Part I Lectures to the Public (continued 2)

Only the Spirit can know Him, only the Spirit can find Him; while it searches through matter it can only hope He is, but the unveiled Spirit can feel the unveiled Godhead, and by the identity of nature can know that God is, and is itself. And as this inner spiritual life more and more awakens in the religions of the world, man will know the truth of that great saying of the Christ: “The Kingdom of God is within you.” As you go down into the depths of your own being, there shall you find Deity, the conviction that God is and must be. For you can strip away from yourself everything that is not He, until only He, the one Self of all, remains. You can mutilate your body and lose your limbs, but you remain. Your emotions can grow worn out and be withered, but behind your emotions you still are there. Your mind may grow weaker, feebler, may become, as it were, paralysed for reasoning, and yet you are there, behind the failing mind; and if you are willing to pass on into spiritual experience, to let your emotions be quieted, to let your mind be still, then in the silence of the emotions, in the tranquillity of the mind, you shall find a deeper consciousness, a deeper life, a more real individuality; and as the emotions are still and the mind is silent, in the innermost depths of the Spirit you shall find yourself and God. And then, contemplating that mighty and eternal life, you shall feel that you share it, that you are part of it, that you cannot be separated from it, and, in a great gush of experience that never again you can doubt, you shall know the reality of Deity in finding the reality of yourself. That is the ultimate conviction that nothing can shake—that the human experience that many a man has had, that for him has transformed the world; that is the sure ground of the religion of the future, that the rock on which a true faith alone can be based; and it is written, and truly written, in an ancient Hindū scripture, that the only proof of God lies in the witness of the Self. On that rock religion will base itself, fearless of all attack, of all assault. No question of chronology can move it, for every man can gain that experience for himself; no criticism and destruction of scriptures can tear this in pieces, for it is ever renewing in the perennial life of the Eternal Spirit; no churches, in failing, can shake it, for it is this that made churches, to help in its own searching; nothing outside can touch it, for it lives in the innermost heart of man. And in that, ever-opening new experiences, fuller knowledge, deeper understanding, more abounding love, and unchanging peace and bliss. Everything else may go, but this remains unchanging; and as out of this all has come, the perishing of the transient matters not, for the Eternal Source remains.

But that is not the only new door, though the most important one, which opens to religion. You remember that I said, that with the unfolding consciousness a more delicately organised body was evolved. And so we find that new senses, new powers awake in the material tabernacle with this unfolding of the divine Spirit in man. The senses which belong to the higher worlds are very near to the opening in every one of you; and if you ask me why I say it, my answer is very simple, because, taking, say, any dozen of you, dulling the physical senses by what is called mesmerism, or hypnotism if you will, so that you cannot see physical things, cannot hear physical sounds, cannot taste or smell or touch so that the senses answer to objects outside—under those conditions in about ten out of every dozen these inner senses are able to make themselves manifest, are able to bear witness to the existence of a subtler world. Now when you find that by an artificial process of that kind an ordinary man or woman can be made what is called clairvoyant or clairaudient, or able to touch and feel things that the ordinary physical touch does not reveal; when you find that by stilling the physical these rudimentary senses are able to work—within limitations, but still to work—it is a fairly clear proof that man is on the threshold of unfolding those senses that now are rudimentary, and that need an artificial condition in order to show themselves. But they do show themselves under that artificial condition. If they were not there they could not show themselves, no matter how much you might paralyse the dense physical body; it is only because they are there that they can function. But when the rougher senses are active, those stronger vibrations dull the delicate vibrations of the rudimentary and dawning senses. It is only because they are present, but only partly developed that you are able to make them manifest in the great majority which might be taken from a meeting such as this.

Now, not only is that true—and I mention that first because that is practically universally recognised by science now—but they may be artificially stimulated without the help of mesmerism at all. While that is a rough-and-ready way of doing it with anybody, the other means requires a consciousness unfolded to the point where the fact of these senses is recognised as probable, and then a deliberate and sustained effort to bring these senses into working order. Now that is done by what is known generally as meditation, and meditation is only concentrated thinking. Anyone who is able to pay attention, any one who is able to think steadily on one subject for a little time without letting the mind wander, is ready to begin meditation; and most of all are those ready to begin it, although at first sight they might not look promising, who are capable of being seized upon by a single idea of a high and lofty character; which, as it were, takes possession of them, obsesses them if you will, so that they become martyrs, heroes for the idea which has gripped them. I do not say that is the highest state—it is not; it is not best to be possessed by the idea, but to possess the idea—that is a stage higher still. But the power of being possessed by an idea shows that you are climbing upwards towards the realms of the ideal; and many a man or woman who is marked out as a fanatic, as unwilling to be reasoned out of their foolish ideals, the dreamers of the world, the Utopians, the poets who dream of a coming golden age, those men and women who despise the present, sometimes irrationally, in the wild enthusiasm of the idea that has possessed them, they are treading on the threshold of that power of concentration of the mind which, when they have mastered their ideas, should carry them far on—on to the next stage in human progress. It is by meditation that these senses are artificially awakened; that is, you quicken the normal workings of evolution by knowing the laws of thought, and utilising them to bring about that which you desire. It is only artificial in the same sense that a cattle-breeder, when he wants to breed a particular type, uses those laws of nature that help him, and avoids or evades those that would hinder him. He clears out of his way all the opposing forces and energies, so that those he wants may have free play. So with the laws of mind; if you know the laws of mind, the laws by which consciousness evolves, then you can use them scientifically to develop in yourselves the highest powers of the mind, and use those powers of the mind to organise your subtler body, so that it may become a vehicle of consciousness, may be obedient to your will to know. That is already stirring within you; hence the nervous troubles that you have; but when you understand the law, you can evolve the finer nervous system without peril to health. Only this demands rules which many people kick against, a physical self-mastery that is not popular in the luxurious and ease-seeking civilisation of our time; to make your physical body only an instrument, to allow it to eat only what you choose for it as best suited to your purpose, to allow it to drink that alone which suits your aim, to allow it to sleep just as long as, and no longer than, conduces to that object that you have set before yourself—to make the body the servant, and not the master, or even the equal, of the Spirit—that is the regimen which has to go with the quicker evolution of the astral body and the keener senses which belong to it. Many are doing it amongst us now; nature is doing it, but not so rapidly as man can do it by working with nature.

On the western coast of America, along the Californian district, where the electric conditions are very peculiar, one of the games the children like is to run along the carpet, rubbing their feet along the carpet as they go. This charges them so highly with electricity that if you turn on a gas-jet they can put a finger to it and light it. These are things that are well known over there, and with that peculiar electrical condition the tension of the nervous system is higher, and so these senses are very much more common there than they are in our damper and less brilliant electrical atmosphere. That, however, is coming for all; there partly by natural conditions; here, if you choose to do it, by deliberate working with nature along the line of evolution.

Now, what will be the effect of evolving those astral senses? That the next world will form part of this world to you, so that in religion a large number of things that now are matters of faith will become matters of everyday knowledge. There will be no need then to talk about human personality persisting on the other side of death, for you will see your dead all around you, as some are able to see them even now. Death will be only going into another room in the house that we are all living in, and even the walls will become transparent, so there will be no real separation; it will no longer be necessary for the clergy to preach about the life on the other side of death, for all the congregation will see that it exists; it will be no longer necessary to talk about the results in that life of what we are doing here, for the results will be open before our eyes, as they are open to the eyes of the seers of to-day; there will be no need then to say that death cannot divide, for all will know that their beloved are with them—tangible, visible, audible.

