' ' \ ' j V t ji 1 ^{ ;« jM-i Aii M B E K 
 
 ..j.Jli PAST LIVES 
 
 1 
 
1 
 
 THE LIBRARY. 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 lirs. R.J. Gobden 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2014 
 
 https://archive.org/details/howwerememberourOOjina 
 
HOW WE REMEMBER 
 OUR PAST LIVES 
 
 AND OTHER ESSAYS ON REINCARNATION 
 
 C. JINARAJADASA, M. A. 
 
 ST. JOHN'S COLL.. CAMB. 
 
 THE THEOSOPHICAL PRESS 
 826 Oakdale Avenue 
 CHICAGO 
 
Copyright 
 
 1923 
 
 The American TbeosopMcal Society 
 826 Oakdale Avenue 
 Chicago 
 
TO 
 
 THE CAPTAIN OF OUR SALVATION 
 IN FULFILMENT OF A PROMISE 
 FULL MOON OF CHAITRA, 1912 
 
NOTE 
 
 These four essays on Reincarnation have 
 been delivered as lectures during the course of 
 my Theosophical work in America, England 
 and India. All have appeared in The The- 
 osopist, except "The Law of Renunciation/' 
 which was published in Bibby's Annual, 
 whence it is reprinted here with Mr. Joseph 
 Bibby's permission. 
 
 C. J. 
 
PREFACE TO AMERICAN EDITION 
 
 A new school of thought is arising to challenge long- 
 accepted views of life. Its keynote may be said to be 
 ''evolutionary creation." It is an exposition of the 
 phenomena that surrounds us in terms that are both 
 scientific and idealistic. It offers an explanation of 
 life, of the origin of our fragment of the universe, of 
 hidden and mysterious natural laws, of the nature and 
 destiny of man, that appeals with moving force to the 
 logical mind. This school of thought is at the same 
 time both iconoclastic and constructive, for it is sweep- 
 ing away old dogmas that are no longer tenable in 
 the light of rapidly developing modern science, while 
 it is building a substantial structure of facts beneath 
 the age-long dream of immortality. 
 
 The literature that is growing out of ideas which 
 are so revolutionary in the intellectual realm and yet 
 are so welcome to a world groping through the fogs of 
 materialism, is receiving a warm welcome in other 
 lands, and it should be better known here. 
 
 The Publishees. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Page 
 
 How We Remember Past Lives 11 
 
 The Vision of the Spirit 53 
 
 The Law of Renunciation 81 
 
 The Hidden Work of Nature 91 
 
HOW WE REMEMBER OUR 
 PAST LIVES 
 
 Among the many ideas that have lightened 
 the burden of men, one of the most service- 
 able has been that of Reincarnation. It not 
 only explains why one man is born in the lap 
 of luxury and another in poverty, why one is 
 a genius and another an idiot, but -it also 
 holds out the hope that, as men now reap as 
 they have sown in the past, so in future lives 
 the poor and the wretched of today will have 
 what they lack, if so they work for it, and 
 that the idiot may life after life build up a 
 mentality which in far-off days may flower 
 as the genius. 
 
 When the idea of reincarnation is heard 
 of for the first time, the student naturally 
 supposes that it is a Hindu doctrine, for it is 
 known to be a fundamental part of both 
 Hinduism and Buddhism. But the strange 
 fact is that reincarnation is found every- 
 where as a belief, and its origin cannot be 
 traced to Indian soiurces. We hear of it in 
 
12 REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 
 
 far-oJEf Australia/ and there is a story on rec- 
 ord of an Australian aborigine who went 
 cheerfully to the gallows, and replied on be- 
 ing questioned as to his levity, "Tumble down 
 black-fellow, jump up white-fellow, and have 
 lots of sixpences to spend!" It was taught 
 by the Druids of ancient Gaul, and Julius 
 Caesar tells us how young Gauls were taught 
 reincarnation, and that as a consequence they 
 had no fear of death. Greek philosophers 
 knew of it; we have Pythagoras telling his 
 pupils that in his past lives he had been a 
 warrior at the siege of Troy, and later was 
 the philosopher Hermotimus of Clazomenae, 
 It is not utterly unknown to Christian teach- 
 ing, if we take the simple statement of Christ, 
 when questioned whether John the Baptist 
 was Elijah or Elias reborn, "If ye will receive 
 it, this is Elias which was for to come," and He 
 follows up the statement with the significant 
 words, "He that hath ears to hear, let him 
 hear." In later Jewish tradition the idea is 
 known and the Talmud mentions several 
 cases of reincarnation. 
 
 There are many to whom reincarnation 
 appeals most forcibly, and Schopenhauer does 
 
 iSee The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, by Baldwin 
 Spencer & F. G. Gillen, 1904, p. 175, etc. 
 
REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 13 
 
 but little exaggerate when he says, "I have 
 also remarked that it is at once obvious to 
 every one who hears of it for the first time." 
 Some believe in the idea immediately; it 
 comes to them like a flash of light in thick 
 darkness and the problem of life is clearly 
 seen with reincarnation as the solution. 
 Others there are who grow into belief, as each 
 doubt is solved and each question answered. 
 
 Now there is one, and only one, objection 
 that can logically be brought against rein- 
 carnation, if correctly understood as The- 
 osophy teaches it, and it lies in the question: 
 ^^If, as you say, I have lived on earth in 
 other bodies, why don't I remember the past?'' 
 
 Now if reincarnation is a fact in nature, 
 there surely will be enough other facts that 
 will point to its existence. No fact in nature 
 is isolated and it is possible in diverse ways 
 to discover that fact. Similarly it is with re- 
 incarnation; there are indeed enough facts 
 of a psychological kind to prove to a thinker 
 that reincarnation must be a fact after all 
 and not a theory. 
 
 In answering the question why we do not 
 remember our past lives, surely the first 
 necessary point is to ask of ourselves what we 
 
14 REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 
 
 mean by memory. If we have some clear 
 ideas as to the mechanism of memory, per- 
 haps we may be able to understand why we 
 do not (or do) ^'remember" our past days or 
 lives. Now, briefly speaking, what we usu- 
 ally mean by memory is a summing up. If I 
 remember to-day the incidents of my cutting 
 my finger yesterday, there will be two ele- 
 ments in my memory, first the series of events 
 that went to produce the pain — the misad- 
 venture in handling the knife, the cut, the 
 bleeding, the sensorial reaction of the brain, 
 the gesture, and so on; and second the sense 
 of pain. As days pass, the cause of the pain 
 recedes into the periphery of consciousness, 
 while the effect as pain still holds the center. 
 Presently we shall find that e ven the memory 
 of the pain itself recedes into the background, 
 leaving behind with us not a direct memory 
 as an event, but an indirect memory as a 
 tendency — a tendency to be careful in the 
 handling of all cutting implements. Con- 
 tinually this process is taking place ; the cause 
 is forgotten, though recoverable under hyp- 
 nosis from the subconscious mind, while the 
 effect, transmuted into tendency, remains. 
 It is here that we are specially aided by the 
 
REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 
 
 15 
 
 brain. We are apt to think of the brain as a 
 recorder of memory, without realizing that 
 one of its most useful functions is to wipe out 
 memories. The brain plays the dual func- 
 tion of remembering and forgetting, and but 
 for our ability to forget, life would be impos- 
 sible. If each time we tried to move a limb, 
 we were to remember all our infantile ef- 
 forts at movement and the hesitation and 
 doubt and perhaps actual pain involved, our 
 consciousness would be so overwhelmed by 
 memories that the necessary movement of 
 the limb would certainly be delayed, or not 
 made at all. Similarly it is with every func- 
 tion now performed automatically which was 
 once consciously acquired; it is because we 
 do forget the process of acquiring, that we can 
 utilize the faculty. 
 
 This is what is continuously taking place in 
 consciousness with each one of us. There is a 
 process of exchange, similar to copper coins 
 of one denomination being changed to silver 
 coins of smaller bulk representing them, then 
 into gold coins of smaller weight stilF, and 
 later to notes representing a value, and last of 
 all to a cheque-book whose intrinsic worth, 
 except in those countries that have stamp 
 
16 REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 
 
 duties, is nil. Yet we have but to write our 
 signature on a cheque to put into operation 
 the whole medium of exchange. It is a simi- 
 lar process that takes place with all memories 
 of sensations, feelings and thoughts. These 
 are severally grouped into categories and 
 transmuted into likes and dislikes, and into 
 talents and faculties. 
 
 Now we know that as we manifest a like or 
 dislike or exhibit any capacity, we are re- 
 membering our past, though we cannot re- 
 member in detail one by one the memories 
 that contribute to the emotion or faculty. If I 
 write these words in English on this page, I 
 am remembering the first time I saw each 
 word in a reading book and looked up its 
 meaning in a dictionary as I prepared my 
 home lessons ; but it is a kind of transmuted 
 memory. Nevertheless I do remember, and 
 but for those memories being somewhere in 
 my consciousness (whether in touch with 
 some brain cells or not is not now the point) 
 I should not be able to think of the right word 
 to express my thought nor shape it on this 
 paper so that the printer would recognize the 
 letters to set them up in print. Furthermore 
 
REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 
 
 we know as a fact that we forget these 
 causative memories one by one; it would be 
 foolish if as I write a particular word I were 
 to try to call up the memory of the first time 
 I saw it. The brain is a recording instrument 
 of such a kind that, though it records, it does 
 not obey the consciousness when it desires to 
 unroll the record, except in certain abnormal 
 cases. To want to remember is not necessarily 
 followed by remembrance, and we have to 
 take this fact as it is. 
 
 Here it is that Bergson has very luminously 
 pointed out that "we think with only a small 
 part of the past, but it is with our entire past, 
 including the original bent of our soul, that we 
 desire, will and act.^^ Clearly then it would 
 be useless to try to remember our past lives 
 by the mere exercise of the mind; though 
 thought can recall something of the past, it is 
 only a fraction of the whole. But on the other 
 hand, let us but feel or act, and then at once 
 our feeling and action is the resultant of all 
 the forces of the past that have converged on 
 our individuality. If therefore we are to trace 
 memories of our past lives in our present 
 normal consciousness, we must note how we 
 feel and act, expecting to recover little of such 
 
18 REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 
 
 memories in a mere mental effort to remem- 
 ber. 
 
