Evolution of Life and Form: Four lectures delivered at the twenty-third anniversary meeting of the Theosophical Society at Adyar, Madras, 1898Besant, Annie
Religion
Evolution of Life and Form: Four lectures delivered at the twenty-third anniversary meeting of the Theosophical Society at Adyar, Madras, 1898
Besant, Annie
Evolution; Life -- Origin; Theosophy
from a great class of concrete objects its uniting quality, its common
characteristic, and formulate this apart from the objects themselves. I
have sometimes taken the triangle as the very simplest image which
thought can form. You may have triangles of any size, you may have
triangles of almost any shape, provided only three lines are used,
and those lines are right lines, or unbent. What is the governing
characteristic of the triangle? That its three angles, formed by the
meeting of enclosing sides, must be equal to two right angles. Now
supposing that you have the power of brain, the power of abstraction, to
take ten, twenty or thirty concrete triangles and hold them in the mind
as though you were looking at them in outer form, to create their mental
images so that every form is present in your mind, you directing your
attention to them all at the same time, then--if out of these many
concrete objects that have the particular properties in common of the
three right lines that enclose and the sum of the three angles equalling
two right angles--if you can draw out the idea of that common property,
separated from every concrete triangle, and make it an object in
consciousness, then you will have risen from the concrete to the
abstract, and will have some idea of what is meant by an archetype in
the higher world. The earliest actions of the Deity in evolving a system
are of this nature; He generates certain types or archetypes, and by the
sub-division and multiplication of these the whole universe of concrete
objects is formed; each one of them is capable of generating innumerable
forms that reproduce its own characteristic amid endless diversities of
subsidiary properties.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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