social criminals who always keep on what is sometimes called the

street-side of the law—that is, they do not go within the jail—such a

man as one I spoke of the other day, who had wrecked the railway system

of a whole district in order that out of that wreckage he might build

himself up an enormous fortune. He is not a burglar from the technical

standpoint, he is not a thief that a policeman might catch hold of, but

in the sight of karma, and in the sight of the eternal justice, that

man who by legal means has robbed thousands of others of their means of

livelihood is a worse thief than the one who has picked a pocket and is

thrown into jail. There are a good many things in a civilised country

which lie very nearly along the line of legal or illegal theft, a good

deal of which goes by the name of company-promoting, where it is just a

toss-up whether there is really fraud that can be proved; but with the

remarkable fact that while the companies always perish, and the people

who took shares are beggared, the company-promoter comes out at the top,

and becomes quite a successful person. Now all that, from the social

standpoint, is utterly immoral, but we cannot call them criminals in the

technical sense, although now and then they go a little too far, and then

the criminal law catches them.

How should those be dealt with who are really the young souls? how shall

we avoid turning them into habitual criminals as we do now?—for is there

anything more miserable and more shameful than that a man should go back

time after time till fifty, sixty convictions are registered against him

in the police court, and the sentence grows longer and longer because he

is a habitual criminal? He has been manufactured into that. You ought

not to treat a man who has committed a crime against your legal system

by consigning him to prison for seven days, or a month, or a year,

growing longer and longer and longer after every return to temporary

freedom. You don’t use people who are ill like that; you never find a

doctor committing a small-pox patient to a hospital for seven days,

nor a fever-stricken one for a month; they are committed until they

are cured, and that is the way in which you should deal with anyone of

marked criminal propensities. You should not punish, you should only

help; and you should take that child-soul and train him into decency of

living. For one thing, you should never have in your prisons any form

of useless labour as a punishment. The criminal who is really a savage

always dislikes labour; he is always idle—that is part of his youth; and

if you give him a form of labour that is punitive and not useful, you

only increase his natural disgust for every kind of labour, and make

him hate it more thoroughly when he comes out of jail than he did when

he went in. Taking up shot and carrying it to one side of the prison

yard, and then carrying it back again, or the useless torture of the

treadmill, these make criminals, they do not cure them.[1] You want, when

the criminal comes into your power, to take him in hand as you would

take a younger brother who does not know how to guide himself, and it

is your duty as the elder to guide him; you need to train him in some

honest trade whereby he might gain a livelihood; you need to discipline

him, not cruelly, but firmly and steadily; you need to lay down the very

wholesome law that if a man will not work neither shall he eat, and teach

him in the prison to earn his dinner before he enjoys it. You need to

set him to work at trades whereby he may earn his own living within the

walls of the jail; and if, after you have taught him a trade so that he

can earn his living, and outside the jail have found him an opportunity

of decent livelihood—if then he refuses to work, and comes back again

into your hands, then you should keep that discipline upon him until he

really is cured, even though it be for many and many a year, for you are

training him into better character. You might make the prison life less

of a disgrace than it is now; give him rational amusement, amusement that

will cultivate, instead of having him deadened by the continual feeling

of disgrace within the prison walls. You may restrain him—that may be

necessary for the welfare of society; but you should treat him as a

younger one in the national household, to be gradually trained up into

decent living; let the willingness to live the decent life be the only

key to the door of the jail.

But you may do much before there is any need to send them to prison at

all. There is a system which is just beginning here, called the Probation

System, one that has been worked in America with very great success,

and one that a late member of our Society, Miss Lucy Bartlett, has had

the immense privilege of introducing into Italy, so that it has been

made the law of the land. Now what is that system? When a young boy or

girl commits a first offence, he is not sent to jail if someone, a good

citizen, of decent standing and good life, will come forward in the court

and say: “I will take charge of that boy or girl, or young man or young

woman. I will be his friend and look after him.” Then the sentence is not

one of imprisonment; it is a sentence which is over the lad’s head for a

time; and if he will not be helped, then it is allowed to take effect.

But, as a matter of fact, that is very seldom the case. This man or woman

coming forward out of the more leisured classes of society, and becoming

a friend to that younger brother or sister, is, in the great majority of

cases, a means of redeeming that younger one from evil into good; the

older makes a friend of him, takes him out sometimes, talks with him,

trusts him really as a brother or a sister, and great is the redeeming

power of human love in restoring self-respect, and great the desire for

approval. Those are the motives that are brought to bear on one who has

only just set his feet on the path of criminality, and that in most

cases brings him back to virtue; and the friendship that began in the

probation goes on through the rest of life, strengthening, helping,

teaching both the helper and the helped. The system has been in operation

for some time now in America, long enough to test it; in Italy only

for some two or three years, too short a time; man after man and woman

after woman of the leisured classes has come forward to act as friend

and helper of the one who has come within the grip of the law. Surely no

better application of Brotherhood to criminal treatment could be found

than that; it is the realisation of the duty of those who are beyond the

temptation to vice to their youngers who have fallen under its power.

I can hardly leave this subject without saying a word on Capital

Punishment. That, of course, cannot find defence from anyone who realises

the principle of Brotherhood. Some of you may remember the saying of a

witty Frenchman: “Que messieurs les assassins commencent”; but it is

not from the lower that reforms begin, but from the higher. You cannot

expect your murderer to respect human life if you have taught him by

your criminal legislation that the right penalty for murder is to

murder again. True, one comes from passion and the other from the law;

but if the law does not teach respect for human life, how should the

passions of the criminal honour that sacredness? It is not only from that

general principle that you make human life cheap by destroying it, but

from another even more important. You cannot get rid of that murderer

of yours; you can only get rid of his body, and his body is the most

convenient prison in which you can keep him. You can lock up his body

and prevent him from committing any further murders, but you cannot

lock him up when you have driven him out of his body by the hangman’s

noose; you have not killed him, you cannot kill him, you have only

killed his body; and you have driven him out into that next world which

interpenetrates this world, and whose inhabitants are with us all the

time; you have sent him out into that other world hating, cursing, full

of anger and revenge against those who have cut short his life. He acts

as the instigator of other murders; he stimulates other criminals into

the last possibility of crime. Have you ever noticed that a brutal murder

is sometimes repeated over and over again in the same community until you

get a cycle of murders of one particular kind? I know, of course, that

the Press, in reporting every detail of those horrors, adds the forces

of imagination to the power of temptation which comes from the man you

have sent to the other side. In a civilised country no such details of

brutal crime should ever be given; people should understand that that

stimulates the faculty of imitation, and so makes repetition of the crime

more likely. Another reason why you should never send a man out like that

is, that when the criminal is in your hands, remembering the lives that

lie in front of him, you should try to give him something to take with

him into the other world which he can turn into capacity and moral sense;

you should remember he will come back again to a physical body, and it is

your duty to make that next birth of his as much an improvement on the

present as it is possible for human thought and human love to make it. We

have a duty to these young souls around us in order that they may profit

by our civilisation, and not suffer from it as they too often do to-day.

