C. and D., however, E., though also a European, reached

the development described without having any touch with the Theosophical Society in the first instance. This is important with reference to preposterous hypotheses some- times put forward with regard to " hypnotic influences." E. knows others of the Masters besides those of whom
INTRODUCTORY 17
theosophic literature has treated, sees on the astral plane (as D. does also) both in and out of the body; has friendly relations also with F., G., and H. on the other plane.
F. is not yet so far on, but knows the Masters on the astral plane; also sees D., E., and H. there constantly.
G. is but just beginning to exercise the faculty of astral consciousness, and need not be more minutely explained.
H. is in a position to be present frequently when astral meetings of pupils are held in the Masters' presence; recollects as yet imperfectly, but is sometimes able to corroborate C., D., E., and F. with respect to conversa- tions at which all were present.
Concerning the reasons why the great " Masters of Wisdom " have remained in the deep seclusion- that has shrouded their very existence, even during recent centuries of Western progress, it would be premature to say much at this stage of my explanation. But for the sake of its direct bearing on the question I may quote a few lines from an old alchemical treatise of the seventeenth century, by a writer who was truly an occult philosopher, though availing himself of the then favourite alchemical disguise. In his Lumen de Lumine Eugenius Philalethes, referring obviously to those whom we now speak of as the Adepts or Mahatmas, says : " Every sophister contemns them because they appear not to the world, and concludes there is no such society because he is not a member of it. There is scarce a reader so just as to consider upon what grounds they conceal themselves and come not to the stage when every fool cries — enter ! No man looks after them but for worldly ends. . . . How many are there in the world that study Nature to know God ? Certainly they study a receipt for their purses, not for their souls, nor in
3
1 8 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL
any good sense for their bodies. It is fit that they should be left to their ignorance as to their cure. It may be the nullity of their expectations will reform them, but as long as they continue in this humour neither God nor good men will assist them."
The fact of the matter is, indeed, not so much that the Adepts have withdrawn into seclusion as that man- kind at large in the modern world has turned a deaf ear to their teaching, until in the end it has all but forgotten their existence. As Thomas Taylor — the indefatigable translator of the Neo-Platonists — writes in his preface to the Orphic Hymns, " Wisdom, the object of all true philosophy, considered as exploring the causes and prin- ciples of things, flourished in high perfection among the Egyptians first and afterwards in Greece. Polite literature was the pursuit of the Romans; and experimental enquiries increased without end and accumulated without order, are the employment of modern philosophy. . . . Modern enquiries never rise above sense, and everything is despised which does not in some respect or other con- tribute to the accumulation of wealth, the gratification of childish admiration, or the refinement of corporeal delight."
It is the prevalence of this characteristic in the modern world that has shut the higher spiritual teaching out of our lives to so great an extent. But happily the exclusion is not complete. For all who can appreciate the height to which it may lead, the Adepts in this closing decade of the nineteenth century are just as accessible as in those bygone ages to which Thomas Taylor refers, when all men knew that the " Mysteries " were a portal through which it was possible for those prepared to make im- mediate temporal sacrifices, to pass on towards a loftier
INTRODUCTORY 19
spiritual evolution. Though rarely approached in the Western world of late, such portals are open still; and Theosophists who have gained access to them have learned before going far to be guided by the great law which governs all real occult progress, — that such progress is never to be attempted even by the neophyte with the single purpose of acquiring spiritual exaltation for himself alone. In its higher stages that progress must find its pre-eminent motives in the desire to help on the spiritual development of humanity at large; and so, in a humbler way, those who make their first steps on " the Path " with a clear sight of the destination to which it leads, cannot but be inspired to proclaim with all the earnestness at their command the importance of the discoveries they have attained to concerning the place occupied by the Adepts in the spiritual evolution of mankind.