Now, these things are so to an ever-increasing number of our own race at the present time; they will become general as evolution proceeds. And the result of that will be that very many of the secondary teachings of religion will become palpably true to the great majority; not only the question of the life after death and the conditions that rule there, but also the value of many church rites and ceremonies that the sceptical and materialistic mind of the moment looks on with scorn and contempt as ancient superstitions. There is such a thing as the sacramental life; there is a bridge between this world and the next in those sacraments of the Churches possessed by every great religion, and not by the Christian alone. Much of that has been lost to western Christendom by the Reformation, which rejected the occult because it had been abused, and superstition believed without understanding. But, none the less, in the great sacraments of the Church there remains a potency which without that sacrament you cannot reach, a real communication of the spiritual to the material, a real down-flowing of the higher life: a thing which is visible to the eye of the seer, although invisible to the normal worshippers in the churches. And gradually, as these senses become common, those ancient traditions will again be justified in the minds of all, and men will again know that in those divinely given offices of religion there is a mighty potency, a living spiritual reality. You do not need them when you have opened up your Spirit to the higher realities of the spiritual world, but how few there are who are really open to these in their daily lives; the sacraments are the bridges that unite the worlds, and it is foolish to throw them aside until you have built a perpetual bridge within yourself.

All along those lines you will readily see how many doors will open in religion where knowledge will justify what humility and faith have received. And along those lines religion, without ceasing to be spiritual, will be rational and scientific as well, and you will realise that Occult Science justifies religion, and can make a rational and scientific defence for many of its rites and ceremonies, for many of its teachings that now rest on authority and tradition. I have not time to go further along that line; I have indicated to you the ways along which the doors are opening both in the spiritual unfolding to the higher realities, and the unfolding of the higher senses which will gradually bring the next world within man’s ken.

II.—Science.

Let us turn to Science, and see how far similar doors are opening there for the science of our day. You may remember that I pointed out to you that science was now rather at its wits’ end as regards observation. It seems to have reached the limit of the delicacy of its outer apparatus. How shall it continue to observe? By means of those same senses that I have been speaking of in relation to the verification of religious teachings, but in science you can begin a little lower down. In the physical world of matter, our own world, science is now recognising not only solid, liquid, gas, but also ether, and beyond ether, possible finenesses arising, so that there may be many ethers, as indeed was suggested in that famous classification of vibrations which Sir William Crookes gave in one of his addresses a few years ago. Let it stand for the moment as a matter of observation of higher sight that there are more ethers than one that science will gradually conquer. But science is not yet able to see even the chemical atom, and that is only on the plane of the gas, the third fineness of matter. The atom escapes by its subtlety, by its minuteness, and yet it would not be a very difficult thing for most of you to develop in yourselves the power of seeing as far as that, for it is only physical matter. It is not now the seeing of another kind of matter altogether, like that of the astral world; it is only the making a little keener of your present physical sight. Now I wonder how many of you, if you were on board ship, quiet, with the air very pure, if you looked into the atmosphere around you, would see dancing in that atmosphere a number of tiny brilliant sparks. Probably a large number of you. Try it next time you happen to be out on the sea. Sit with your back to the sun, otherwise your eyes will become dazzled; fix your gaze at the distance at which you can see an object clearly, so as not to strain the eyes; focus your eyes, say at a distance of four or five yards away, not near enough to cause any strain by the crossing of the eyes; you must not cross the axes of the eyes, that is, you must not squint; that, prolonged, will injure the eyes. Let them look quite easily out a few yards away from you into the empty air, and stay quite quietly looking at that point. Probably most of you presently would begin to see a number of brilliant little sparks dancing like motes in a sunbeam. One word of warning I must give you: if, in fixing your attention on one of those, it slowly glides away out of sight, round the corner as it were, then it is only something in the retina, and the humour of the eyes carries that gradually away; anything that gradually slides out of sight belongs to the physical retina of the eye, and is not outside yourself. But if they dance up and down in every direction, exactly as the dust in a ray of light coming through a shutter, then you may be sure that you are seeing something in the air beyond your ordinary vision. Look at them easily, not straining your vision, but with the will to see—every organ of sense is evolved by the will of the Spirit behind it—the will to see more plainly, and gradually you will find that those dancing sparks of light can be stopped by your will to look at them, until they will, as it were, hang in the air like minute sparks without the rapid motion. You have begun then to develop etheric sight, and going on steadily along similar lines you would find that before very long the atom of the chemist would become visible to you. Of course, this is possible to any clairvoyant who possesses real clairvoyance, and not only a dim response to vibrations outside that are not understood. Two years ago, under favourable conditions, two of us who had developed some of these higher kinds of sight set to work on the atoms of the chemist. We examined some fifty-five or fifty-six of them, drew the forms, and since then have examined all the rest that are known to science. Those forms fall into classes; they can be drawn so that anyone who is now able to see them can test his own vision if he pleases by that which we have put on record; and you will find in that work, which we published under the name of Occult Chemistry, pictures of the chemical elements, observations as to their breakings up into finer and finer forms of ether, and possibly to the trained chemist suggestions of experiments by which he may guide his own investigations, and by utilising what we have seen as scientific hypotheses to him, although facts to us, may be able to follow these subtle and elusive particles of matter further than he has been able to follow them by any instrument that he is able to manufacture. For when a thing is once done, it is possible then to verify it over and over again; when once the pictures have been made, it is easy for others to see them and verify their details; and along that line opens up a whole vast series of new observations by man developing within himself instruments of observation keener than those he possesses by his apparatus and his machinery. Along that line physical research may go. As these senses become commoner and commoner, investigations may be carried on by scientists into the subtler worlds on whose thresholds they now are standing, until we shall be able to have a chemistry founded on direct observation which shall carry us right up to the ultimate atom of the physical plane, and make practicable those so-called dreams of the Alchemist, which are only practicable by bringing together atoms of a finer kind than the gaseous, and so leading to aggregations that make the elements along the lines that the chemist desires, he doing in his laboratory what nature has done outside. And so along that line to chemistry, to electricity, new powers of observation will extend the bounds of science.

And in medicine the same is true. Now medicine is to some extent, especially on the Continent, profiting by this clear seeing. It is not an uncommon thing in a Paris hospital for the doctors to look for someone who is sensitive, to hypnotise that sensitive person, to half awaken him, so that he is what is called “lucid” or “clairvoyant,” to take him then to the bedside of the patient and get him to describe the inner condition of the organs of that patient. Diagnoses are being made in that way now in several of the Paris hospitals, enormously facilitating the work of the physician, and even of the surgeon. It is only seeing by what you call the Röntgen rays. The human eye can develop the power to see by those rays, and then you don’t want your screens and all the rest of your apparatus, for direct vision will do what is now done imperfectly by apparatus. Once, in speaking about this, I pointed out that all that the doctors had done was to give a new label to a power that had been recognised by many right back in the last century. They don’t call it clairvoyance—I use that word—they call it internal autoscopy. After all, a rose by any other name smells as sweet. Clairvoyance is just as useful when it is described in seven syllables as when it is described in three the power is the same; and that is now being used, as I say, for medical purposes. As that extends, as the action of drugs can be watched, as the physician can see what he is doing instead of groping, then medicine will become what it ought to be—a science of healing; and instead of the miserable practice of vivisection you will have the clairvoyant vision, which directs alike the scalpel of the surgeon or the prescriptions of the physician.

But that is not the only door which is opening before medical science. Doctors are beginning to realise the enormous value of the power of mind in the treatment of disease. Along this line the way has been led as usual by the great hosts of people who are banned as charlatans by modern science—Christian Scientists, Mental Scientists, faith curers of all sorts. These are the things that are leading the medical profession slowly along sounder lines of cure, along safer methods of healing. Most doctors will now admit that to get the mind of the patient with them is to double the value of their drugs; most doctors will admit that the use of the imagination by the patient is an immense help in the curing of any disease. On every side you may see that these methods are being taken up by medical men, and are being rendered more and more scientific. What is the law that underlies them all? That the mind creates; that the mind is the one great creative power in the universe, divine in the universe, human in man; that as the mind can create, so can it restore; that where there is injury, the mind can turn its forces to the healing of the injury; that where harm has happened to the body, the mind can bring a remedy and strengthen the action of the drugs that are given by the physician. And I see now that in the Anglican Church there are several guilds of healing by the action of prayer—which is concentrated thought—by the touch of consecrated oil—which is a sacramental function—and by the faith of the patient, which is the determination of the mind to work in the direction which is desired by the sufferer. Now there is nothing new in that, nothing that has not been known in the world for thousands of years. It was pushed out of sight by a science that depended only on material means; it is coming back with the supremacy of mind over matter, and with the recognition which science is now making, that it is life which is the evolver and the moulder of matter. As medicine goes along that line instead of along the lines of torture, the doctor will again become the healer instead of the poisoner that he too often is to-day.