When you turn to economics, what will be the result of Brotherhood there?

The detailed working out of that problem will certainly need the keenest

intellects in order to devise some scheme of production and distribution

which shall make human life less burdened on the one side, less full of

useless luxury on the other. But not along the rough-and-ready lines

of the Socialism of the streets are these great and difficult problems

rightly to be solved. You need to solve them by the most careful

consideration of all the problems which are interlinked the one with the

other. Some system of general co-operation, of general profit-sharing, or

something along those lines, will be the principle on which the changed

conditions will go; but while you will make the lot of the toilers far

lighter and happier, you will never give to the ignorant the control

over that on which their food supply depends; for that means ruin. Let

me give you one illustration to show you what I mean. There have been a

large number of strikes in this country for years and years past, and

there is no doubt that many of those were brought about by the greed of

the employing class, and by the unfair treatment of the workers; but none

the less they have in more than one case—in fact, in many cases—reduced

the workers to a lower condition than they were in before. I was up at

Tyneside the other day. Newcastle with its adjoining ports, Sunderland,

and the whole coast along there, was once one of the great shipbuilding

centres in England. Strike after strike made shipbuilding impossible to

carry on, because the men could not pay their way. The result is that

it has ceased to be a great shipbuilding district; that the trade has

largely gone away from the Tyneside, and that those parts are falling

into decay. You cannot blame the men who struck; they tried to get better

conditions for themselves; they did not understand the difficulties

of all these large commercial firms, and that they might readily make

shipbuilding impossible for the shipbuilder by pressing for a particular

rate of wage which was not too much for them, but more than at the time

the exigencies of the trade enabled the shipbuilder to pay. And so on

and on in endless cases. Careful thought and deliberate judgment are

wanted. Many proposals have been made by the trades unions themselves—a

sliding scale of wages, arbitration boards, and so on—all steps in the

right direction. But your difficulty with arbitration boards is that

their decision is not always accepted. When people go to arbitration

they hope to get a decision on their own side; when it does not come

out, they are not always willing to submit. When I was in New Zealand

last year there had been a great struggle between employers and men; at

last both applied to the arbitration court, but when the decision was

given against the men, the men refused to go back to work. You cannot

play that way with these great economic questions; no one trade should

ever decide entirely for itself what should be the rate of wage that it

is possible for the employers to pay, for the question is complicated

by many considerations; it is not one trade, but it is the balance of

all trades on which the ultimate decision has to turn. Hence the need of

ability, of power to understand, of wide study of economic questions

which no handiworker is able to give. There is where the difficulty comes

in, and where there is need on both sides of a spirit which shall seek

the common good; otherwise at the end there is only more trouble than

before, and the trade vanishes where the conditions for carrying it on

are made impossible. Exactly the same thing is going on now in Australia.

The men who know conditions of mining and things of that sort are laying

down the wages which shipping companies must pay to their sailors. When a

P. and O. boat, for instance, goes within the waters of Australia, they

will soon be compelled to pay their men at the particular rate of pay

which has been fixed on economic conditions in Australia. What will be

the result? The P. and O. boats will not go; they cannot ruin themselves

to please the Australian working-men; hence the means of communication

will be very largely cut off; and when the harm is done, it is too late

then to cry out for the remedy. Those are the kind of things that are

going on in every direction with the coming of manual workers into power,

because the attempt to rule has come before the conditions of rule have

been understood.

It is very much the same when you come to deal with all questions of

Woman’s Labour. Woman claims the right to labour, but very often she has

forgotten that employers can play upon certain characteristics of the

woman that nothing can alter, because they are fundamental and natural.

When a woman has taken up the trade of the wife and the mother, and then

goes out to work in the mill, leaving the children behind and the baby

uncared for save by hired care, then wages are driven down because she

is willing to work for lower wages, knowing the misery of the children

she has left at home; then comes the playing-off of the wife against the

husband, of the woman against the man; the children are the sufferers

from the taking away of the mother to work in the mill, and the man is

turned out to walk the streets because cheaper female labour has taken

his place. These are some of the complicated difficulties that arise out

of what seems the simple thing of allowing a woman to sell her labour.

Women and men can never be equal in the labour market, because the woman

is the childbearer, and there comes in the difference, and the question

of the nation’s health and vigour. She can never command the same wage as

the man, because, as I once heard brutally said when I was complaining

about the starvation wage of some match-girls: “There is always another

way the woman has to increase her income.” That is true, pitifully true;

but it puts her at a disadvantage in the struggle of the labour market.

That which seemed so promising at first has only increased the stress of

economic conditions, has turned the man out into the streets while the

woman is trying to do the double work of the mill and the home. That is

an impossible condition of things, for which a remedy will have to be

found.

And so to deal with these economic questions we want the best brains and

the best hearts, the widest knowledge and the deepest sympathy. Those,

and those only, can solve these terrible economic problems of the time.

You cannot solve them by any rough-and-ready means, nor by any quick and

sudden means. You must solve them by wisdom and by love, and by realising

the nation’s interest is a common interest, not of class against class,

but of union of all for the common good of the community.

But then it is said: What about politics? On the detail of that, frankly,

I have naught to say, for I am concerned only with principles. But one

thing I would like to put to you, coming back to that point of liberty

with which I started. People have supposed that liberty means a vote. You

could not have a bigger blunder. Liberty and the vote have practically

nothing in common. The vote gives you the power to make laws, to coerce

other people; it by no means gives you necessarily liberty for yourself.

We have never yet had, as I said, liberty upon earth. We have had class

legislation of every kind in England, but liberty never. Go back in

history and you find the Kings ruling, and that built up the one nation

of England. Then the Barons ruled, and they did not on the whole do so

badly, for England was called Merrie England then, and certainly no one

would dream of applying that name to it now. Then there came the England

of Parliaments, getting duller and duller, deader and deader; then the

England of Commercialism. And who is our ruler now? Neither King nor

Lords nor Parliament altogether, but on the one side King Purse, and

King Mob on the other. Neither of those is a ruler who is likely to

make this nation great. Liberty is a great celestial Goddess, strong,

beneficent, and austere, and she can never descend upon a nation by the

shouting of crowds, nor by the arguments of unbridled passion, nor by

hatred of class against class. Liberty will never descend upon earth in

outer matters until she has first descended into the hearts of men, and

until the higher Spirit which is free has dominated the lower nature, the

nature of passions and strong desires, and the will to hold for oneself

and to trample upon others. You can only have a free nation when you

have free men to build it out of—free men and women both; but no man is

free and no woman is free who is under the dominance of appetite, or

vice, or drunkenness, or any form of evil which he is unable to control.

Self-control is the foundation on which alone freedom can be built.

