Page 91 (part 9)

) He rejects the conclusions of Kant, Herbert Spencer, of du Bois-Reymond and Tyndall. The latter expresses the opinion of all the great men of science, as of the greatest thinkers of this and the past ages, in saying that "the passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of Consciousness is unthinkable. Were our minds and senses so . . . illuminated as to enable us to see and feel the very molecules of the brain; were we capable of following all their motions, all their groupings . . . electric discharges . . . we should be as far as ever from the solution of the problem . . . The chasm between the two classes of Phenomena would still remain intellectually impassable. " But the complex function of the nerve-cells of the great German EMPIRIC, or, in other words, his Consciousness, will not permit him to follow the conclusions of the greatest thinkers of our globe. He is greater than they. He asserts this, and protests against all. "No one has the right [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * In " The Transmigration of the Life-Atoms, " we say, to explain better a position which is but too often misunderstood: -- "It is omnipresent . . . . though (on this plane of manifestation) often in a dormant state -- as in stone. The definition which states that when this indestructible force is disconnected with one set of atoms ( molecules ought to have been said) it becomes immediately attracted by others, does not imply that it entirely abandons the first set (because the atoms themselves would then disappear), but only that it transfers its vis viva , or life power -- the energy of motion, to another set. But because it manifests itself in the next set as what is called Kinetic energy, it does not follow that the first set is deprived of it altogether; for it is still in it, as potential energy or life latent," etc., etc. Now what can Haeckel mean by his "not identical atoms but their peculiar motion and mode of aggregation," if it is not the same Kinetic energy we have been explaining? He must have read Paracelsus and studied "Five Years of Theosophy," without properly digesting the teachings, before evolving such theories. [[Vol. 2, Page]] 674 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. to hold that in the future we (Haeckel) shall not be able to pass beyond those limits of our knowledge that to day seem impassable"; and he quotes from Darwin's introduction to the "Descent of Man" these words, which he modestly applies to his scientific opponents and himself: "It is always those who know little, and not those who know much, that positively affirm that this or that problem will never be solved by Science." The world may rest satisfied. That day is not far off when the "thrice great" Haeckel will have shown (to his own satisfaction) that the consciousness of Sir I. Newton was, physiologically speaking, but the reflex action (or minus consciousness) caused by the peri-genesis of the plastidules of our common ancestor and old friend, the Moneron Haeckelii. The fact that the said "Bathybius" has been found out and exposed as a pretender simulating the organic substance it was not ; and since, among the children of men, Lot's wife alone (and even this, only after her disagreeable metamorphosis into a salt pillar) could claim the pinch of salt it is, as her forefather -- will not dismay him at all. He will go on asserting, as coolly as he has always done, that it was no more than the peculiar mode and motion of the ghost of the long-vanished atoms of our "Father Bathybius," which, transmitted across aeons of time into the cell-tissue of the grey matter of the brains of every great man, caused Sophocles and AEschylus, as well as Shakespeare, to write their tragedies, Newton, his "Principia," Humboldt, his "Cosmos," etc. etc. It prompted Haeckel to invent Graeco-Latin names three inches long, pretending to mean a good deal, and meaning -- nothing. Of course we are quite aware that the true, honest evolutionist agrees with us; and that he is the first to say that not only is the geological record imperfect, but that there are enormous gaps in the series of hitherto discovered fossils, which can never be filled. He will tell us, moreover, that "no evolutionist assumes that man is descended from any existing ape or any extinct ape either, " but that man and apes originated probably aeons back, in some common root stock. Still, as de Quatrefages points out, he will claim as an evidence corroborating his (the evolutionist's) claim, even this wealth of absent proofs, saying that "all living forms have not been preserved in the fossil series, the chances of preservation being few and far between," even primitive man "burying or burning his dead" (A. Wilson). This is just what we ourselves claim. It is just as possible that future should have in store for us the discovery of the giant skeleton of an Atlantean, 30ft. high, as the fossil of a pithecoid "missing link": only the former is more probable. -------