Chapter IV: Part 4

Yet, without renouncing, it is not well that we should feed ourselves upon too petty illusions. We should always keep before our eyes certain verities which put us in our place. There is no doubt that we shall never know everything; and so long as we do not know everything we shall be just as though we knew nothing. It is extremely possible, as the Rig-Veda suggests, that God Himself, or the first cause, does not know everything. It is equally possible that the universe has not yet, in any of its parts, become conscious of itself; that it knows not whence it came nor whither it is going, what it was nor what it will be, what it has accomplished nor what it is seeking to accomplish; and, on the other hand, it is probable that, if it has not yet learnt these things, it will never learn them, seeing that, as I have already said, there is no reason why it should be able, in the infinity of time which will come after us, to do what it has not been able to do in the infinity of time which went before.

5

If there be a consciousness of the universe, a God, He knows all that He should know, or He will never know it. And, if He knows it, why has He done what He has done, which cannot lead to anything, seeing that He might already have led us where we ought to go? Why did He not prefer nothingness, or at least that which we call nothingness, the only form of lasting happiness, immovable, incontestable and comprehensible?

We could understand, if need were, an immobile, immutable, eternal universe, a finished universe; but we cannot understand a universe in movement, or one, at least, of which all the parts that we see are incessantly in movement, evolving through space and time, a universe hurling itself at a dizzy rate of speed towards an end which it will never attain, since it has not yet attained it.

We may say, to console ourselves, that all despair comes only from the limited nature of our purview; but it is fair to add that our purview limits all hope in the same way.

MACROCOSM AND MICROCOSM

XIV

MACROCOSM AND MICROCOSM

1

The biologists tell us that the human embryo repeats, very rapidly during the early months of its development and more slowly during the later months, all the forms of life which preceded man upon this earth.

The round speck which is the germ becomes a hollow sphere, a sort of sac with a double wall, which is known as the gastrula and whose orifice of invagination, when it closes, receives the name of the blastopore. This is protozoic life, the as yet gelatinous beginning of animal life, and is followed, after transformations that would take too long to enumerate, by polypoid life.

Next, on either side of the head, appear the branchial arches, corresponding with the gills of the fish. At the end of the first month, the limbs are still no more than mere buds; on the other hand, the embryo is provided with a tail, which, folded against the body, nearly touches the forehead. It now has the appearance of a tadpole and lives a life which is wholly aquatic, bathed in the amniotic fluid which represents for it the water in which the embryos of fish and frogs move about freely.

It now becomes a matter of forming a resolution and knowing what to do with it. The embryo is almost in the situation occupied by life at the origin of the species; and nature, as though to humiliate man or to humiliate herself by remembering her mistakes and hesitations, returns to her gropings, her asymmetrics, her repentances, her unsuccessful experiments. Tentative forms, such as the dorsal cord, are reabsorbed; the primitive kidneys disappear, to make room for the final kidneys, which are enormous, filling the greater portion of the peritoneal cavity. Enormous too is the liver, which invades almost the whole of the visceral cavity; enormous the head, almost as large as the rest of the body; and in this enormous head the primitive ocular vesicles are formed, themselves enormous, as is the umbilical vesicle. This is the incoherent and monstrous period corresponding with the period of madness and gigantism when nature, as yet inexperienced, was blindly sketching uncertain creatures, formidable, unbalanced and anomalous, birds, crocodiles, elephants and fish in one, as though she had not as yet decided what to do, not yet completed her classifications, disentangled her laws, or acquired the sense of proportion, of balance, or of conditions essential to the maintenance of the life which she was creating.

2

This, roughly speaking, is the recapitulation which occurs before our eyes, but of which, no doubt, many incidents escape us or do not sufficiently attract our attention, for it is possible that they reproduce types with which we are not acquainted and which have not even left geological traces, seeing that the number of species which have disappeared is infinitely greater than that of the species which we know.

Dr. Hélan Jaworski may therefore very justly assert that the embryonic period corresponds with the geological period. And, even as, in the great terrestrial evolution, we observe the gradual disappearance of the armour-plated fishes, the monstrous reptiles and the gigantic mammals, so, in the minor embryonic evolution, we see the primitive kidney, the dorsal cord and the umbilical vesicle dissolve, while the liver diminishes and the disproportion between the head and the rest of the body is lessened. In a word, nature is learning wisdom, recognizing her errors, profiting by her experience, doing her best to repair her blunders and acquiring a sense of equilibrium, economy and form.

Dr. Jaworski finds other analogies between the geological period corresponding with man’s appearance upon earth and the birth of the child, analogies which are ingenious, but rather more hazardous. Birth is in fact preceded by a miniature deluge, caused by the tearing of the foetal envelopes, which allow the amniotic fluid to escape. Then the child, at the moment of entering into life, suddenly experiences a sort of glacial period; it passes, in fact, from an environment with a temperature of over 98° to the outer air, which is barely 60° or 65°. The sense of cold is so terrible that it wrests a first cry of suffering from the new-born child.

3

What is the meaning of this strange recapitulation?