 Every feeling and act, then, can be slowly 
 traced to its component parts of impressions 
 from without and reactions from within. So 
 much is this the case with each one of us, 
 that we can construct for ourselves what has 
 been another's past as we watch that other 
 feel and act, provided he does both in an 
 average fashion. But if he manifests a mode 
 that is not the average mode of thought or 
 feeling, then he becomes incomprehensible 
 and needs explanation. Since then average 
 feelings and actions can be readily explained 
 as the result of average experiences, unusual 
 feelings and actions must be explained as 
 having an unusual causation. If the present 
 writer were to deliver a lecture in English in 
 India, where so many can speak English, each 
 of his listeners would take for granted that 
 he had been to school and college, without 
 perhaps inquiring further when and where. 
 But were he instead of speaking in English to 
 speak in Italian, at once then each would be 
 curious to know how and when that faculty of 
 speaking in Italian had been grown. Further- 
 more, if an Italian were present in the audi- 
 
REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 19 
 
 ence, he would know that the speaker 
 must have been in Italy or must have spent 
 considerable time among Italians. Wherever 
 there is any manifestation of feeling or action 
 — as indeed of some expressions of thought 
 too — which has something of the quality of 
 the expert, then we must construct for that 
 faculty a slow growth through experiences 
 that result from experiments along that par- 
 ticular line. 
 
 Now each one of us has qualities of an 
 average kind, as also a few of an expert kind. 
 The former we can account for by average 
 experiences. Let us examine some of the lat- 
 ter, and see if we can account for them on any 
 other hypothesis than that of reincarnation. 
 
 Now one of the principal things that 
 characterize men is their likes and dislikes. 
 Sometimes these might be called rational; 
 that is, they are such likes and dislikes as an 
 average typical individual of his particular 
 species might be said normally to possess at 
 his stage in evolution. We can account for 
 these normal likes and dislikes, because they 
 are such as we ourselves manifest under simi- 
 lar conditions,, But-suppose we take the case 
 of an extraordinary liking, such as is termed 
 
20 REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 
 
 ^^love at first sight/' Two people meet in the 
 seeming fortuitous adjustment of human 
 events, sometimes, it may be, coming from 
 the ends of the earth. They know nothing of 
 each other, and yet ensues the curious phe- 
 nomenon that they know a great deal of each 
 other. Life would be a happy thing if we 
 could go out with deep affection to all we 
 meet; but we know we cannot, it is not in our 
 nature. Why then should it be in our nature 
 to "fall in love'' with a particular individual? 
 Why should we be ready to sacrifice all for 
 this person whom, in this life at least, we 
 have met but a few times? How is it that we 
 seem to know the inner working of his heart 
 and brain from the little he reveals at our 
 conventional intercourse at the beginning? 
 "railing in love" is indeed a mysterious 
 psychological phenomena, but the process is 
 far better described as being dragged into 
 love, since the individual is forced to obey 
 and may not refrain. Now there are two 
 logical explanations possible ; one is the ribald 
 one of the scoffer that it is some form of hys- 
 teria or insanity, due it may be to a microbe ; 
 the other is that in this profound going forth 
 of one individual, as an expert in feeling, 
 
REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 21 
 
 towards another, we have not a first meeting 
 but the last of many many meetings that took 
 place in past lives. Where or when is of little 
 consequence to the lovers; indeed Rudyard 
 Kipling has suggested in his ^'Finest Story in 
 the World'' that it is only in order that we 
 might not miss the delicious sensation of fall- 
 ing in love with our beloved, that the kindly 
 gods have made us drink of the river of for- 
 getfulness before we returned to life on earth. 
 The principal thing to note in this emotional 
 mood of being in love is that the friendship is 
 not as one that begins, but as one that is con- 
 tinued; and in that psychological attitude of 
 the two lovers we have the remembrance of 
 past lives when they met and loved and sac- 
 rificed to each other. 
 
 Not dissimilar to this unusual liking that 
 is falling in love is the unusual disliking that 
 is not so very rare in human experience. 
 Certain nojmal dislikes we can readily ac- 
 count for;^^ut take the case of two individu- 
 als meeting for the first time, it may be know- 
 ing nothing even by hearsay of each other, 
 and then we have sometimes the striking phe- 
 nomenon of one of the two drawing back from 
 the other, not outwardly by gesture, but in- 
 
22 REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 
 
 wardly by a feeling or an intuition. In all 
 such cases of drawing back the curious thing 
 is that there is no personal feeling; it is not a 
 violent feeling of '^I do not like you/^ but far 
 more an impersonal state of mind where al- 
 most no feeling manifests, but may be para- 
 phrased into, "It is wise to have little to do 
 with you.'^ Sometimes we follow this in- 
 tuition, but usually we brush it aside as un- 
 just, and then turn to understanding our ac- 
 quaintance with the mind. Not infrequently 
 it then follows that we begin to like him, per- 
 haps even to love him. We forget our "first 
 impression,'^ or put it aside as mere irrational 
 impulse. Now^ there are many such revul- 
 sions that are purely irrational impulses, but 
 there is a residue of cases where after-events 
 show that the dislike was not an impulse but 
 an intuition. For it may happen, after years 
 have passed of intercourse with our friend, 
 that suddenly without any warning he as it 
 were stabs us in the back and deals us a mor- 
 tal blow; and then in our grief and humilia- 
 tion we remember that first impression of ours 
 and wish that we had followed it. 
 
 Whence came this first impression? Re- 
 incarnation offers a solution, which is that the 
 
REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 23 
 
 injured had suffered in past lives at the hands 
 of the injurer and it is the memory of that 
 . suffering that flashes to the mind as the in- 
 tuition. 
 
 More striking still are those cases where 
 there exist at the same time like and dislike, 
 love and resentment. The writer well remem- 
 bers a lady describing her attitude to a friend 
 to whom she was profoundly attached in the 
 following words, "I love him, but I despise 
 him!" I wonder how many wives say this 
 daily of their husbands, or husbands of their 
 wives. Why should there be this incompre- 
 hensible jumble of contradictory feelings? 
 
 The clue is strikingly given by W. E. Hen- 
 ley in his well-known poem, 
 
 Or ever the knightly years were gone 
 With the old world to the grave, 
 
 I was a king in Babylon, 
 
 And you were a Christian slave. 
 
 The poet goes on to tell us how the king "saw 
 and took," and toyed with the maid and, as is 
 a man's way, finally cast her aside. But she 
 loved him well, but heart-broken at his treat- 
 ment committed suicide. Now it is obvious 
 that the girl dies full of both love and resent- 
 
24 REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 
 
 ment, and since what we sow we reap, each 
 in the rebirth reaps an emotional attitude the 
 result of past causes. For this time the man 
 loves, and desires to possess her; she loves 
 him in return and yet does not permit him to 
 have his heart's desire. 
 
 The pride I trampled is now my scathe, 
 
 For it tramples me again; 
 The old resentment lasts like death, 
 
 For you love, and yet you refrain; 
 I break my heart on your hard unfaith, 
 
 And I break my heart in vain. 
 
 Henley sees with his poetic vision that the 
 present situation as between the two cannot 
 be the end in eternity; there must be a true 
 loving and understanding of each other at the 
 long last; and so the poem ends with the 
 man's pride in his past, and resignation in the 
 present, 
 
 Yet not for an hour do I wish undone 
 
 The deed beyond the grave, 
 When I was a king in Babylon 
 
 And you were a virgin slave. 
 
 There can only be one ending, that of the 
 fairy tale, since it needs must be a universe 
 where there is One who loves, that. 
 
REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 25 
 
 Journeys end in lovers' meeting 
 Every wise man's son doth know. 
 
 We have so far been considering the mani- 
 festations of an individuaFs emotional nature, 
 and it is obvious that because of his own ex- 
 periences he will be able to understand the 
 emotions of others, so long as such emotions 
 are in the main of like nature. But what of 
 those individuals who thoroughly understand 
 such experiences as have not come to them? 
 Shakespeare understands the working of a 
 woman's heart and mind, and, too, all 
 the intricate mental and emotional processes 
 of the traitor; Dickens knows how the mur- 
 derer feels after committing the crime. 
 
 Furthermore, some gifted men and women, 
 experiencing emotions, generalize from them 
 to what is experienced by all, while one not so 
 gifted, though once ^^bitten,'' is not twice 
 ^'shy,'' nor is made appreciably wiser by the 
 same experience coming to him over and over 
 again. The gifted few, on the other hand, 
 will fathom the universal quality in a single 
 experience, and from it will anticipate many 
 of like nature ; for themselves, and sometimes 
 for others too, they will state their experiences 
 
26 REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 
 
 reduced to algebraic formulse, as it were, each 
 formula including in one general statement all 
 particular cases. Their thoughts and feelings 
 are like aphorisms, with the transformation 
 of many experiences into one Experience. 
 
 Now to generalize from our particular emo- 
 tions is as rare a gift as to originate a philos- 
 ophy from the particular thoughts we gain 
 about things. Yet it is this generalization 
 from particular emotions that is characteris- 
 tic of a poet, and the more universal are his 
 generalizations the greater is he as poet. Why 
 then should an individual here and there have 
 this wonderful ability of seeing particular 
 men as representatives of types, and particu- 
 lar emotions as expressions of universal emo- 
 tions? We say that such a man is a genius, 
 but the word genius merely describes and 
 does not explain. There are geniuses in every 
 department of life — religion, poetry, art, mu- 
 sic, statesmanship, the drama, generalship in 
 war and in commerce, and in many other 
 phases of life. These geniuses are character- 
 ized by many abnormal qualities ; they are al- 
 ways men of the future and not of their day, 
 and each genius is a lawgiver to future gener- 
 ations in his own department of activity; and 
 
KEMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 
 
 27 
 
 above all, they live emotionally and mentally 
 in wide generalizations. Whence comes this 
 wonderful ability? 
 