Without that you have anarchy, not freedom; and every increase of the

present anarchy is paid for by the price of happiness, which is given

in exchange. But when Freedom comes, she will come down to a nation

in which every man and every woman will have learned self-control and

self-mastery; and then, and then only, out of such men who are free,

out of such women who are free, strong, righteous, ruling their own

nature and training it to the noblest ends—of such only can you build up

political freedom, which is the result of the freedom of the individual,

and not the outcome of the warring passions of men.

Lecture V

The Coming Race

Friends: Some of you who have been attending this course of lectures may

remember that in speaking of the new doors opening in religion, science,

and art, I made a somewhat hasty and imperfect reference to changes that

would be taking place in the human organism and an unfolding of the

human consciousness, and I promised, in that brief statement, to return

to the subject when I was to deal with “The Coming Race.” The nature,

the character of that unfolding of consciousness, the changes in the

bodily organism of man that will accompany those unfolding powers in

consciousness, and make it possible for them to be manifested in our

physical world—those changes naturally fall under the heading which I

have taken for to-night’s discourse, “The Coming Race.” For it is of one

of these great changes in the type of humanity that I have specially to

speak to you to-night. In order to lead your thoughts to that rationally,

and without gaps or chasms, I shall ask you to consider with me for a

few moments certain great principles of study which we find continually

used by the Mystics of the past, and in our own day adopted to a very

considerable extent by modern science. The reason why science has

adopted them is the same reason that made Mystics originally work them

out, and that is, that science in our own time has been dealing with such

enormous periods of growth, with such vast extent of these periods, that

the scientific man cannot observe; that he is obliged to try to find a

principle by which, observing what is near, he may be able, by a process

of induction, to discover what is far off.

Now, this principle is called the principle of correspondences. You

find it, as I said, used by Mystics of all types in the past: the great

scientist-mystic, Swedenborg, of Sweden, based a very large part of his

thought on the system of correspondences, of trying to discover what was

far off and extensive by a study of that which was near and comparatively

small. So in our own day with regard to science; and I remind you first

of that in order to show you that in using this principle we are on

ground which is recognised as being firm and stable, and is adopted

in all the greater researches which have to deal with the distant and

the extensive. Science has made specially good use of this system of

correspondences in two lines of its thought: one, that of evolutionary

growth, illuminated by the study of embryology; the other, that of

the evolution of consciousness in humanity at large, illuminated by

an observation of consciousness in the child, the youth, and the man.

If, for a moment, we stop on the great evolutionary series or cycles

of the past, we shall at once recognise that direct observation is

only possible to a very small extent. It is true that by the aid of

geology many buried skeletons of the past may be brought to the surface

and examined, and thus light may be thrown on the various classes to

which the skeletons in the time of the living animal belonged. Fossil

remains certainly help us to a very great extent in trying to study the

evolutionary past of our globe; but, as everyone knows who has studied

the geological record, that record has large gaps occurring in it from

time to time. It is exceedingly imperfect, exceedingly unsatisfactory,

and only along some limited lines of evolutionary study is it possible

to find from the fossils of the past the principle of life as it has

gradually grown and branched upon our earth. Hence, in the difficulty of

thus unveiling the past, evolutionists have turned to the study of the

near, the growth of the individual, the stages through which his body

passes, especially during ante-natal life, and it was very largely the

study of embryology that threw light on the evolutionary truth. For it

is observed, in tracing the growth of the human body of the individual,

that it passes through certain clear, definite, marked stages. There is a

stage at which the characteristics are those of the fish, bringing about

some very curious results as regards especially the distribution of some

of the nerves; then a stage which is that of the reptile; then a stage

which is that of the mammal; and so on up to the highest in the mammalian

kingdom, man himself. From the standpoint of mere observation from

outside, without use of reason, this sequence invariably followed would

say little, would signify little; but when man looks at that with the eye

of reason, and not only observes the succession of certain stages, but

applies his reason to solve the problem as to why those stages constantly

appear, then it is he realises that in the body of the individual the

whole evolutionary course of nature is traced and repeated; that in

that highest, the human, form all the past history of the evolution of

forms is broadly indicated; and that while, of course, details cannot be

observed, the great succession is seen there, the invariable sequence

ever repeated in the highest, the noblest form. And, working back with

the light of that, science was then able to recognise very clearly the

evolutionary stages of which geology yielded up its imperfect fossil

record; for there it found the great age of the fishes, with no higher

form of vertebrate life existing; then it found the age of the reptiles,

then that of the mammals, finally the human kingdom; and looking over the

past in that way, illuminated by the observations of the present, science

recognised the truth of that ancient principle of correspondences which

serves as a clue in distant regions where observations well-nigh fail

us, and enables us, by the use of analogy, to trace our way among the

labyrinths of the past.

It is not only along this line of æonian evolution and embryological

growth that science has found help from this application of the principle

of correspondences. It has found that not only in the state of bodies

but also in the state of minds the same principle serves as its best

clue once again in the labyrinth of the past. It has found out that the

stages of human consciousness may be traced from the earliest stage

of the will to live, then upwards through the unfolding consciousness

of the child, in the stage of passions of the youth, in the stage of

mentality dominating the maturity of man; and it goes along these lines

into very much of detail, showing us how at a certain stage the child is

reproducing the savage condition of consciousness; how a little later

it grows out of that into the passional and barbarous; then through

that into the emotional, where art and beauty begin to show themselves

as outgrowths from human nature; and then on, at later stages, to that

splendid mentality which it regards as the crown of human consciousness.

Along these lines, which will be familiar to all the thoughtful and the

cultured amongst you, science has been led to new discoveries, has been

able in this fashion to find out many of the hidden things of nature.

But while this is true, there is a point at which science always stops.

It uses correspondences to explain the past; it never struck science to

use them to try to forecast the future; and naturally, for along the

scientific line such forecast of the future is practically impossible;

science works by induction, not by deduction, gathers together

innumerable facts, arranges them, classifies them, compares them, and

out of all that gathering, arrangement, and comparison it tries to find

by a process of logical induction some great principle in which all the

classified facts find their explanation, and thus a law is discovered.

But further than that induction cannot take us. It cannot take us beyond

the facts that are observed. Nothing in the facts observed presages

that which is to come; and it is only when you use the other logical

method—not that of induction, which is the scientific plan, but that of

deduction, which we find in the philosophies of the past, which we find

in the one perfect science, the science of mathematics, the Platonic

method as against that of Aristotle—it is only then that we find it

possible by a process of deduction not only to explain the past, but also

to draw out a chart of the future. And it is by using that noble form

of logical thought that Occult Science has ever been able to presage

the future from the principles that it finds existing in the universe,

unfolding stage by stage. I want, if I can, now to show you how that

method may be applied; how, knowing the nature of man, we may be able

from that to indicate not only the past through which he has come from

far beyond the range of what is recognised as history, but also to throw

a light along the road that mankind will travel in the future, seeing the

heights up which he will climb, realising the powers yet hidden within

the partially unfolded and evolved man.