In psychology the same is true; new doors are opening there. These higher bodies of man that I spoke of at the beginning, as they become organised, bring us into touch with one region after another of the universe around us, answer to vibrations from the outer world far away from our physical globe, bring us into contact with the subtler regions, the regions of thought as well as the regions of Spirit. As our consciousness makes its vehicles more plastic, more useful, more keen, more subtle, we shall find the consciousness far larger than we dreamed of, until at last we shall realise that this human consciousness of ours is only like a vast body touching delicately, as it were, the surface of the physical matter of the globe, putting a little more of itself down into the physical brain that is more sensitive, but ever transcending the physical, and using the higher, finer matter for its keener instrument, until at last we shall realise that genius of every kind is only the manifestation of a larger consciousness that each of us possesses, only we are not able to make it work through the denser matter of our brain. And we shall realise that all that the Prophets have said, all that the great Mystics have told us, all those things are only the fruits of a wider consciousness contacting a wider world, and that before psychology is unfolding an enormous range of possibilities, in which man will be in touch with other worlds than this, and in which he will climb higher and higher, until he realises that he is cosmic, not planetary, and belongs to a vaster system, and not only to one tiny world. Along those lines, and along many another, then, the finer sense is opening to science new doors, new avenues of knowledge.

III.—Art.

And what of Art? Here, again, these senses will be the builders of the new art, the givers of the new ideals; and there are already signs, in the world of painters more especially, of new powers which are opening, new splendour of colour, and new wedding of emotion to colour also. A new school of painters is beginning to grow up, some in this country, one at least in Belgium, several in Hungary. I was looking at their paintings only three or four days ago, in which new use of colour is being shown to indicate the higher emotions of the mind, in which the painter is throwing into forms of new beauty, glorious in new brilliancy of colour, the higher thoughts and emotions which show themselves especially in religious feelings. There was one painting that was hanging in the hall in which we were holding our International Congress, which from the further end of the hall seemed as though it were impossible as a mere painting on opaque canvas. As you looked at it from a distance it seemed as though the colour were transparent, as though the canvas were transparent, as though there were a light beyond the painting shining through the colours from behind. Now, there is something of that quality in the paintings of Mr. Mortimer Menpes which he did in Japan. It shows so strongly that I remember, in one exhibition of his paintings, that people looking would hardly believe that a light had not been hidden behind the painting, so extraordinary was the brilliance that seemed to shine through; but if you talked to that great colourist, you would find that he sees colours in quite a different way from you, or at least I will say I found he saw them in quite a different way from my normal sight, and in talking to him about the colours that he saw, I was able to recognise, having unfolded some of the higher vision, that he was seeing astral colours, and not physical, and that the effort to throw those upon the canvas brought about the remarkable results which everyone wondered over, though they did not understand. Now there are many artists who are growing up along that line, who are groping after new possibilities of colour as well as after new ideals which they seek to limn, and you will find in the more modern paintings of that school, at present so small but with the promise of the future in it, that they are seeking after new forms of beauty; that they are trying to translate some of the higher visions that belong to worlds of matter subtler and finer than our own; that they are beginning to draw down from the ideal great thoughts, which they are putting at present imperfectly into form and colour, but in which is the promise of the Art of the Future, where larger worlds shall be drawn upon, where a vaster Nature shall unfold herself to man, where new colours and new possibilities of outline shall be found in every direction, and where human genius shall have a wider range, because a wider world and wider powers will come within the power of the painter.

And so we shall see it also in music. That is beginning to show signs of the coming art—subtler harmonies, minuter distances between notes, tendencies to quarter-notes as well as half-notes, quarter-tones; and already there are one or two musicians who are beginning in their melodies to play with these subtler kinds of tones, making strange new music—music which the public ear is not yet accustomed to, which it challenges when it hears it, but which is the Music of the Future, when a vaster range of sound shall appeal to ears more finely organised than ours, and when the ears of a new race shall demand from its musicians greater delicacies of musical sound than have yet been mastered amongst us; and there is a new possibility there. That has been seized in India, although little put at present into music that the West would love. If you go to India you will find some strange rules of music there: there is music for the sunrising, and music for the high noon, and music for the evening hours, and music for the stillness of the night. Nature has her sounds in all the different times of her unfolding, from dawn to sunset, and sunset to dawn, and these finer notes are attuned to these mysteries of Nature, so that unheard melodies may be mirrored in the music of human instruments. The Indian musician would not play to you a melody of the dawn when the sun was setting; he would say it was against religion to do it, for to him all things are religious. It is a subtler harmony between man and Nature; and not without significance, again, was it that, at the Congress I have just spoken of, a Russian lady teacher—for the Russian is very sensitive, a young nation with possibilities of the future in it—brought to us what she called “coloured sounds.” She had learned to translate into musical sounds the colours of the sunset and the colours of a forest, so that in music she could play sounds that made arise in the mind the same emotions as would be aroused in the mind that looked at the glory of the clouds in the sunset, or that sat in the wood and saw the delicate shadings of the trees; the same emotions in the one case seen in Nature, in the other heard in music, and both changeable the one into the other, eye and ear, and ear and eye. Along those lines many new possibilities lie—new melodies, new delicacies, new exquisite harmonies in sound.

So art will go forward here, with these keener, subtler organs, further even in one way than science along the line of observation, for art reaches out by emotion where science is only observing, and so the poet is very easily the prophet, and the artist very easily the seer; and as these powers increase and multiply, a new race arises in which the powers are inborn. Can you not dream some of the new possibilities in Religion, in Science, and in Art?

You think it is all a dream, all a fancy! But to say that, you must be making the preposterous claim that evolution is over, and that you are the highest products which Nature is able to bring to birth. We are far higher than the savages: should there not be races higher than we are? Surely Nature’s power is not exhausted; surely she, who has gradually builded up the exquisite mechanism of the human retina from the pigment spot in the nervous ring of the medusa, surely she can evolve these eyes further and further, to greater power of sight. It all grows out of the Spirit, and of the Spirit there is no ending. If you see to-day with your eye it is because the Spirit in you willed to see, and by that will built up the organ which made the will effective in the material world; and that same Spirit that evolved you in the past is living in you now, and is your innermost Self; its powers are not exhausted, its inspiration is not over, it is still the architect of the human body, as the divine Spirit is the architect of the universe. Ever to higher and higher forms of matter, ever to loftier and loftier stages of consciousness, everlastingness stretches in front of us, as everlastingness stretches behind us. As we have climbed, so we shall climb; as we have come upwards from the dust, so shall we ascend to the stars; for the Spirit of God within us knows no limitation either in time or space, and the evolution of the future should be a millionfold more splendid than the evolution which has made us what we are.

Lecture IV Brotherhood Applied to Social Conditions

Friends: I wish to deal to-night with the question of the principle of Brotherhood as applied to human life; how we may use it to solve some of the problems that we find around us at the present day, how we may use it to make possible the transition from one stage of civilisation to another, so that the transition may come in peace and goodwill, and thereby may last, rather than in anger and revolution, which can only mean a brief period of the new order, and then another struggle, prolonged ill-will, and misery. But if Brotherhood is to be applied to the solution of our difficulties, the first thing that is necessary is to try to understand what is meant by Brotherhood, and what it implies. Now, Brotherhood by no means implies what is called equality, for just as you do find Brotherhood in nature, so do you not find equality; in fact, the very name Brotherhood carries our thoughts to the constitution of the family, implies at once the inequality of elder and younger, of wiser and more ignorant, of those who guide and those who obey; so that if man is to aim at a society in which equality is to be the watchword, then the principle of Brotherhood must be entirely thrown on one side. The disadvantage of taking the war-cry of equality in trying to make a social system, or even to fight a social battle, is that natural law is against you, and that you are dealing with a fiction, not with a fact. There is nothing more obvious throughout the whole realm of nature than the inequalities of which natural order consists; and if you turn aside from the vaster order of the various grades of living things, and confine yourselves only to the study of man, there the same principle of inequality is perpetually asserting itself. It is not only the difference of age which always comes in, in the question of a family; it is the difference of capacity, of power, of characteristics, of qualifications. What sort of equality is possible between the strong and healthy man and the cripple or the invalid? what sort of equality between the man with eyes and the blind? between the man who is dowered with genius and the man who is weighted by dulness and stupidity? Inequality is the law of nature, not equality; and it is of no use to try to build a social system on that which is only a fiction, thought out in the study of doctrinaires, but breaking down the very moment it comes to be applied to human life. That famous declaration of the American Republic: “Man is born free,” and on that freedom basing equality, is denied by every fact of human life. Man is born a babe, helpless and dependent; and if the babe were left to the enjoyment of freedom, he would have very little chance of growing into youth and maturity. A babe is not born free, but dependent on all those around him for the possible continuance of his life; and if it were not that he is born into a system of affection and obligation, there would be no chance for the human babe to survive the first hours of his infancy.