Dr. Jaworski thinks that, if the brief process of embryonic evolution which prepares the way for the birth of man repeats the great process of terrestrial evolution, this latter, on its side, might well be but a vast embryonic period that is preparing for a birth which we cannot as yet imagine. I do not know whether he will succeed in maintaining this stupendous theory. If he does, he will really have made us, as he promises to do, “take a step towards the essence of things.” Meanwhile, thanks to his preparatory studies, he will always have made us take another and a very useful step towards a truth which this time is incontestable, which, though less unexpected, has never been elucidated with so much patience and which is no less big with consequences.

4

Dr. Jaworski, then, undertakes to demonstrate that the human body unites in itself, in a plainly recognizable form, all the living creatures which now exist upon earth and which have existed since the origin of life. In other words, each creature sums up in itself all those which have preceded it; and man, the last-comer, contains within himself the whole biological tree, so much so that, if we could distribute his body, if we could segregate each of his organs and keep it alive in isolation, we should be able to reconstitute all existing forms, to repeople the earth with all the species which it has borne, from the primitive protoplasm to the synthesis, the final achievement, which is man.

We might perhaps go farther than Dr. Jaworski and declare, with the occultists of the east, that we likewise contain within us, in the germ or in a rough-hewn state, all the creatures and all the forms that will come after us. But here we should be leaving the domain of science proper to lose ourselves in a speculation which by its very nature is incapable of verification.

5

So it is not merely in a figurative sense, such as that foreshadowed by the current idiom, where it speaks of the vascular tree, the branches of nerves, or the ovarian cluster; it is not merely by analogy, but in a literal and strictly scientific sense that our heart, fundamentally, is nothing but a medusa and our kidneys sponges, that our intestines represent the polyps and our skeleton the polypites, that our reproductive organs are worms or molluscs, that the vertebral column and the spinal marrow take the place of the Echinodermata, while the Brachiopoda and the Ctenophora would be derived from our eye and the reptiles found in our digestive apparatus, the birds in our respiratory organs and so on.

I repeat, there is no question here of metaphors or of more or less approximate, elastic and plausible correspondences but of rigorously and meticulously established proofs.

I cannot, of course, set before you the details of Dr. Jaworski’s exegesis. It would not permit of the slightest solution of continuity and, in the three volumes published so far, it leads us to conclusions which are very difficult to contest. People used to assert, without attaching too much faith to what they said or scrutinizing it too closely, that man is a microcosm. It seems to be clearly proved to-day that this is not merely literally defensible, but scientifically accurate. We are a prehistoric colony, immense and innumerous, a living agglomeration of all that lives, has lived and probably will live upon earth. We are not only the sons or brothers of the worms, the reptiles, the fish, the frogs, the birds, the mammals and no matter what monsters have defiled or affrighted the surface of the globe: we bear them within us; our organs are no other than themselves; we nourish all their types; they are only awaiting an opportunity to escape from us, to reappear, to reconstitute themselves, to develop and to plunge us once again into terror. In this respect, quite as much as in respect of the secret thoughts, the vices and the phantoms with which we are filled, we might repeat the words which Emerson’s old man used to speak to his children, when they were frightened by a strange face in the dark passage:

“Children, you will never see anything worse than yourselves!”

If all the species were to disappear and only man remained, none would be lost and all might be reborn of his body, as though they were coming out of Noah’s ark, from the almost invisible protozoa down to the formidable antediluvian colossi which could lick the roofs of our houses.

It is therefore fairly probable that all these species take part in our existence, in, our instincts, in all our feelings, in all our thoughts; and here once more we are led back to the great religions of India, which foresaw all the truths that we are gradually discovering and which already, thousands of years ago, were telling us that man is everything and that he must recognize his essence in every living creature.

HEREDITY AND PREEXISTENCE

XV

HEREDITY AND PREEXISTENCE

1

The law of heredity which insists that the descendants shall suffer by the faults and profit by the virtues of their ancestors comprises truths that are no longer disputed. They shine forth, visible to the eyes of all. The child of a drunkard will bear the burden of his father’s vice all his life long, from the day of his birth to that of his death, in body and in mind. One might say that by this irrefutable example nature had intended ostentatiously to affirm and manifest the implacable character of her law, as though to make us understand that she takes no account whatever of our conceptions of justice and injustice and that she acts on an unvarying principle in all the obscure circumstances in which we cannot follow the inextricable windings of her will. This example, if we had no other, would be enough to brand that inhuman will with infamy. There is no law more repugnant to our reason, to our sense of responsibility, nor one which does a deeper injury to our trust in the universe and the unknown spirit that rules it. Of all life’s injustices, this is the most glaring and the least comprehensible. For most of the others we find excuses or explanations; but, when we remember that a new-born child, a child which did not ask to be born, is, from the moment of inhaling its first breath of air, smitten with irremediable insolvency, with a ferocious, irrevocable sentence and with evils which it will drag to the grave, it seems to us that not one of the most hateful tyrants that history has cursed would have dared to do what nature does quietly every day.