There is one other thing that will help us a little as well as the

principle of correspondences, but, so far as I know, this other clue

of ours has not been adopted or used in modern science. I say, so far

as I know, for science is going on so rapidly at the present time

that it is not possible to keep abreast with all the details of the

later investigations. This second principle is called the principle

of reflexion. As you may have a mountain reflected in a lake, and all

the peculiarities, the outlines, the foliage on the mountainside, will

be reproduced in the calm water of the lake that washes the foot of

the mountain; as in that reflexion the highest in the object will be

reflected as the lowest in the image, and as at every intermediate point

where the mountain is reproduced in the image, the reflexion of the

mountain, there will be a reversal, the higher being the lower, and so

on, until you come to the point of junction between water and mountain,

and there the nearest to you on the mountain will be reflected in the

nearest to you on the water—just so may we in studying man understand

something of him by regarding him as a reflexion of divinity, the great

threefold aspect of divine life showing itself out in man. But you may

ask me: What do you exactly mean when you say reflexion? I mean the

reproduction of similar characteristics in a grosser and denser form

of matter. That is what we mean by reflexion thus applied. Just as the

mountain which you see by the air is reflected in the denser water, so

are spiritual attributes reflected in grosser matter; or, otherwise

expressed, the same, or rather a similar characteristic, works in grosser

matter; therefore with powers more limited, therefore with faculties less

potent. That is the use we make of this term “reflexion” in theosophical

literature. The characteristics are the same, but because of the denser

matter their manifestation is limited and confined. So the great Will

which brings the universe into existence is reflected in the Will to

Live in man; and as that is the highest manifestation of Deity, so,

reflected in man, does it appear at the lowest stage of evolution as the

one prominent characteristic of the dawning human consciousness. In the

babe, that will to live is practically the only sign of consciousness,

showing itself out in groping movements, whereby the will to live is

striving to come into contact with the outer world and discover something

of its environment. And so the second great manifestation of Deity, the

Wisdom-Love which in the Christian nomenclature shows itself out in the

person of the Son, that reflected in human nature comes out as the

emotions, the refined, gentle, unselfish emotions that form the second

great stage of human consciousness, beginning with the lowest stage of

passion, and gradually rising unbroken to the loftiest manifestation of

emotion; and then the third, the creative activity, which, again, in the

Christian nomenclature would be the creative Spirit, shows itself out

in man’s one creative power, the power of the mind, of which one of the

expressions is imagination, that which creates with the intellectual

force of man. The correspondence, you see, is complete, but how limited

the manifestation compared with the manifestation on the planes of

divinity. Hence this limited reflexion, this limited reproduction, we

term the law of reflexion; and we very often find it hand in hand with

the law of correspondences, giving us a clue once more to guide us

through difficulties and obscurities where direct vision might fail.

Let us begin at that point I spoke of with regard to the human being.

Now, by this process of deduction, and seeing in man the image of the

Supreme, we are not compelled to stop our study when we have taken these

three stages—the stage of the will to live showing itself in activity,

the stage of passion and emotion, the stage of mentality; for we see

that above those there shine out the three same attributes of Deity in

subtler, finer form that we call the human Spirit, and that this human

Spirit, reproducing in itself the three great aspects, tells us of the

future, as the lower reflexions tell us of the past. So that we cannot

only trace, as science does, the unfolding of consciousness through the

vast ages of the past, but we can follow it onwards into the future,

where that higher repetition of divinity is gradually unfolding, and

trace out for ourselves man’s higher qualities, the later stages of human

evolution.

Now, it is true that in this the theory is not complete and perfect

unless you recognise the fundamental truth of Reincarnation. No

otherwise can you trace the unfolding of the divine Spirit in man,

save by giving him time and environment by which these successive

stages may be accomplished. For, looking at humanity, we see that very

many men disappeared in the savage state, where only the preliminary

stage of human consciousness had been unfolded; others we find coming

into the world above the savage state, but showing out only passions,

strong, selfish emotions; others, again, further on, showing out mental

powers, and in them the mind becoming predominant. But unless you admit

here a sequential unfolding of the individual consciousness, you will

find yourself surrounded by complicated difficulties when you try to

understand human evolution; for if you follow those consciousnesses

onwards, thinking they are never to return to the school of life to learn

the lessons that they have not learned in the infant school of savage

life, then you will have to posit a heaven or heavens, one of which

is full of these souls that have only accomplished savagery on earth;

another that is full of those that have reached the emotional stage

without having started and laid the foundation of the savage; a third

that show forth mind, but not the will to live of the savage, nor the

emotion of the half-cultivated man. And so you get a world on the other

side more fantastic than rational, and you realise that somehow or other

in your scheme of things you must make room for _post-mortem_ evolution;