It is a remarkable fact, one full of significance, that the two societies in the world which recognise Universal Brotherhood both also recognise a hierarchical order. Take the great fraternity of Masons. They lay down the principle of Universal Brotherhood over the whole surface of the globe, but there is nothing more rigid in its order and in the authority committed to the officers than a Masonic Lodge. Hierarchy is there recognised as the very condition of liberty. If you turn from that proclamation of Universal Brotherhood to the Theosophical Society, exactly the same thing is seen. You have there the recognition of a hierarchy that guides the destinies of humanity, and presides over the evolving growth of man—a mighty hierarchy, where wisdom only gives the right to rule, and where the commands of wisdom are gladly carried out by the less wise, who recognise the authority of those wiser than themselves. And that, in truth, is the condition of liberty. For without that hierarchical order, where wisdom rules and ignorance obeys, there is no possibility of anything that is worthy to be called by the name of liberty. As I shall want to put to you at the close of what I have to say to-night, we have never yet seen liberty upon earth outside the ranks of that great human hierarchy; we have only seen the rule of different classes, the rule of one group over another; but never have we seen liberty, for man is not yet sufficiently evolved to understand the conditions under which alone liberty can exist.

In looking at this strange fact, that the only two societies that proclaim Universal Brotherhood also admit a hierarchical order, let us see how far in the great Brotherhood of man there are any foundations on which a hierarchy can be based. I am coming, now, away from that great occult hierarchy of which I spoke into the ordinary humanity known to us all. In the family, where the principle of Brotherhood is recognised, and where duty and responsibility go with age and knowledge, there we have, as it were, a rough outline as to what a State should be. But how does the principle of age come in as regards mankind? For unless there be something in the human race which bears an analogy, at least, to the principle of age within a family, we shall find it difficult to vindicate Brotherhood, much less to make it the foundation-stone of society in the centuries to come. Now, it is as true of humanity as it is true of the members of a family that there is a difference of age. Exactly on the same lines by which the members of a family are born one after the other, and in all those different ages make up the family circle, so is it with the great family of man. The human and intelligent Spirits that make up that vast family are not of the same age, have not all been born into individual existence at the same time. Side by side with the idea of Brotherhood comes out the natural law of reincarnation—that there is a difference of age in the individualised human Spirits, and that there are elders and youngers in the great human family. These differences of age do not go necessarily with any of the distinctions of castes or classes that you find in modern society, although the great caste system of India was founded upon this principle of the different ages of the reincarnating Egos. Long ago, however, has that passed away, and you have not now manifest on earth that same definite order as in the earlier days of our Aryan ancestors in India. Still, you can tell the younger or the older soul by examining the characteristics that the man or the woman brings into the world at birth; by looking at the character, the marks of the being older or younger leap into sight. The younger soul, unable to acquire any large amount of knowledge, with very little moral faculty showing itself, very selfish and desirous to grasp the pleasure of the moment without any care for what may be the result of grasping it in the time that follows, the trivial, shallow, easy-going way of life, the being carried away by the ever-changing fancy, and with no strong underlying thought or principle or will on which you can reckon, very changeable, very frivolous, easily carried away by every passing whim of the moment—those are marked out as the younger souls, who have little experience of life behind them in which character has been builded, in which will has been evolved. And when you come across those of calm judgment, great capacity for acquiring knowledge, power to turn knowledge into wisdom, steadfast in will, steadfast in principle ready to look to the future beyond the passing attractions of the moment, ready to sacrifice a temporary gain for a larger happiness—in such men and women you have the marks of the older souls, whose past experiences have gradually developed capacities, and who have brought with them into the world the fruits of long-reaped harvests. That great principle of Reincarnation must ever go hand in hand with Brotherhood if Brotherhood is to be applied, if it is to be made a working principle of ordinary life. For it is out of these differences of age between us that grow up all the possibilities of an ordered and happy society amongst ourselves. When the young souls come into places of power and wealth, then ill is it for the nation, for then children rule instead of men. But well is it for a people where wisdom is the test of weight and authority, where the wise and the thoughtful and the learned are those who are held to have the greatest claim to social distinction, where knowledge and power go hand in hand, and where experience is the guide of righteousness, the standard of honour. Only as those facts are recognised—and they grow out of the knowledge of reincarnation—only on that stable law in nature can you build securely and strongly the society that shall endure.

But it is sometimes said: If you are going to build a society on these great principles, then you have to change human nature, because human nature is selfish, superficial, readily swayed, and you cannot build a society which is truly great out of trivial and superficial people. The wise are always in the minority; how, then, will you gain for them the right and the power to rule? It is true that human nature will have to change very much from what it is to-day, but then it is changing all the time—it is no new thing to change human nature. Human nature is perpetually changing as century succeeds century and civilisation succeeds civilisation; and when we once understand the law of life, and realise the mighty power of thought in the building of character, and understand that law of inviolable sequence which Theosophists call karma, working in every department of human life and not only in non-intelligent nature, when we realise the time that reincarnation gives us, and the certainty that that law of inviolable sequence gives us, then we begin to understand that human nature is a very malleable thing; and just in proportion as we understand the law, so shall be the rapidity of the changing. Do you think that human thought is weak as a force to change human nature? Is it not rather true that thought is the power which brings about all mighty changes?—first the ideal, then the action. Let me give you two striking examples of the only two nations in Europe that have attained national unity during our own lifetime; one Italy, the other Germany. I only take them as examples of nations that out of many States and warring interests have reached unity as a nation; and how was it done? It was done by the holding up of the ideal in both cases, the ideal of national unity. Not until German poets had sung of the German Fatherland for many and many a long year, not until that ideal of the Fatherland rose strongly and clearly in the minds of the young, not until the poet had made the ideal was it possible for the soldier to come forward with the statesman and build those States into one. And so also with Italy. Long before there was any talk of revolution or war, long before there was any idea of appealing to the sword, Italian thinkers had spoken of Italian unity, Italian patriots had held up the ideal of a united Italy; and it was only when the ideal had fired the hearts of the young that there was strength enough for the self-sacrifice that followed the sword of Garibaldi, and made it possible for Italy to become a united people. For it is out of the ideal that enthusiasm grows, out of the ideal and the longing to realise it that the power of self-sacrifice is generated. What we need to do, then, to change human nature, is to hold up great ideals before the young of our time, and those ideals shall fire their hearts to passionate enthusiasm, until self-sacrifice shall be a joy and not a sacrifice at all, in order that the ideal they worship may become realised upon earth. Along those lines human nature will change; for, never forget that Human Nature is divine, not devilish; that a God is at the heart of every man, unfolding the power of divinity; hence the power of the ideal to fire and the power of thought to mould the lines of character.

