a distance from us. When the elements of time and space are eliminated all
our ideas of things must necessarily be as subsisting in a universal here
and an everlasting now. This is, no doubt, a highly abstract conception,
but I would ask the student to endeavour to grasp it thoroughly, since it
is of vital importance in the practical application of Mental Science, as
will appear further on.
The opposite conception is that of things expressing themselves through
conditions of time and space and thus establishing a variety of _relations_
to other things, as of bulk, distance, and direction, or of sequence in
time. These two conceptions are respectively the conception of the abstract
and the concrete, of the unconditioned and the conditioned, of the absolute
and the relative. They are not opposed to each other in the sense of
incompatibility, but are each the complement of the other, and the only
reality is in the combination of the two. The error of the extreme idealist
is in endeavouring to realize the absolute without the relative, and the
error of the extreme materialist is in endeavouring to realize the relative
without the absolute. On the one side the mistake is in trying to realize
an inside without an outside, and on the other in trying to realize an
outside without an inside; both are necessary to the formation of a
substantial entity.
THE HIGHER MODE OF INTELLIGENCE CONTROLS THE LOWER.
We have seen that the descent from personality, as we know it in ourselves,
to matter, as we know it under what we call inanimate forms, is a gradual
descent in the scale of intelligence from that mode of being which is able
to realize its own will-power as a capacity for originating new trains of
causation to that mode of being which is incapable of recognizing itself at
all. The higher the grade of life, the higher the intelligence; from which
it follows that the supreme principle of Life must also be the ultimate
principle of intelligence. This is clearly demonstrated by the grand
natural order of the universe. In the light of modern science the principle
of evolution is familiar to us all, and the accurate adjustment existing
between all parts of the cosmic scheme is too self-evident to need
insisting upon. Every advance in science consists in discovering new
subtleties of connection in this magnificent universal order, which already
exists and only needs our recognition to bring it into practical use. If,
then, the highest work of the greatest minds consists in nothing else than
the recognition of an already existing order, there is no getting away from
the conclusion that a paramount intelligence must be inherent in the
Life-Principle, which manifests itself _as_ this order; and thus we see
that there must be a great cosmic intelligence underlying the totality of
things.
The physical history of our planet shows us first an incandescent nebula
dispersed over vast infinitudes of space; later this condenses into a
central sun surrounded by a family of glowing planets hardly yet
consolidated from the plastic primordial matter; then succeed untold
millenniums of slow geological formation; an earth peopled by the lowest
forms of life, whether vegetable or animal; from which crude beginnings a
majestic, unceasing, unhurried, forward movement brings things stage by
stage to the condition in which we know them now. Looking at this steady
progression it is clear that, however we may conceive the nature of the
evolutionary principle, it unerringly provides for the continual advance of
the race. But it does this by creating such numbers of each kind that,
after allowing a wide margin for all possible accidents to individuals, the
race shall still continue:--
"So careful of the type it seems
So careless of the single life."
In short, we may say that the cosmic intelligence works by a Law of
Averages which allows a wide margin of accident and failure to the
individual.
But the progress towards higher intelligence is always in the direction of
narrowing down this margin of accident and taking the individual more and
more out of the law of averages, and substituting the law of individual
selection. In ordinary scientific language this is the survival of the
fittest. The reproduction of fish is on a scale that would choke the sea
with them if every individual survived; but the margin of destruction is
correspondingly enormous, and thus the law of averages simply keeps up the
normal proportion of the race. But at the other end of the scale,
reproduction is by no means thus enormously in excess of survival. True,
there is ample margin of accident and disease cutting off numbers of human
beings before they have gone through the average duration of life, but
still it is on a very different scale from the premature destruction of
hundreds of thousands as against the survival of one. It may, therefore, be
taken as an established fact that in proportion as intelligence advances
the individual ceases to be subject to a mere law of averages and has a
continually increasing power of controlling the conditions of his own
survival.
We see, therefore, that there is a marked distinction between the cosmic
intelligence and the individual intelligence, and that the factor which
differentiates the latter from the former is the presence of _individual_
volition. Now the business of Mental Science is to ascertain the relation
of this individual power of volition to the great cosmic law which provides
for the maintenance and advancement of the race; and the point to be
carefully noted is that the power of individual volition is itself the
outcome of the cosmic evolutionary principle at the point where it reaches
its highest level. The effort of Nature has always been upwards from the
time when only