But do we really bear the burden of the errors of the dead? In the first place, is it quite certain that the dead are really dead and no longer dwell within us? It is a fact that we continue them, that we are the durable part of what they were. We cannot deny that we are still subject to their influence, that we reproduce their features and their characters, that we represent them almost entirely, that they continue to live and to act in us; it is therefore very natural that they also should continue to bear the consequences of an action or a way of living which their departure has not interrupted.

“But,” you may say, “I had no part in this action, this habit, this vice for which I am paying to-day. I was not consulted; I had no opportunity of uttering a protest, of checking my father, or my grandfather, as he went to his ruin down the fatal precipice. I was not born; I did not yet exist!”

How do you know? May there not be a fundamental mistake in the idea of heredity as we conceive it? At one end of the beam of those scales which we accuse of injustice hangs heredity, but the other is borne down by something different, which we have never taken into account, for it has not yet a name, something which is the antithesis of heredity, which cleaves into the future instead of emerging from the past and which we might call preexistence or prenatality.

Even as our dead still live in us, so we have already lived in them. There is no reason to believe that the future, which is full of life, is less active and less potent than the past, which is full of the dead. Instead of descending, should we not rather ascend the course of the years to discover the source of our actions?

We know not in what fashion those already dwell in us who shall be born of us, down to the last generation; but that they do dwell in us is certain. Whatever the number of our descendants, in the sequence of the ages, whatever the transformations which the elements, climates, countries and centuries may cause them to undergo, they will keep intact, through all vicissitudes, the principle of life which they have derived from us. They have not obtained it elsewhere or they could not be what they are. They have really issued from us; and, if they have issued from us, it is because they were in us from the first. What were they doing within us, all these innumerable, accumulated lives? Is it permissible to suppose that they were absolutely inactive? Then what were their functions, what their power? What divided them from us? When did we begin, where did they end? At what point did their thoughts and their desires mingle with ours?

“How could they think and act in us,” you ask, “having as yet no brain?”

True; but they had ours. The dead too are without a brain; nevertheless no one will deny that they continue to think and act in us. This brain of which we are so proud is not the source but the condenser of thought and will. Like the Leyden jar or the Ruhmkorff coil, it exists, it is animated only so long as the electric fluid of life passes through it or resides in it. It does not produce this fluid, it collects it; what matters is not its convolutions, which may be compared with the windings of an induction-coil, but the life that flows through it; and what can this life be, if it be not the sum of all the existences which are accumulated within us, which are not extinguished at our death, which begin before our birth and which continue us, forwards, and backwards, into the infinity of time?

2

Writers of essays and novels have at times endeavoured to represent these diverse lives which we harbour within us; and each of us, if he question himself sincerely and profoundly, will discover in himself two or three clearly-defined types, which have nothing in common but the body in which they reside, which rarely agree among themselves, which are incessantly striving to gain the upper hand and which put up with one another as best they can, in order to go through an existence whose aggregate forms our ego. This ego will be good or bad, remarkable or insignificant, more or less generous or selfish, calm or uneasy, pacific or pugnacious, heroic or pusillanimous, hesitating or decided and enterprising, brutal or refined, crafty or loyal, active or idle, chaste or lascivious, modest or vainglorious, proud or obsequious, unreliable or steadfast, according to the authority which the type that captures the best positions of the heart or brain is able to assume over the others. But, even in the life that appears the most stable, the most homogeneous, the best-balanced, this authority will never be final or undisputed. The dominant type will find itself for ever disputed, attacked, thwarted, disturbed, circumvented, harassed, tempted, deceived, betrayed and sometimes cunningly dethroned by one of the rival or subordinate types which it failed to distrust or which it did not watch narrowly enough. We behold unexpected coalitions, fantastic compromises, regrettable defections, fierce competitions, incessant intrigues and positive revolutions, especially at the critical periods and at each moment of important happenings; and all this prodigious inward tragedy does not cease for an instant until the hour of death.

3

But, once again, why seek only in the past and among our ancestors for the actors in this drama which is the essential drama of humanity? What justification have we for supposing that the dead alone play all the parts? Why should those from whom we have issued possess more influence than those who will issue from us? The first are remote from our bodily selves, they are separated from us by unfathomable mysteries and their survival may perhaps be called in question; the others inhabit our flesh and their existence is incontestable. We have just seen that the argument deduced from the absence of any brain is not invincible.

“But,” you will perhaps go on to say, “how do you suppose that, when they have not yet lived, they can possess habits, virtues and vices, preferences and experience, in a word, all that constitutes a character and cannot be acquired save by contact with life?”

But the same objection could be raised, in most cases, with regard to our ancestors. Generally speaking, when we issued from them, they were still young; they were not yet what they became and what we shall become after them. They had not yet adopted the habits, the ways of thinking or feeling, or cultivated the virtues or the vices which are reproduced in us. The stubborn little mediocrity whom we all feel within us, frugal, cautious and shabby in his dealings, was still perhaps a prodigal, high-spirited and reckless youth; the rake was still perhaps chaste, the thief had never stolen and the murderer may have had a horror of bloodshed. All this is almost equally immaterial and equally potential in both cases; the only present points at issue are the amorphous tendencies and forces whereon the brain which we receive from these and pass on to those bestows a form.

