ill and died the next day. The parents were overwhelmed with grief. The
last hope of their house was thus cut off in the glad days of
adolescence.
They remained at Bayreuth through the winter. On the fifteenth of April
they set out for their return homeward and sailed for Constantinople.
Lamartine interspersed his narrative of this voyage with reflections
upon what he observed and meditated. “I would like to sail all the
while,” says he, “to have a voyage with its chances and distractions.
But what I read in my wife’s eyes goes deep into my heart.[6] The
suffering of a man is nothing like that of a woman, a mother. A woman
lives and dies in one sole thought, or one solitary feeling. Life for a
woman is a something possessed; death, a something lost. A man lives
with everything that he has to do with, good or bad; God does not kill
him with a blow.”
On the subject of travelling and sojourning abroad, he speaks
philosophically:
“When a man is absent from his country, he sees affairs more perfectly.
Details do not obstruct his view, and important matters present
themselves in their entireness. This is the reason why prophets and
oracles lived alone in the world and remote. They were sages who studied
subjects in their entirety and their judgment was not warped by the
little passions of the day. The statesman, likewise, if he would judge
and foresee the outcome, must often absent himself from the scene in
which he performs the Drama of his time. To predict is impossible, for
foreknowledge is for God alone; but to foresee is possible, and
forethought is for man.”
Lamartine analyzes closely the doctrines of Saint-Simonism, and what he
considers their weak points. “We must not,” he says, “judge new ideas by
the derision which they encounter during the period. All great thoughts
were first received in the world as aliens. Saint-Simonism has in it a
something true, grand and beautiful; the application of Christianity to
civil society, the legislation of Human Brotherhood.
“From this point of view I am a Saint-Simonian.
“What has placed this Society under an eclipse, though not under death,
is not the want of an idea, nor the lack of disciples. In my opinion it
wants a leader, a master, a manager. If there should be found a man of
genius and virtue who was religious and at the same time prudent, who
would bring the two horizons into one field of vision which should be
placed under the direction of the nascent ideas, I have no doubt that he
would transform it into a potent reality. Times in which there is an
anarchy of ideas, are favorable seasons for the germinating of new and
heroic thoughts.
“Society, to the eye of the philosopher, is in a state of disorder. It
has neither direction, object nor leader; and it is reduced accordingly
to the instinct of conservatism. A sect that is religious, moral, social
and political,—that has a creed, a watchword, an object, a leader, and
mind, if it were to advance compactly and directly at the midst of the
disordered ranks in the present social order, would inevitably gain the
victory. But it must bring safety and not ruin, attacking only what is
injurious and not that which helps, and calling religion back to reason
and love, prudence and Christian Brotherhood, having universal charity
and usefulness as its only title and only foundation.
“A law-maker requires young men ardent in zeal and on fire with the
hunger for faith, from which however, senseless dogmas have been
rejected. The organizers of Saint-Simonism have taken for their first
article of belief: war to the death between the family, property and
religion on one hand and ourselves on the other. They ought to perish.
The world, by the force of speech is not conquered; it is to be
converted, stirred, wrought into activity, changed.
“So long as an idea is not practical, it is not presentable to the world
of society. Human nature goes from the known to the unknown, but not
from the known to the absurd. That will be held back in the subordinate
effort. Before great revolutions, the signs are to be seen on the earth
and in the sky. The Saint-Simonians have had one class of those signs:
they have broken up as a body, and they are now more slowly at work
making leaders and soldiers for the new army.”
The vessel and its convoy arrived in the Bosphorus on the twenty-fifth
day of May. Lamartine, his wife and friends now took up their residence
at Buyukdéré, for the next two months. During this period they were
recipients of the most friendly attentions. The Grand Seigneur himself,
and the principal officials at Constantinople extended courtesies and
cordial demonstrations, exceeding any that had ever before been bestowed
to “Franks.” This was in recognition of the substantial help which had
been given to prevent the further dismemberment of the Ottoman empire.