Let us pass on from principles to practice, and see which of the social problems shows good hope of resolution by applying this principle of Brotherhood, with its corollaries of reincarnation and karma. Evidently our first tool is education. In the plastic bodies and brains of the young there lies the greatest possibility of a speedy upbuilding of a noble social feeling. As I pointed out in the first of this course of lectures, the attempt that is being made in many directions now to separate religion and morals, and to give an education from which religion shall be excluded—that, for the reasons which I then gave you, and need not repeat, is foredoomed to failure. Now, it is quite clear why politicians and the public, impatient of the quarrels of many sectarians and denominations, want to throw religion aside altogether, and not bring religious controversies into the schools. But if you apply the principle of Brotherhood to religion, it surely is not too much to hope that in a country where the vast majority are at least nominally Christian, some sort of agreement might be come to on essentials for the teaching of the young. In India you have sectarian religions as you have here, great divisions in the schools of religious thought; and it was said some dozen years ago in India, quite as strongly as you hear it said now in England: It is impossible to teach religion to Indian boys and girls, for the strife of sects makes unity impossible, and how should you teach the children without deciding on what to teach them? That seemed, as it seems over here, a great obstacle in the way of religious teaching, and yet in four or five years that question was solved in India so far as concerns Hindūism, the religion of the enormous majority of the people. What was done? The principle of Brotherhood was applied. Some of us, in concert with some theosophical Hindūs, gathered together a small committee to mark out what were the essential doctrines of Hindūism, and what were unessential and sectarian. After that sketch had been made, we set to work to get scholars to collect from Indian scriptures passages which bore upon these doctrines characteristic of Hindūism, and, with that material gathered together, a Theosophist sat down and wrote a text-book of Hindūism. Having written it, a hundred copies were drawn in proof, and sent to the heads of all the great Hindū sects and schools of philosophy. They were asked to read it through, to strike out anything they objected to, to mark in anything they thought essential; and when these books had travelled round in that way the whole circle of the quarrelling Hindū sects, they came back again into our hands with all the emendations and suggestions. Once more we sat round the book, examined the criticisms, adopted the widely supported suggestions, with such success that, when the elementary and the advanced text-books on Hindūism were issued, they were taken up by all the sects over India and adopted as a fair presentment of the fundamental doctrines of Hindūism. They have been taken up in school after school, adopted by prince after prince, so that when the great Mussulmān ruler of Hyderabad in the Deccan wanted to give his Hindū subjects Hindū education in the whole of the State schools, he simply took these books and placed them in every school, so that the Hindūs among his people might be instructed in their own faith. The same thing was done by the English Government in the Princes’ College in Rājputāna, because they found that secular education made princes who were immoral and unfit to rule. During the last eight years these books have spread everywhere, everywhere accepted and everywhere used. Do you mean to tell me that the divisions among Christians are so much deeper that they cannot do what the Hindūs have done, or that you have not more on which you agree than on which you disagree; and that you could not teach the children that in which you are united, and leave them in their manhood or their womanhood to add the sectarian parts of the doctrines for themselves? In India, to show you the effect of this, one of the directors of public education asked me: “Cannot you write, Mrs. Besant, a text-book for the Christians?” My answer was: “Yes, I could write it, but I don’t think they would use it.” It must come from so recognised Christian authority. I quite grant that a Theosophist would do it better than anybody else, because the Theosophist has no quarrel with any form of religious belief, and because the whole of his study leads him along the lines of recognising the points of union rather than the points of divergence; but it need not be done by a Theosophist, only by some one with the spirit of Theosophy in him, and that only means the spirit of the Divine Wisdom, of which every separate religion is an expression, so that there ought to be no quarrel with any.

Supposing that to be done for the whole of the Empire wherever Christians are found, see how enormous would be the gain; and it would not be so difficult. There are certain doctrines you all accept if you are Christian at all: you would only have to put those into a rational, intelligible form, and then gather from your own Scriptures the verses which support and give them authority to all who look on those Scriptures as authoritative. I have had in my mind an idea that may possibly be carried out, of trying whether it would not be possible to write a Universal Text-Book of Religion and Morals, with texts from every Scripture of the great religions, from all the Bibles of mankind, drawing the authority in support of the universal doctrine, and in that way making a book that Christian and Hindū, Parsī, Buddhist and Mussulmān could use; for all their Scriptures might be quoted in support of the general doctrine, and each might then add its own specific teachings to that great broad foundation, showing the real Brotherhood of faiths. That is a dream, but I think it may become a reality.

Along that line, then, in our education we must have religious teaching, in order that we may have a firm foundation for morals. With regard to other teaching, what would grow out of the principle of the State being a great family, with children of many ages and varying capacities that ought to be equally trained? There would grow up a system of education in which one broad common basis would be given to every child alike up to about the age of ten or eleven years, and then there would come a differentiation according to the capacities of the children. You would no longer, when a child has musical capacity, insist that that child shall get a smattering of three or four other arts, so that he is not good in any one, but only superficial in all. If you saw musical ability you would let the other points go, and music would form the predominant part of the education of such a child. If you found power of colour, power of form, then along the plastic or the painting art the child would have developed his natural capacity; and slowly and gradually you would learn that the power of art must pass into the handicrafts of the nation, and that large numbers of your boys and girls should be trained to the handicraft as against the machine-made product; because there you have the possibility of general beauty coming back to life, and there alone will the sense of beauty be cultivated throughout the nation. Where you see the tendency is literary, there you should not insist, especially as you do with girls still, that they should all play a little music, and all do a little drawing, and all learn a little singing; you would let all that go, and you would cultivate the literary faculty where you found it, and make that the special point of this more specialised education. Where you found the scientific faculty, there you would make that the most important part of the educational curriculum, remembering only that you must add to scientific training something of literature and the ideal, otherwise your science will tend to produce vulgarity and lack of the wider understanding of human life. Where you find mechanical power, there you will cultivate that especially, always remembering that no boy should leave school until he has learned some method of being useful to the State while earning his own livelihood. Unskilled labour should be a thing of the past in every department of human life. It is necessary that you specialise at an age which is early enough to enable a boy to learn effectively that which is to be his livelihood in later life. A good deal of mistake is being made in the education of the day, where, when the boy has to earn his livelihood along some line of manual work, too much of the literary is given to the sacrifice of manual dexterity. You want far more practical training in your schools than you have to-day, and the continual pointing-out that one form of human activity is not inherently nobler than any other form; that the man who uses his hands well is as honourable in the use of them as the man who uses his brain well. What is dishonourable is that either brain work or manual work should be badly done. Your really destructive spirit along all these lines is: “Oh, it is good enough; it will do.” There is nothing that will do unless it is done as well as you are able to do it; otherwise it is slop work, and degrading in itself. It is not the kind of work you do that makes you either honourable or dishonourable; it is the spirit in which you do it, and the quality of the work that you turn out. Until you can get that through the nation, as it is not to-day—until you can give back to the workman the dignity of the artist, and not want every carpenter to educate his boy superficially so that he may be a clerk instead of a handicraftsman, spoiling your crafts and overloading your offices—until you can bring back that balance of human duty and human labour, there is little hope of a sane and healthy society amongst you.

Pass, again, from that to another thing that is badly wanted in education; but I think that is learned more in the playground than in the classroom—discipline, the sense of duty to a larger life. That may sound rather a grand sort of description to give of the effect of a game on a boy, but it is true. Where a boy is a member of a team—cricket, football, hockey, what you like—that boy will never be a success unless he learns to think of his side and not of himself, and that is a larger self than his own personal claims. It is in the playground that the boys and girls learn many a lesson which makes them better citizens in later life—the sense of order, the sense of discipline, the doing your work in your place, wherever you are put in the field. You may have one place or another in the cricket field or the football field, but the test of the boy is that he does his work well in the place where he is, and does not want to be somewhere else when his captain has placed him there. That moral discipline of the playground is more valuable than the discipline of the classroom, for it is voluntary, gladly obeyed, and it is stimulated by an ideal, unalloyed by fear. Hence the value of the playground, and the value of teaching boys really to play. For the greatest danger of these so-called democratic nations is that they have no sense of discipline, no sense of order, no sense of obedience; without these no nation can be great. When you get, as you sometimes do get, a thing that happened last time I was in Australia, that an apprentice boy at a mine, because he was reproved for not doing his work rightly, at once left work, and then the whole mine struck in order to defend this young scamp’s liberty—there is not much chance of building a nation out of materials like that; you have only got a heap of marbles with no cohesion, with no binding sense of duty nor sense of responsibility, and out of those materials you can never make a State. Without discipline, order, obedience, no possibility of greatness. But all that has to grow out of the education definitely based on these ideas of Brotherhood, of reincarnation, and law.