It is therefore very possible that the little mediocrity, the rake, the thief or the murderer, far from being dead, are not yet born and are taking as active a part as our ancestors in the agitations and sometimes in the conduct of our existence. This is what the most ancient and the most venerable religions of humanity always foresaw or revealed, receiving it perhaps on the authority of an unknown and loftier source; and of these religions Christianity, with its dogma of original sin, is but an imperfect echo. Even to-day, more than six hundred millions of human beings believe in the preexistence of the soul, in successive lives and in reincarnation. In the eyes of these religions, the little mediocrity who begot us several centuries ago is the same who, a little less paltry, a little less narrow, improved by his previous life and his passage through the mysteries of death, is awaiting within us the moment of rebirth and who, while waiting, shares our instincts, our feelings and our thoughts. He does not wait in solitude; he is but one life in the host of lives which have preceded us and which come back to live in us again; and all these past and future lives form the sum total of our own.

4

We will not here discuss this doctrine of successive lives and of the expiatory and purifying reincarnation, which is the noblest and, up to now, the only acceptable explanation of nature’s injustices that has been discovered. In the present state of our knowledge, it can be only a magnificent theory or a statement impossible of proof. Let us not forsake the indisputable ground on which heredity and preexistence have their being. Heredity is an acquired fact, an experimental truth; preexistence is a logical necessity. It is not indeed possible to conceive that what will be born of us does not already exist within us in fact, in principle, in the germ, in essence or in potentiality; and, from the moment of its existence in a fashion probably more spiritual than material, it is far less surprising that it should be more or less responsible for thoughts and actions to which it could not be wholly a stranger.

In any case, heredity, which is incontestable, and preexistence, which is necessary, remind us yet once again that each of us is not a single being, isolated, permanent, hermetically sealed, independent of others and separated from all things in time and space, but a porous vase dipping into the infinite; a sort of cross-roads, where all the paths of the past, the present and the future meet; an inn beside the eternal highways, where all the lives which make up our own foregather for a few days’ sojourn. We believe ourselves dead when they leave the inn; and we fancy that they too have perished. It is more likely that this is not so at all. They are merely quitting the ruined hostel to install themselves in a new and more habitable house. They carry with them their debts and their obligations; they remove to their new abode their instincts, their habits, their ideals, their passions also, their merits and their faults, their acquisitions and their memories. The house is different, but the guests are the same; and the old life will resume its course in the new dwelling and will be perhaps a little nobler, perhaps a little fairer, perhaps filled with a little brighter light.

THE GREAT REVELATION

XVI

THE GREAT REVELATION

1

We despair of ever knowing the origin of the universe, its aim, its laws, or its intentions; and we end by doubting whether there be any. It were wiser very humbly to confess that we are not able to conceive them. It is probable that, if the universe to-morrow were to yield us the key of its riddle, we should be as incapable of understanding how to use it as is a dog to whom we show the key of a clock. In revealing its great secret to us, it would teach us hardly anything; or at least the revelation would have but an insignificant influence upon our life, our happiness, our ethics, our efforts, and our hopes. It would soar at such heights that no one would perceive it; at most it would disencumber the sky of our religious illusions, leaving only the infinite void of the ether in their place.

2

For that matter, there is no saying but that we once possessed this revelation. It is highly possible that the religions of nations which have disappeared, such as the Lemurians, the Atlanteans and many others, were aware of it and that we have discovered its remains in the esoteric traditions that have come down to us. It must not indeed be forgotten that there exists, side by side with the outward, scientific history, a secret history of mankind which derives its substance of legends, myths, hieroglyphics, strange monuments and mysterious writings from the hidden meaning of the primitive books. One thing is certain, that, though the imagination of those who interpret this occult history is often venturesome, all that they declare is not to be despised and deserves to be examined more seriously one day than has hitherto been done.

The essence of this esoteric revelation is very well summed up by M. Marc Saunier, a disciple of Fabre d’Olivet and Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, in his book, _La Légende des symboles_.

“The Initiates,” he says, “have always regarded each continent as
a being subject to the same laws as man. For them, the minerals
constitute its skeleton, the flora its flesh, the fauna its
nerve-cells and the human races the grey matter of its brain. This
continent itself is but an organ of the earth, wherein each man is
treated as a thinking cell and whereof the thought is represented by
the sum of human thoughts. The earth itself is but an organ of the
solar system, which in turn is considered as an individual; and our
solar system thus becomes merely an organ of another being of the
infinite, whose heart would appear in the star Alpha in Aries. And
lastly, by a final synthesis, we come to the Cosmos, which expresses
the general sum of all things, in a being whose body is the world
and whose thought is the universal intelligence, exalted by the
religions to the rank of a deity.”

The basis of their doctrine is plainly evolutionistic. Each continent has merely transformed, in its own time and according to its own ideal, the seeds which came from the Hyperborean tracts; and man is but the result of an animal evolution. For the rest, they borrow it in part from the Hindus, thus anticipating by many thousands of years the latest hypotheses of our modern science.