 One explanation offered is Heredity. But 
 how far does heredity really explain genius? 
 According to the hitherto accepted theory of 
 heredity, each generation adds a little to a 
 quality brought from the generation before, 
 and then transmits it to the next ; this in turn 
 adds a little, and passes on the total of what it 
 has received plus its own contribution ; and so 
 on generation after generation, till we arrive 
 at a particular generation, and one individual 
 of it, in whom the special quality in some 
 mysterious way gets concentrated, and that 
 individual is thereby a genius. According to 
 this popular theory, some remote ancestor of 
 Shakespeare had a fraction of Shakespeare^s 
 genius, which he transmitted through hered- 
 ity to his offspring; this offspring then, keep- 
 ing intact what was given him by his parent, 
 added to the stock from his own experiences, 
 and then passed on both to his child; and so 
 on in successive generations, each generation 
 treasuring what is given to it from all pre- 
 vious generations, and adding something of 
 its own before transmitting it to the next. 
 
28 REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 
 
 Shakespeare then is as the torrent from a 
 reservoir that has slowly been dammed up, 
 and bursts its sides when the pressure has 
 passed beyond a certain point. 
 
 Such a conception of heredity is .based 
 upon the assumption that what an individual 
 acquires of faculty as the result of adaptabil- 
 ity to his environment is passed on to his off- 
 spring. Such is indeed the conclusion that 
 the Darwinian school of biologists came to 
 from their analysis of what happens in na- 
 ture. But biological research during the last 
 twenty-five years has been largely directed to 
 testing the validity of the theory of the trans- 
 mission of acquired characteristics, and not 
 only has not one indisputable instance yet 
 been found, but all experiments in breeding 
 and crossing on the other hand accumulate 
 proofs to the contrary. 
 
 The new school of biologists known as the 
 Mendelians have therefore come to theories 
 about heredity that are not only novel 
 but startling. According to them, struc- 
 tural characteristics, upon which must 
 depend the mental and moral capa- 
 cities of an individual, existed in 
 every ancestor in their fullness; and further 
 
REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 29 
 
 they must all have been in the first speck of 
 living matter. Nothing has been added by 
 evolution to this original stock of capacities 
 in protoplasm, and every genius the world has 
 known or will know existed potentially in it, 
 though he had to wait millions of years be- 
 fore there arose the appropriate arrangement 
 of the '^genetic factors" to enable him to ap- 
 pear as a genius on the evolutionary stage. 
 Nature has not evolved the complex brain 
 structure of Shakespeare out of the rudimen- 
 tary brains of the mammals; that complexity 
 existed in a pin-head of protoplasm. Nature 
 has not evolved the genius; she has merely 
 released him from the fetters that bound him 
 in the primordial protoplasm, by eliminating, 
 generation after generation, such genetic fac- 
 tors as inhibited his manifestation. Bateson 
 sums up these modern theories when he says : 
 
 I have confidence that the artistic gifts of mankind 
 will prove to be due not to something added to the 
 make-up of the ordinary man, but to the absence of 
 factors which in the normal person inhibit the de- 
 velopment of these gifts. They are almost beyond 
 doubt to be looked upon as releases of powers nor- 
 mally suppressed. The instrument is there, but it is 
 '^stopped down."^ 
 
 iPresidential Address, British Association, 1914. 
 
30 REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 
 
 Time alone will show how far the Mende- 
 liari conception will need to be modified by 
 later discoveries; but it is fairly certain al- 
 ready that the older Darwinian conception of 
 heredity is untenable, and that if a man is a 
 genius he owes very little to the intellectual 
 and emotional achievements of his ancestors. 
 If, however, we admit with the Mendelians 
 that a genius is "released" merely by the re- 
 moval of inhibiting factors, and is not the 
 result of slow accumulations, we have still the 
 original mystery unsolved, and that is to ex- 
 plain the synthetic ability of the genius. We 
 are therefore no nearer really explaining the 
 nature of genius along Mendelian theories 
 than along the Darwinian; the theories of 
 science merely tell us under what conditions 
 genius will or will not manifest, but nothing 
 more. 
 
 The only rational theory of genius, that ac- 
 cepts scientific facts as to heredity and also 
 explains what genius is, comes from the con- 
 ception of reincarnation. If we hold that an 
 individual is a soul, that is, an imperishable 
 and evolving ego, and manifests through a 
 body appropriate to his stage of growth and to 
 a work he is to do in that body, then we see 
 
REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 
 
 31 
 
 that his emotional and mental attributes are 
 the results of experiences he has gained in 
 past lives ; but since he can express them only 
 through a suitable body and brain, these then 
 must be of such a kind as nature has by 
 heredity selected for such use. The manifesta- 
 tion of any capacity then depends on two in- 
 dispensable factors, first an ego or conscious- 
 ness who has developed that capacity by re- 
 peated experiments in past lives, and second, 
 a suitable instrument, a physical body, of 
 such a nature structurally as makes possible 
 the expression of that capacity. When there- 
 fore we consider genius, if on the one hand a 
 particular genius has not a body fash- 
 ioned out of genetic factors that do not inhibit 
 his genius, he is ^'stopped down,'' to use Bate- 
 son's simile, and his genius is unreleased; but 
 if on the other hand nature were to produce a 
 thousand bodies that were not "stopped 
 down, "we should not ipso facto have a thou- 
 sand geniuses. Two lines of evolution must 
 therefore converge before there can manifest 
 any quality that is not purely functional, the 
 first being that of the evolution of an inde- 
 structible consciousness that continually ex- 
 periments with life and slowly becomes ex- 
 
32 REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 
 
 pert thereby, and the second the evolution of 
 a physical structure, that by heredity is 
 selected to respond to a given stimulus from 
 within. 
 
 If, with this clue as to what is happening in 
 nature, we examine the various geniuses the 
 world has produced, we shall see that they are 
 remembering their past lives as they exhibit 
 their genius. Take for instance such a genius 
 as the young violinist, Mischa Elman, who a 
 few years ago began his musical career; he 
 was then but a lad, and yet even at that age 
 he manifested marvellous technical ability. 
 Now we may perhaps legitimately account for 
 this technical ability along Mendelian lines, 
 as being due to a rare confluence of genetic 
 factors; but by no theory of physical heredity 
 can we explain what surprised the most exact- 
 ing of musical critics — Mischa Elman's 
 interpretation of music. For it is just in this 
 interpretation that a music lover can see the 
 soul of the performer, whether that soul is a 
 big one or a little, whether the performer has 
 known of life superficially or has touched 
 life's core. Now Elman's interpretation, ab- 
 solutely spontaneous as it was, and unimi- 
 tated from a teacher, was that of a man and 
 
REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 33 
 
 not that of a boy. Little wonder that many a 
 critic was puzzled, or that the musical critic 
 of the London Telegraph should write as fol- 
 lows: 
 
 Rain beat noisily upon the roof and thunder roared 
 and rattled, but Mischa Elman went calmly on with 
 his prescribed Paganini and Bach and Wieniawski. 
 Calmly is the word, be it noted, not stolidly. We have 
 had stolid wonder-children on our musical platforms; 
 Mischa is not of them. Upon his face, as he plies 
 the bow, rests a great peace, and only now and then, 
 with a more decided expression, does he lower his 
 cheek upon the instrument, as though he would re- 
 ceive from it the impulse of itsvibrations and to it com- 
 municate his own soul beats. The marvel of this boy 
 does not lie in his execution of difficult passages. If 
 it did, perhaps we should award it but perfunctory 
 notice, seeing that among the children of our genera- 
 tion there are so many who play with difficult pas- 
 sages much as their predecessors did with marbles. 
 We have gone beyond mere dexterity in bowing and 
 fingering, and can say, in the spirit of one of old time, 
 that from the babe and suckling comes now the per- 
 fection of such praise as lies within the compass of a 
 violin. 
 
 Asked to account for this — to explain why Mischa 
 Elman, laying cheek to wood, reveals the insight and 
 feeling of a man who has risen to the heights and 
 plumbed the depths of human life — we simply ac- 
 knowledge that the matter is beyond us. We can do 
 no more than speculate, and, perhaps, hope for a day 
 
34 REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 
 
 in which the all-embracing science of an age more 
 advanced than our own shall discover the particular 
 brain formation, or adjustment, to which infants owe 
 the powers that men and women vainly seek. Those 
 powers may be the Wordsworthian '^clouds of glory," 
 brought from another world. If so, what a brilliant 
 birth must that of Mischa Elman have been! The 
 boy was heard in a work by Paganini and another by 
 Wieniawski, both good things of their meretricious 
 kind, and both irradiated, as we could not but fancy, 
 by the unconscious genius which shines alike on the 
 evil and the good, making the best of both. Upon 
 the mere execution of these works we do not dwell, 
 preferring the charm of the moments in which the 
 music lent itself to the mysterious emotion of the 
 youthful player, and showed not the painted visage of 
 a mountebank, but the face of an angel! 
 
 If along lines of reincarnation we suppose 
 that Mischa Elman is a soul who in his past 
 lives has in truth "risen to the heights and 
 plumbed the depths of human life/' then we 
 have a reasonable explanation for his genius; 
 in each interpretation there is reflected the 
 summing up of his past experiences, and he 
 can through his music tell us of a man's sor- 
 row or a man's joy because as a man in past 
 lives he has experienced both, and retains 
 their memory in emotional and intellectual 
 generalizations. This explanation further 
 
REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 35 
 
 joins hands with science, because the reincar- 
 nation theory of genius implies the need by 
 the musical soul of a body with a musical 
 heredity, that has been ''selected'' by evolu- 
 tion and has been built up by appropriate 
 genetic factors. 
 
 Reincarnation alone explains another 
 genius who must remain a puzzle according 
 to all other theories. Keats is known in 
 English poetry as the most "Greek" of all 
 England's poets; he possessed naturally that 
 unique feeling for life that was the treasure 
 of the Greek temperament. If he had been 
 a Greek scholar and steeped in the traditions 
 of Greek culture, we might account for this 
 ''anima naturaliter Graeca of the Greekless 
 Keats." But when we consider that Keats 
 had "little Latin and less Greek," and began 
 life as a surgeon's apprentice and a medical 
 student, we may well wonder why he sings 
 not as a Christian poet should do, but as some 
 Greek shepherd born on the slopes of Mt. 
 Etna. The wonder however at once ceases 
 if we presume that Keats is the reincarnation 
 of a Greek poet, and is remembering his past 
 lives as he reverts to Greek ways of thought 
 and feeling. 
 