and the very moment you adopt that, that moment you have accepted the

principle of reincarnation, even though you may choose to carry it on in

other worlds rather than in the present.[2] With that, of course, other

difficulties arise, but on those I need not for the moment dwell, as I

do not want to deal fully with reincarnation now. But suppose you accept

it, then the whole thing is rational before you—a spiritual intelligence

unfolding in one stage after another, and building each stage on the one

that preceded. If you apply that to the evolution of the reincarnating

individual, you see the stage of the child, the stage of the youth, the

stage of the man, and you await the unfolding of the spiritual man. Or if

you choose to look at it in the vast cycles of the past, then you will

realise that you have before you animal man, passional man, intellectual

man, and you can hardly stop without thinking next of spiritual man—the

four stages that you can trace by this principle that I spoke of, the

deduction from the divine life leading you onwards to the stage not

yet unfolded, save in some lofty specimens of humanity. And when you

have just seen these stages so thoroughly reproducing at each point

of enlarging sight the other in yourself—the four stages visible—the

three and the dawning of the next; then in the whole reincarnating life

of the individual the same three and the dawning of the next; then in

evolution the same three and the possibility of the next—it does not

seem strange then to come on to the races, as the Theosophist does, and

to see in the early human race—that which is really the first that can

truly be called human, although there preceded it a semi-animal man—the

birth of our present humanity. We call it the Lemurian Race; and it is

interesting that Haeckel points to the lost continent of Lemuria as that

which was the cradle of the human race; so does modern science every now

and again touch on these teachings of the elder world. In that Lemurian

Race was shown the strong will to live; then came the Atlantean, that

which lived on the vast continent of Atlantis, the existence of which

is being recognised more and more by science by logical necessity, as

it cannot get geological evidence or antiquarian evidence, the greater

part of the continent being whelmed beneath the Atlantic Ocean. Still,

antiquarian research gives us something by pointing out to us identities

of racial characteristics in places now separated by that same vast

Atlantic Ocean. And archæology shows us in ancient Egypt, in the style

of its painting, in the symbols that it used, nay, even in some of the

human types that it limned, exactly the same symbols, the same types,

the same outlines of philosophical and religious thought as in Southern

Mexico, in a civilisation long since disappeared, that was swept away

by the Aztec civilisation, which had become ancient and corrupt when

the Spaniards invaded Mexico. In those two far removed portions of the

earth’s surface, separated by the Atlantic, we find the repetition of

one in the other. And there are many other reasons on which I need

not now dwell, similarities of fauna and flora, certain architectural

likenesses, and so on, which are all leading scientific men onwards to

the recognition of the great continent of Atlantis. Just as the men of

the Lemurian continent showed out only that will to live in clumsiest

form, so did the men of the Atlantean continent show out passion,

appetite, desire, the whole of their civilisation showing the marks

of this predominant passional nature; that which might be expected in

theory showed itself out in fact. With that went—as always goes with

the passional and non-intellectual type—a great development of what in

these days we call the lower form of psychism. We apply that term, as our

knowledge of these powers grows more precise, to the way of seeing the

invisible, hearing the inaudible, and so on, that we find in some members

of the animal kingdom; that we find largely developed in savage nations;

that we find showing themselves out sometimes among the dwellers in

mountains and in vast spaces where the air is pure, where nature is still

in a fairly primitive condition. It is not precise, exact science under

the control of the will; it seems to be responsive to impressions of

passions, emotions; very rarely, if ever, to impressions from the mind.

And so, looking back on the great Atlantean peoples, we see them showing

out these forms of psychism that we connect with the higher animal and

with the lower human evolution before mentality has been very largely

developed, before the nervous system characteristic of the modern man has

dominated the sympathetic system more characteristic of the animal. And

then we come to a time when we can glance backward and see the method

of the evolution of a new race, giving many an indication to help us

in our study of the Coming Race of our own time. For, looking back into

that far-off history, we see a selection going on among the Atlantean

people, and we notice that the selection was made not amongst those

who had carried the Atlantean type to its highest and most triumphant

point, but, on the contrary, from a subdivision of that race—a sub-race,

as we call it—in which those qualities did not show which had made

Atlantis great and mighty, but in which there were more germs than in

the triumphant Atlantean of the coming development—that of the mind.

Some of you will be familiar with the name of the Toltec, the race, or

rather sub-race, in which the Atlantean civilisation touched its highest

point. Not from those were the germs of the Aryan race chosen; rather

from the succeeding sub-race, in which, as I said, mental qualities

were beginning to assert themselves, with the inevitable result that as

those qualities became manifest, the others, the psychic, fell into the

background. Look round to-day and you will see how true that still is

with the ordinary uncultivated, untrained psychic; how very low is the

stage of the intelligence, very little mental power going hand-in-hand

with that lower kind of psychism; and so the people who were chosen to be

the germs of our own great Race were not amongst the most admired of the

Atlantean civilisation, but were rather looked down upon as not showing

out these faculties which then were regarded as the most valuable, as

falling below the triumphant type of the Toltec, as people of little

account, and yet people who had in them the promise of the future. Then

the gathering of those together, the isolating of them from the rest of

the then civilised world; the deliberate breeding of them into a type

which was aimed at. For all the great types of human kind exist in the

mind of the Logos before they are made manifest in the matter of our

earth—first the idea, then the manifestation; and the seven great types

which were to make up the humanity of our globe in the present cycle of

its existence, those existed as Ideas in the Platonic sense of the word,

those were the types towards which the great Powers guided the evolution

of humanity; and when the highest point was being touched at the fourth,

then came the preparation for the birth of the fifth. The same great

laws which, on a far lower scale, are used by the ordinary scientific

gardener or scientific breeder of cattle, when he is trying to develop a

new type that exists in his mind, remember, before he tries to work it

out in petals of flower or flesh and blood of animal, that ideal type

to which the scientific breeder directs his efforts, those laws help

him to-day which, on a far loftier level and for mightier purposes,

were used by the great Ruler of the Coming Race in order to shape the

ideal type that now we know as the Aryan. If you compare one of the men

of Kashmir, in Northern India, with your best Caucasian type, you will

find they closely resemble the one the other, evidently replicas of the

same type. I choose the man of Kashmir especially, because he is fair

of skin, owing to his living in a temperate clime, and because from the

shutting in of his land from communication with other countries, due to

the difficulty of reaching his fellows—owing to that the type has been

kept purer there than probably anywhere else upon earth. Fair of skin,

blue- or violet-eyed, with hair brown in varying shades, with features

sharply cut, delicate lips, thin and well-formed nose, there you have one

of the finest types of human beauty existing upon earth. You find that

type reproduced over and over again, with varying modifications as the

sub-races develop, but the one type is everywhere visible; and in the

shape of the head, with the forehead largely developed, with the place in

the brain where all intellectual faculties can be made manifest, in that

type of head you have the type of mentality, the Race that is to carry to

the highest point the possibilities of the human intellect. As you come

down, looking at the sub-races, the same strange point strikes you as we

saw with regard to the psychic Atlantean, and the comparatively psychic

sub-race from which our own was gradually built up. Compare together the

refined Roman, luxurious, well-built, cultured, and the Goth, who was

the origin of the Teutonic sub-race; there again you see the same thing,

the contrast with the regnant type of the apparently lower type, the

one that has in it the promise of rising higher than its predecessor.

Judging by analogy, following along similar lines of thought, we can very

readily understand to-day that the type of the Coming Race will not be

that which is the triumph of the present, but rather those in whom the

characteristics of the present are less developed, but which have in

them the germ of something more, which can unfold in the far-off future

into a greater splendour, a diviner manifestation. So that when we are

looking for those who are the beginnings of the Coming Race, we should

not look for them to-day among those in whom our Aryan peoples show

out the highest types of mentality, of intellect, of power, of thought.

Their work is to carry on the present civilisation to the zenith. Who

but they can lead it to the highest point? They have developed the mind

which is the great characteristic of this fifth Teutonic sub-race;

theirs the mission, theirs the privilege, to guide that sub-race to its

highest point of achievement. They only, whose intellect is so loftily

developed, are fit to guide the present civilisation to the point of

glory which it has yet to reach, and it is they who are the leaders of

the triumphant type of to-day, they to whom our present race looks up

as the ideal of all that is most splendid in intellectual power. Not

amongst them, then, should we seek the beginnings of the Coming Race, of

the Race that shall be; for, using our principle of correspondences, we

can see that now we must look for the germinating of the spiritual man,

not of the intellectual; that which is beyond intellect, that which is

higher than the scientific mind, the qualities that have shone out in the

great religious teachers of the past, the qualities that characterised

the Buddha, the Christ, are the spiritual qualities as apart from the

intellectual; and it is the germinating of those qualities now which will

make the origin of the Race that is to be.