3

But, without loitering in these shifting sands, let us go direct to clear and reliable sources. We possess, in the sacred and secret books of India, of which we know only an infinitesimal part, a cosmogony which no European conception has ever surpassed. It would not be correct to say that it attained, at the first endeavour, the ultimate limits beyond which the mind of man could not venture without dissolving in the infinite, for it was the work of centuries of which we do not know the tale; but it indisputably preceded all the others, its birth was earlier than anything that we know and, at the beginning of all things, it exceeded in grandeur all that we have learnt and all that we can imagine.

It was the first, for instance, long before our historic periods, to give us a dizzy yet concrete idea of the infinity of time. The Book of Manu teaches us that twelve thousand years of mortals are but a day and a night to the gods; their year, therefore, consisting of three hundred and sixty days, numbers 4,320,000 years. A thousand years of the gods make but one of Brahma’s days, that is to say, 4,320,000,000 human years, representing the total life of our globe; and Brahma’s night is of equal duration. Three hundred and sixty of these days and nights make one of this god’s years; and a hundred of these years constitute one of his lives, that is to say, the duration of the universe, which is represented by the formidable figure of 311,090,000,000,000 years. After this he begins a new life. At present we have not yet attained the noon of Brahma’s actual day nor half the life-time of our terrestrial globe.

To complete this outline of the stupendous chronology of the Vedas, I continue to profit by some notes received from my war-time godson, who has a thorough knowledge of this unduly neglected science. For the rest, it will be seen that chronology and cosmogony are here in intimate connection:

“The day of Brahma (4,320,000,000 years) is divided into fourteen
lives of Manu, consisting alternately of seven Manvantaras and seven
Pralayas. The word Manvantara signifies the interval between two
Manus: one of these appears in the dawn and the other in the twilight
of this period of terrestrial activity. The morning Manu gives the
Manvantara its name and the evening Manu presides over the Pralaya,
that is to say, the period of dissolution, or negative _status quo_,
death, sleep, or inertia, as the case may be, which divides two waves
of life.

“Universal evolution is a chain without beginning or end, each
link of which in turn appears and disappears in our field of
consciousness. Brahma himself dies only to be reborn. But for the
sovereign of the worlds, as for a random star or the least of
organized creatures, there is death and dissolution only from the
individual point of view. Darkness is the ransom to be paid for
light, the evening balances the morning, age is the price of youth
and death the reverse of life. In reality, however, all evolution is
at the same time continuous and discontinuous; the Manvantaras and
Pralayas are at once simultaneous and successive; each individual
life is engendered by its elemental double and engenders its residual
double. Every decline of life in a given place coincides with an
increase of being in a corresponding place and proceeds by means of
a rebirth in a fresh place. Fundamentally, there is no individual
life. We are at once ourselves and another, ourselves and several
others, ourselves and all others, ourselves and the Universe,
ourselves and infinity.

“The evolution of our terrestrial globe is an infinitesimal cycle of
this universal evolution, corresponding merely with a day and a night
of Brahma, and is divided into fourteen cycles, each consisting of
a Manvantara and a Pralaya. The cycle of organic evolution upon our
solidified globe represents only one of these subdivisions, that is
to say, the radius of the organic sphere is only a fourteenth part
of the radius of the mineral sphere. Mineral evolution is manifestly
continuous from the formation of the globe to its dissolution. If,
between the periods of geological activity, there exists a Pralaya
of any kind, this latter, despite the etymology of the word, must
be not a dissolution, which would be perfectly inconceivable from
the logical and scientific point of view, but a period of inertia
or abatement, of which the hypothesis is readily admissible
and of which the glacial periods, occurring in the very course
of the present Manvantara, afford us an example. In the earlier
cycles of Manu, the earth passed in succession through the various
stages of condensation which science regards as igneous and which
correspond with the ethereal, gaseous and liquid evolution of the
elements. During these long periods, the life of the present existed
potentially in the soul of the earth and actually on other globes
than ours.”

4

But we will proceed no further with this outline, which would become so complicated as to be inextricable. Let us remember simply the magnificent doctrine of the reincarnation, which is the most ancient reply, the only decisive and, no doubt, the most plausible reply, to all the problems of justice and injustice, the immortal torture of mortals, and its corollary, the law of Karma, which, as my godson so truly says, “is the most wonderful of ethical discoveries: it represents abstract liberty and is enough to enfranchise the human will from any superior or even infinite being. We are our own creators and the sole captains of our fate; no other than ourselves rewards or punishes us; there is no sin, but only consequences; there is no morality, but only responsibilities. Now Buddha taught that, merely by virtue of this sovran law, the individual must be reborn to reap what he has sowed; and this certainty of rebirth was enough to neutralize the horror of death.”

* * * * *

Is all this nothing more than imagination, than the dreams of brains more ardent than our own, the hallucinations of ascetics which amaze the young and the immobility or the echo of immemorial traditions bequeathed by other races, or by races anterior to man and more spiritual? It is impossible to decide; but, whatever its origin, it is certain that the monument whereof we have seen but a corner of the pedestal is prodigious and that it has not a human aspect. All that we can say is that our modern sciences, notably archæology, geology and biology, confirm rather than invalidate either of these revelations.

