structures of matter or forms of energy, rather than quarries from
which they are cut, and we seem to get a glimpse of the origin of
life, perhaps itself the cause of "retrogression" in the material,
coming through from the Reality, the Infinite beyond the physical
Universe.
Life and its processes are well symbolised by a triangle, the base of
which is the "Divide" between the Real and its reflections or shadows
on the Material plane, and through which all energy percolates. One
side of the triangle represents anabolism, or the process of building
up, and the other katabolism, the process of breaking down, and at the
Apex is the Mystical "Terror of the Threshold," the "Ainsoph" (_vide_
frontispiece), which introduced _sacrificial_ death to the Physical,
as an adaptation in the evolution of, and for the good of, the Human
race. With the death of the Physical, the rending of the Veil, as we
have seen in View Two, all Shadows and Reflections disappear, and, in
place of "seeing as through a glass darkly," the Soul has its true
birth, and at last enters upon its heritage in the Divine Life, face
to face with the Reality, the Good, the Beautiful, and the True.
VIEW FOUR
LOVE IN ACTION
In the preceding Views we have seen that Time and Space have no real
existence apart from our physical senses; they are only modes or
conditions under which those senses act, and by which we gain a very
limited and illusory knowledge of our surroundings. Our very
consciousness of living depends upon our perception of multitudinous
changes in our surroundings, and our very thoughts are therefore also
limited by Time and Space, because _change_ is dependent on those two
limits, the very basis of perceived motion being the time that an
object takes to go over a certain space; we must therefore look behind
consciousness itself, beyond the conditioning in Time and Space, for
the true reality of Being. We have seen that man is the offspring of
two distinct natures--the Spiritual or Transcendental and the Material
or Physical; the former is the Real, the latter is only a shadow. If
we now try to consider the connection between these two natures, we
have to recognise that, with all our advance in Knowledge during the
last hundred years, we are indeed still as children playing with
pebbles on the sea-shore, knowing neither why we are placed there, nor
what those pebbles are, or whence they came. Though we seem ever to be
discovering fresh truths concerning their relations one with another,
when arranged in different patterns, built up into new forms, or split
up into smaller fragments, we have to acknowledge (substituting
thoughts for pebbles) that we are still only learning our alphabet and
the simple rules of multiplication, addition, and division, which must
be mastered before we can hope to take the real step towards
understanding.
We are surrounded by mysteries; we are indeed a mystery to ourselves,
we do not even know how the Physical Ego is connected with the
physical world; how the sense organs, receiving the impression of
multitudinous and diverse frequencies of different intensities,
transmit them to the brain, and how the mind is able to combine all
these impressions and form concepts. But by examining the Physical
Universe, we seem to see clearly that the only Reality is the
Spiritual, the Here, and the Now, that our real _Personality_ being
Spiritual is independent of Space and Time limitations, and is
therefore Omnipresent and Omniscient; it may indeed be not only
connected with the Physical Ego of this World, but be in close working
connection with other Physical Egos in the Universe, and may, in some
wonderful process, through its affinity with the Great Spirit, be
helping them to progress in other directions possibly quite beyond our
power to conceive under the conditions we are accustomed to here.
A great forest tree forms each year a multitude of separate buds; each
of these buds is an independent plant which has only a temporary
existence and has no present knowledge of the other buds, but it is by
means of all these buds and the leaves they develop, that the tree is
nourished and increases from year to year. Still more wonderful is the
fact that it is these temporary existences which, in accordance with
the general law of life-production, form special "ovules," which we
call seeds, each of which has the potentiality for growing up into a
great forest tree, which, in its turn, is capable of pushing forth
temporary existences in countless directions. We have, in the above
process of creating a forest tree, a likeness on the Physical Plane to
what I would suggest is the process not only of the creation of the
Race, but, on the Transcendental Plane, the multiplication of
permanent personalities by means of, or in connection with, the
temporary and Space-limited Human Physical Ego.
Again, as the human mind forms a thought, clothes it in physical
language, and sends it forth in such a form as not only affects our
material sense of hearing, but conveys to the hearer the very thought
itself, so the whole Physical Universe is a temporary and
Space-limited representation of the Reality which is behind, is in
fact the materialisation of the Will or Thought of the Great Spirit.
The "taking root" or advent of the Spiritual to the genus homo, made
it possible for man to interpret the Good, Beautiful, and True in the
phenomena of nature, and, as we, by studying these materialisations,
gain knowledge of the Reality, and our personalities become real
powers, so may we at length approach the point where we may feel that
we are thinking, or having divulged to us, the very thoughts of God;
and, though it may never be possible in this life to form a full
conception of the Reality, we may, I think, even with our present
state of knowledge, aspire to understand the messages conveyed to us
in some of the multitudinous forms, under which these thoughts are
presented to us, and I propose giving an example of this later on in
this View.