But we can see in the race of the present signs of the changing evolution

which shall gradually show out the coming type of consciousness, which

shall gradually adapt the bodies to the fuller manifestation of the

qualities that shall gradually unfold. For what is the great mark of such

spiritual types of humanity, what the quality that shines out above all

others wherever they appear upon earth? It is that quality that to-day

we name Brotherhood, the recognition of that unity of life which makes

for all-embracing compassion and boundless self-sacrifice. Those are the

types that we see in these great Ones of our race, they who have unfolded

the spiritual nature, who show out the glory of the Spirit. It is very

marked that in every one of those mighty Teachers of the past this is the

quality which above all others shines out as their distinguishing mark

among the men of the generation in which they are born. The love of the

helpless and the weak, the effort ever to raise those who are downtrodden

and oppressed, the effort to share, to uplift, to make happy—in a word,

to save; that is the great spiritual characteristic of all the Saviours

of the world, and therefore at the present time those are making ready

for the beginning of the Coming Race who show out in conception and in

practice their belief in the universal Brotherhood of man. They may be

less developed in intellect, that is not what is for the moment wanted

from them; they may be less glorious in the triumphs of the mind, that

is not the material that is needed specially for the Coming Race; it

is these higher qualities of the Spirit that must be looked for by the

Leader of that Race as the material which gradually He can mould into

the type He has in His mind, and so out of those germinal possibilities

evolve the Man that shall be.

Now let us pause for a moment and ask what are the special marks of

that Race in consciousness and in body. In consciousness, clearly the

recognition of unity. That is essential; for what the intellect divides

the Spirit unites. The recognition of life in each rather than of the

separated form, the recognition of the one Self in all rather than the

separated selves that are marked out by the separated bodies, that will

be the great mark in consciousness, the new unfolding; wherever that

recognition of unity is made, there is one of the signs of the Coming

Race. And then, side by side with that, growing inevitably out of it, a

breadth and liberality of tolerance will mark those in whom the sense

of unity is beginning to unfold. All that is narrow and exclusive, all

that tends to separate one from another, all that emphasises differences

instead of emphasising likenesses, all those are against the unfolding of

the consciousness that knows the One in the many, and recognises Divinity

in all. With that unfolding consciousness will come a type of body of

which there are beginning to be many amongst us to-day. When there is

going to be a variation which will start a new evolutionary type, it

is always noted that those out of whom the variation grows are what is

called unstable. Instability is the mark of progress, or of degeneration.

There is the instability of health, but also of disease; and with the

changing type of the nervous system you find this instability present

in both its forms. If you look around you at the present time, what is

one of the marks of the bodies in the most advanced races of the earth?

Nervous troubles of every kind, and most marked amongst the most highly

developed. It is needless to draw your attention to that; everyone knows

it. The greater tension of the nervous system shows itself out amongst

us in all kinds of different ways; saddest of all, in the extraordinary

increase of madness in the most highly civilised nations of the world.

Lunatic asylums are always multiplying, for as soon as a new one is built

it gets filled, and another is demanded. That is the sad sight when

we are looking around, looking for the Coming Race; the present race

suffers by the very conditions that that race has made for itself; all

the separative conditions of competition, struggle, class and individual

and trade antagonism, all these are destructive to the evolving nervous

system of man. The environment is impossible, the conditions ruinous for

the evolution of a finer, more delicate nervous organisation; and yet the

resistless force of nature presses onwards against the human race, forces

it onwards whether it will go or not, and the evolutionary forces cannot

be opposed save at the risk of destruction.

Now that is one of the lessons that needs to come out of these studies

for the immediate guiding of our own lives to-day. We are living in an

environment that is destructive of the higher evolution, and at our peril

we leave it as it is when the Coming Race must inevitably be born. If we

would go on we must adapt ourselves, and that adaptation is the crying

need of the time. For amongst us to-day are being born children in whom

this finer nervous organisation is showing itself already, children

of delicate nervous type, but not necessarily at all unhealthy; often

perfectly healthy, but with the nervous system so delicately poised that

it is always in danger of jar and injury. There must be many amongst you

who know that out of your own personal experience as fathers and mothers;

there may be born into your family a little child whose nervous system

is so delicate, so exquisitely poised, that the child is very readily

thrown out of balance, and suffers quite abnormally. One thing that it

is very necessary for the fathers and mothers of the time to understand

is, that as these children come to them for protection, for training,

for help, they must remember that they have there organisms which suffer

and enjoy more keenly than organisms that are less delicately, less

exquisitely balanced. Such a child feels pain where a child of rougher

type would pass through unnoticing. The intense joy which, on the other

hand, marks such an organism is always balanced with periods of intense

depression. Such children should be guarded as far as possible from

all that can jar and trouble. It is useless to try to make them live

in the surroundings that suit those whose nervous systems are not so

fine. On the contrary, it is the duty of the parent to try to provide

for such children gentler and more harmonious surroundings, realising

that without those the delicate instrument would be jarred and thrown

out of tune, so that that from which the most lovely melodies might have

been drawn will be only an instrument fit to be thrown away, destroyed.

Think for a moment of the conditions under which you are living now in

London. During the last ten years London has become almost intolerable

to live in, if only for the noise, the continual rattle, the shrieking

and hooting that fill the streets; the shaking of the very earth itself

under the heavy vehicles of all sorts that we place upon it. London is

becoming a city where to live in peace you would want to go about with

cotton-wool stuffed into your ears and spectacles over your eyes so

that you might not see too clearly, and with your nose closed so that

you might not smell the horrible smells with which the streets are

continually filled. Literally, what will have to be done is this: all

the more refined and cultured people will have to go out of these huge

towns and leave them to the people who like them. For remember, there

are many people who like them; there are plenty of people who enjoy

the rattle and the noise and the tumult of a London street. There are

plenty of country peasants who, if you bring them up to London, like it

enormously; but if you take the London lad or lass and put them down

the country they say how frightfully quiet and dull it is. Why not let

the great cities go to the people who like them, who will be helped

to evolve by them? For, mind, that which is destructive to a delicate

nervous system is the necessary stimulus for the evolution of a nervous

system of a lower and coarser type. I do not want to abolish all these

great cities at all; but I would say to any who feel the suffering which

grows out of the noise and the rush and the hurry. Your place is no

longer here, and, above all, it is no place for the children. For the

finer the organisation of the father and the mother from the nervous

standpoint, the finer will be the nervous organisation of the child; and

if they suffer from it, their best policy is to leave London for the

country, and surround themselves and the children of the Coming Race with

sweeter and better environments. It is not only that these vast towns

that are deforming and defacing England are an impossible environment

for the Coming Race; we must also adapt ourselves to the new conditions

by changes of food, by changes of method in ordinary living. The food

that the great majority of people now use, flesh, is utterly unsuited

to the finer type of nervous organisation. You may notice how people of

a finer type shrink from it instinctively. Children of a finer type,

when they realise that meat was a living thing, will turn aside from it

with disgust, and leave it untouched. That instinctive dislike is one

of the things that will be growing very much amongst the little ones;