5

But this is not the question for the moment. Let us suppose that one of these revelations, for instance, that of the sacred books of India, were true, incontestable and scientifically proved by our researches; or that an interplanetary communication or a declaration of some superhuman being no longer permitted us to doubt its authenticity: what influence would such a revelation have upon our life? What would it transform in our life, what novel element would it add to our morality or our happiness? No doubt it would work but a very slight change. It would pass too high above us; it would not descend to our level; it would not touch us; we should lose ourselves in its immensity; and upon the whole, knowing everything, we should be neither happier nor wiser than when we knew nothing.

Not to know what he has come upon this earth to do: that is man’s great and everlasting torment. Now we must perforce admit that the actual truth of the universe, if some day we learn it, will probably be very similar to one or other of those revelations which, while appearing to teach us everything, teach us nothing at all. It will at least possess the same inhuman character. It will necessarily be as unlimited in both space and time, as abysmal, as foreign to our senses and our brain. The more tremendous, the more majestic the revelation, the greater chance will it have of being true; but also, the more remote from us it is, the less will it interest us. We can hardly hope to escape from this discouraging dilemma: those revelations, explanations or interpretations which are too petty will not satisfy us, because we shall instinctively feel them to be insufficient; while those which are too great will pass us by too far to affect us.

6

It nevertheless seems desirable that this revelation of the sacred books of India should be authentic and that our knowledge, still so slight, so unimportant, so timid and so incoherent, should gradually confirm, as indeed it unwittingly does daily, certain points scattered through the boundless immensity of this immemorial truth.

It would in any case, even if it did not succeed in affecting us directly, possess the advantage of enlarging our horizon, which is narrower than we suppose, until it embraces infinity; of studding this infinity with magnificent landmarks; of animating it, peopling it, filling it with wonderful faces, making it a living, perceptible, almost comprehensible thing.

We all know that we dwell in infinity; but this infinity is, for us, only a bare and barren word, a black and uninhabitable void, a formless abstraction, a lifeless expression, to which our imagination can give only a momentary vitality, at the cost of a tiring, solitary, unskilful, unassisted, ungrateful and unfruitful effort. We hold ourselves, in fact, pent in this terrestrial world of ours and in our brief historic ages; and at the most we raise our eyes, from time to time, towards the other planets of our solar system and project our thoughts, which are discouraged from the beginning, as far as the nebulous periods that preceded man’s advent on our globe. More and more deliberately we are directing the whole activity of our intelligence upon ourselves; and, by a regrettable optical illusion, the more it restricts its field of action, the deeper we believe it to be probing. Our thinkers and philosophers, fearing lest they should stray as their predecessors did before them, no longer concern themselves with any but the least disputable aspects, problems and secrets; but, if these are the least disputable, they are also the least sublime; and man, in his quality as a terrestrial animal, becomes the sole object of their investigations. The scientists, on the other hand, are accumulating minor data and observations whose weight is stifling them; yet they no longer dare to thrust them aside or open them out, so as to ventilate them by some general law, some salutary hypothesis, for those which they have hitherto ventured to advance have been pitiably contradicted, one after the other, and scouted by experience.

Nevertheless, they are right to act as they do and to continue their investigations according to their narrow and restricted methods; but we are entitled to observe that, the closer they believe that they have drawn to a fugitive truth, the greater are their uncertainty and confusion, the more precarious, imaginary and insufficient seem the foundations upon which they based their confidence and the more fully do they perceive the immense distance that still divides them from the least of life’s secrets. As one of the most illustrious of them, Sir William Grove, prophetically remarked:

“The day is fast approaching when it will be confessed that the
Forces we know are but the phenomenal manifestations of Realities we
know nothing about, but which were known to the Ancients and by them
worshipped.”

7

This, indeed, is what we are bound to think if we study slightly this primitive revelation, this ancient wisdom and what has grown out of it. Man once knew more than he now knows. He was ignorant perhaps of the enormous mass of petty details which we have observed and classified and which have enabled us to subdue certain forces which he never thought of turning to account: but it is probable that he understood better than we do their nature, their essence and their origin.

The higher civilization of humanity, which history traces back tentatively to five or six thousand years before Christ, is perhaps far more ancient; and, without admitting, as has been asserted, that the Egyptians kept astronomical records through a period of six hundred and thirty thousand years, we may consider it as established that their observations embraced two precessional cycles, two sidereal years, or fifty-one thousand, seven hundred and thirty-six solar years. Now they themselves were not initiators but initiates, who derived all that they knew from a more ancient source. It was the same with the Semites, in the matter of their primitive books and their Kabbalah; and the Greeks, among whom all those who really taught us something about the origin and constitution of the world and its elements, about nature and divinity, mind and matter, men such as Hesiod, Pythagoras, Anaxagoras, Plato and the Neo-Platonists, were likewise initiates, that is to say, they were men who, having travelled in Egypt or India, had drunk of the same one and immemorial spring. Our prehistoric religions, Scandinavian or Germanic and the Druidism of the Celts, those of China and Japan, of Mexico and Peru, despite numerous deformations, were also derived from the same source, even as our great western metaphysics, which preceded our modern materialism, with its somewhat sordid outlook, and notably the metaphysics of Leibnitz, Kant, Schelling, Fichte and Hegel have approached it and, more or less unconsciously, slaked their thirst at it.

