Page 45 (part 4)

Cannot men and animals, plants and rocks, be supposed to be endowed with quite a different set of senses from those we possess? Cannot their organisms be born, developed, and exist, under other laws of being than those that rule our little world? Is it absolutely necessary that every corporeal being should be clothed in "coats of skin" like those that Adam and Eve were provided with in the legend of Genesis? Corporeality, we are told, however, by more than one man of science, "may exist under very divergent conditions."*** Do not we know through the [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * Nevertheless, it will be shown on the testimony of the Bible itself, and of such good Christian theologians as Cardinal Wiseman, that this plurality is taught in both the Old and the New Testaments. ** See "The Plurality of the Worlds," wherein the list of many men of Science, who wrote to prove the theory, is given. *** Professor A. Winchell -- arguing upon the plurality of the worlds -- makes the following remarks: "It is not at all improbable that substances of a refractory nature might be so mixed with other substances, known or unknown to us, as to be capable of enduring vastly greater vicissitudes of heat and cold than is possible with terrestrial organisms. The tissues of terrestrial animals are simply suited to terrestrial conditions. Yet even here we find different types and species of animals adapted to the trials of extremely dissimilar situations. . . . . . That an animal should be a quadruped or a [[Footnote continued on next page]] [[Vol. 1, Page]] 608 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. discoveries of that very all-denying science that we are surrounded by myriads of invisible lives? If these microbes, bacteria and the tutti quanti of the infinitesimally small, are invisible to us by virtue of their minuteness, cannot there be, at the other pole of it, beings as invisible owing to the quality of their texture or matter -- to its tenuity, in fact? Conversely, as to the effects of cometary matter, have we not another example of a half visible form of life and matter? The ray of sunlight entering our apartment, reveals in its passage myriads of tiny beings living their little life and ceasing to be, independent and heedless of whether they are perceived or not by our grosser materiality. And so again, of the microbes and bacteria and such-like unseen beings in other elements. We passed them by, during those long centuries of dreary ignorance, after the lamp of knowledge in the heathen and highly philosophical systems had ceased to throw its bright light on the ages of intolerance and bigotry during early Christianity; and we would fain pass them by again now. And yet these lives surrounded us then as they do now. They have worked on, obedient to their own laws, and it is only as they were gradually revealed by Science that we have begun to take cognisance of them, as of the effects produced by them. [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- [[Footnote continued from previous page]] biped is something not depending on the necessities of organization, or instinct, or intelligence. That an animal should possess just five senses is not a necessity of percipient existence. There may be animals on the earth with neither smell nor taste. There may be beings on other worlds, and even on this , who possess more numerous senses than we. The possibility of this is apparent when we consider the high probability that other properties and other modes of existence lie among the resources of the Kosmos, and even of terrestrial matter. There are animals which subsist where rational man would perish -- in the soil, in the river, and the sea" . . . (and why not human beings of different organizations, in such case?) . . . "Nor is incorporated rational existence conditioned on warm blood, nor on any temperature which does not change the forms of matter of which the organism may be composed. There may be intelligences corporealized after some concept not involving the processes of injection, assimilation, and reproduction. Such bodies would not require daily food and warmth. They might be lost in the abysses of the ocean, or laid up on a stormy cliff through the tempests of an Arctic winter, or plunged in a volcano for a hundred years, and yet retain consciousness and thought. It is conceivable. Why might not psychic natures be enshrined in indestructible flint and platinum? These substances are no further from the nature of intelligence than carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and lime. But, not to carry the thought to such an extreme (?), might not high intelligences be embodied in frames as indifferent to external conditions as the sage of the western plains, or the lichens of Labrador, the rotifers that remain dried for years, or the spores of bacteria which pass living through boiling water. . . . These suggestions are made simply to remind the reader how little can be argued respecting the necessary conditions of intelligent, organized existence, from the standard of corporeal existence found upon the earth. Intelligence is, from its nature, as universal and as uniform as the laws of the Universe. Bodies are merely the local fitting of intelligence to particular modifications of universal matter or Force." ( World - Life , or Comparative Geology , pp. 496-498 et seq. ) [[Vol. 1, Page]] 609 THE GEOLOGY OF ENOCH. How long has it taken the world, as it is now, to become what it is? If it can be said of cosmic dust that some of it comes to the present day " which had never belonged to the earth before " (" World - Life "), how much more logical to believe -- as the Occultists do -- that through the countless ages and millions of years that have rolled away, since that dust aggregated and formed the globe we live in around its nucleus of intelligent primeval substance -- many humanities, differing from our present mankind, as greatly as the one which will evolve millions of years hence will differ from our races, appeared but to disappear from the face of the earth, as our own will. Those primitive and far-distant humanities, having, as geologists think, left no tangible relics of themselves, are denied. All trace of them is swept away, and therefore they have never existed. Yet their relics -- a very few of them, truly -- are to be found, and they have to be discovered by geological research. Though, even if they were never to be met with, there is no reason to say that no men could have ever lived in those geological times, to which the period of their presence on earth is assigned. For their organisms needed no warm blood, no atmosphere, no feeding; the author of "World-Life" is right, and it is no such great extreme to believe even as we do, that as there may be, on scientific hypotheses, "psychic natures enshrined in indestructible flint and platinum" to this day, so there were psychic natures enshrined in forms of equal indestructible primeval matter -- the real forefathers of our fifth race.