Once more, in the case of a picture, it is possible, by examining and
comparing a number of certain short lines in perspective, to discover
not only the position occupied by the Artist, but also the point to
which all those lines converge; so by examining and combining certain
lines of Thought on the Physical Plane, and following them as far as
we can with our present knowledge towards the point where our Ideals
of the Good, Beautiful, and True intersect, we may reach the position
from which we may be able to form, although through a glass darkly,
even a conception of the Great Reality, and therefore of Its Offspring
the Transcendental Ego, and its connection with the Universe.
As the whole of Nature is the temporary and Space-limited
manifestation of the Reality, so the individual Physical Ego is the
manifestation in Time and Space of the Transcendental Ego or true
Personality. The Physical Ego is its transient expression and has no
other use beyond this life. Each Physical Ego helps, or should help
forward, the general improvement of the Race towards perfection. Each
generation should come into being a step nearer to the Spiritual,
until it can be pictured that at the final consummation, there will be
nothing imperfect, no shadow left; the full complement of Spiritual
Personalities being complete in the Great All-Father.
Do we not then see clearly that the Physical Ego, comprised in what we
call "I am," "I perceive," "I think," "I conceive," "I remember," is
transient, and has only to do with the progress of the Race? It is the
Shadow or Image in the Physical Universe of that Personality which
Transcends Time and Space. Take away a small portion of the Brain, the
organ of the Mind, and Memory is wiped out, remove the greater part of
it and the manifestation of the Physical Ego is destroyed; though the
body is as much alive as before, there is apparently nothing left but
the physical life, which it has in common with all animals, plants,
and probably, as strongly suggested by late discoveries in
Radio-activity, even with what is called inorganic matter. The Brain,
and therefore the Ego, is not a necessity for Physical life; this is
clearly seen in the lower forms of life--it would be difficult to
point out the brain of a Cabbage or an Oak Tree.
In the last forty years we have entered upon a new era of religion and
philosophy; we hear no more of the old belief that the study of
scientific facts leads to atheism or irreligion; we begin to see that
Religion and Science must go hand in hand towards elucidating the
Riddle of the Universe, and such a change enables us even to aspire to
show, as I now propose to do, that it is possible, by examining
certain phenomena in Nature, to reach that point where we may feel
that we are listening to and understanding, though through a glass
darkly, what may be called the very Thoughts of the Great Reality. I
will take for examination the subject most intimately connected with
the title of this View--namely, the nature of the growth of the
Transcendental Personality, upon what that growth depends, and how we
may understand that the attainment to Everlasting Life is dependent
upon that growth.
I have already pointed out in View Two that the Transcendental
Personality, being Spiritual, and therefore akin to the Great Reality,
may be said to have no free-will of itself. Its will or influence must
always be working towards perfection in the form "Let Thy Will, which
is also my will, be done"; the efficacy of its influence with the
Great Reality depends on its growth or nourishment by the knowledge of
the Good, Beautiful, and True ever bringing it more and more nearly
into perfect touch or sympathy with the All-loving. The power of
prayer therefore depends upon two conditions; it must be in the form
of "Let thy Will be done," and that which prays must be capable of
making its petition felt, by having already gained a knowledge of what
that Will is. I am, of course, not referring to that form of prayer
which, alas with so many, seems to be the attempt to get as much out
of the Absolute as is possible, with the least amount of trouble.
If now we carefully examine the Phenomena around us, we make the
extraordinary discovery that this power to influence is the very basis
of survival and of progress throughout the universe. In the organic
world all Nature seems to be praying in one form or another, and only
those that pray with efficacy, based upon the above two conditions,
survive in the struggle for existence. The economy of Nature is
founded upon that inexorable law the "Survival of the Fittest"; every
organism that is not in sympathy with its environment, and cannot
therefore derive help and nourishment from its surroundings, perishes.
Darwin tells us that the colours of flowering plants have been
developed by the necessity of attracting the bees, on whose visits
depends the power of plants to reproduce their species; those families
of plants which do not as it were pray to the bees with efficacy, fail
to attract, are not therefore fertilised, and disappear without
leaving successors. Flowers may also be said to be praying to us by
their beauty, or usefulness, and in some cases, as with orchids, by
their marvellous shapes. We answer their prayer by building hot houses
and tending them with care, because they please us, and therefore we
help them to live; while, on the contrary, those plants that have not
developed these qualities are not only neglected, but, in some cases,
as with weeds, we take special trouble to exterminate them, because
their existence is distasteful to us.