more and more will they revolt against the use of flesh. But it would

be wise not only to notice how that revolt is growing, but deliberately

to avoid the use of such articles of diet yourself, if you desire to

train your bodies into a preparation for the Coming Race. For the body

which is nourished on flesh and on the many forms of alcohol is a body

which will be thrown out of health by the opening up of the higher

consciousness; and nervous diseases are partly due to the fact that the

higher consciousness is trying to express itself through bodies clogged

with flesh-products and poisoned with alcohol. For, let me take a point

of very great importance which has direct bearing upon this. As the new

bodies develop, and the higher, more nervous organisation of the physical

body grows, the next of your bodies, the astral, will become more and

more highly organised year by year. The organisation of that next body

of yours, of finer matter than the physical, is going on very rapidly

at the present time under the pressure of thought, which all educated

and cultured people use at least to some extent. As that body becomes

more highly organised, its special sense-organs come into activity, and

then we have what is called a higher psychism, which is not the result

of an astral body unorganised and vibrating to every passing wind of

emotion, but of a body highly organised, with its own senses developed,

and those senses seeking to express themselves through the grosser body

of the physical plane. Now there is one organ in your brain which is the

sixth sense, the sense through which all these astral cognitions, astral

emotions, will show themselves down in your own waking consciousness,

and that is the body which very much puzzles many of our doctors and

scientific men—the pituitary body. That is not, as many of them think, a

mere vestigial organ left from the past; it is that, but it is also the

organ of which the finer internal differentiation is making the sense for

the higher psychic powers of the Coming Race. Now that is matter of fact

known to the occult student, because he sees that development going on

in his own case and in the case of others around him; and in proportion

as that finer and well-organised astral body hands down into the brain

the various things which it cognises, so does he find the pituitary body

functioning, so does he experience changes that go on in that. Now, that

body, according to one of the latest discoveries of modern science, is

at once affected by the vapours of alcohol; it is one of the glands of

the body which are most readily poisoned, and even a very small amount

of alcohol poisons the pituitary body, and chokes its highest evolution.

Obviously, then, if you want to ease that, if you want at this stage of

evolution to put a little evolutionary pressure even on the bodies of

the fifth Race, and thus ease that, one of the first things that should

be said to you is: Never touch alcohol at all in any form, for if you

do the vibrations of the alcohol poison the very means of communication

between the astral and the physical bodies, and the developing of them

to higher purposes is one of the marks of the Coming Race, the means

whereby it will sense the astral world in waking consciousness; hence

the instruction that you will have from everyone who is speaking of this

and understands the conditions: Do not only give up all forms of flesh,

but also take care that your diet is free from every trace of alcohol.

Now, these are laws of nature that you cannot get over; and if you make

up your mind to cling to the fifth Race way of diet, then you must be

content to remain fifth Race, and go no further. No one wants you to go

further than you wish to go, but the conditions are unchangeable, and

the more that is recognised the better will it be. Above all, with those

children that I have been mentioning, take care not to try to force them

in any way, nor to induce them to take those articles of diet which will

injure their growing delicacy of nervous organisation, and destroy that

developing organ in the brain by which they will bring their knowledge

through into ordinary life.

Then let me remind you of the way in which this may be done. Let us

suppose that you desire to hasten the coming of the Coming Race; let

us suppose that you are not willing to wait for the slow processes of

nature, lasting hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of years, but

want to co-operate with nature, as we ought to do to-day, having reached

the stage of evolution that we have reached, where human intelligence

can quicken the workings of nature. The first thing that you must do

is to make meditation a part of your daily life. Now, meditation has

three stages: first, the reining in of the wandering mind, the checking

of its thinking from one point to another continually in activity; then

the fixing of that controlled mind on a single object of thought; then

the contemplation of that object in order that it may be reproduced in

yourself. That process of meditation is the way in which the unfolding

consciousness may be definitely stimulated, and there is no other healthy

and sane way. By a daily practice of that sort, the fixing of your mind

either on the ideal Self or on some ideal of virtue that you desire to

reproduce within yourself—as you follow that practice of meditation,

the higher consciousness develops, and you change your contact with the

world. Let me take a case. You come across a man who is very untruthful.

Normally he may deceive you for a time until you get evidence that

appeals to the mind, until you can argue logically and prove that the

man is not truthful; a slow process, but one that needs to be used in

the present stage. What will be the process of recognising untruth where

the spiritual nature has begun to develop by the process of meditation?

You would meditate on truth; that is the first step. By that regular

daily meditation on truth you make your subtle body vibrate, so that the

nature of your subtle body becomes that which answers to truth; then

when a man who is untruthful comes along you do not have to reason; by

the direct process of intuition you recognise that man as false; he

jars you just as a false note jars on a musical instrument. There is

no process of reasoning, no need to go into evidence, no need to seek

for proofs; you feel him, see him to be false, by intuition instead of

reasoning. Now, I know a case of that kind in India, although I don’t

suppose you will quite copy my Indian friend, for he was a man who, from

his boyhood upwards, had meditated every day upon truth, and he had done

it for forty years. That is a long time from the western standpoint. The

effect of that was that he had so tuned himself to the note of truth—he

happened to be a judge—that no evidence could deceive him, however

plausible; he knew when a man was lying by the jar that he felt within

himself. I only mention that as a special case to show you the method by

which this meditation unfolds the inner powers, so that, instead of the

slow processes you are accustomed to, a direct intuition tells you the

character of the person with whom you come into touch. I might go through

the whole string of the virtues; the principle is the same everywhere.

In addition to meditation, you must practise. You must practise in

your daily life the keenest sympathy that you are able to develop; by

deliberate effort, force yourself into sympathy with everyone whom you

may happen to meet; make yourself feel as that person feels; and above

all, practise it with those who are lower in evolution than yourself, for

there sympathy becomes most useful, and the practise of feeling as the

less-evolved feel enables you to lift them up nearer to your own level.

You must not only practise sympathy, too, in your daily life; you must

practise the absence of the sense of separateness, the most difficult

thing in the world to do for all of us who belong to this Teutonic

sub-race. Our sense of individuality is so strong that in everything we

feel “my,” “mine,” “my property,” “my books,” “my house,” “my friends”—a

continual repetition of the “my.” You must get rid of that; you must get

rid of the feeling which instinctively claims something that you call

your own as against other people. Now, it is not an easy thing to do;

and the first stages are very disagreeable, jarring the fifth sub-race

type of mind. Try to get rid of your sense of individual ownership in the

things that are yours. How often you hear a generous-tempered man say:

“Oh, I would have given it to him at once if he had asked for it, but I

did not like his taking it!” Why not? Because you feel separate; because

of “I” and “he,” “mine,” “his.” The next Race is not going to have that

sense so strongly developed; and if you want to take part in the building

of it, the sooner you get rid of it the better for yourselves. Practise

not minding having your things taken away and used by anybody who wants

to use them. It sounds strange to you, but it is a commonplace in India.