It is therefore certain that through the Greeks, through the Bible, through Christianity, which is its last echo, for the author of the Apocalypse and St. Paul were initiates, we are all steeped in this revelation; that there is not and never has been any other; that it is the great human or superhuman revelation; and that consequently it would be right and salutary to study it more attentively and more profoundly than we have hitherto done.

8

Where does the source of this revelation lie? We place it in the east because nearly everything that we know about it is found in the sacred books of India. But it is almost certainly of western or rather Hyperborean origin and dates back to those wonderful vanished Atlanteans, whose last Protoscythian colonies flourished over eleven thousand years ago and whose existence can no longer be denied.

Remember that famous passage in Plato:

“One day, when Solon was conversing with the priests of Saïs on the
history of the remote ages, one of them said:

“‘O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children!... There is not
an opinion, not a tradition of knowledge among you that is old....
You know nothing of that noble race of heroes of whom you are a
remnant.... Nine thousand years, as our annals record, have elapsed
since what I am about to tell you.... The most famous of your actions
was the overthrow of the island of Atlantis, which lay over against
the Pillars of Hercules, was greater than Libya and Asia put together
and was the passage to other islands and to a great ocean whereof
the Mediterranean Sea was but a harbour; and within the Pillars the
empire of Atlantis reached in Europe to Tyrrhenia and in Libya to
Egypt. This mighty power was arrayed against Egypt and Greece and
all the Mediterranean countries. Then your city did bravely and won
renown throughout the earth. For, risking her own existence, she
repelled the invader and gave liberty to all the nations within the
Pillars. Soon after, earthquakes arose and floods; and your warlike
race was swallowed up by the earth; and the island of Atlantis also
disappeared in the sea.’”

This page in the _Timæus_ is the first glimpse that history properly so-called affords of the immense chaos of the antediluvian period. Modern researches and discoveries have confirmed it step by step. To quote Roisel, who devoted a remarkable book to the Atlanteans, a work less well-known than those of Scott Elliott and Rudolf Steiner, but one that does not admit of the slightest doubt:

“It is proved that, long before the historic ages, the Atlanticans
had acquired a marvellous science whose elements mankind is hardly
beginning to reconstitute and whose mighty relics are found in
ancient Gaul, Egypt, Persia, India and the central portion of the
American continent. More than ten thousand years before our era, they
knew the precession of the equinoxes, the slow changes which many
stars experience in their courses and the thousand secrets of nature.
They had processes of which modern industry has not yet fathomed the
mysteries.”

9

The outcome of these studies is that humanity never underwent a disaster to be compared with the disappearance of Atlantis. It will perhaps need thousands of years to repair that loss and to reascend to the level of a civilization which had certainties of which we laboriously glean the scattered remnants, regarding the origin and movements of the universe, the energy of matter, the unknown forces of this and other worlds, the life beyond the grave and a social organization and political economy similar to those of the bees. Nothing could better prove the uselessness of man’s effort than this unparalleled loss, if we did not strive to hope in spite of all.

A nation of wonderful metallurgists, who had discovered the means of tempering copper for which we are still seeking, a nation of fabulous engineers, whose geometry, as Professor Smyth tells us, began where Euclid’s ends, they lifted and transported to enormous distances, by mysterious methods, rocks weighing fifteen hundred tons and strewed the world with those fantastic moving stones known as “mad stones” and “stones of truth,” stones weighing five hundred tons and so ingeniously poised on one of their corners that a child can move them with its finger, whereas the united impetus of two hundred men would be incapable of overturning them, stones which, from the geological point of view, never belong to the spot where they are found. A nation of explorers who had traversed and colonized the whole surface of the earth, a nation of scholars, mathematicians and astronomers, they appear to have been above all things ruthless rationalists and logicians, endowed with, so to speak, a metallic brain, the lateral lobes of which were much more highly developed than ours. They applied their incomparable faculties exclusively to the study of the exact sciences; and the sole object of their energies was the conquest of truth. But the study of the invisible and the infinite, under their powerful scrutiny, itself becomes an exact science; and the main idea of their cosmogony, by virtue of which everything issues from the ocean of cosmic matter or from the boundless waves of the eternal ether, soon to return and to reemerge, disfigured and overladen with numberless myths by the imagination of their degenerate descendants or settlers: this main idea forms the base of every religion. It is improbable that man will ever discover one to equal it or replace it.

