Chapter XXIII (part 15)

Simple Consciousness and flashes of thought. Animals possessing complex organisms. Absence of consciousness of death. Body, instincts, desires, voices of the body, emotions. Reasoning. Moments of self-consciousness and flashes of cosmic consciousness. Man. Consciousness of death or fantastic theories of immortality. Simple emotions, logical reason, mind. Self-consciousness and beginning of cosmic consciousness. Man of higher type. Beginning of immortality. Higher emotions, higher intellect, intuition, mystical wisdom. "Evolutionists," being incapable of understanding the whole, without representing it to themselves as a chain, one link of which is connected with another, are like the blind men in the Oriental fable, who feel of an elephant in different places, and one affirms that the elephant is like pillars, another that it is like a thick rope, and so forth. The evolutionists however, add to this that the trunk of the elephant must evolve from the feet, the ears from the trunk, and so on. But we after all know that this is an elephant , i.e., a single being, unknown to men who are blind. Such a being is the living world. And with regard to the forms of consciousness, it is far more correct to consider them not as consecutive phases or steps of evolution which are separate from one another, but as different sides or parts of one whole which we do not know. In "man" this unity is apparent. All forms of consciousness in him can exist simultaneously; the life of cells and organs, with their consciousness; the life of the entire body, taken as a whole; the life of the emotions and of the logical reason, and the life of the higher understanding and feeling. p. 328 The higher form of consciousness is not necessary for life ; it is possible to live without it. But without it the organization and orderliness of life is impossible. Long under the domination of materialism and positive thinking, forgetting and perverting religious ideas, men thought that it was possible to live by the merely logical mind alone. But now, little by little, it is becoming quite evident to those who have eyes, that merely by the exercise of logical reason men will not be able to organize their life on earth, and if they do not finally exterminate themselves, as some tribes and peoples are doing, in any case they will create (and have already created) impossible conditions of life in which everything gained will be lost—i.e., everything that was given them in the past by men of self-consciousness and cosmic consciousness. ______ The living world of nature (including man) is analogous to man; and it is more correct and more convenient to regard the different forms of consciousness in different divisions and strata of living nature as belonging to one organism and performing different, but related functions, than as separate, and evolving from one another. Then the necessity disappears for all this naive theorizing on the subject of evolution. We do not regard the organs and members of the body of man as evolved one from another in a given individual and we should not be guilty of the same error with relation to the organs and members of the body of living nature. I do not deny the law of evolution, but the application of it to the explanation of many phenomena of life is in great need of correction. Firstly, if we accept the idea of one common evolution, after all it is necessary to remember that the types which develop slower, the remnants of evolution, may not continue to follow after, and at a slow pace, the same evolution, but may begin an evolution of their own, developing in many cases exactly those properties on account of which they were thrown out from basic evolution. Secondly, though we accept the law of evolution, there is no necessity to regard all existing forms as having been developed one from another (like man from the ape, for example). In such p.