THE EDINBURGH LECTURES ON MENTAL SCIENCE. Thomas Troward
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the lowest forms of life peopled the globe, and it has now
culminated in the production of a being with a mind capable of abstract
reasoning and a brain fitted to be the physical instrument of such a mind.
At this stage the all-creating Life-principle reproduces itself in a form
capable of recognizing the working of the evolutionary law, and the unity
and continuity of purpose running through the whole progression until now
indicates, beyond a doubt, that the place of such a being in the universal
scheme must be to introduce the operation of that factor which, up to this
point, has been, conspicuous by its absence--the factor, namely, of
intelligent individual volition. The evolution which has brought us up to
this standpoint has worked by a cosmic law of averages; it has been a
process in which the individual himself has not taken a conscious part. But
because he is what he is, and leads the van of the evolutionary procession,
if man is to evolve further, it can now only be by his own conscious
co-operation with the law which has brought him up to the standpoint where
he is able to realize that such a law exists. His evolution in the future
must be by conscious participation in the great work, and this can only be
effected by his own individual intelligence and effort. It is a process of
intelligent growth. No one else can grow for us: we must each grow for
ourselves; and this intelligent growth consists in our increasing
recognition of the universal law, which has brought us as far as we have
yet got, and of our own individual relation to that law, based upon the
fact that we ourselves are the most advanced product of it. It is a great
maxim that Nature obeys us precisely in proportion as we first obey Nature.
Let the electrician try to go counter to the principle that electricity
must always pass from a higher to a lower potential and he will effect
nothing; but let him submit in all things to this one fundamental law, and
he can make whatever particular applications of electrical power he will.
These considerations show us that what differentiates the higher from the
lower degree of intelligence is the recognition of its own self-hood, and
the more intelligent that recognition is, the greater will be the power.
The lower degree of self-recognition is that which only realizes itself as
an entity separate from all other entities, as the _ego_ distinguished from
the _non-ego_. But the higher degree of self-recognition is that which,
realizing its own spiritual nature, sees in all other forms, not so much
the _non-ego_, or that which is not itself, as the _alter-ego_, or that
which is itself in a different mode of expression. Now, it is this higher
degree of self-recognition that is the power by which the Mental Scientist
produces his results. For this reason it is imperative that he should
clearly understand the difference between Form and Being; that the one is
the mode of the relative and, the mark of subjection to conditions, and
that the other is the truth of the absolute and is that which controls
conditions.
Now this higher recognition of self as an individualization of pure spirit
must of necessity control all modes of spirit which have not yet reached
the same level of self-recognition. These lower modes of spirit are in
bondage to the law of their own being because they do not know the law;
and, therefore, the individual who has attained to this knowledge can
control them through that law. But to understand this we must inquire a
little further into the nature of spirit. I have already shown that the
grand scale of adaptation and adjustment of all parts of the cosmic scheme
to one another exhibits the presence _somewhere_ of a marvellous
intelligence, underlying the whole, and the question is, where is this
intelligence to be found? Ultimately we can only conceive of it as inherent
in some primordial substance which is the root of all those grosser modes
of matter which are known to us, whether visible to the physical eye, or
necessarily inferred by science from their perceptible effects. It is that
power which, in every species and in every individual, becomes that which
that species or individual is; and thus we can only conceive of it as a
self-forming intelligence inherent in the ultimate substance of which each
thing is a particular manifestation. That this primordial substance must be
considered as self-forming by an inherent intelligence abiding in itself
becomes evident from the fact that intelligence is the essential quality of
spirit; and if we were to conceive of the primordial substance as something
apart from spirit, then we should have to postulate some other power which
is neither spirit nor matter, and originates both; but this is only putting
the idea of a self-evolving power a step further back and asserting the
production of a lower grade of undifferentiated spirit by a higher, which
is both a purely gratuitous assumption and a contradiction of any idea we
can form of undifferentiated spirit at all. However far back, therefore, we
may relegate the original starting-point, we cannot avoid the conclusion
that, at that point, spirit contains the primary substance in itself, which
brings us back to the common statement that it made everything out of
nothing. We thus find two factors to the making of all things, Spirit
and--Nothing; and the addition of Nothing to Spirit leaves _only_ spirit:
x + 0 = x.
From these considerations we see that the ultimate foundation of every form
of matter is spirit, and hence that a universal intelligence subsists
throughout Nature inherent in every one of its manifestations. But this
cryptic intelligence does not belong to the particular _form_ excepting in
the measure in which it is physically fitted for its concentration into
self-recognizing individuality: it lies hidden in that primordial substance
of which the visible form is a grosser manifestation. This primordial
substance is a philosophical necessity, and we can only picture it to
ourselves as something infinitely