10

It is in the sacred books of India that we find the surest and most plentiful traces of this cosmogony or of this revelation. Less than a century ago, men were almost wholly unaware of the existence of these sacred books. Their interpreters have taken two different paths. On the one hand, scholars whom we may describe as official have supplied translations of a certain number of texts, which might also be called official, texts which they do not always understand and which their readers understand even less. On the other hand, initiates, genuine or pretended, with the assistance of adepts of an occult fraternity, have suggested a new and more impressive interpretation of these same texts or of others still more secret. They still, rightly or wrongly, inspire a certain distrust. We are obliged to admit the authenticity and the antiquity of certain traditions, of certain primitive and essential writings, though it is impossible to assign an approximate date to them, so completely are they merged in the mists of the prehistoric ages. But they are almost incomprehensible without keys and commentaries; and it is here that our doubts and hesitations begin. A large number of those commentaries are likewise very ancient and in their turn need keys; others appear to be more recent; lastly, others seem to be contemporary; and it is often difficult to draw a dividing line between that which may well exist in the original and that which the interpreters believe to exist in the original or which they more or less deliberately add to it. Now the most striking, the most impressive and in any case the most lucid part of the doctrine is often contained in the commentaries.

Next, as I have observed, comes the question of the keys, which is intimately connected with the foregoing. These keys are more or less workable and command more or less respect; sometimes they seem fanciful or arbitrary; they are delivered only with curious precautions, singly and grudgingly; and they are apt to unlock several superimposed meanings. And all this is accompanied by fantastic reticences, by so-called dangerous or terrible secrets, withheld at the decisive moment, and by revelations which, it is contended, cannot be communicated until many centuries have elapsed. Doors through which we were about to pass are slammed in our faces just as we were at last catching a glimpse of a long-promised horizon; and behind each of them hides a supreme initiate, a still living master, the sacred guardian of the ultimate mysteries, who knows all things, but can or will say nothing.

Observe, moreover, that a host of more or less intelligent _illuminati_, of elderly women and unbalanced spinsters, of simple-minded people who accept, blindly and off-hand, that which they do not understand, of discontented, unsuccessful, vain or crafty persons who fish in troubled waters, in a word, all the usual suspect mob that gathers round any more or less mysterious doctrine, science or phenomenon, has discredited these first esoteric interpretations, of which the very source is none too dear. Lastly, let us add that the burning of the famous library of Alexandria, in which all the knowledge of the east was amassed, the destruction in the sixteenth century, under the Mogul Akbar, of thousands of Sanskrit volumes, the systematic and merciless demolition, especially during the first few centuries of the Church and in the Middle Ages, of all that referred or alluded to this dreaded and embarrassing revelation, have deprived us of our best means of control. The adepts, it is true, assert on the other hand that the true texts, as well as the ancient commentaries which alone enable them to be understood, still exist in the secret crypts and subterranean libraries of Thibet or the Himalayas, libraries of books more innumerable than any which we possess in the west, and that they will reappear in a more enlightened age. It is possible, but in the meanwhile they are of no help to us.

11

Be this as it may, what we have is enough to perplex us greatly; and the control allowed by the fragments which have been saved from historic antiquity absolutely removes all suspicion of more or less recent fraud or deception in respect of the essentials. Moreover, any fraud or deception of this nature seems hardly possible and would be so ingenious that we should be obliged to marvel at it as a phenomenon almost as remarkable as that whereof it would be seeking to give the illusion; and we should have to admit that the mind of man has never insinuated itself so far into the infinity of time and space, or into the origin of things, and has never risen to such heights. Had this revelation profited by all the attainments of our latter-day science and thought, it could not have furnished us with theories more satisfactory, more logical, more coherent, more plausible, more synthetic, or worthier of the infinity which they strive to embrace and often seem to attain, on the rhythm of the eternities, the ebb and flow of the eternal Becoming, the never-ending cycle and the periodic existences of the ego, the birth, movement and evolution of the worlds, the divine breath and the intelligence that animate it, on Maya, the eternal illusion of ignorance, the struggle for life, natural selection, the gradual development and transformation of stars and men, the functions and energies of the ether, immortal and infallible justice, the intermolecular and fantastic activity of matter, on the nature of the soul and the existence of the vast, nameless power that governs the universe, in a word, on all the riddles that assail and all the mysteries that overwhelm us.

But, let us hasten to repeat it, there could not seriously be any question of fraud, because the texts or traditions that might be regarded with suspicion are corroborated by other texts, such as the sacred inscriptions of Egypt, which no one thinks of contesting. At most we may come upon a few passages antedated by the imprudent zeal of adepts or commentators, a few interpolations which merely embroider the majestic lines. Taking it as a whole, we have to do with a revelation which dates back infinitely farther than all that we have called the prehistoric ages, wherefore it is legitimate that our astonishment should be unbounded.

12

Very good, it will be said, this interpretation of the universe, this anthropocosmogenesis is the loftiest, the most spacious, the most wonderful, the most unassailable that has ever been conceived; it teems in every part with human thought and imagination; but what is it all based upon? When all is said, we have here only magnificent hypotheses, boldly disguised as authoritative, dogmatic and peremptory declarations, but every one incapable of verification. This is the objection which I myself put forward, a little hastily, in one of the early chapters of _Our Eternity_.