Only by learning to appreciate in some measure the attributes and powers of these, our Elder Brethren, will humanity at large get some glimpse of the future that lies before them, of the possibilities connected with spiritual evolution that are associated with the rank in Nature to which they have now attained. The investiga- tion of these possibilities is the foremost task of those who may fairly be described as occult students. The effort to realise in daily work and thought and habits, the lofty ideals which theosophic teaching defines for our aspiration, is the next step in their upward progress. Such efforts can only be made with the best effect when we compre- hend the system to which we belong, and, in some measure, the design that it subserves. We cannot aim in- telligently at the noblest objects, for the sake of which such efforts should be made, till we know something of the extent to which consciousness may be developed on
3*
20 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL
those higher planes of Nature, as yet veiled from ordinary vision. And this cannot be appreciated even in imagina- tion till those higher planes are described for us by persons who are already in a position to function there. Bewilder- ing at first, as it may be, the vast cosmology of occult teaching must be apprehended in general outline, at all events, before the true character of the spiritual evolution available for us can be adequately grasped. But it is not necessary to plunge into this at the beginning of the whole study. We begin to appreciate the nature of the prospect before us when we get firm hold of the idea that Man is not merely a product of Nature adrift on the stream of evolution, but is eventually carried, so to speak, by that stream out into a vast ocean that he can only cross by virtue of conscious efforts put forward on his own account. And then, with some comprehension of its winds and currents — with some understanding, that is to say, of the higher planes of Nature that may be described for us by those familiar with them — we may know enough to appre- ciate the way in which it is competent to man to help forward his own evolution towards the loftier levels.
Just as chemistry or astronomy may be largely com- prehended now by people who would not have been equal, in the first instance, to the task of wresting their secrets from Nature, so with occult science. The com- prehension of great realms of superphysical law and phenomena is relatively easy for any of us who will take advantage of the adequate guidance offered, now that the knowledge has been acquired by those who have been spiritually strong enough to lead the way. In the present day people quite unprovided with psychic gifts may invest themselves with a true and sufficient acquaintance with realms of nature which seemed almost hopelessly removed
INTRODUCTORY li
beyond the comprehension of all but the initiated few only a handful of years ago. Only by students of mediaeval occult literature, almost maddening in its obscurity, can the bright light now thrown in our own time upon the subjects that literature dealt with be estimated at its true value.
In chaotic disarray, indeed, but in great abundance, facts have been lying before us for the last half-century which have all along established for observers, whose common-sense has been unclouded by illogical prejudice, the broad truth that animated matter does not sum up or embrace the whole intelligent consciousness of the world. Mainly, it would seem, because these facts were not amenable to systematic experiment or correlation, the classes chiefly concerned with the interrogation of Nature have shunned them with something like irritation. They had dropped from the clouds, as it were, in an unintel- ligible fashion, instead of growing in a reasonable and coherent manner out of previously existing knowledge. It was very doubtful, when first reported, whether they had really occurred. No one could make sense of them, and with the unacceptable hypotheses concerning their origin — generally put forward by those who testified to their occurrence — they were doubly offensive to a materialistic generation. Whether they had to do with the records of psychic mesmerism or were frankly associated with spiritualistic mediumship, they were equally out of gear with ordinary knowledge and were too hastily assumed to involve a denial of principles to which ordinary knowledge was devoted. But, inhospit- ably received as they were, evidences of incident and ex- perience transcending those of familiar physical science continued to pour in very freely. The literature of
22 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL
spiritualism, mainly consisting of records of .abnormal observation and experience, has expanded to enormous proportions. The accumulations of mesmeric record were very considerable before the new departure, which within the last few years has reconciled public opinion with mes- merism generally by restating some of its conclusions under a new name. Psychic research of an independent character, keeping both spiritualism and mesmerism, with all their hypotheses, at arm's length, has also accumulated its records, and the situation is now such that nothing but ignorance or stupidity of the densest sort can in the present day provoke a denial of the broad conclusions which point to the existence of super-physical conditions of matter, force, and consciousness. These conclusions may not be sufficiently precise in themselves to constitute material from which to deduce any theory of extra corporeal life, but they ought to satisfy even the least thoughtful observer that there is a realm of some sort of extra corporeal life around us. And when we find — as we do find at the outset of any examination of the facts concerned — that different people are very differently endowed in respect to their capacity for cognising the phenomena of the super- physical planes, that ought to suggest the possibility that some persons may be able to cognise these completely enough to make sense of them, and fit their phenomena into a coherent scheme of Nature.
At this stage of the argument we get back to the theory that with adequate guidance it is possible for persons who are themselves quite without the gifts required for the personal observation of occult phenomena, to bring the whole subject within the area of intelligent study. We can listen first of all to a statement which may profess to formulate the various and bewildering phenomena of
INTRODUCTORY 23
psychic, mesmeric, and spiritualistic investigations (together with many others besides). We may check the methods by which information of that kind is alleged to be attained, by the consideration of all accumulated ex- perience of abnormal vision, and may then check the state- ment itself by a general consideration first of all of its inherent reasonableness; secondly, of its adaptation to the enigmas and requirements of life, and thirdly, of its sym- metry as compared with the working of Nature in depart- ments within the range of easy observation. Finally, we may consider its power of explaining the sporadic and, in themselves, unintelligible occurrences that lie around us in profusion.
