Section 5

A modern author says, '* Let us accustom ourselves to thought of evil that may come." Come to what? The allusion is to evil coming to body. Epictetus shrugs his shoulders in derision when his leg is twisted to its breaking by the brutal Epaphroditus, remarking, with a smile, "It is nothing, the body is external." The difference between the modern author and Epic- tetus is another expression of the difference between Agnosticism and Gnosticism. Agnosticism is the way
CONCERNING MATTER, 51
Up the mountain j Rosicrucianism is the garden of the gods at the top.
The term Exclusion, on which so much stress is laid, means simply finding the garden by following the way.
Agnosticism defines itself and the world, inclusive of man, in its declaration, —
" Everything that is is Matter."
As we have understood, a brick is matter, a potato is matter, water and air and fire are matter, brain is matter; if a man be not Something besides matter, it follows, necessarily, that his concerns and meaning differ nothing from other matter-composed things. It having been shown that matter, in itself, is not at all what the senses which constitute man's judgment — namely, touch, taste, smell, hearing, and seeing — are wont to regard as this entity, that while it is substance it is yet without form, that while sapid there is nothing to taste, that while odorous a flower is a myth, that while it is the reverberating sea grinding a beach there is no water, or that while it is chains of high mountains and stretches of measureless plains there is, in reality, nothing at all to see, who is to wonder at the confusion and at the absolute nihility which is Agnosticism? An Agnostic repeats, after the manner of his wisdom, words spoken by Pyrrho two thousand years back, *'// may be so y" ^^ Perhaps /" *' Such as it is is possible ;^^ ^^ I assert nothing y not even that I assert nothing. ' ' *
Agnosticism is a department of scientific evolution
* See " Thinkers and Thinking."
52 SPIRITUS SANCTUS.
which it is becoming in every intelligent and inquiring person to inform himself or herself about. The word itself is so comparatively new that it has hardly yet found place in the English dictionary. The idea, on the contrary, is so old — as will be shown presently — that it originates with Thales in his famous question, " Who and what is man ?" asked just six hundred years before the birth of Christ.
Agnosticism is the same — if expressed after a differ- ent manner — as Darwinism. It is the same as spontane- ous or natural selection or evolution, under whatever name presented, or however called. It is scepticism which sees all the God it knows anything about in the brick, in the potato, in the water, the mountains and the plains. It is what has held, and continues to hold, in its discipleship some — many, indeed— of the learned savans of the earth.*
Matter, says Agnosticism, is the sum of every- thing; it is everything that is either comprehensible or apprehensible: beside matter there is nothing out of which to make judgment. The measure by which an Agnostic measures is the use of the rule recog- nized in philosophy under the term common sense. Now by this term is not meant that indefinite some-
* It is certainly not here the idea to make foolish outcry against the religiousness of Darwin and of a multitude like him ; the scepticism of such is not at all the scepticism of the uneducated ; it is not at all scepticism in the common idea of the term. To say " that it is scep- ticism which sees all the God it knows anything about in the brick, the potato," etc., means saying that in the estimation of such God is unknowable after any other manner than through what is seen in phenomena.
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thing which is on the tongue of every person who disagrees with the actions of his neighbors, but it im- phes the five media of intercourse which relate men with the world as it is outside of them, and that these five media tell us everything we require to know and everything that it is possible to know.
When a man starts to build a house his security for a satisfactory result lies with the foundation. Consider in turn the stupendous importance of a foundation upon which is to rest the significance of a man's life.
To walk satisfactorily in a road, one is to know that it is the right road. Man is to have understanding of an ending through comprehension of a beginning.
By that reader familiar with the confusion as to foundational premise existing in philosophical systems, as exampled in the asseveration of Agnosticism, that ** premise is impossible," that "man can know nothing, and that there is no use in trying to find out anything,'* great interest must be felt in a declaration that premise is not only possible but irrefutable, not only irrefutable but, once attained, ever maintainable and holdable.
As philosophy means knowledge, and as knowledge is the beautiful and desirable thing of the world, so the temptation is great to reach here and there, and to wander hither and thither, as one pursues the way of the mountain. But to wander is to incur danger of becoming lost, which accident has happened to a multi- tude of wanderers, and will surely happen to every one who carries not with him an unerring compass.
Understanding of self begins with inquiry into what is known as Anthropology, meaning by this an inlook at man's efforts to find out who he is, what he is, where he
5*
54 SPIRITUS SANCTUS.
is. The origin of inquiry, as employment of purely an- alytical sense is concerned, lies with one Thales, an in- habitant of Ionia, born six hundred and twenty years before Christ, and known, because of his learning, as one of the seven wise men of Greece. Thales was an extensive traveller, was skilled in astronomy, was a geometrician, was prominent as a politician in public affairs, has the credit of being the founder of philoso- phy, certainly was the originator of what is known as lonianism. By lonianism is meant very much the same, if, indeed, not identically the same, as is meant by modern Agnosticism, namely, —
" Everything that is is Matter."