36 REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 
 
 With reincarnation as a clue it is interest- 
 ing to see how a little analysis enables us to 
 say where in the past an individual must have 
 lived. In the culture of the West, there are 
 three main types of "reversion/' to Rome, to 
 Greece and to India. Any one who has stud- 
 ied Roman institutions and the Roman con- 
 ception of life finds little difficulty in noting 
 how the English temperament is largely that 
 of ancient Rome in a modern garb; the val- 
 ues, for instance in history, of such historians 
 as Gibbon, Macauley, Hume, are practically 
 the same as those of Roman historians, 
 Sallust, Tacitus, Livy, and the rest; whereas 
 if we were to take French historians we shall 
 find them scarcely at all Roman in tempera- 
 ment, and far more akin to the Greek. The 
 equation Tennyson = Virgil is certainly not 
 far-fetched to those who know the quality of 
 both poets. 
 
 The reversion to Greece we find very clear 
 in such writers as Goethe, Schiller, Lessing. 
 Why should these writers have proclaimed to 
 Germany with unbounded enthusiasm the 
 message of "back to Greece,'' but that they 
 knew from their own experience in past lives 
 what Greek culture had still for men? For 
 
REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 37 
 
 what is enthusiasm but the springing forward 
 of the soul to experience a freshness and de- 
 light in life that it has known elsewhere and 
 whose call it recognizes again? These men of 
 enthusiasm, the pioneers of the future, are as 
 sports or freaks in nature otherwise; let us 
 but think of them as reincarnated souls re- 
 membering in their enthusiasm their past 
 lives, and they become not sports but the first- 
 fruits of a glorious humanity that is to be. 
 
 Who that has studied Platonism has not 
 been reminded of Platonic conceptions when 
 reading Emerson? Though Emerson has not 
 the originality nor the daring of Plato, yet is 
 he truly "Greek;'' it does not require such 
 a great flight of the imagination to see him as 
 some Alexandrian follower of Plato. How 
 natural then too that Emerson should enter 
 the ministry to give his message, but should 
 find himself unable to do it as a Christian 
 minister, and should strike out a path for 
 himself as an essayist to speak of the World- 
 Soul! And who that has studied Indian 
 philosophies does not recognize old Vedantin 
 philosophers in Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and a 
 Buddhist philosopher in Schopenhauer, all 
 reverting to their philosophic interests of past 
 
38 REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 
 
 lives, and uttering their ancient convictions 
 more brilliantly than ever before? Wherever 
 the deeper layers of a man^s being are offered 
 to the world in some creation through 
 philosophy, literature, art, or science, there 
 may we note tendencies started in past lives ; 
 for the pageant of a man's life is not planned 
 and achieved in the few brief years that begin 
 with his birth, and he that knows of reincar- 
 nation may note readily enough where the 
 parts of that pageant were composed. 
 
 Reincarnation as it affects large groups of 
 individuals is a fascinating study to one with 
 a historical bent of mind. I have mentioned 
 that the English race as a whole is largely a 
 reincarnation of the ancient Roman ; but here 
 and there we find a sprinkling of returned 
 Greeks in men like Byron, Ruskin, Matthew 
 Arnold, and in those English men and women 
 who have the Greek joy of life and are as 
 strangers in a strange land. Let a returned 
 Greek, wherever he be born in this life, but 
 go to South Italy or Greece, and he will be- 
 gin to remember his past life in the instinc- 
 tife familiarity he will feel with the hidden 
 jBirit of tree and lake and hill ; as none but a 
 ^reek can, he will find a joy in the sunshine, 
 
REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 39 
 
 in the lemon groves and vineyards and water- 
 falls that in a Greek land give the message of 
 nature as in no other land. 
 
 Others there are who, born last life in the 
 middle ages somewhere in Europe, perhaps 
 in Italy or Spain or Germany, when they re- 
 visit the land of their former birth, will have 
 a strange familiarity with the things that pass 
 before them. In striking ways they read into 
 the life of the people, and understand the why 
 of things. To some this mysterious sense of 
 recollection may be strongest in Egypt, or 
 India, or Japan; but wherever we have the 
 intuitive understanding of a foreign people, 
 we have one mode of remembering our past 
 lives. 
 
 It is in the characteristic intellectual attitude 
 of the French that we see the reincarnation 
 of much that was developed in later Greece. 
 The French intellectual clarity and dispas- 
 sionate keenness to see things "as they are'' 
 (whether they bring material benefits or not) 
 is typically Greek. And perhaps, could we 
 know more fully of the life of the Phoenicians, 
 we should see them reborn in the Germans 
 of today; and then the commercial rivalry be- 
 tween England and Germany for the capture 
 
40 REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 
 
 of the markets of the East would be but the 
 rebirth of the ancient rivalry between Rome 
 and Carthage for the markets of the Mediter- 
 ranean. 
 
 An eruption of Greek egos is fairly evident 
 in the United States of America. On the Pa- 
 cific coast specially there are many men and 
 women of the simple Greek temperament of 
 the pre-Periclean age, and yet their ancestors 
 were not infrequently New England Puritans. 
 It is in America, too, we have the Sophists of 
 Greece in full strength in the ^^New Thought" 
 writers that spring up in that land month 
 after month. In them we have the same char- 
 acteristics as had the Sophists of Greece — 
 much sound sense and many a useful wrinkle, 
 an independence of landmarks and traditions, 
 an unbounded confidence in their own pan- 
 acea, and a giving of their message of the 
 Spirit "for a consideration.'^ The lack of dis- 
 tinction in their minds in Greece between 
 Sophism and Wisdom returns in the twen- 
 tieth century as a confusion between the New 
 Thought ideas of the Divine Life and the real 
 life of the Spirit. Let us hope that as the 
 Sophists helped to bring in the Golden Age of 
 Greece, so the "New Thought-ers" are the 
 
REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 41 
 
 forerunners of that True Thought that is to 
 dawn, which is neither old nor new. 
 
 Here and there in India we find one who is 
 distinctly not Hindu. For the most part the 
 modern Hindus seem scarce to have been in 
 other lands in their late incarnations; but 
 now and then a man or woman is met with 
 for whom the sacrosanct institutions of ortho- 
 doxy have no meaning, and who takes up 
 western ideas of progress with avidity. Some 
 of these are "England-returned,'' in this 
 present incarnation, and we can thus account 
 for their mentality; but when w^e find a man 
 who has never left India, who was reared in 
 strict orthodoxy, and yet fights with enthusi- 
 asm for foreign ways of thought, surely we 
 have here a "Europe-returned'' ego, from 
 Greece or Rome or from some other of the 
 many lands of the West. 
 
 We must not forget to draw attention to the 
 egos from Greece that returned to Europe to 
 usher in the age of art. To one familiar with 
 Greek sculpture and architecture it is not dif- 
 ficult to see the Greek artists reborn in the 
 Italian masters of painting and architecture. 
 The cult is no longer that of Pallas Athene 
 and the gods; there is now the Virgin Mary 
 
42 REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 
 
 and the saints to give them their heavenly 
 crowns. Whence did the Italian masters 
 gain their surety of touch if not from a past 
 birth in Greece? It is striking, too^ how the 
 Romans who excelled in portraiture should be 
 reborn in the English School of portrait 
 painters, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Lawrence, 
 and the rest. 
 
 Nor must we forget the band of Greeks that 
 like an inundation swept over the Elizabethan 
 stage. Marlowe, Beaumont, Fletcher, Peele, 
 Johnson, and the rest — are they not pagans 
 thinly veiled in English garb? They felt life 
 in un-English modes ; they first felt and then 
 thought out the feeling. The Greek is ever 
 the Greek, whatsoever the language that is 
 given him to speak, and his touch in litera- 
 ture and art is not easily veiled. 
 
 Strong impressions made on the conscious- 
 ness in a past life appear in the present often 
 in some curious mood or mind. Sometimes 
 fears of creeping things, fire, cutting imple- 
 ments, etc., are thus to be accounted for, 
 though sometimes these "phobias'' may only 
 be sub-conscious remainders of this life. In 
 the cases where we have no subconsciousness 
 of the present body appearing, there is 
 
REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 43 
 
 sure to have been some shock, resulting 
 it may be in a violent death, in a past life; 
 and the after-effects appear now in an uncon- 
 trollable fear or in discomfort in the presence 
 of the object that caused the shock. More 
 strange is the attitude of one individual to 
 another brought over from a past life; 
 sometimes one sees the strange sight of a girl 
 of ten or twelve taking care of her mother in a 
 maternal way, as though the positions were 
 reversed, and almost as if she had the onerous 
 duty of bringing up her mother in the way 
 she should go. Of a deeper psychological 
 nature is it when, as sometimes happens, a 
 wife mated to a husband that causes her suf- 
 fering finds charity towards him possible only 
 when she looks on him not as her husband but 
 as her child; here we have a reminiscence of 
 a life when he was indeed her child, and his 
 better nature came out towards her in the 
 relation that he bore to her then. 
 
 A rather humorous instance of past recol- 
 lection is found when there has been betv/een 
 the last life and this a change of sex of the 
 body. In the West specially, where there is a 
 more marked differentiation temperamentally 
 between the sexes than in the East, not in- 
 
44 REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 
 
 frequently the girl who dislikes playing with 
 dolls, delights in boy's games, and is a pro- 
 nounced tomboy, is really an ego who has just 
 taken up a bod}^ of the sex opposite to that 
 with which he has been familiar for many 
 lives. Many a girl has resented her skirts, 
 and it takes such a girl several years before 
 she finally resigns herself to them. Some 
 women there are on whose face and mode 
 of carriage the last male incarnation seems 
 still fairly visibly portrayed, as indeed a 
 similar thing is to be seen in some men who 
 bring into this life traces of their habits of 
 thought and feeling when last they had 
 women's bodies. 
 