Lamartine had been heralded everywhere as a personage of distinction,
and his reception was warm and cordial, almost as if he had been a royal
prince. His opinions were treasured, and his advice eagerly sought by
the ministers and representatives of the Government. He was admitted to
places from which other Europeans had been excluded, and so long as he
remained in Turkish territory, every necessary provision was made for
his safety and honorable recognition.
His journal of the voyage records minutely the occurrences and
observations which thus came within his notice.
Footnote 2:
Talleyrand did not know Lamartine at this period. When some of his
verses were recited to Lamennais he sprang from his chair, exclaiming,
“Eureka! we have found a poet!”
Footnote 3:
Edward Gibbon, the historian, who had known Lamartine’s mother in her
girlhood, spent a year at a house near her residence. He greatly
admired the child Alphonse and predicted his future career.
Footnote 4:
The concièrges and porters at the large mansions in France were
allowed to keep a lottery. A _quine_ consisted of five prizes.
Footnote 5:
Leopold declined the crown of Greece and became the King of Belgium.
Footnote 6:
The body of the daughter, at her dying request, had been embalmed and
sent directly home for interment at Saint Point. The mother was in
many respects like her husband’s mother, a devoted wife and indulgent
parent, as well as the kindest of neighbors.
* * * * *
“Whoso takes good advice is secure from falling; but whoso rejects it,
falleth into the pit of his own conceit.”
_Gems from the East._
PASSAGE TO INDIA.
(Extracts Selected.)
WALT WHITMAN.
(Curious in time I stand, noting the efforts of heroes,
Is the deferment long? bitter the slander, poverty, death?
Lies the seed unreck’d for centuries in the ground? lo, to God’s due
occasion,
Uprising in the night, it sprouts, blooms,
And fills the earth with use and beauty.)
O Thou transcendent,
Nameless, the fibre and the breath,
Light of the light, shedding forth universes, thou centre of them,
Thou mightier centre of the true, the good, the loving,
Thou moral spiritual fountain—affection’s source—thou reservoir,
(O pensive soul of me—O thirst unsatisfied—waitest not there?
Waitest not haply for us somewhere there the Comrade perfect?)
Thou pulse—thou motive of the stars, suns, systems,
That circling, move in order, safe, harmonious,
Athwart the shapeless vastnesses of space,
How should I think, how breathe a single breath, how speak, if, out
of myself
I could not launch, to those, superior universes?
Swiftly I shrivel at the thought of God,
At Nature and its wonders, Time and Space and Death,
But that I, turning, call to thee O soul, thou actual Me,
And lo, thou gently mastereth the orbs,
Thou matest Time, smilest content at Death,
And fillest, swellest full the vastnesses of Space.
Greater than stars or suns,
Bounding O soul thou journeyest forth;
What love than thine and ours could wider amplify?
What aspirations, wishes, outvie thine and ours O soul?
What dreams of the ideal? what plans of purity, perfection,
strength?
What cheerful willingness for others’ sake to give up all?
For others’ sake to suffer all?
Reckoning ahead O soul, when thou, the time achiev’d,
The seas all cross’d, weather’d the capes, the voyage done,
Surrounded, copest, frontest God, yieldest, the aim attain’d,
As filled with friendship, love complete, the Elder Brother found,
The Younger melts in fondness in his arms.
Passage to more than India!
O secret of the earth and sky!
Of you O waters of the sea! O winding creeks and rivers!
Of you O woods and fields! of you strong mountains of my land!
Of you O prairies! of you gray rocks!
O morning red! O clouds! O rain and snows!
O day and night, passage to you!
O sun and moon and all you stars! Sirius and Jupiter!
Passage to you!
Passage, immediate passage! the blood burns in my veins!
Away O soul! hoist instantly the anchor!
Cut the hawsers—haul out—shake out every sail!
Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long enough?
Have we not grovel’d here long enough, eating and drinking like mere
brutes?
Have we not darken’d and dazed ourselves with books long enough?
Sail forth—steer for the deep waters only,
Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me,
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.
O my brave soul!
O farther, farther sail!
O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God?