Pass from that department of life, and turn to a very important question—Penology, the treatment of criminals. What is the criminal? Criminals fall into two great classes: one class of young souls, and they need to be educated; another class of souls whose development has been lopsided, so that the intellect has grown, but the conscience has not developed side by side with it—by far the more dangerous criminals those, and far more difficult to deal with. Now, the young soul is very largely a savage, the man at so low a stage of human evolution that earlier in the evolution of our race he would have been guided into some savage tribe in some island or desert, where the rough discipline of that savage life would have begun the hewing of him into shape—rough, hard, cruel, but gradually building up that young soul into a sense of duty to his tribe. Now, as things have changed, and human evolution has gone forward rapidly, there are not places enough in the world where those conditions are available for the gradual training of these younger souls. The civilised nations, as we call them, have been spreading everywhere over the world’s surface, have been driving these miserable people out of their possessions, have taken their lands, largely murdered them, have appropriated the land and dispossessed the earlier possessors into the next world. What has become of all those? They have got to come back, and they tend by natural law to come to the nations who have been most active in sending them out of their possessions. It is quite natural, if you think that we live under law, not by chance; and it is not, perhaps, if I may say it with all respect, very wonderful that the people of Great Britain have a rather extra share of those unfortunate savages to look after. They come into the slum, and there they are born really savages. If you look at them you call them congenital criminals. But they are really young souls, without morality, without much brains, with a certain craft and cunning and cleverness, but fundamentally young. Then you find others who have come out of that lowest condition of savagery, but who are not yet at the point where the restraints of the society that suits the older souls are tolerable to them. And so you get a great crop of occasional criminals, with the tendency to turn them into habitual criminals. Then you have that other class I spoke of, the lopsided people, whom I said were the most difficult to deal with; men who are really clever, but turn their cleverness to plundering their fellows instead of using it within the limitations of the law. That is a large class. Sometimes they just go over the edge of the law, sometimes they just keep within it, but from the social standpoint, remember, there are many social criminals who always keep on what is sometimes called the street-side of the law—that is, they do not go within the jail—such a man as one I spoke of the other day, who had wrecked the railway system of a whole district in order that out of that wreckage he might build himself up an enormous fortune. He is not a burglar from the technical standpoint, he is not a thief that a policeman might catch hold of, but in the sight of karma, and in the sight of the eternal justice, that man who by legal means has robbed thousands of others of their means of livelihood is a worse thief than the one who has picked a pocket and is thrown into jail. There are a good many things in a civilised country which lie very nearly along the line of legal or illegal theft, a good deal of which goes by the name of company-promoting, where it is just a toss-up whether there is really fraud that can be proved; but with the remarkable fact that while the companies always perish, and the people who took shares are beggared, the company-promoter comes out at the top, and becomes quite a successful person. Now all that, from the social standpoint, is utterly immoral, but we cannot call them criminals in the technical sense, although now and then they go a little too far, and then the criminal law catches them.

How should those be dealt with who are really the young souls? how shall we avoid turning them into habitual criminals as we do now?—for is there anything more miserable and more shameful than that a man should go back time after time till fifty, sixty convictions are registered against him in the police court, and the sentence grows longer and longer because he is a habitual criminal? He has been manufactured into that. You ought not to treat a man who has committed a crime against your legal system by consigning him to prison for seven days, or a month, or a year, growing longer and longer and longer after every return to temporary freedom. You don’t use people who are ill like that; you never find a doctor committing a small-pox patient to a hospital for seven days, nor a fever-stricken one for a month; they are committed until they are cured, and that is the way in which you should deal with anyone of marked criminal propensities. You should not punish, you should only help; and you should take that child-soul and train him into decency of living. For one thing, you should never have in your prisons any form of useless labour as a punishment. The criminal who is really a savage always dislikes labour; he is always idle—that is part of his youth; and if you give him a form of labour that is punitive and not useful, you only increase his natural disgust for every kind of labour, and make him hate it more thoroughly when he comes out of jail than he did when he went in. Taking up shot and carrying it to one side of the prison yard, and then carrying it back again, or the useless torture of the treadmill, these make criminals, they do not cure them.[1] You want, when the criminal comes into your power, to take him in hand as you would take a younger brother who does not know how to guide himself, and it is your duty as the elder to guide him; you need to train him in some honest trade whereby he might gain a livelihood; you need to discipline him, not cruelly, but firmly and steadily; you need to lay down the very wholesome law that if a man will not work neither shall he eat, and teach him in the prison to earn his dinner before he enjoys it. You need to set him to work at trades whereby he may earn his own living within the walls of the jail; and if, after you have taught him a trade so that he can earn his living, and outside the jail have found him an opportunity of decent livelihood—if then he refuses to work, and comes back again into your hands, then you should keep that discipline upon him until he really is cured, even though it be for many and many a year, for you are training him into better character. You might make the prison life less of a disgrace than it is now; give him rational amusement, amusement that will cultivate, instead of having him deadened by the continual feeling of disgrace within the prison walls. You may restrain him—that may be necessary for the welfare of society; but you should treat him as a younger one in the national household, to be gradually trained up into decent living; let the willingness to live the decent life be the only key to the door of the jail.

But you may do much before there is any need to send them to prison at all. There is a system which is just beginning here, called the Probation System, one that has been worked in America with very great success, and one that a late member of our Society, Miss Lucy Bartlett, has had the immense privilege of introducing into Italy, so that it has been made the law of the land. Now what is that system? When a young boy or girl commits a first offence, he is not sent to jail if someone, a good citizen, of decent standing and good life, will come forward in the court and say: “I will take charge of that boy or girl, or young man or young woman. I will be his friend and look after him.” Then the sentence is not one of imprisonment; it is a sentence which is over the lad’s head for a time; and if he will not be helped, then it is allowed to take effect. But, as a matter of fact, that is very seldom the case. This man or woman coming forward out of the more leisured classes of society, and becoming a friend to that younger brother or sister, is, in the great majority of cases, a means of redeeming that younger one from evil into good; the older makes a friend of him, takes him out sometimes, talks with him, trusts him really as a brother or a sister, and great is the redeeming power of human love in restoring self-respect, and great the desire for approval. Those are the motives that are brought to bear on one who has only just set his feet on the path of criminality, and that in most cases brings him back to virtue; and the friendship that began in the probation goes on through the rest of life, strengthening, helping, teaching both the helper and the helped. The system has been in operation for some time now in America, long enough to test it; in Italy only for some two or three years, too short a time; man after man and woman after woman of the leisured classes has come forward to act as friend and helper of the one who has come within the grip of the law. Surely no better application of Brotherhood to criminal treatment could be found than that; it is the realisation of the duty of those who are beyond the temptation to vice to their youngers who have fallen under its power.

I can hardly leave this subject without saying a word on Capital Punishment. That, of course, cannot find defence from anyone who realises the principle of Brotherhood. Some of you may remember the saying of a witty Frenchman: “Que messieurs les assassins commencent”; but it is not from the lower that reforms begin, but from the higher. You cannot expect your murderer to respect human life if you have taught him by your criminal legislation that the right penalty for murder is to murder again. True, one comes from passion and the other from the law; but if the law does not teach respect for human life, how should the passions of the criminal honour that sacredness? It is not only from that general principle that you make human life cheap by destroying it, but from another even more important. You cannot get rid of that murderer of yours; you can only get rid of his body, and his body is the most convenient prison in which you can keep him. You can lock up his body and prevent him from committing any further murders, but you cannot lock him up when you have driven him out of his body by the hangman’s noose; you have not killed him, you cannot kill him, you have only killed his body; and you have driven him out into that next world which interpenetrates this world, and whose inhabitants are with us all the time; you have sent him out into that other world hating, cursing, full of anger and revenge against those who have cut short his life. He acts as the instigator of other murders; he stimulates other criminals into the last possibility of crime. Have you ever noticed that a brutal murder is sometimes repeated over and over again in the same community until you get a cycle of murders of one particular kind? I know, of course, that the Press, in reporting every detail of those horrors, adds the forces of imagination to the power of temptation which comes from the man you have sent to the other side. In a civilised country no such details of brutal crime should ever be given; people should understand that that stimulates the faculty of imitation, and so makes repetition of the crime more likely. Another reason why you should never send a man out like that is, that when the criminal is in your hands, remembering the lives that lie in front of him, you should try to give him something to take with him into the other world which he can turn into capacity and moral sense; you should remember he will come back again to a physical body, and it is your duty to make that next birth of his as much an improvement on the present as it is possible for human thought and human love to make it. We have a duty to these young souls around us in order that they may profit by our civilisation, and not suffer from it as they too often do to-day.