 A consideration of the many psychological 
 puzzles I have enumerated will show us that 
 as a matter of fact people do remember some- 
 thing of their past lives. Truly the memory 
 is indirect, as a habit or a mood, but it is 
 memory of the past nevertheless. Now people 
 willing to accept reincarnation as a fact in 
 life naturally ask the question, ^^But why 
 don't we remember fully f To this there are 
 two answers, the first of which is: "It is best 
 for us not to remember directly and fully, till 
 we are ready for the memories." 
 
REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 45 
 
 We are not ready for remembrance so long 
 as we are influenced by the memories of the 
 past. Where, for instance, the memory is of 
 a painful event, up to a certain point the past 
 not only influences our present but also our 
 future, and in a harmful way; and so long as 
 we have not gone beyond the sphere of in- 
 fluence of the past, our characters are weak- 
 ened and not strengthened by remembrance. 
 Let us take an extreme case, but one typical 
 nevertheless. Suppose that in the last life a 
 man has committed suicide as the easiest way 
 out of his diflGiculties. As he dies, there will 
 be in his mind much mental suffering and a 
 lack of confidence in his ability to weather 
 the storm. The suicide does not put an end 
 to his suffering, and after death it will con- 
 tinue for some time till it slowly exhausts 
 itself; but there will be a purification through 
 his suffering, and when it ends there will be 
 a keener vision and a fuller response to the ' 
 promptings of his higher nature. When he 
 is reborn, he will be born with a stronger con- 
 science; but he will still retain the lack of 
 confidence in his ability, because nothing has 
 happened after his death to alter that. Con- 
 fidence can be gained only by mastering cir- 
 
46 REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 
 
 cumstance, and it is for that very purpose he 
 has returned. Now, sooner or later, he will be 
 confronted with a situation similar to that 
 before which he failed in a past life. As dif- 
 ficulties crowd round him in the new life, once 
 more there will be the old struggle; the fact 
 of having committed suicide will now come in 
 as a tendency to suicide, as a resignation to it 
 as the easiest way; but on the other hand the 
 memory of the suffering after suicide will also 
 return in a stronger sense of conscience that 
 this time it must not be. In this condition of 
 strain, when the man is being pulled to one 
 side by the past and to the other by his future, 
 if he were to know, with vivid memory, how 
 he had committed suicide in the past in a like 
 situation, the probabilities are that he would 
 be influenced by his past action and his lack 
 of confidence would be intensified, with as a 
 result suicide once again. We little realize 
 how we are being domineered over by our 
 past, and it is a blessing for most of us that 
 the kindly gods draw a veil over a record 
 which at our present stage of evolution 
 cannot be anything but deplorable in many 
 ways. 
 
REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 47 
 
 So long as we identify ourselves with the 
 past, that past is hidden from us, except in 
 the indirect modes as tendencies. But the 
 direct memory will come when we can 
 dissociate our present selves from our past 
 selves. We are ever the Future, not the past; 
 and when we can look at our past, of this life 
 first, and after of past lives, without heat, 
 impersonally, in perspective, as it were, like a 
 judge who has no sense of identity with the 
 facts before him for judgment, then we begin 
 to remember, directly, the past in detail; but 
 till then, 
 
 We ranging down this lower track, 
 
 The path we came by, thorn and flower, 
 Is shadow'd by the growing hour, 
 
 Lest life should fail in looking back. 
 
 The second reason for our not directly re- 
 membering our past lives is this: the I who 
 asks the question, ''Why don't I remember?" 
 has not lived in the past. It is the Soul that 
 has lived, not this I with all its limitations. 
 But is not this I that Soul? With most peo- 
 ple not at all, and this will be evident if we 
 think over the matter. 
 
 The average man or woman is scarcely so 
 
48 REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 
 
 much a Soul as a bundle of attributes of sex, 
 creed, and locality. But the Soul is immortal, 
 that is, has no sense of diminution or death ; 
 it has no idea of time, that it is young, wastes 
 away, and grows old; it is neither man nor 
 woman, because it is developing in itself the 
 best qualities of both sexes; it is neither 
 Hindu, nor Buddhist, nor Christian, because 
 it lives in One Divine Life and assimilates 
 that life according to its temperament; it is 
 not Indian, nor English, nor American, and 
 belongs to no country, even though its outer- 
 most sheath, the physical body, belongs to a 
 particular race; it has no caste, for it knows 
 that all partake of One Life, and that before 
 God there is neither Brahman nor Shudra, 
 Jew nor Gentile, aristocrat nor plebian. It 
 is this Soul that puts out a part of itself, a 
 personality, for a life, "as a mere subject for 
 grave experiment and experience;^' through 
 a persona, a mask, of a babe, child, youth or 
 maid, man or woman, bachelor, spinster or 
 householder, old man or old woman, it looks 
 out into life, and, as it observes, eliminates 
 the distorting bias its outer sheath gives; its 
 personalities have been Lemurian or Atlan- 
 tean, Hindu or Roman or Greek, and it selects 
 
REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 49 
 
 the best out of them all and discards the rest; 
 all literatures, sciences, arts, religions and 
 civilizations are its school and playground, 
 workshop and study; its patriotism is for an 
 indivisible Humanity, and its creed is to co- 
 operate with God's plan, which is Evolution. 
 
 It is this Soul that has had past lives. How 
 much of this Soul are we, the men and women 
 who ask the question, '^Why don't we remem- 
 ber our past lives?'' The questioner is but 
 the personality, and the body of that per- 
 sonality has a brain on whose cells the mem- 
 ories of a past life have not been impressed; 
 those memories are in the Divine Man who is 
 of no time, of no creed, and of no land. To 
 remember past lives, the brain of the per- 
 sonality must be made a mirror on to which 
 can be reflected the memories of the Soul; 
 and before those memories can come into the 
 brain, one by one the various biases must be 
 removed — of mortality, of time, of sex, of 
 creed, of color, of caste. So long as we are 
 wrapt up in our petty thoughts of nationalism 
 and in our narrow beliefs of creeds, so long do 
 we retain the barriers that exist between our 
 higher selves and our lower; an intellectual 
 breadth and a larger sympathy, ^^without dis- 
 
50 REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 
 
 tinction of race, creed, sex, caste or color," 
 must first be achieved before there breaks, as 
 through clouds, flashes of our true conscious- 
 ness as Souls. There is no swifter way to dis- 
 cover what we are as Immortals out of time 
 than by discovering what is our Work in time. 
 
 Let but a man or woman find that Work 
 for whose sake sacrifice and immolation is 
 serenest contentment, then slowly the larger 
 consciousness of the Soul descends into the 
 brain of the personality, and with that de- 
 scent the direct memory of past lives. As 
 more and more the personality presses for- 
 ward, desiring no light but what is sufiicient 
 for the next step on his path to his goal of 
 work, slowly one bias after another is burnt 
 away in a fire of purification ; like as the sun 
 dissipates more clouds the higher it rises, so is 
 it for the life of the personality; it knows 
 then, with such conviction as the sun has 
 about its own nature when it shines, that "the 
 soul of man is immortal, and its future is the 
 future of a thing whose growth and splendor 
 have no limit." 
 
 Then come back the memories of past lives, 
 and how they come those who live the life 
 know. There are many kinds of knowledge 
 
REMEMBRANCE OF PAST LIVES 51 
 
 useful for a man, but none greater than the 
 knowledge "that evolution is a fact, and that 
 the method of evolution is the constant dip- 
 ping down into matter under the law of ad- 
 justment/^ This knowledge is for all who 
 seek, if they will but seek rightly, and the 
 right way is to be a brother to all men, "with- 
 out distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or 
 color." 
 
THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 The history of humanity is the history of 
 ideas, and the stages through which men have 
 risen from savage to civilized are dis- 
 tinguishable one from the other by the influ- 
 ence of certain great doctrines. Among these 
 teachings that have moulded civilizations, the 
 idea of Evolution stands out as heralding a 
 new era in the world of thought. Considered 
 at first as a mere academic interest, soon it 
 was recognized as of practical value, and to- 
 day it is known as necessary in the under- 
 standing of every problem in every depart- 
 ment of being. 
 
 Nevertheless it is a fact that the doctrine 
 of evolution is a theory after all. No one has 
 lived long enough to see sufiicient links in the 
 evolutionary chain to attest that the changes 
 postulated as having taken place did actually 
 so occur, and that the chain is not a fancy but 
 a fact. Yet evolution is accepted by all as a 
 
54 THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 dynamic idea, for like a magic wand it per- 
 forms wonders in the world of thought. It 
 marshals the heterogeneous organisms of na- 
 ture into orderly groups, and from inanimate 
 element to protoplasm, from unicellular or- 
 ganism to multicellular, from invertebrate to 
 vertebrate, from ape to man, one ascending 
 scale of life is seen. 
 
 And striving to be man, the worm 
 Mounts through all the spires of form. 
 
 Yet none can say that evolution is an agree- 
 able fact to contemplate, for there is a ruth- 
 lessness to nature's methods that is appalling. 
 Utterly cruel and wasteful she seems, creating 
 and perfecting her creatures only to prey on 
 each other, generating more than can live in 
 the fierce struggle for existence ; ''red in tooth 
 and claw with ravin,'' she builds and unbuilds 
 and builds again, one-pointed only that a type 
 shall survive and reckless of the pleasure or 
 pain to a single life. Men themselves, proud 
 though they be in a fancied freedom of 
 thought and action, are nothing but pawns in 
 a game she plays. The more fully evolution 
 is understood from such facts as scientists 
 have so far gathered, the more justifiably can 
 
THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT 55 
 
 men say with Omar of their birth, life and 
 death : 
 
 Into this Universe, and Why not knowing, 
 Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing, 
 
 And out of it, like Wind along the Waste, 
 I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing. 
 
 Of course this attitude does not represent 
 that of the majority of men. Millions of men 
 believe in a Creator and that "God's in his 
 heaven, all's right with the world!" But it is 
 no exaggeration to say that their optimism 
 continually receives rude shocks. No man or 
 woman of sensibility can look about him and 
 not agree with Tennyson's comparison of life 
 to a play: 
 
 Act first, this Earth, a stage so gloom'd with woe. 
 You all but sicken at the shifting scenes. 
 