O farther, farther, farther sail!
To determine the real relations that exist between man and God is my
thought. It is the need of the times. We need to convince ourselves that
man is the object of all earthy resources if we ask ourselves if he is a
means to an end. If man is linked to all, is there nothing above him to
which, in his turn, he is bound? If he is the last of the unexplained
transformations which reach up to him, may he not be the tie between
visible and invisible nature? The action of the world is not an
absurdity; it leads up to an end, and this object cannot be society
constituted as ours is. There is a terrible gap between us and the
heavens.
In reality, we cannot ever enjoy or always suffer. To gain either
paradise or hell an enormous change must take place in us; without
either place, the masses can conceive no idea of God at all.
Is not the idea of motion stamped on the systems of worlds, sufficient
to prove God to us? We busy ourselves very little about the pretended
nothingness which precedes birth while we fumble in and ransack the dark
gulf that awaits us, that is, we make God responsible for our future and
we demand from him, no record of the past. To get out of this difficulty
the soul has been invented, but it is repugnant to our feelings to
render God obligated for human baseness, our disillusions, our decline
and fall. How can we admit in ourselves a divine principle over which a
potent liquor can get the advantage?
Can we imagine immaterial faculties which matter may utterly subjugate
whose exercise a grain of opium can prevent? Is not the communication of
motion to matter an unexplored abyss whose difficulties have been rather
displaced than resolved by Newton’s system? Motion is a _great soul_
whose alliance with matter is quite as difficult to explain as is the
production of thought in man.—BALZAC, _Louis Lambert_. (Translated by
Harriett Green Courtis.)
THE HUMAN CELL.
BY ARTHUR A. BEALE, M. B.
“To demonstrate that Brotherhood is a fact in Nature; to investigate the
laws of Nature and the divine powers in Man.”
When we fall away from the path of duty, when torn by the storms of
passion we forget that there reposes within the complexities of our
nature a divine spark—much more, perhaps, that we ourselves are a
universe, nay, a universe of Universes, a Great Eternal God,
controlling, energizing and creating worlds that live and have their day
and cease to be. But it is so. Hour by hour worlds are falling away and
with them ebb the vital forces of our being. Take a flake of scurf from
the head and put it under the microscope,—a new vista is opened up. And
yet, this is only a type of millions of like or dissimilar entities,
which are so bound together as to compose the mighty universe of man’s
body,—the least important of his constitution. These little lives take
different shapes to suit different necessities, but they agree in
certain essential features which we learn to call _the cell_. And
looking lower still this cell is of the same type as those found in the
animals and again in the plants. How very little difference, too,
between these and the monads of the mineral kingdom!
But keeping to man, these cells form themselves into societies, which we
call tissues, these into others we call organs, and the organs form
together a corporate organization, the body, which in a healthy state is
subservient to the synthesizing forces emanating from the Heart, where
lives the source of life, the divine Ruler. So the organs work together
in harmony. If any organ begins to absorb more attention and life than
is due to it, not only does it suffer itself, but brings discord into
the whole.
But as long as it observes its own duty and fulfils its place, so does
it maintain its own status, and receive its own benefits; for thus, and
thus alone, can it participate in the higher impulse, that comes from
that sacred centre.
As of the organs so of the cells of which each is composed, they must
act in accordance with the unified impulse of the organ, but so must
each cell be true to the heart of its own tiny body—whence, as I shall
try to show, comes the true impulse, by which it evolves,—that centre
where are played the divine harmonies and where stands the God directing
his forces in the building of “the temple not made with hands.”
This is a Universal Activity. It is the same process going on through
all the kingdoms of the Universe, from the tiny crystals to plants, from
plants to animals, and animals to man.
But specializing the cell we note not only that all the body is composed
of cells or the deposit of cells, but that one type of cells develops
from another type, and ultimately all cells result from one single cell
“into which,” in the words of Darwin, “life was breathed by the
Creator”—of course always understanding that we have not specified the
nature of the Creator.
