Buch lesen: «THE EDINBURGH LECTURES ON MENTAL SCIENCE»

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 the lowest forms of life peopled the globe, and it has now

culminated in the production of a being with a mind capable of abstract

reasoning and a brain fitted to be the physical instrument of such a mind.

At this stage the all-creating Life-principle reproduces itself in a form

capable of recognizing the working of the evolutionary law, and the unity

and continuity of purpose running through the whole progression until now

indicates, beyond a doubt, that the place of such a being in the universal

scheme must be to introduce the operation of that factor which, up to this

point, has been, conspicuous by its absence--the factor, namely, of

intelligent individual volition. The evolution which has brought us up to

this standpoint has worked by a cosmic law of averages; it has been a

process in which the individual himself has not taken a conscious part. But

because he is what he is, and leads the van of the evolutionary procession,

if man is to evolve further, it can now only be by his own conscious

co-operation with the law which has brought him up to the standpoint where

he is able to realize that such a law exists. His evolution in the future

must be by conscious participation in the great work, and this can only be

effected by his own individual intelligence and effort. It is a process of

intelligent growth. No one else can grow for us: we must each grow for

ourselves; and this intelligent growth consists in our increasing

recognition of the universal law, which has brought us as far as we have

yet got, and of our own individual relation to that law, based upon the

fact that we ourselves are the most advanced product of it. It is a great

maxim that Nature obeys us precisely in proportion as we first obey Nature.

Let the electrician try to go counter to the principle that electricity

must always pass from a higher to a lower potential and he will effect

nothing; but let him submit in all things to this one fundamental law, and

he can make whatever particular applications of electrical power he will.

These considerations show us that what differentiates the higher from the

lower degree of intelligence is the recognition of its own self-hood, and

the more intelligent that recognition is, the greater will be the power.

The lower degree of self-recognition is that which only realizes itself as

an entity separate from all other entities, as the _ego_ distinguished from

the _non-ego_. But the higher degree of self-recognition is that which,

realizing its own spiritual nature, sees in all other forms, not so much

the _non-ego_, or that which is not itself, as the _alter-ego_, or that

which is itself in a different mode of expression. Now, it is this higher

degree of self-recognition that is the power by which the Mental Scientist

produces his results. For this reason it is imperative that he should

clearly understand the difference between Form and Being; that the one is

the mode of the relative and, the mark of subjection to conditions, and

that the other is the truth of the absolute and is that which controls

conditions.

Now this higher recognition of self as an individualization of pure spirit

must of necessity control all modes of spirit which have not yet reached

the same level of self-recognition. These lower modes of spirit are in

bondage to the law of their own being because they do not know the law;

and, therefore, the individual who has attained to this knowledge can

control them through that law. But to understand this we must inquire a

little further into the nature of spirit. I have already shown that the

grand scale of adaptation and adjustment of all parts of the cosmic scheme

to one another exhibits the presence _somewhere_ of a marvellous

intelligence, underlying the whole, and the question is, where is this

intelligence to be found? Ultimately we can only conceive of it as inherent

in some primordial substance which is the root of all those grosser modes

of matter which are known to us, whether visible to the physical eye, or

necessarily inferred by science from their perceptible effects. It is that

power which, in every species and in every individual, becomes that which

that species or individual is; and thus we can only conceive of it as a

self-forming intelligence inherent in the ultimate substance of which each

thing is a particular manifestation. That this primordial substance must be

considered as self-forming by an inherent intelligence abiding in itself

becomes evident from the fact that intelligence is the essential quality of

spirit; and if we were to conceive of the primordial substance as something

apart from spirit, then we should have to postulate some other power which

is neither spirit nor matter, and originates both; but this is only putting

the idea of a self-evolving power a step further back and asserting the

production of a lower grade of undifferentiated spirit by a higher, which

is both a purely gratuitous assumption and a contradiction of any idea we

can form of undifferentiated spirit at all. However far back, therefore, we

may relegate the original starting-point, we cannot avoid the conclusion

that, at that point, spirit contains the primary substance in itself, which

brings us back to the common statement that it made everything out of

nothing. We thus find two factors to the making of all things, Spirit

and--Nothing; and the addition of Nothing to Spirit leaves _only_ spirit:

x + 0 = x.

From these considerations we see that the ultimate foundation of every form

of matter is spirit, and hence that a universal intelligence subsists

throughout Nature inherent in every one of its manifestations. But this

cryptic intelligence does not belong to the particular _form_ excepting in

the measure in which it is physically fitted for its concentration into

self-recognizing individuality: it lies hidden in that primordial substance

of which the visible form is a grosser manifestation. This primordial

substance is a philosophical necessity, and we can only picture it to

ourselves as something infinitely finer than the atoms which are themselves

a philosophical inference of physical science: still, for want of a better

word, we may conveniently speak of this primary intelligence inherent in

the very substance of things as the Atomic Intelligence. The term may,

perhaps, be open to some objections, but it will serve our present purpose

as distinguishing _this_ mode of spirit's intelligence from that of the

opposite pole, or Individual Intelligence. This distinction should be

carefully noted because it is by the response of the atomic intelligence to

the individual intelligence that thought-power is able to produce results

on the material plane, as in the cure of disease by mental treatment, and

the like. Intelligence manifests itself by responsiveness, and the whole

action of the cosmic mind in bringing the evolutionary process from its

first beginnings up to its present human stage is nothing else but a

continual intelligent response to the demand which each stage in the

progress has made for an adjustment between itself and its environment.

Since, then, we have recognized the presence of a universal intelligence

permeating all things, we must also recognize a corresponding

responsiveness hidden deep down in their nature and ready to be called into

action when appealed to. All mental treatment depends on this

responsiveness of spirit in its lower degrees to higher degrees of itself.

It is here that the difference between the mental scientist and the

uninstructed person comes in; the former knows of this responsiveness and

makes use of it, and the latter cannot use it because he does not know it.