My Indian friends, when I first knew them, used to be astonished when

I said to them: “May I use such-and-such a thing?” “Why, of course, if

you want it,” was the invariable answer; and at last I got to realise

that that was a very much higher position towards objects of property

than the self-assertive owning. Similarly, in India, when you have a

garden, anybody who likes comes in, sits under your trees, lights a

little fire, and cooks his dinner there if he likes. When one day, again,

in my very early days, before I understood this, I said to somebody:

“Oh, but do you like people coming into your garden like that without

asking permission?” “What else is a garden for?” was the reply. That is

the natural feeling there because of the communal life which has been

universal for thousands of years. You think of the use of the thing and

the man who wants to use it; that he wants it is the reason why he should

have the use of it. That is a very long way from our fifth sub-race way

of looking at property. Practise that, then, in order to get rid of this

utterly exaggerated sense of separation which we find in our social life

at the present time. This habit of self-sacrifice—sacrificing your own

whims, wishes, wants, every day of your life, for the sake of making life

easier for those around you—that will be one of the characteristics of

the Coming Race. And as you do it, you will gradually find that you won’t

mind; that the pleasure of making another person satisfied is far greater

than the pleasure of having a thing for yourself; that the words of the

Christ are literally true: “It is more blessed to give than to receive”;

not a duty but more blessed, more happy, so that the joy that comes out

of the sharing utterly swamps any feeling of self-sacrifice. That, again,

will be the great social type of the Coming Race.

See how practically, then, this thought of the Coming Race bears upon

our living of to-day. Those who would prepare themselves for the part of

that changed type of man must begin building it up in their character,

their emotions, their minds to-day, by meditation, the opening of the

consciousness by practise, the training of the life into expressions

along higher lines. That race will be the builder of a universal

religion, in which sharing what each has of truth will be the only form

of missionary effort. That Race will be the builder of a brotherly

civilisation, in which the need of every man will be the measure of what

he has given to him; in which the power of every man will be the limit

of his responsibility. Those will be the great changes that will come,

and you, if you will, may take part in that changing; you, even in the

present civilisation, may hold to the higher ideal, and try to make it

acceptable to the minds of your fellow-men. But our hope is mostly in the

young, in those who have not yet been hardened in the brutal competition

which marks the commercial and class life of to-day. The young lads and

the young girls, still plastic, still easily fired by great ideals, with

nervous systems finer in many cases than ours, and hearts warmer than

those that have been chilled in the experience of life—in them lies the

hope of the future. For they shall make ideals, they shall create them in

the world of thought, and out of the world of thought those ideals shall

be sent into the world of matter, and make the Coming Race, which shall

build a civilisation happy, glorious, beautiful, and free, but in which

it shall be realised that the greatest freedom expresses itself in the

greatest service.

Lecture VI

The Coming Christ

Friends: Looking back over the long story of the past we can see certain

mighty, grandiose figures emerging from the great crowd of human beings,

men who tower far above their generation, who are giants, as it were,

with pigmies around them; however far we look back such figures are ever

to be seen, until at last the mists appear to roll across this great

vista of the past, and even through those mists we can discover the

outlines of great Ones who teach and bless mankind. To the great mass of

students these figures, standing out in the past, appear very closely to

resemble each other. We cannot, as it were, distinguish Them with regard

to Their knowledge or Their power; all are so far above the men of the

time, so far above the most advanced humanity of our own day, that it

seems impossible to throw Them into any kind of order, or to understand

how far They are part of one great group of mighty Beings; what relation

They bear to each other we cannot see; what Their rank in the hierarchy

of the superhuman we are practically unable to say. But as the occult

student tries to study the past, there are certain indications that he

can grasp which serve as a kind of guide as to these mighty Beings. He

sees great world-cycles of different extent, embracing longer or shorter

periods of time, and he is able to trace some relation between these

mighty Beings and the cycles of the world, the point of time at which

They appear, at which They manifest. And by this study of the past,

assisted by occult methods, these periods in the world’s story and these

Teachers of the world’s humanity fall into quite definite relations.

We can notice, looking back, that there are four great ages through

which the world passes in its long evolutionary history, ages that are

often referred to in what are called the mythologies of the past, ages

which are characterised very differently the one from the other, and in

which the whole cycle of the world’s story is divided. It may be noticed

that at the beginning of each of those huge cycles a very great figure

appears, as though, when the world was entering on a new phase of life,

it were necessary that a special benediction should descend upon it, a

special light should shine out. When we ask who are the great Ones who

mark these longest periods in human history, we are told that They are

Beings belonging to past worlds, belonging to other planets than our

own, planets and worlds older in the scale of manifestation; that They

have passed through all the struggles of an evolving life, that They

have formed part of a humanity that long since has passed away and been

numbered in the records of the universe, too far off to touch a world

like ours; that, reaching through human to superhuman growth, They have

finally joined their consciousness with the consciousness of the Logos

Himself, expanding to His consciousness, uniting with His nature, and

yet never losing that centre which is the result of Their long evolution

up the human and the superhuman ladder. Holding that centre in all the

life of God, it is possible for Them to draw around Themselves again a

circumference which shall enable Them to become manifest in any world,

in any race. Where a centre is, a circumference can ever be drawn; and

around such a centre in Deity itself, of the Son made one with the

Father, from such a centre a new circumference of a human life may be

drawn, and such a Being, mighty in His Deity and yet veiled in humanity,

may appear to enlighten and to bless the world. Among the Hindū people,

whose teachers have carried them far along occult lines, whose sacred

scriptures are full of occult indications, a special name is given to

these pre-eminent manifestations. They call them by a Sanskrit word

which means those who descend. The name avatāra may be familiar to you,

perhaps. But it is the significance of the name on which for a moment I

pause. They have climbed up to unity with the God head: They descend to

humanity in order to preserve and help. Such are the mightiest figures

that appear in any world, on any globe, through the long course of its

evolution. Egypt signified that mystery under a special name: they called

it the birth of Horus. Christianity has symbolised it under another

name—Divine Incarnation; and the Christian will tell you—accurate in

the spiritual fact, although at times confused in the definition of the

life—that the Second Person of the Trinity descends upon earth, and

he regards the Christ of Judea as being such a manifestation of the

Most High. The main fact that such a revelation may come to man is a

fundamental spiritual truth. It ought never to be lost from sight; and in

every great religion it has ever been said that it is from that aspect

of the Logos that these manifestations descend upon earth. Christianity

recognises but a single manifestation; Hindūism recognises nine that

have passed and one that is to come. In Zoroastrianism you find the same

conception. Religions, living and dead, have ever groped after that

highest of truths; only it must never be lost sight of that He who is an

Avatāra, the highest of divine manifestations, has been in some other

cycle of life a man among men, and that it is because of that long-past

experience that a return to those conditions is possible at any time.