If this is so, and no one in these times will dare to dispute it, it
begins to dawn upon us that this curious complex body of man is, as it
were, a tremendous society of entities, the separate individualities of
which, whilst retaining their place as such in the great body, are
swamped in the individuality of that one. Not only so, but as it will be
our endeavor to show later on, the healthy existence of each part
greatly depends on its maintaining its loyalty and subservience to the
supreme Chief, from which it gets its daily source of energy and
inspiration.
What is true of the part is true of the whole and _vice versa_. For in
its turn the body of man must be subservient to that of which it is a
part, and answer to the call of that which represents the corporate body
of bodies, and to the divine light within, “that lighteth every man that
cometh into the world,” which is one with the Father, the Divine over
soul, of which we are all dim reflections. So also of the part, the tiny
microcosm of man, the cell, it is in its turn a universe, a universe so
grand that the many revelations that scientific investigation has
unveiled makes that science stand aghast; but these, we may venture to
prophesy, are nothing to the occult secrets that still lie waiting for
revelation.
All that the magnificent symbolism of the Gnostics has taught us
concerning The Man Iesous and his relation to Ichthys the fish, the ark
and the ship, can be well applied to the _cell_, which is a veritable
Ark with its Holy of holies in which sit and meditate the holy ones, the
_prajapati_ of the Hindus and the Christos of the Gnostics. Veritably it
is _par excellence_ the Astral Vehicle, the ship floating on the watery
ocean, veritably it is the Dagon, the fish-man, the new teacher coming
from the unknown regions of the Silence, the boat of Vishnu carrying the
God-Man into the world of Manifestation. We may well exclaim: O God, how
manifest are thy works! how sublime are thy powers! And when we
contemplate the tiny vehicle of life under the microscope we may well
close-to the doors of the senses, take off the sandals and worship, for
are we not at the very altar of the Temple—the temple of the Almighty;
are we not face to face with the Creators? He that hath eyes to see let
him see!
Amongst the great contributors to the Science of the Cell perhaps none
has approached nearer the Holy of Holies—none so nearly tore aside the
Veil of Isis, as H. P. B. has practically told us, than Professor
Weissmann in his contribution on the Germ Plasm and the New Problem of
Heredity as handled by him. Under the guiding hand of this savant we see
the cell in a new light, we begin to see kingdom within kingdom; and had
he but recognized the other side, had he but explored the dark side of
the Moon, much more might have been written, many more mouths might have
gaped and many more sceptics have smiled. Professor Weissmann however
has found a mare’s nest. He has raised the devil, but forgotten to give
him something to do, and as of old we cannot help exclaiming, what next!
The cell of Weissmann like the cell of most other students, is a tiny
ball of protoplasm with a central nucleus (the Holy of Holies, Fish Man,
etc.) but unlike that of other writers, instead of containing more
differentiated protoplasm, taking the forms of meaningless and
accidental rods, our revered professor has discovered a Nest of
Creators. He tells us that the greater portion of the cell does not in
any way participate in the process of hereditary transmission. Nay,
further still, not only does he regard the nucleus as the all important
particle but to quote his own words: “The law that only a certain part
of the nuclear matter is to be regarded as the hereditary substance
appears to me to receive fresh support from all the more recent
observations.”
Now the parts referred to are a series of minute rod-like structures
called _chromatin rods_ that are very active and manifest all kinds of
changes according to necessity, especially at that critical period in
the history of a cell called cell-division, when it is about to
propagate its species by _making itself_ into two by equal distributions
of its substance between its two selves. For you must know that when a
cell divides (and this does not refer to human cells alone, but all
vegetable and animal cells from the simplest to the most complex) the
products are two so-called “daughter cells,” but they are daughters
without a mother. It is one of the most mystical processes in existence
and contains much secret knowledge for it contains the mystery of the
birth of two from one. In this process, called in scientific parlance
_Karyokinesis_, these little rods play a most important part, nay, the
_all-important_ part, for the whole process commences with them and
proceeds from the centre outward. There is at the commencement of the
process a disturbance, a series of vibrations throughout the nucleus.