Charles Darwin also tells us that Heredity and Environment are the
prime influences under which the whole Organic World is sustained; in
other words, every organism has implanted in it by heredity the
principle of life, but the conditions under which it will be possible
for that life to expand and come to perfection, rest entirely upon its
power to bring itself into harmony with its environment. This
principle of life does not come naked into the world, it is fortified
by heredity, with power gained by its parents in their struggle for
existence, and in their persistence to get into sympathy with their
environment. The knowledge they gained, by this struggle, they have
handed down to their offspring, and given it thereby the possibility
of also gaining for itself that knowledge of, and power to get into
sympathy with, its environment, upon which its future existence will
depend. So may we not see that in the Spiritual World, these two
conditions dominate, and that it is only by the clear comprehension of
their reality that we can understand how all-important it is for the
soul to bring itself nearer and nearer into harmony with its
environment, the Spiritual, and how the efficacy of prayer depends
upon the Knowledge of what is the Will of God?
We have received from our Spiritual Father the principle of
Everlasting Life, and the aspirations which, if followed, will enable
that life to expand and come to perfection; but, as in the case of
physical organism, the gift is useless unless we elect to use those
aspirations aright, and gain thereby a knowledge of our Spiritual
Environment, which alone can bring us into sympathy with the Great
Reality. Without this "Knowledge of God," we can see by analogy on the
Organic Plane that Everlasting Life is impossible--we are as weeds and
shall be rooted out. This is no figment of the imagination, it seems
to be the only conclusion we can come to if Nature is the work of
Nature's God, and Man is made in the image (spiritual) of that God.
Herbert Spencer came to the same conclusion when defining everlasting
existence. He says: "Perfect correspondence would be perfect life;
were there no changes in the environment but such as the organism had
adapted changes to meet, and were it never to fail in the efficiency
with which it met them, there would be Eternal Existence and Eternal
Knowledge" (_Principles of Biology_).
The power of influence, by sympathetic action, may also be seen in
another direction; consider the fact that if we are in a room with a
piano and we sing a certain note, say E flat, we not only hear that
note coming back from the piano, but, if we examine the strings, we
find that all the E flats are actually vibrating in sympathy, because
they are in perfect harmony with the note given out by the voice; but
none of the other strings are responding because they are out of
harmony. With this simile in mind, let us consider the curious fact
that a moth always lays its eggs on that particular plant upon which
the caterpillars, when they hatch out of these eggs, must feed. The
study of the Life History of Insects has always been of great interest
to me, as I firmly believe that we are on the verge of a great
discovery, and that the first indications are being revealed to us
through the investigation of the Biology of Insects. Some of you may,
perhaps, have watched this progress of ovipositing, as I have done,
and noticed how the female moth will hover in a peculiar way over
different plants, but does not alight until she comes to a plant near
akin to the one she is seeking. She then alights, but remains, on
tip-toe as it were, with legs outstretched and wings quivering, and
soon mounts again into the air; it is only when she alights on the
proper food plant that she shows unmistakably that she knows her quest
is ended and her eggs are laid. This particular plant has no other
attractions for her, she takes her food irrespectively from any other
flower which secretes honey, and yet, when she is ready to fulfil her
destiny, she is unerringly drawn towards that particular plant which
must be the food of her offspring. What is this wonderful sense? We
call it instinct, a name which is made to cover all other senses in
the lower animals, of which we have no cognisance ourselves. Let us
take our own senses as a guide: we find that they are all based on the
appreciation of frequencies, of greater or less rapidity, by means of
organs specially adapted to vibrate in sympathy with those pulsations,
and thus we gain knowledge of external things. Two tuning forks or two
organ pipes when vibrating close to each other, give out a pure
musical note when they are in perfect harmony, and they then have, as
it were, "rest" together; but when one is put even slightly out of
harmony, there is, in place of a pure musical note, a rise and fall of
sound in heavy throbs, strangely characteristic of "quarrelling"; in
fact, discord and "unrest."
In our sense of hearing we can only appreciate up to 40,000 vibrations
in a second as a musical sound, whereas, with Light and other
electrical phenomena, as we shall see in a later View, we can
appreciate sympathetic frequencies of not only many millions, but
indeed millions of millions in a second, and yet it is possible that,
in the sense (of insects) we are now examining of life appreciating
life, we may be in the presence of frequencies as far removed from
light as light is from sound. If, then, we may follow the analogy from
our highest senses, we seem to get a clear explanation of the mystery
of insect discrimination. The insect, in her then state, could have no
pleasure in the presence of certain plants, their modes of frequency
being out of sympathy with that particular Insect Life, and, it may be
conceived that, not only is there no inducement for the insect to
alight on that plant, but that even in its near proximity that insect
would feel discomfort or restlessness; when, however, a plant is
reached which is near akin to the one required, less antipathy or
unrest would be felt, and, when the true species of plant is reached,
all would be harmony, pleasure, and rest, the functions of Insect Life
would be vivified, and its life-work accomplished under the influences
of sympathetic action.