When you turn to economics, what will be the result of Brotherhood there? The detailed working out of that problem will certainly need the keenest intellects in order to devise some scheme of production and distribution which shall make human life less burdened on the one side, less full of useless luxury on the other. But not along the rough-and-ready lines of the Socialism of the streets are these great and difficult problems rightly to be solved. You need to solve them by the most careful consideration of all the problems which are interlinked the one with the other. Some system of general co-operation, of general profit-sharing, or something along those lines, will be the principle on which the changed conditions will go; but while you will make the lot of the toilers far lighter and happier, you will never give to the ignorant the control over that on which their food supply depends; for that means ruin. Let me give you one illustration to show you what I mean. There have been a large number of strikes in this country for years and years past, and there is no doubt that many of those were brought about by the greed of the employing class, and by the unfair treatment of the workers; but none the less they have in more than one case—in fact, in many cases—reduced the workers to a lower condition than they were in before. I was up at Tyneside the other day. Newcastle with its adjoining ports, Sunderland, and the whole coast along there, was once one of the great shipbuilding centres in England. Strike after strike made shipbuilding impossible to carry on, because the men could not pay their way. The result is that it has ceased to be a great shipbuilding district; that the trade has largely gone away from the Tyneside, and that those parts are falling into decay. You cannot blame the men who struck; they tried to get better conditions for themselves; they did not understand the difficulties of all these large commercial firms, and that they might readily make shipbuilding impossible for the shipbuilder by pressing for a particular rate of wage which was not too much for them, but more than at the time the exigencies of the trade enabled the shipbuilder to pay. And so on and on in endless cases. Careful thought and deliberate judgment are wanted. Many proposals have been made by the trades unions themselves—a sliding scale of wages, arbitration boards, and so on—all steps in the right direction. But your difficulty with arbitration boards is that their decision is not always accepted. When people go to arbitration they hope to get a decision on their own side; when it does not come out, they are not always willing to submit. When I was in New Zealand last year there had been a great struggle between employers and men; at last both applied to the arbitration court, but when the decision was given against the men, the men refused to go back to work. You cannot play that way with these great economic questions; no one trade should ever decide entirely for itself what should be the rate of wage that it is possible for the employers to pay, for the question is complicated by many considerations; it is not one trade, but it is the balance of all trades on which the ultimate decision has to turn. Hence the need of ability, of power to understand, of wide study of economic questions which no handiworker is able to give. There is where the difficulty comes in, and where there is need on both sides of a spirit which shall seek the common good; otherwise at the end there is only more trouble than before, and the trade vanishes where the conditions for carrying it on are made impossible. Exactly the same thing is going on now in Australia. The men who know conditions of mining and things of that sort are laying down the wages which shipping companies must pay to their sailors. When a P. and O. boat, for instance, goes within the waters of Australia, they will soon be compelled to pay their men at the particular rate of pay which has been fixed on economic conditions in Australia. What will be the result? The P. and O. boats will not go; they cannot ruin themselves to please the Australian working-men; hence the means of communication will be very largely cut off; and when the harm is done, it is too late then to cry out for the remedy. Those are the kind of things that are going on in every direction with the coming of manual workers into power, because the attempt to rule has come before the conditions of rule have been understood.

It is very much the same when you come to deal with all questions of Woman’s Labour. Woman claims the right to labour, but very often she has forgotten that employers can play upon certain characteristics of the woman that nothing can alter, because they are fundamental and natural. When a woman has taken up the trade of the wife and the mother, and then goes out to work in the mill, leaving the children behind and the baby uncared for save by hired care, then wages are driven down because she is willing to work for lower wages, knowing the misery of the children she has left at home; then comes the playing-off of the wife against the husband, of the woman against the man; the children are the sufferers from the taking away of the mother to work in the mill, and the man is turned out to walk the streets because cheaper female labour has taken his place. These are some of the complicated difficulties that arise out of what seems the simple thing of allowing a woman to sell her labour. Women and men can never be equal in the labour market, because the woman is the childbearer, and there comes in the difference, and the question of the nation’s health and vigour. She can never command the same wage as the man, because, as I once heard brutally said when I was complaining about the starvation wage of some match-girls: “There is always another way the woman has to increase her income.” That is true, pitifully true; but it puts her at a disadvantage in the struggle of the labour market. That which seemed so promising at first has only increased the stress of economic conditions, has turned the man out into the streets while the woman is trying to do the double work of the mill and the home. That is an impossible condition of things, for which a remedy will have to be found.

And so to deal with these economic questions we want the best brains and the best hearts, the widest knowledge and the deepest sympathy. Those, and those only, can solve these terrible economic problems of the time. You cannot solve them by any rough-and-ready means, nor by any quick and sudden means. You must solve them by wisdom and by love, and by realising the nation’s interest is a common interest, not of class against class, but of union of all for the common good of the community.

But then it is said: What about politics? On the detail of that, frankly, I have naught to say, for I am concerned only with principles. But one thing I would like to put to you, coming back to that point of liberty with which I started. People have supposed that liberty means a vote. You could not have a bigger blunder. Liberty and the vote have practically nothing in common. The vote gives you the power to make laws, to coerce other people; it by no means gives you necessarily liberty for yourself. We have never yet had, as I said, liberty upon earth. We have had class legislation of every kind in England, but liberty never. Go back in history and you find the Kings ruling, and that built up the one nation of England. Then the Barons ruled, and they did not on the whole do so badly, for England was called Merrie England then, and certainly no one would dream of applying that name to it now. Then there came the England of Parliaments, getting duller and duller, deader and deader; then the England of Commercialism. And who is our ruler now? Neither King nor Lords nor Parliament altogether, but on the one side King Purse, and King Mob on the other. Neither of those is a ruler who is likely to make this nation great. Liberty is a great celestial Goddess, strong, beneficent, and austere, and she can never descend upon a nation by the shouting of crowds, nor by the arguments of unbridled passion, nor by hatred of class against class. Liberty will never descend upon earth in outer matters until she has first descended into the hearts of men, and until the higher Spirit which is free has dominated the lower nature, the nature of passions and strong desires, and the will to hold for oneself and to trample upon others. You can only have a free nation when you have free men to build it out of—free men and women both; but no man is free and no woman is free who is under the dominance of appetite, or vice, or drunkenness, or any form of evil which he is unable to control. Self-control is the foundation on which alone freedom can be built. Without that you have anarchy, not freedom; and every increase of the present anarchy is paid for by the price of happiness, which is given in exchange. But when Freedom comes, she will come down to a nation in which every man and every woman will have learned self-control and self-mastery; and then, and then only, out of such men who are free, out of such women who are free, strong, righteous, ruling their own nature and training it to the noblest ends—of such only can you build up political freedom, which is the result of the freedom of the individual, and not the outcome of the warring passions of men.

Lecture V The Coming Race

Friends: Some of you who have been attending this course of lectures may remember that in speaking of the new doors opening in religion, science, and art, I made a somewhat hasty and imperfect reference to changes that would be taking place in the human organism and an unfolding of the human consciousness, and I promised, in that brief statement, to return to the subject when I was to deal with “The Coming Race.” The nature, the character of that unfolding of consciousness, the changes in the bodily organism of man that will accompany those unfolding powers in consciousness, and make it possible for them to be manifested in our physical world—those changes naturally fall under the heading which I have taken for to-night’s discourse, “The Coming Race.” For it is of one of these great changes in the type of humanity that I have specially to speak to you to-night. In order to lead your thoughts to that rationally, and without gaps or chasms, I shall ask you to consider with me for a few moments certain great principles of study which we find continually used by the Mystics of the past, and in our own day adopted to a very considerable extent by modern science. The reason why science has adopted them is the same reason that made Mystics originally work them out, and that is, that science in our own time has been dealing with such enormous periods of growth, with such vast extent of these periods, that the scientific man cannot observe; that he is obliged to try to find a principle by which, observing what is near, he may be able, by a process of induction, to discover what is far off.