These little rods immediately form into a kind of reticulum or network;
then this network arranges itself into an indefinite spiral, at which
instant two mysterious bodies issue from the mass at opposite poles, and
take up a position in the cell, at some distance from the coil of rods;
then the spiral breaks up into two opposing sets of loops.
Ultimately these two sets of rods settle down in the neighborhood of the
two little bodies (_centrosomes_) shot out, or, I should perhaps say,
are attracted separately to the two poles of the cell by the
_centrosomes_. Then a cell wall forms between; the one cell becomes two.
There are some very occult forces at work behind all this, and they
generally are referred to, to cover our ignorance, as the law of
polarity, albeit that this law, whatever it is, involves the most occult
of the creative forces, in fact of all manifestation.
To go back, Dr. Weissmann does not consider these rods which he calls
_idants_ as the essential units, but states that in their turn these are
themselves composed of more minute bodies he calls _ids_.
In this respect, however, he considers protoplasm as a whole as
composed, not of so many chemical compounds, having an indefinite and
uncontrollable action on one another, but of collections of “molecules
united into a single group.” These molecules he calls _biophors_. The
biophors, as bearers of vitality, possess the power of growth and of
multiplication by fission. But the biophors which go to make up the
rods, have a more specific character of their own, and are the carriers
of those minuter bodies still which this savant speaks of as the real
creative units, or what he calls “_determinants_.” These ultimate
determinants, smaller than microscopic, hold within their tiny hearts
the ideal shape of the part which they are destined to control, carried
and distributed in the process of evolution of the creature by the
process of cell division.
This conception, enormous advance as it is on the previous materialism
of Huxley’s protoplasm, is yet so pregnant with the taint of the
materialistic age, that it requires modifying before it can even be
admitted as a logical hypothesis. For one must ask; if the cell gets its
impulse from the nucleus, the nucleus from the rods that inhabit it,
these rods from the little biophors of which they are composed, and
these from the determinants, where on earth do the determinants get it
from? We are reminded, moreover, that there was a time, not far away,
when this particular cell had no separate existence of its own. And if
we are directed back to the ovaries, and from them to the germinal
layer, and this from the cell again, still there is no escape, for we
may well ask with the Duke of Argyle: “What then! Whence the first?”
But the thing has a more definite and easy solution, for if these
material units are the Creators, and if as it is stated, the ingredients
of matter, especially sentient matter (so-called) are constantly
undergoing motion and change, by displacement; what about these units
when the time comes for them to play their part, has not their substance
been lost and replaced over and over again.
So we come back to our philosophy and we realize what our Chief, W. Q.
Judge, taught us, that the cell only has an existence as an _idea_.
Thinking of this word for a moment, looking it up in the dictionary we
find the following _verbatim_ (Gr. idea, from _idein_, to see) “one of
the archetypes or patterns of Created things, conceived by the
Platonists to have existed from eternity in the mind of the Deity.”[7]
Now look at the words used by Dr. Weissmann, _idants_ and _ids_. Is
there not something very suggestive here. We are then dealing not with
matter alone, but with ideas; nay, more, what is matter but an idea or
congeries of ideas? For as has been well said we know nothing of matter
_per se_ but only the manifestation of matter. It is the idea not the
matter that takes form. Now we must surely recognize that ideas as
_things_ are not causes but effects. So our professor all this time has
been dealing with effects and gets these mixed up with the causes. If
cells and the contents are ideas containing ideas, and if idea means
that which is seen, then there must somewhere be a Seer, and such a seer
without any sophistry must be a magician—not because we associate the
word Seer with magician, but quite independently.
Now we have realized that the body of man is composed of many minuter
entities, over which stands the supreme ruler. Each organ is composed of
many entities, over which rules the conscious governor of that organ,
and so on to the little cells which in their turn are composed of
minuter creatures each having a conscious existence of its own, whilst
that Consciousness is composed of the consciousness of all its component
lives. That consciousness is in each case part of the Divine
consciousness that pervades all things and acts in direct proportion to
its plane of activity.