 And yet be patient. Our Playwright may show 
 In some fifth Act what this wild Drama 
 means. 
 
 Both the idea of Evolution and the idea of 
 a Divine Guidance, as at present conceived, 
 fail to satisfy fully the needs of men for an in- 
 spiring view of life. The former indeed shows 
 a splendid pageant of nature, but it has no 
 message to individual man except to make 
 
56 
 
 THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 the most of his brief day of life, and stoically 
 resign himself to extinction when nature 
 shall have no further use for him. The latter 
 speaks to men^s hearts in alluring accents of 
 a power that maketh for righteousness, but it 
 sees God as existing only in the gaps of that 
 pitiless cosmic order that science reveals. It 
 is obvious, therefore, that any philosophy 
 which postulates an inseparable relation be- 
 tween God and evolution, between nature and 
 man, is worthy of examination, and this is 
 the view of life that Theosophy propounds in 
 the light of one great idea. 
 
 This idea is that of the Evolution of Life. 
 Just as modern science tells us of a ceaseless 
 change of forms from protoplasm to man, so 
 Theosophy asserts that there is, pari passu, a 
 changing, growing life. This life does not 
 depend on the forms, though we see it asso- 
 ciated with them; and of it Theosophy says 
 that first it is indestructible, and second that 
 it evolves. 
 
 It is indestructible, in the sense that when 
 an organism is destroyed, nevertheless all is 
 not destroyed, for there remains a life that is 
 still conscious. If a rose fades and its petals 
 crumble and fall into dust, the life of that rose 
 
THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT 57 
 
 has not therefore ceased to be; that life per- 
 sists in nature, retaining in itself all the mem- 
 ories of all the experiences it gained garbed as 
 a rose. Then in due course of events, follow- 
 ing laws that are comprehensible, that life 
 animates another rose of another spring, 
 bringing to its second embodiment the mem- 
 ories of its first. Whenever therefore there 
 seems the death of a living thing, crystal or 
 plant, animal or man, there persists an inde- 
 structible life and consciousness, even though 
 to all appearance the object is lifeless and 
 processes of decay have begun. 
 
 Further, this life is evolving in exactly the 
 same way that the scientist says that an or- 
 ganism evolves. The life is at first amorphic, 
 responding but little to the stimuli from with- 
 out, retaining only feeble memories of the ex- 
 periences it gains through its successive em- 
 bodiments. But it passes from stage to stage 
 through more and more complex organisms, 
 till slowly it becomes more definite, more di- 
 verse in its functions; as the outer form 
 evolves from protoplasm to man, so evolves 
 too the life ensouling it. All nature, visible 
 and invisible, is the field of an evolution of 
 life through successive series of evolving 
 
58 THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 forms, and the broad stages of this evolving 
 life are from mineral to vegetable, from vege- 
 table to animal, and from animal to man. 
 
 The doctrine of a life that evolves through 
 evolving forms answers some of those ques- 
 tions that puzzle the biologist today. Many 
 a fact hitherto considered as outside the do- 
 main of science is seen as illustrative of new 
 laws, and existing gaps are bridged over to 
 make the doctrine of evolution more logical 
 than ever. It further shows nature as not 
 wasteful and only seemingly cruel, for noth- 
 ing is lost, and every experience in every form 
 that was destroyed in the process of natural 
 selection is treasured by the life to-day. The 
 past lives in the present to attest that nature^s 
 purpose is not death crushing life, but life 
 ever triumphant over death to make out of 
 stocks and stones immortal men. 
 
 In each human being is seen this same prin- 
 ciple of an imperishable evolving life. For 
 man is an individual life and consciousness, 
 an immortal soul capable of living apart from 
 the body we usually call ^^the man.^^ In each 
 soul the process of evolution is at work, for at 
 his entrance on existence as a soul, he is feeble 
 and chaotic in his consciousness, vague and 
 
THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 59 
 
 indefinite in his understanding of the mean- 
 ing of life, and capable only of a narrow range 
 of thought and feeling. But he too evolves, 
 from indefinite to definite, from simple to 
 complex, from chaos to order. 
 
 Man's evolution is by successive manifesta- 
 tions in bodies of flesh, passing at the death of 
 one body to begin life once more in another 
 new one ; and in this passage he carries with 
 him the memory of all experiences he has 
 gained in the past behind him. This aspect 
 of the evolution of life as it affects men is 
 called reincarnation. 
 
 As all processes of nature are intelligible on 
 the hypothesis of an evolution of organisms, 
 so all that happens to men becomes compre- 
 hensible in the light of reincarnation ; as the 
 former links all forms by species and genus, 
 family and order, class and group, sub-king- 
 dom and kingdom into one unbreakable chain, 
 so the latter binds all human experiences into 
 one consistent philosophy of life. How re- 
 incarnation explains the mysteries around us 
 and inspires us we shall now see. 
 
 Imagine with me that existence is a moun- 
 tain, and that millions are climbing to its 
 summit. Let many many days be needed 
 
60 
 
 THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 before a traveller comes to his goal. Then as 
 he climbs day after day, the proportion of 
 things below him and above him will change ; 
 new sights will greet his eyes, new airs will 
 breathe around him; his eyes will adjust 
 themselves to new horizons, and step by step 
 objects will change in shape and proportion. 
 At last on reaching the summit a vast pan- 
 objects will change shape and proportion, 
 clearly every part of the road he climbed, and 
 why it dipped into this valley and circled that 
 crag. Let this mountain typify existence, 
 and let the climbers up its sides be men and 
 women who are immortal souls. 
 
 Let us now think for a moment of travellers 
 at the mountain's base, who are to climb to 
 its summit. We know how limited must be 
 their horizon and how little they can see of 
 the long path before them. Let such travellers 
 typify the most backward of our humanity, 
 the most savage and least intelligent men and 
 women we can find to-day. According to re- 
 incarnation these are child-souls, just enter- 
 ing into existence to undergo evolution and to 
 be made into perfect souls. To understand 
 the process of evolution let us watch one of 
 them stage by stage as he climbs the moun- 
 tain. 
 
THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT 61 
 
 The first thing that we shall note is that 
 this child-soul manifests a duality. For he is 
 soul and body; as a soul he is from God but 
 as a body he is from the brute. 
 
 The Lord let the house of a brute to the soul of a 
 man, 
 
 And the man said, "Am I your debtor?" 
 
 And the Lord — ^'Not yet: but make it as clean as 
 
 you can, 
 And then I will let you a better." 
 
 The body he occupies has in it a strong in- 
 stinct of self-preservation, stamped upon it 
 by the fierce struggle for existence of its ani- 
 mal progenitors ; he himself as a soul coming 
 from God has intuitions as to right and 
 wrong, but as yet hardly any will. The body 
 demands for its preservation that he be self- 
 assertive and selfish; lacking the will to di- 
 rect his evolution, he acts as the body im- 
 pels. 
 
 The Vision of the Separated Self 
 Hence at this earliest stage of the soul his 
 vision of life as he climbs is that of the sepa- 
 rated self: ^'Mine not yours" is his principle of 
 action ; greed rules him and a thirst for sensa- 
 tion drives him on, and he little heeds that he 
 
62 
 
 THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 is unjust and cruel to others as he lives 
 through his nights and days of selfishness and 
 self-assertion. He seems strong-willed, for he 
 crushes the weaker before him ; but in reality 
 he has no will at all, for he is but the play- 
 thing of an animal heredity he cannot control. 
 He has no more freedom of will than the 
 water-wheel that turns at the bidding of the 
 descending stream; he is but the tool of a 
 "will to live'^ that accomplishes a purpose not 
 his own. 
 
 Millions of men and women around us are 
 at this first stage. Their craftiness, hardly 
 deserving the name of intellect, is that of a 
 Falstaff for whom "the world is mine oyster 
 which I with sword will open.'' In their least 
 animal phases comfort is their aim in life: 
 "They dressed, digested, talked, articulated 
 words; other vitality showed they almost 
 none.'' The universe around them is mean- 
 ingless, and they are scarce capable of won- 
 der: "Let but a Rising of the Sun, let but a 
 creation of the world happen twice, and it 
 ceases to be marvellous, to be noteworthy or 
 noticeable." The center of the circle of the 
 cosmos is in themselves and they neither 
 
THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT 63 
 
 know nor care if another and truer centre be 
 possible. 
 
 Yet when we recognize that each of these 
 souls is immortal and that his future is ''the 
 future of a thing whose growth and splendor 
 have no limit/' we begin to understand why 
 at this early stage selfishness plays such a 
 prominent part in his life. For in the stages 
 to come he must be capable of standing alone, 
 firm on the basis of a coherent individuality; 
 Qow it is, therefore, he must develop initia- 
 tive and strength. He is quick to retaliate, 
 but the germs of swift decision are grown 
 thereby; he is domineering and cruel, but the 
 seeds of intelligent enterprise result from the 
 animal cunning he displays. Every evil he 
 does must some time be paid back in labor- 
 ious service to his victims; yet on the whole 
 the evil he does at this stage is less in quan- 
 tity and force, for all its seeming, than that 
 done in later stages where intelligence is 
 keener and emotion more powerful. At a cer- 
 tain period in human evolution selfishness 
 has its place in the economy of things, for 
 selfishness too is a force used to build the bat- 
 tlements of heaven. 
 
64 
 
 THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 These souls, whose youth alone is the cause 
 of their selfishness, are in their essence di- 
 vine, and there is in them no evil of a positive 
 kind; the vices are but the result of the ab- 
 sence of virtues, and the evil "is null, is 
 naught, is silence implying sound/' Each is 
 a "good man" who, deep down within him, 
 has a knowledge of "the one true way,'' 
 though in his attempts to tread it he seems to 
 retrograde rather than to evolve. Like plants 
 in a garden they are all tended by Him from 
 Whom they come ; He knows the perfect souls 
 that He will make out of them by change and 
 growth as the ages pass by. 
 