Just such a statement as I have here imagined is em- bodied in the theosophical literature of recent years. Available for our acceptance if we find it satisfying the tests that we are entitled to apply, we now have before us a scheme of nature, of the world, of human life and future existence, which has as it were drawn aside the veil from the symbolism of religion, and brought the region of faith within the area of exact apprehension.
And theosophic teaching in reference to spiritual pro- gress should surely claim favourable consideration from modern thinkers, if for no other reason, for this : that it brings that transcendental process within the uniform operation of cause and effect. Perhaps, indeed, religious teaching only seemed to disregard cause and effect in assigning the conditions of after-life to arbitrary favour or condemnation. Clear-sighted students may as readily dis- cern true theosophy disguised in the symbolism of religion, as the most intelligent exponents of religious doctrine will discern the spirit of religion in the sublime teaching of occult science; but at all events popular corrupt religion
24 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL
is apt to regard the destinies of man after death as subject to treatment which, whether gracious or retributive, is influenced by considerations quite external to himself; and exact thinking must recognise such treatment as capricious — as outside the law of cause and effect which operates so invariably in all realms of Nature, fairly open to observation. Theosophy, on the other hand, in regard to the progress of humanity, embodies an infinite exalta- tion of the doctrine of the conservation of energy. All future experiences of each of us in turn are the inevitable and logical outcome of our previous acts with their con- current states of mind. The apparent iregularity and injustice of life is an appearance merely due to the fact that we take too short a view of life when we think that we perceive such irregularity and injustice. Spiritual science reveals the fact that each human life stretches both in front of and behind any given period of physical manifestation to an enormous extent. On the whole account the events and conditions of each life in turn are the effects of antecedent causes.
With this magnificent revelation, which is at the root of all truly scientific views of human existence, we shall be largely concerned later on; but there are some general principles concerning the potentialities of human progress which may be dealt with at once.
If we start from the safe point of departure to be found in the established fact that some persons have a much more highly perceptive organism than others, and if we keep in touch with the idea that faculty itself is the pro- duct of causes, we are at all events within reach of a plausible hypothesis pointing to the theory that people may perhaps be able by appropriate effort to develop the aptitudes of their own organism for cognising a wider
INTRODUCTORY 25
range of natural phenomena than those which are reflected in the five senses. And if so, do we not come within range of the idea that human evolution may be the product of two lines of force, the one proceeding, so to speak, from Nature at large, and representing the normal im- pulse of evolution, the other generated by the spontaneous volition of the individual, and representing the previously dormant principle of Divinity within him ?
This idea is really the keynote of the scientific view of human spiritual evolution. The will force of each human being who would rise in Nature must be united with the evolutionary tendencies of the race as a whole in order that his greatest possible development may be brought about. The plain common-sense of this should be obvious to anyone who will dwell in thought on the deep signi- ficance of any among many conventional religious phrases that are constantly echoed and rarely appreciated. Take, for instance, the familiar idea that in God we live and move and have our being. The converse — spoken with all due reverence — is a corollary of that statement. God — the spirit or influence of God — lives in us, and in so far as w'e have consciousness of being very ungodlike in many respects, it should be obvious that the extent to which that condition of things may be destined to become a vital truth, depends on the degree to which we render ourselves, so to speak, habitable for God. But surely, if one human being has rendered himself very much more habitable for God than another, that human being is the one whose will has became a more potent force than the will of the other, for it is more largely infused with the Will which, in its perfection, is recognised as the first cause of all things, and the guiding principle of Nature and evolution.