''The world," said Thales, *' is water, man is water, God is water."
Another philosopher of this school is known as An- aximenes. His conclusions related all existence with air, which he declared to be the original principle of which all things are formed, and into which all things resolve. Another of this sect is the famous inventor of the sun-dial, Anaximander. His theory apportioned the sum of the all to heat. Empedocles was another of this school. He was a Sicilian, born somewhere about 450 B.C. That he was a man of simple nature is not to be doubted, seeing that he refused the offer of royalty with the purpose of giving to Sicily a republican form of government. The views of Empedocles are to be remembered by us with an object. He himself put them thus, —
" Nature is a clay, a plastic ; it is but a mingling and then a separation of the mingled. To-day the clay
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represents a man, to-morrow it is a stone, another day it is something else. Nothing is there but a perpetual flux of things j the world of phenomena is a flowing river, ever changing, yet ever the same." He goes on, —
Who thinks aught can begin to be which formerly was not,
Or that aught which is can perish and utterly decay ;
Another truth I now unfold : no natural birth
Is there of mortal things, nor death's destruction final ;
Nothing is there but a mingling and then a separation of the mingled,
Which are called a birth and death by ignorant mortals.''^
The famous Aristotle, credited by Sir William Ham- ilton with being the founder of the science of logic, pronounced by well-judging biographers as being not only illustrious among ancient philosophers, but per- haps the most remarkable man, as intellect is con- cerned, that ever lived; the ** peripatetic," as he was called, because of a restless temperament that never allowed of his standing still, — a man who for two thousand years governed the thoughts of the world not less than the scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas rules the thinking of the present Roman Catholic in- tellectual evolution, — this man, mighty in learning, wrote his position thus: ''Matter is, and always has been ; yet has it end, but each end is the beginning of a new end."
This Aristotelian conclusion leads necessarily to a digression without which the premises to succeed could not be logically followed.
* See " Thinkers and Thinking," presented after other fashion in that book.
56 SPIRITUS SANCTUS,
Where and what, agnostically, was beginning will no doubt be a confusion to men so long as the earth exists. One of two premises is certainly true, — namely, that the earth had a beginning, or that it is without a beginning. In our own Bible it is described as to its make and its manner of making, and the age is inferred as about six thousand years. Traditional Chinese history refers, on the contrary, to things said to have happened even so far back as forty thousand years. Merlet, in the direction of geological events, makes calculations as to the age of certain human remains, putting the years at one hundred and forty- three thousand. Surely, at any event, there was an Azoic age, meaning an age without lifej for how could life have been possible when the rocks themselves, or that which was to become rocks, was liquid fire? Then surely do water-made stratified rocks prove a Palaeozoic age, and here first living things are met with by science in shape of mollusks and fishes. Next, the water fairly dried up, a Carboniferous age. Following this the ages of reptiles, brutes, and men. Let us strengthen this by repeating, but in difi'erent terms, the fact that human body is a phenomenal expression of Matter known to the Rosicrucian as protoplasm. Protoplasm is, in turn, analyzable into gases combined with carbon and sulphur. The source, chemically, of protoplasm is the green growth of the ground ; man's body thus seen to be simply grass in a changed form. Animal body understood as being protoplasm, and protoplasm understood as being, after a manner, identical with the green verdure of the earth, it is no difficult matter to comprehend that, as lower organiza-
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57
tions go before the higher, verdure must have been before man ; neither is it any more difficult to com- prehend that animal body resolves into whence it has origin, — this round going on forever. Here the Aris- totelian aphorism, *' Matter has end, but each end is the beginning of a new end ;"■ that is, an end of grass being milk, an end of milk being flesh, an end of flesh being a fertilizer, an end of a fertilizer being grass; thus round and round forever.
Notice here, as desired to be emphatically impressed, that the philosophy of the present volume is shortly to map out locality and origin of responsible beginning, and that, if such locality and origin be not accepted, then subsequent studies are to be esteemed as of simple educational import, and not as a guide to life and to living, which the inauguration set out to make them.
But let us take a glance at man's evolution as he is known, not to tradition, but to absolute observa- tion and inspection. For heed ! not until we have travelled a long way do we as philosophers come up with our Bible. Indeed, as Descartes puts it, "until ground be found to stand upon, a philosopher must deny both God's and his own existence." Certitude in philosophy must be absolute. No tradition, no system is to be taken for granted. Where ground is not immovable there is no foundation. Materialism — absolute materialism — is the science of beginning; there cannot be any other science of beginning.