 Though still confused his service unto Me, 
 
 I soon shall lead him to a clearer morning. 
 Sees not the gardener, even while he buds his tree. 
 Both flower and fruit the future years adorning? 
 Life after life these souls come to birth, 
 now as men and now as women; they live a 
 life of selfishness, and they die, and hardly 
 any change will be noticeable in the char- 
 acter; but slowly there steals into their lives 
 a dissatisfaction. The mind is too dull to 
 grasp the relation of the individual to the 
 whole, and the imagination is too feeble to 
 realize that "man doth not live by bread 
 
THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT 65 
 
 alone." Hence it is that "the thousand nat- 
 ural shocks that flesh is heir to" are duly 
 marshalled and employed to ruffle their self- 
 centered contentment; old age and death cast 
 over them shadows that have no power to 
 sadden a philosophic mind; disease and ac- 
 cident lie in wait for them to weigh down 
 their spirits and make them rebel against a 
 fate they do not understand. Till their hearts 
 shall enshrine a divine purpose, a Hound of 
 Heaven pursues them^ and "naught shelters 
 thee, who wilt not shelter Me." 
 
 Thus are they made ready to pass on to the 
 next stage; the foundations of abilities have 
 been laid, and the individual is firm on a basis 
 built through selfishness. Now has come the 
 time to begin the laborious work of casting 
 out the self, and so there opens before the 
 souFs gaze the vision of the next stage. Ac- 
 cording to the type of soul, this vision is 
 either the Vision of the Mind or the Vision of 
 the Emotions. 
 
 There are in life two main types of souls, 
 the one in whom intelligence controls emo- 
 tion and the other in whom emotion sways 
 the mind. One type is not more evolved than 
 the other; they are both stages to pass 
 
66 
 
 THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 through to grow a higher faculty, that of In- 
 tuition. The vision of the third stage is the 
 Vision of the Intuition, but to it souls come 
 from the first stage either through intellect 
 or through emotion. Let us first consider 
 those souls whose evolution is by way of the 
 intellect. 
 
 The Vision of the Mind 
 We shall see in the past of these souls that 
 much intelligence has been developed in the 
 first stage; their selfishness has made them 
 quick and cunning to adapt opportunities to 
 minister to their comfort. This intelligence 
 is now taken up by the unseen Guides of 
 evolution, and the soul is placed in environ- 
 ments that will change mere animal cunning 
 into true intellect. The past good and evil 
 sown by him will be adjusted in its reaping, 
 so as to give him occupations and interests 
 that will force him to think of men and things 
 around him apart from their relation to him- 
 self. Instead of weighing experiences in 
 terms of personal comfort he begins now to 
 group them in types and categories; little by 
 little he begins to see a material and moral 
 order in the cosmos that is more powerful 
 than his will. Each law of nature when first 
 
THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT 67 
 
 seen is feared by him, for it seems to be there 
 to thwart him; but later, with more expe- 
 rience of its working, he begins to trust it 
 and to depend upon it to achieve his aim. A 
 love of learning appears in him and nature is 
 no longer a blank page; he has ceased to be '^a 
 pair of spectacles behind which there is no 
 eye/' 
 
 At this stage we shall see that the selfish- 
 ness still in him will warp the judgments of 
 his mind. He will be a doctrinaire, a pedant, 
 combative and full of prejudice; for all his 
 intellect his character will show marked 
 weaknesses, and he will often see and pro- 
 pound principles of conduct which he will not 
 be able to apply to himself. Again and again 
 he will fail to see how little he understands 
 the world, since the world is the embodiment 
 of a life that is more than mind, and whoso 
 understands it with mind alone will mis- 
 understand. Excess of intellect will become 
 in him defect of intelligence, and he will see 
 all things as through a glass darkly. 
 
 Many a life will pass while he slowly gains 
 experiences through the mind and assimilates 
 them into a truer conception of life. By now 
 he will have begun to take part in the intel- 
 
68 THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 lectual life of the world, and when he is on 
 the threshold of the next stage we shall find 
 him as a worker in science, philosophy or 
 literature. But his intellect has too great a 
 personal bias still, and it must be made im- 
 personal and pure before the next vision, that 
 of the intuition, can be his. Once again we 
 shall see that there enters into his life a dis- 
 satisfaction. The structures which he builds 
 so laboriously as the results of years of work 
 will crumble one by one, because nature re- 
 veals new facts to show the world that his 
 generalizations were only partly true; the 
 world for which he toiled will forget him and 
 younger workers will receive the honors that 
 are his due. He will be misunderstood by his 
 dearest friends, and '^he is now, if not ceasing, 
 yet intermitting to eat his own heart, and 
 clutches round him outwardly on the Not-Me 
 for wholesomer food." 
 
 But this suffering, through the reaping of 
 sad sowings of injustice to others through 
 prejudice, brings in its train a high purifica- 
 tion sooner or later; the soul learns the great 
 lesson of working for work's sake and not for 
 the fruit of action. Now he knows the joy of 
 altruistic dedication of himself to the search 
 
THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT 69 
 
 for truth. A student of philosophies but the 
 slave of none, he now watches nature "as it 
 is," and in a perfect impersonality of mind 
 solves her mysteries one by one ; of him now 
 can it be said with the Pythagoreans that "a 
 great intellect is the chorus of divinity." Thus 
 dawns for him the Vision of the Intuition. 
 
 The Vision of the Emotions 
 I mentioned when describing the transition 
 from the first stage to the second that there 
 were in the world two main types of souls — 
 those who pass from the Vision of the Sep- 
 arated Self to the Vision of the Intuition by 
 way of the mind, and those others who de- 
 velop along a parallel path and pass from the 
 emotions to the intuition. We have just seen 
 how souls are trained through intellect to cast 
 out the self; we shall now see how the same 
 result is achieved for those in whom emo- 
 tions sway the mind. 
 
 As the intellectual type showed in the first 
 stage a marked development of intelligence of 
 a low kind, so similarly shall we find that the 
 souls we are going to consider show during the 
 same stage a great deal of feeling. Not that 
 this feeling will be refined or unselfish ; indeed 
 it will mostly be lust and jealousy, with per- 
 
70 
 
 THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 haps a little crude religious emotion thrown 
 in. But the character will be obviously easily 
 swayed by emotions, and this trait in the soul 
 is now taken up and worked upon to enable 
 him to pass to the next stage. 
 
 Following his emotional bent, and selfish 
 and oblivious of the feelings of those around 
 him, the soul will compel others weaker than 
 himself to be the slaves of his desires; but 
 the passion and the sense of possession he has 
 of these that minister to his lusts will link him 
 to them life after life, till slowly he begins to 
 feel that they are necessary to his emotional 
 life and not dispensable at will. Gradually 
 his impure passions will be transformed into 
 purer affections, and then he will be brought 
 again and again into contact with them so 
 that his emotions shall go out impulsively 
 towards them. But the evil he wrought them 
 in the past will now cast a veil over their 
 eyes and make them indifferent to him. He 
 will be forced to love on, to atone for past evil 
 by service, but despair will be the only 
 reward; when in resentment he tries to break 
 the bond that ties him to them he will find he 
 cannot. He will curse love, only to return 
 
THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 71 
 
 again and again to love's altar with his offer- 
 ings. 
 
 Though life now becomes full of disap- 
 pointment and despair, in his serener mo- 
 ments he will acknowledge that in spite of the 
 suffering it entailed, his emotional life has 
 slowly opened a new sense in him. He catches 
 now and then glimpses of an undying youth 
 in all things, and the world that seems dreary 
 and aging will re-appear under certain emo- 
 tional stress as he knew it before life became 
 a tragedy. These glimpses are transitory at 
 first, lasting indeed only so long as the love 
 emotion colors his being; but there is for him 
 a time, 
 
 When all the world is young, lad, 
 
 And all the trees are green, 
 And every goose a swan, lad, 
 
 And every lass a queen. 
 
 Life after life, fostered by his transitory 
 loves, this sense will grow in him till it blos- 
 soms into a sense of wonder. Then nature 
 reveals in all things in life new values whose 
 significance he can henceforth never wholly 
 forget. While love sways his being each blade 
 of grass and leaf and flower has to him a new 
 
72 
 
 THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 meaning; he sees beauty now where he saw 
 none before. Everything beautiful around 
 him — a face, a flower, a sunset, a melody — 
 will link him in mysterious ways to those he 
 loves; the world ceases to be a blank page. 
 
 Love wakes men once a lifetime each, 
 
 They lift their heavy lids and look; 
 And lo I what one sweet page can teach, 
 
 They read with joy, then close the book. 
 And some give thanks, and some blaspheme, 
 
 And most forget. But either way, 
 That and the child^s unheeding dream 
 
 Is all the light of all their day. 
 
 It will happen that this sense of wonder is 
 intermittent, and that there come periods 
 when the world is veiled; but the veil is of his 
 own making, and must be torn asunder if he 
 is to possess the Vision of the Intuition. Once 
 more there enters into his life a dissatisfac- 
 tion — a discontent that love itself is transi- 
 tory after all. Those he loves and who love 
 him in return will be taken from him just 
 when life seems in flower; friends he idealizes 
 will shatter the ideals so lovingly made of 
 them. Cruel as it aU seems, it is but the reap- 
 ing of sad sowings in past lives, but the reap- 
 ing has a meaning now as always. He has so 
 
THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT 73 
 
 far been loving not Love but its shadow, not 
 the Ideal from which nothing can be taken 
 away but its counterfeit which suffers di- 
 minution; he must now see clearer and feel 
 truer. The character must be steadied so that 
 it shall not rebound from enthusiasm to de- 
 pression, nor be satisfied with a vague mysti- 
 cism that prefers to revel in its own feelings 
 rather than evaluate what causes them. 
 
 Hence the inevitable purification through 
 suffering; the dross of self is burned away till 
 there remains the gold of a divine desire. He 
 then discovers that the truest feelings are 
 only those that have in them the spirit of 
 offering. Now for him thus purified in de- 
 sire, and for that other type of soul made im- 
 personal in intellect, there dawns the Vision 
 of the Intuition. 
 
