The Theosophical Path Illustrated Monthly Volume 1, July-December, 1911
Religion
The Theosophical Path Illustrated Monthly Volume 1, July-December, 1911
Theosophy -- Periodicals
The newest speculations about the processes of solar and planetary
development from nebulae are bound to lead to the discovery of the
truth of the Theosophical teaching that there is an archetypal world, a
world of causes, lying concealed behind all manifested material forms.
Once this is admitted by scientists, once a sane metaphysical basis
for the universe is found logically necessary, there will be a great
change in the way of looking at phenomena, including the problem of
human life, and we know that what the most advanced thinkers proclaim
will be followed before long by the great mass; see, for instance, the
strong effect the Darwinian theory of Natural Selection, incomplete
and materialistic as it is, has already made in every department of
modern thought. Of course the acceptance of a merely metaphysical
foundation for the facts recorded by our ordinary senses does not mean
the acceptance of the reality of a _spiritual_ world; that is a far
deeper problem, and has to be approached through the experience of the
intuition, trained and untrained, but a long step will be made when
it is thoroughly realized that the material plane is not the plane of
ultimate causes.
According to one of the nebular hypotheses of today the collision of
two suns, (dark and "dead" or otherwise) crashing into each other
at tremendous speed, results in a vast nebula, in which, owing to
the enormous heat produced, the atoms would be reduced to the state
of "corpuscles," the root of matter on our plane, all alike, and
without any of the characteristics of the elements, even in the most
rudimentary form; there would be no metallic vapors, no gases, not
even helium or coronium, nothing but the primitive corpuscular basis
of matter. Then, as the nebula formed by the collision condensed
and perhaps cooled, it would begin to rebuild its substance into
the well-known elements, combinations would take place, and the
evolution of a new solar system would be started. But now arises the
important question: What causes the perfectly homogeneous or uniform
"corpuscular" substance, the mass of _sub-atoms_ of unknown nature, to
perform the astonishing feat of transforming itself into the marvelous
complexity we find even in the simplest star? The problem is similar to
that of the egg. In a new-laid egg the great mass of its constituent
materials is structureless, but in a short time of incubation the
eggshell is completely filled with a most complicated living organism.
Is it not clear that behind both nebula and egg there must be an
archetype or model form, invisible to ordinary eyesight, which is
being used as the pattern into which the simple materials are being
woven? and that there are Builders, who know the plan and work it out
in a conscious harmony that we call the correlation of "natural laws"?
"Blind forces," "necessity," "unconscious laws," are meaningless terms
which only disguise ignorance, or _stave off_ the anti-materialistic
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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