Darwin evolves man from the anthropoid ape, and an ape from a reptile, and a reptile from a conjunction of Silurian and vegetable life, and Silurian and vege- table from palaeozoic rocks broken down into soil ; and
5 8 SPIRITUS SANCTUS,
the palaeozoic rocks are a birth of the waters, and the mollusk came from a monad that preceded it, and the monad that preceded it came from — came from — . Professor Haeckel, the foremost champion in Germany of materialistic views, cuts the Gordian knot after this very summary fashion : i' The primitive monads were born in the sea by spontaneous generation, as saline crystals are born of their mother- waters." This being accepted, Archimedes might come back; for the ful- crum to enable him to lift the world, after which he inquired, has been found.
Lefevre tries for a start after this manner: " Living organisms result from chemical combinations. The organic contains nothing that is not contained in the inorganic," — fluidity, crystallization, cell, vegetable or animal organism, sense, thought, are modes of motion."
Many hours could be consumed in referring to men's inquiries into a foundational ground from which to start and upon which to find themselves able to build a structure that zephyrs, not to say hurricanes, will not bring down as tumbles the playhouse built of cards.
Accepting the tracings on some bones of the pliocene period, detected by the Abbe Burgeois, as expressive of the oldest vestiges of men, we are carried to an age when the human differed nothing at all from apes able to strike with stones and sticks. He cracked bones to get at the marrow. His resting-place was a cave or the concealment of a leafy tree. He fought to satisfy hunger. He knew good and evil simply as he was warmed by the sun or conquered by the cold.
How did he come from that to where he is ? He
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came, and comes, simply as a torrent differs from a rivulet. He differs in constitution, or, if you prefer the word, in progressive development, from what has been overcome and advanced upon.
Put it in this way : No man can compete in jumping with a kangaroo, for the reason that the latter has stronger thigh- and leg-muscles. Fishes swim and men go to the bottom : the former have fins. An eagle soars and the ox walks; the bird can fill its bones with air.
Advance in man is through refinements or relation of his material attributes. Man has a brain instru- ment of greater range than any of the lower animals. Here is the intellectual power of a man, and here is the difference between man and man. Observe : there were Silurians that moved with agility, and yet a mussel is a Silurian. A sloth moves so indolently that his motion is hardly to be seen. The sapajou, a member of the same family, seldom stirs save in leaps.
Here let us leave the Material of animal body and of the world at large as it is known to Agnosticism. To trace from the question of Thales to the refined and irrefutable physiological premises attained in the present day would indeed afford a beautiful field for study, but it would mean, not unlikely, for all except trained students, loss of the straight way by which we are to bring the less hardy to the mountain-top.
Apropos. — As water, to be held, means the possession of a retaining vessel, in like manner recognition of Ego lies, with Rosicrucianism, in appreciation of Matter; that is, out of the use of the processes of Exclusion a Rosicrucian is led to know that there is
6o ' SPIRITUS SANCTUS,
something beside matter. If the reader who has the book in hand is without this appreciation, he cannot take and hold, after the mediate manner, of what is to follow.
Two terms growing more and more into general understanding are Exoteric and Esoteric. The stu- dents of ancient philosophic systems found themselves divided into classes under these two heads. This division is not at all an arbitrary one, but is a neces- sary condition of what Porphyry and Jamblichus speak of as *' degrees of initiation," which, however, is only another term for '* degree of knowledge." Both Pytha- goras and Plato, and as well the Alexandrian mystics, had doctrines which they taught publicly to all ; they had also other doctrines which they taught secretly to the initiates, — i,e,, to disciples informed enough to comprehend. Agnosticism treats of the Exoteric, or external. The Esoteric, or internal, is treated of by^ Gnosticism. The way of a Rosicrucian, who will take nothing, or believe nothing, on the ipe dixit^ or on faith, is to gnosticism through agnosticism; through exoteric to esoteric.
Invisible Made Visible. — A piece of carbon, say charcoal, if combined with hydrogen gas, is made in- visible as a gaseous compound, known to science as Di-Carbide, or Ethylene, H^Cj. This invisible is to be brought back into sight by mixing in a tall jar two measures of the gas Chlorine with one measure of the gas Ethylene, procured as above, and then quickly ap- plying a light to the mouth of the vessel ; a flame is seen in which the Chlorine and the hydrogen unite.
CONCERNING MATTER. 6 1
forming Hydrochloric Acid. The charcoal, carbon, being set free, falls in the form of a black smoke. The following is the chemical equation ;