Chapter III: Part I: Lectures to the Public (3)

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

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

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

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

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

II.—SCIENCE.

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

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

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

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

III.—ART.

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

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

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

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

Lecture IV

Brotherhood Applied to Social Conditions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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