I have made several other investigations on this subject, but I must
only give one more to illustrate the higher form of Animal Life
appreciating Animal Life. There is a large class of insects, called
Ichneumonidae, which lay their eggs in the bodies of caterpillars, and,
as in the case of a moth laying its egg on the special food plant upon
which its caterpillar can feed, so does each species of these insects
unerringly lay its eggs in the body of a particular kind of
caterpillar. It must be a wonderful sense which can enable an
Ichneumon Fly to do this; it has never seen that caterpillar before,
as the egg, from which its own caterpillar was hatched, was laid
inside the body of one of those caterpillars, and the caterpillar upon
which it fed had been eaten up and disappeared at least six months
before the Ichneumon Fly had even made its way out of its own cocoon;
and yet this insect is not only forced, by some mysterious power, to
lay its egg in the body of a caterpillar, but there is only one
species which will serve its purpose, and it has to hunt up this
particular caterpillar from among thousands of other different
species.
Let me put before you what is, perhaps, the most mysterious
illustration which we have under this heading, wherein the Ichneumon
Fly cannot even get sight of its prey, nor employ any sense similar to
our own for its detection. There are several species of moths whose
caterpillars live in the very heart of trees. We will take the case of
the caterpillar of Zeuzera Aesculi, the Leopard Moth; the egg of this
Moth is laid in a crevice of the bark, and, when first hatched, the
small larva penetrates through the bark into the centre of an apple,
pear, or plum tree, and then commences to eat its way upwards, forming
at first a very small tunnel, but gradually increasing it, as the
caterpillar grows larger, into a passage of about half an inch in
diameter. In such a position, surrounded as it is by solid wood, the
thickness of which would probably not be less than one and a half or
two inches, we might suppose that the caterpillar would be safe from
its enemies, but it is not: there is a large Ichneumon Fly which
cannot propagate its species unless it can lay its eggs in the body of
this particular caterpillar. This Ichneumon Fly can, from outside, not
only tell that inside the stem of that tree there is a caterpillar,
but can locate the exact spot, and, still more wonderful, is able to
determine whether or not that caterpillar is the particular species it
is in search of. There are numerous other species of moths whose
caterpillars feed in the centre of trees, and yet this female
Ichneumon is able to mark down as her prey, although far out of reach
of any sense known to us, that one species which alone can serve her
purpose. As soon as she has located the exact position of the
caterpillar, she unsheathes a long delicate ovipositor, with which
she is provided, and drills it right through the intervening solid
wood until it pierces the body of the caterpillar; she then lays an
egg down that long tube into its body and repeats the process two or
three times. The caterpillar itself does not appear to feel any
inconvenience from this process and continues to feed and grow larger;
but it has the seeds of death within itself, and the two or three
little caterpillars, which hatch out of the eggs of the Ichneumon, are
also growing rapidly inside it. At last, when the time comes that the
large caterpillar should have been full fed, and it has eaten its way
outwards until it rests close under the bark, preparatory to turning
into a chrysalis, its enemies finish their destructive work, and, if
the tree is then opened, the empty skin and cartilage skeleton of the
large caterpillar is found, together with two or three large cocoons.
These cocoons, if kept, will produce in due time specimens of the
Ichneumon Fly, and these will in their turn go about their murderous
work as soon as their proper hunting season comes round again.
This is only an isolated case out of thousands of similar occurrences
in every locality; in fact, if you walk along any palings in the
country in the early summer, you will see at every few steps the
evidence of similar tragedies. Those of you who live in the country
must often have seen on palings little heaps containing a dozen or
more of the small yellow Microgaster Cocoons, and if these are
examined carefully they will be found to be surrounding the skin of a
caterpillar. These minute cocoons may be kept under a wine glass and,
from each a minute Ichneumon Fly, with (if a female) its sharp
ovipositor, will emerge in due time. It is curious what mistakes can
be made even by intelligent persons. I have had the skin of the
caterpillar and this little heap of yellow Microgaster Cocoons sent me
to examine, and have been seriously asked whether this was not a true
case of Parthenogenesis; the suggestion being that the caterpillar had
actually laid eggs, instead of waiting until it had become a moth, and
that its efforts, to alter the course of nature, had been too much for
its constitution and it had died in the act! There are other
illustrations I should have liked to give but space will not permit,
the most remarkable being, perhaps, the knowledge a Queen Bee
possesses of the proximity of another Queen, even when that other is
still in the pupa state, sealed up in a waxen cell. I have made
numerous experiments with Queens of the common black English Bee
(_Apis mellifica_), and also the yellow-striped Italian Bee (_Apis
ligustica_), which belong to the same order (_Hymenoptera_) as the
Ichneumon Flies, and the same marvellous sense of life appreciating
life at a distance, and through solid matter, is experienced.