Now, this principle is called the principle of correspondences. You find it, as I said, used by Mystics of all types in the past: the great scientist-mystic, Swedenborg, of Sweden, based a very large part of his thought on the system of correspondences, of trying to discover what was far off and extensive by a study of that which was near and comparatively small. So in our own day with regard to science; and I remind you first of that in order to show you that in using this principle we are on ground which is recognised as being firm and stable, and is adopted in all the greater researches which have to deal with the distant and the extensive. Science has made specially good use of this system of correspondences in two lines of its thought: one, that of evolutionary growth, illuminated by the study of embryology; the other, that of the evolution of consciousness in humanity at large, illuminated by an observation of consciousness in the child, the youth, and the man. If, for a moment, we stop on the great evolutionary series or cycles of the past, we shall at once recognise that direct observation is only possible to a very small extent. It is true that by the aid of geology many buried skeletons of the past may be brought to the surface and examined, and thus light may be thrown on the various classes to which the skeletons in the time of the living animal belonged. Fossil remains certainly help us to a very great extent in trying to study the evolutionary past of our globe; but, as everyone knows who has studied the geological record, that record has large gaps occurring in it from time to time. It is exceedingly imperfect, exceedingly unsatisfactory, and only along some limited lines of evolutionary study is it possible to find from the fossils of the past the principle of life as it has gradually grown and branched upon our earth. Hence, in the difficulty of thus unveiling the past, evolutionists have turned to the study of the near, the growth of the individual, the stages through which his body passes, especially during ante-natal life, and it was very largely the study of embryology that threw light on the evolutionary truth. For it is observed, in tracing the growth of the human body of the individual, that it passes through certain clear, definite, marked stages. There is a stage at which the characteristics are those of the fish, bringing about some very curious results as regards especially the distribution of some of the nerves; then a stage which is that of the reptile; then a stage which is that of the mammal; and so on up to the highest in the mammalian kingdom, man himself. From the standpoint of mere observation from outside, without use of reason, this sequence invariably followed would say little, would signify little; but when man looks at that with the eye of reason, and not only observes the succession of certain stages, but applies his reason to solve the problem as to why those stages constantly appear, then it is he realises that in the body of the individual the whole evolutionary course of nature is traced and repeated; that in that highest, the human, form all the past history of the evolution of forms is broadly indicated; and that while, of course, details cannot be observed, the great succession is seen there, the invariable sequence ever repeated in the highest, the noblest form. And, working back with the light of that, science was then able to recognise very clearly the evolutionary stages of which geology yielded up its imperfect fossil record; for there it found the great age of the fishes, with no higher form of vertebrate life existing; then it found the age of the reptiles, then that of the mammals, finally the human kingdom; and looking over the past in that way, illuminated by the observations of the present, science recognised the truth of that ancient principle of correspondences which serves as a clue in distant regions where observations well-nigh fail us, and enables us, by the use of analogy, to trace our way among the labyrinths of the past.

It is not only along this line of æonian evolution and embryological growth that science has found help from this application of the principle of correspondences. It has found that not only in the state of bodies but also in the state of minds the same principle serves as its best clue once again in the labyrinth of the past. It has found out that the stages of human consciousness may be traced from the earliest stage of the will to live, then upwards through the unfolding consciousness of the child, in the stage of passions of the youth, in the stage of mentality dominating the maturity of man; and it goes along these lines into very much of detail, showing us how at a certain stage the child is reproducing the savage condition of consciousness; how a little later it grows out of that into the passional and barbarous; then through that into the emotional, where art and beauty begin to show themselves as outgrowths from human nature; and then on, at later stages, to that splendid mentality which it regards as the crown of human consciousness. Along these lines, which will be familiar to all the thoughtful and the cultured amongst you, science has been led to new discoveries, has been able in this fashion to find out many of the hidden things of nature.

But while this is true, there is a point at which science always stops. It uses correspondences to explain the past; it never struck science to use them to try to forecast the future; and naturally, for along the scientific line such forecast of the future is practically impossible; science works by induction, not by deduction, gathers together innumerable facts, arranges them, classifies them, compares them, and out of all that gathering, arrangement, and comparison it tries to find by a process of logical induction some great principle in which all the classified facts find their explanation, and thus a law is discovered. But further than that induction cannot take us. It cannot take us beyond the facts that are observed. Nothing in the facts observed presages that which is to come; and it is only when you use the other logical method—not that of induction, which is the scientific plan, but that of deduction, which we find in the philosophies of the past, which we find in the one perfect science, the science of mathematics, the Platonic method as against that of Aristotle—it is only then that we find it possible by a process of deduction not only to explain the past, but also to draw out a chart of the future. And it is by using that noble form of logical thought that Occult Science has ever been able to presage the future from the principles that it finds existing in the universe, unfolding stage by stage. I want, if I can, now to show you how that method may be applied; how, knowing the nature of man, we may be able from that to indicate not only the past through which he has come from far beyond the range of what is recognised as history, but also to throw a light along the road that mankind will travel in the future, seeing the heights up which he will climb, realising the powers yet hidden within the partially unfolded and evolved man.

There is one other thing that will help us a little as well as the principle of correspondences, but, so far as I know, this other clue of ours has not been adopted or used in modern science. I say, so far as I know, for science is going on so rapidly at the present time that it is not possible to keep abreast with all the details of the later investigations. This second principle is called the principle of reflexion. As you may have a mountain reflected in a lake, and all the peculiarities, the outlines, the foliage on the mountainside, will be reproduced in the calm water of the lake that washes the foot of the mountain; as in that reflexion the highest in the object will be reflected as the lowest in the image, and as at every intermediate point where the mountain is reproduced in the image, the reflexion of the mountain, there will be a reversal, the higher being the lower, and so on, until you come to the point of junction between water and mountain, and there the nearest to you on the mountain will be reflected in the nearest to you on the water—just so may we in studying man understand something of him by regarding him as a reflexion of divinity, the great threefold aspect of divine life showing itself out in man. But you may ask me: What do you exactly mean when you say reflexion? I mean the reproduction of similar characteristics in a grosser and denser form of matter. That is what we mean by reflexion thus applied. Just as the mountain which you see by the air is reflected in the denser water, so are spiritual attributes reflected in grosser matter; or, otherwise expressed, the same, or rather a similar characteristic, works in grosser matter; therefore with powers more limited, therefore with faculties less potent. That is the use we make of this term “reflexion” in theosophical literature. The characteristics are the same, but because of the denser matter their manifestation is limited and confined. So the great Will which brings the universe into existence is reflected in the Will to Live in man; and as that is the highest manifestation of Deity, so, reflected in man, does it appear at the lowest stage of evolution as the one prominent characteristic of the dawning human consciousness. In the babe, that will to live is practically the only sign of consciousness, showing itself out in groping movements, whereby the will to live is striving to come into contact with the outer world and discover something of its environment. And so the second great manifestation of Deity, the Wisdom-Love which in the Christian nomenclature shows itself out in the person of the Son, that reflected in human nature comes out as the emotions, the refined, gentle, unselfish emotions that form the second great stage of human consciousness, beginning with the lowest stage of passion, and gradually rising unbroken to the loftiest manifestation of emotion; and then the third, the creative activity, which, again, in the Christian nomenclature would be the creative Spirit, shows itself out in man’s one creative power, the power of the mind, of which one of the expressions is imagination, that which creates with the intellectual force of man. The correspondence, you see, is complete, but how limited the manifestation compared with the manifestation on the planes of divinity. Hence this limited reflexion, this limited reproduction, we term the law of reflexion; and we very often find it hand in hand with the law of correspondences, giving us a clue once more to guide us through difficulties and obscurities where direct vision might fail.