Who can fail to see what nonsense it must be to predi-
26 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL
cate the same immediate destiny in evolution for the God- inhabited man and the mere self-centred human animal. True, conventional religion, taking refuge in a meek faith that the worst sinner may be purified somehow in another world, is content to remain in ignorance of the way in which its paradox works, — of the device by which it is arranged that opposite causes should produce the same effect; but occult science, comprehending the patience of Nature, as well as its invariability, is well aware that the human animal will have other chances, besides any one in particular that we may see him wasting, for making the efforts that will render himself — in some future per- sonality— the temple of spiritual consciousness. Oppor- tunities may be wasted, and if so they may recur. The considerations governing that reflection will be examined later on. The all-important point is that at some stage or other of his career a human being must undertake his own evolution — unite an adequately powerful ray of the Universal Spirit with his own consciousness — or he will not evolve up into those superior realms of evolution which the humanity of our own epoch merely exists to subserve. Nor is that the whole of the thought which this simple view of the subject suggests. It is a common- place of all scientific thinking that there cannot be im- mobility in Nature; there must be progress or retrogression — change of some sort. Nothing really stands still, either in the cycles of astronomy, or chemical change, or meta- physical condition. A man may live one life, perhaps, and appear to be neither higher nor lower in the scale of Nature at the close of it than he was at the beginning; but one life is after all but a brief interval in eternity, or even in those very protracted cycles of time which occult science prefers to handle rather than to prattle,
INTRODUCTORY 27
with the modern creeds, of conceptions so embarrassing to the finite mind as eternity and infinitude.
The man, as a continuous being, having a life history of which the one physical personality is but a single link, cannot stand still in evolution. It is an intellectual absurdity to imagine man doing that. He must either advance or recede; progress or retrogress like everything else — every being else — in Nature. Up to the rank in creation where most of us are standing now, such retro- gression as has been possible need not for the moment be considered. The great automatic forces of evolution have driven each individual forward. There has been suffering, perhaps, if during the process of such driving his will has been set against the Great Power behind him, but broadly speaking there has been no retrogression. From the humbler spheres of consciousness in the lower king- doms of Nature the soul, in dim ages of the past, has risen upward. Through processes of ethereal existence ante- dating the humanity of the type now attained, the in- dividuality has moved onward towards its higher destinies as a human being qualified to say with a full comprehen- sion of what it is about — " Now I will blend this con- sciousness and volition which is myself with the superior divine consciousness of which I am the material mirror, and thus illuminated and inspired I will move forward again ever onward and upward." But just because he is now qualified to say this if he chooses to act upon such a declaration, a man is also qualified to determine that it is all too much trouble; too painful for the time-being, perhaps. And then if the election is so made, the human consciousness which is the product of natural evolution so far, chooses, in effect, to unite itself with matter and its limitations, instead of with spirit and its potentialities.
28 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL
It is not necessary to stop here and at full length attempt to define the characteristics of the descent that must then set in. It should be obvious to any rational understanding that such a descent is the inevitable alternative to the conscious self-directed ascent, at the turning-point of evolution, wherever that may be, at which a higher progress to be achieved by the preparation of the interior self for the access of the Divine influx is offered to each man in turn as a potentiality of the consciousness he has attained. But looking upward and considering the prospects of humanity — so very ill comprehended as yet by the world at large — in their broadest aspects the truth just defined is one of pre-eminent significance. We have got half-way through the great evolutionary process on which the human faculty is launched. So far we have been led and supported. For the rest of the way we must push on ourselves — seeing our way; understanding what is expected of us; resolute to fulfil the Divine purpose.
Nor from this moment onward need we be any longer in the dark concerning the road to be travelled, the interior development we have it in our power to reach, nor the attributes of that rank in Nature which it is open to us to attain. The view of the whole evolutionary scheme that has been gradually set forth in theosophical literature is now sufficiently complete to make the prospects of the future as intelligible as the history of the past. We are as I have said, half-way through the whole " manvantara," or period within which the present chapter of spiritual evolution is designed to take place. The time spent up to now — on other planets besides this — has been counted in millions of ages. Millions of ages lie before the human family for the full and complete development of its evolution. Paying attention for the moment to that which
INTRODUCTORY 29
may be described as normal evolution alone, occult science shows us that the stupendous task of harmonising our wills completely with the Divine idea of the whole undertaking, and of mastering all the knowledge which it is possible for us to acquire when our natures are adequately exalted by that process, is one which may be protracted over the whole range of those millions of ages. We shall gather more as we go on concerning the circumstances under which it is so protracted, but taken as slowly as Nature allows for, or as rapidly as the process can be hastened, nothing can be achieved from the middle point of the manvantara onwards unless a comprehension of what is to be done animates each effort at every stage. That is the all-essential idea to keep hold of in contemplating the prospects of humanity. The nature of the attainments possible eventually, will be considered more conveniently at a later stage of the inquiry.