Page 64 (part 5)

Bastian are very suggestive: (1) On account of the imperfect manner in which the several forms may be represented in the strata pertaining to the period; (2) on account of the extremely limited nature of the explorations which have been made in these imperfectly representative strata; and (3) because so many parts of the record are absolutely inaccessible to us -- nearly all beneath the Silurian system having been blotted out by time, whilst those two-thirds of the earth's surface in which the remaining strata are to be found are now covered over by seas. Hence Mr. Darwin says himself: -- "For my part, following out Lyell's metaphor, I look at the geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved, and of each page only here and there a few lines. " It is not on such meagre data, certainly, that the last word of Science can be said. Nor is it on any ground of human pride or unreasonable belief in man's representing even here on earth -- (in our period, perhaps) -- the highest type of life, that Occultism denies that all the preceding forms of human life belonged to types lower than our own, for it is not so. But simply because the "missing link," such as to prove the existing theory undeniably, will never be found by palaeontologists. Believing as we do that man has evolved from, and passed through, (during the preceding Rounds) the lowest forms of every life, vegetable and animal, on earth, there is nothing very degrading in the idea of having the orangoutang as an ancestor of our physical form. Quite the reverse; as it [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * Checked and modified, however, by the Law of Retardation, which imposes a restriction on the advance of all species when a Higher Type makes its appearance. [[Vol. 2, Page]] 261 NATURE IS UNIFORM. would forward the Occult doctrine with regard to the final evolution of everything in terrestrial nature into man, most irresistibly. One may even enquire how it is that biologists and anthropologists, having once firmly accepted the theory of the descent of man from the ape -- how it is that they have hitherto left untouched the future evolution of the existing apes into man? This is only a logical sequence of the first theory, unless Science would make of man a privileged being, and his evolution a non -precedent in nature, quite a special and unique case. And that is what all this leads physical Science to. The reason, however, why the Occultists reject the Darwinian, and especially the Haeckelian, hypothesis is because it is the ape which is, in sober truth, a special and unique instance, not man. The pithecoid is an accidental creation, a forced growth, the result of an unnatural process. The occult doctrine, is, we think, more logical. It teaches a cyclic, never varying law in nature, the latter having no personal, "special design," but acting on a uniform plan that prevails through the whole manvantaric period and deals with the land worm as it deals with man. Neither the one nor the other have sought to come into being, hence both are under the same evolutionary law, and both have to progress according to Karmic law. Both have started from the same neutral centre of Life and both have to re-merge into it at the consummation of the cycle. It is not denied that in the preceding Round man was a gigantic apelike creature; and when we say "man" we ought perhaps to say, the rough mould that was developing for the use of man in this Round only -- the middle, or the transition point of which we have hardly reached. Nor was man what he is now during the first two and a half Root-races. That point he reached, as said before, only 18,000,000 years ago, during the secondary period, as we claim. Till then he was, according to tradition and Occult teaching, "a god on earth who had fallen into matter," or generation. This may or may not be accepted, since the Secret Doctrine does not impose itself as an infallible dogma; and since, whether its prehistoric records are accepted or rejected, it has nothing to do with the question of the actual man and his inner nature, the Fall mentioned above having left no original sin on Humanity. But all this has been sufficiently dealt with. Furthermore, we are taught that the transformations through which man passed on the descending arc -- which is centrifugal for spirit and centripetal for matter -- and those he prepares to go through, henceforward, on his ascending path, which will reverse the direction of the two forces -- viz., matter will become centrifugal and spirit centripetal -- that all such transformations are next in store for the anthropoid ape also, all those, at any rate, who have reached the remove next to man in this [[Vol. 2, Page]] 262 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. Round -- and these will all be men in the Fifth Round, as present men inhabited ape-like forms in the Third, the preceding Round. Behold, then, in the modern denizens of the great forests of Sumatra the degraded and dwarfed examples -- "blurred copies," as Mr. Huxley has it -- of ourselves, as we (the majority of mankind) were in the earliest sub-races of the Fourth Root-race during the period of what is called the "Fall into generation." The ape we know is not the product of natural evolution but an accident, a cross-breed between an animal being, or form, and man. As has been shown in the present volume (anthropogenesis), it is the speechless animal that first started sexual connection, having been the first to separate into males and females. Nor was it intended by Nature that man should follow the bestial example -- as shown by the comparatively painless procreation of their species by the animals, and the terrible suffering and danger of the same in the woman. The Ape is, indeed, as remarked in Isis Unveiled (Vol. II 278) "a transformation of species most directly connected with that of the human family -- a hybrid branch engrafted on their own stock before the final perfection of the latter " -- or man. The apes are millions of years later than the speaking human being, and are the latest contemporaries of our Fifth Race. Thus, it is most important to remember that the Egos of the apes are entities compelled by their Karma to incarnate in the animal forms, which resulted from the bestiality of the latest Third and the earliest Fourth Race men. They are entities who had already reached the "human stage" before this Round. Consequently, they form an exception to the general rule. The numberless traditions about Satyrs are no fables, but represent an extinct race of animal men.