 The Vision of the Intuition 
 '^Before the eyes can see, they must be in- 
 capable of tears. Before the ear can hear, it 
 must have lost its sensitiveness.^' All souls 
 that have come to this stage have learned by 
 now the bitter lesson that '^it is only with 
 Renunciation that Life, properly speaking, 
 can be said to begin;" they have proved in 
 their own experience that what once seemed 
 
74 THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 death was but a ^^repentance unto life/' They 
 have now discovered the meaning of life — 
 that man is a child of God come forth to life 
 to be a co-worker with his Father. It matters 
 not that a soul does not state to himself his 
 relation to the whole in these terms; it only- 
 matters that he should have discovered that 
 his part in existence is to be a worker in a 
 work, and that nothing happening to himself 
 matters, so long as that work proceeds to its 
 inevitable end. He knows that the end of 
 thought and feeling is action for his fellow- 
 men, and that this action must be either dis- 
 passionate and without thought of reward, or 
 full of a spirit of grateful offering. 
 
 He possesses now the faculty of the intu- 
 ition, which transcending both reason and 
 emotion yet can justify its judgments to 
 either. He grows past "common sense,'' the 
 criterion for common things, into an uncom- 
 mon sense; for life is full now of uncommon 
 things of whose existence others are not 
 aware. In men and women he discerns those 
 invisible factors which are inevitable in human 
 relations, and hence his judgment of them is 
 "not of this world." In all things he sees and 
 feels one Life. Whatever unites attracts him; 
 
THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT 75 
 
 if intellectual he will love to synthesize in 
 science or philosophy, if emotional he will 
 dedicate himself to art or philanthropy. 
 
 Now slowly for him the Many become the 
 One. The Unity will be known only in the 
 vision of the next stage, but preparing him 
 for it, science and art, religion and philos- 
 ophy, will deduce for him eternal fundamen- 
 tal types from the kaleidoscope of life. Types 
 of forms, types of thought, types of emotions, 
 types of temperament — these he sees every- 
 where round him, and life in all its phases be- 
 comes transformed because it reflects as in a 
 mirror Archetypes of a realm beyond time 
 and space and mutability. 
 
 Everything of mortal birth 
 
 Is but a type; 
 What was of feeble worth 
 
 Here becomes ripe. 
 What was a mystery 
 
 Here meets the eye; 
 The Ever-womanly 
 
 Draws us on high. 
 
 "The Ever-womanly^' now shows him 
 everywhere one Wisdom; science tells him of 
 the oneness of nature, and philosophy that 
 man is a consciousness creating his world; art 
 
76 THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 reveals in all things youth and beauty, and 
 religion whispers to his heart that Lov6 
 broods over all. His sympathies go to all as 
 his will is ever at their service. 
 
 Not far now is the time when for him shall 
 dawn the Vision of the Spirit. But to bring 
 him to its portal a dissatisfaction once more 
 enters his soul. No longer can that dissatis- 
 faction be personal; the sad reaping of sorrow 
 for evil done is over, and "only the sorrow of 
 others casts its shadow over me." Nor is it 
 caused by any sense of the mutability of 
 things, for, absolutely without question, he 
 knows his immortality, and that though all 
 things change there is behind them That 
 which changes never. Yet while he climbs 
 to his appointed goal dissatisfaction must al- 
 ways be. 
 
 It comes to him now as a creator. For with 
 intuition to guide him he creates in that field 
 of endeavor in which he has trained himself 
 in past lives; as a poet, artist, statesman, 
 ^ saint or scientist, he is one of the world's 
 geniuses. But though his creations are a mir- 
 acle to all, yet to him they are only partly true 
 and only partly beautiful, for he sees the ideal 
 which he would fain bring down to men, and 
 
THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT 77 
 
 knows his failure as none others can know. 
 Life is teaching him "to attain by shadowing 
 forth th' unattainable/' 
 
 As thus he grows life after life, scientist 
 and poet, artist and saint, now merge into a 
 new type of being who sees with "larger, other 
 eyes than ours.'' He has regained his integ- 
 rity of heart and his innocency of hands and 
 is become "a little child;" "by pity enlight- 
 ened" he is now Parsifal, the "Pure Fool," 
 who enters upon his heritage. 
 
 The Vision of the Spirit 
 Then it is that at its threshold there meets 
 him One Who has watched him climbing for 
 many a life and all unseen has encouraged 
 him. This is the Master, one of that "good- 
 liest fellowship of famous knights whereof the 
 world holds record." In Him the soul sees in 
 realization all those ideals that have drawn 
 him onward and upward; and hand in hand 
 with this "Father in God" he now treads "the 
 Way" while the Vision of the Spirit is shown 
 him by his Master. Who shall describe that 
 vision but those that have it, and how may 
 one less than a Master here speak with au- 
 thority? And yet since Masters of the Wis- 
 dom have moved among men, since Buddha, 
 
78 • THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 Krishna and Christ have shown us in Their 
 lives something of what that vision is, surely 
 from Their lives we can deduce what the 
 vision must be. 
 
 In that Vision of the Spirit the Many is the 
 One/ "Alone within this universe He comes 
 and goes; 'tis He who is the fire, the water He 
 pervadeth ; Him and Him only knowing, one 
 crosseth over death; no other path at all is 
 there to go/' 
 
 Now for the soul who has come to the end 
 of his climbing each man is only "the spirit 
 he worked in, not what he did but what he 
 became/' There is no high nor low in life, 
 for in all he sees a ray from the Divine Flame ; 
 as through the highest so through the lowest 
 too, to him "God stooping shows sufficient of 
 His light for us i' th' dark to rise by." Life is 
 henceforth become a Sacrament and he is its 
 Celebrant; with loving thoughts and deeds he 
 celebrates and at-ones man with God and God 
 with man. He discerns, purifies in himself, 
 and offers to God "infinite passion and the 
 pain of finite hearts that yearn;" from God 
 on high he brings to men what alone can satis- 
 fy that yearning. 
 
THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 79 
 
 He has renounced "the will to live'^ and 
 thereby has made its purpose his own: 'Tore- 
 going self the universe grows I." Yet he 
 knows with rapture that that ''I'' is but a tiny 
 lens in a great Light. Henceforth he lives 
 only that a Greater than he may live through 
 him, love through him, act through him; and 
 evermore shall his heart whisper, in heaven 
 or in hell, whithersoever his work may take 
 him: ''Him know I, the Mighty Man, resplen- 
 dent like the Sun, beyond the Darkness; Him 
 and Him only knowing one crosseth over 
 death; no other path at all is there to go/' 
 
 jjc jjc 5|c jjc 5jc 5^ 3|c 
 
 Thus do we, the happy few, the precursors 
 of a new age, see life in the light of reincarna- 
 tion. As the evolutionist sees all nature 
 linked in one ladder of life, and sky and sea 
 testify to him of evolution, so do we see all 
 men linked in one common purpose, and their 
 hopes and fears, their self-sacrifice and their 
 selfishness, testify to us of reincarnation. Life 
 and its experiences have ceased to be for us, 
 
 an arch wherethro' 
 Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades 
 For ever and for ever when I move. 
 
80 THE VISION OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 No longer can the world be for us as the 
 poet sang: 
 
 Act first, this Earth, a stage so gloomed with woe, 
 You all but sicken at the shifting scenes. 
 
 And yet be patient. Our Playwright may show 
 In some fifth Act what this wild Drama means. 
 
 The Fifth Act is here before our eyes. It is 
 that Vision of the Spirit that is the heritage 
 of every soul, and thither all men are slowly- 
 treading, for "no other path at all is there to 
 go." 
 
THE LAW OF RENUNCIATION 
 
 The joy of life! Is it not everywhere? In 
 plant and animal and man do we not see an 
 instinct for happiness which impels all crea- 
 tion to rise from good to better, from better 
 to best? Since God said, "Let there be light!'' 
 are not all men seeking to step out of dark- 
 ness into light — ^blindly, dimly feeling that 
 happiness must be their goal? Yet how few 
 find happiness in life ! It is easy to sing, 
 
 God's in his heaven, 
 
 All's right with the world! 
 
 But to sing so long one must be blind to 
 facts. Life is a tragedy to many, and far 
 truer is it described by Tennyson: 
 
 Act first, this Earth, a stage so gloom'd with woe 
 You all but sicken at the shifting scenes. 
 
 And yet be patient. Our Playwright may show 
 In some fifth Act what this wild Drama means. 
 
 Nevertheless all feel that happiness must 
 be the goal of life, and humanity never errs 
 
82 THE LAW OF RENUNCIATION 
 
 in its deepest feelings. But then why should 
 not the attainment of happiness be easier 
 than it is? 
 
 Man an Evolving Soul 
 There is a philosophy of life which holds 
 that man is an immortal soul, living not one 
 life on earth but many, growing by the expe- 
 riences he gains in them manifold capacities 
 and virtues. This philosophy further postu- 
 lates that all men are the children of One 
 Father, who has created a universe, in order 
 that working therein His children may know 
 something of Him, and come to Him in joy. 
 According to this theory, the purpose of life is 
 not to achieve a stable condition of happiness 
 for any individual, but rather to train him to 
 work in a Plan of an Ideal Future, and find in 
 that work an ever-changing and ever-growing 
 contentment. 
 
 From the standpoint of the Theosophist all 
 men are indeed working for a foreordained 
 ideal future; but they work at different stages 
 according to their differing capacities. A 
 recognition of these stages and the laws of life 
 appropriate to each makes life less the riddle 
 that it is. There are three broad stages on 
 the Path of Bliss that leads to the Highest 
 
THE LAW OF RENUNCIATION 
 
 83 
 
 Good, and they are happiness, renunciation, 
 and transfiguration. 
 
 The Stage of Happiness 
 God calls upon His children at this stage to 
 co-operate with Him by offering them happi- 
 ness as the aim of life. He has implanted in 
 them a craving for happiness, and provides 
 work for them that shall make then! happy. 
 Love of wife and child and friend, fame and 
 the gratitude of men, success and ease — these 
 are His rewards for those that serve Him. 
 Many are the pleasant paths in life for the 
 young souls at this stage, reaping happiness 
 as they prove those pleasures 
 
 That hills and valleys, dale and field, 
 And all the craggy mountains yield. 
 
 Useful as men are in the Great Work at this 
 stage, yet so long as a man deliberately seeks 
 happiness, his capabilities as a worker are 
 soon exhausted. For soon he "settles down 
 in life;'' the precious gift of wonder slowly 
 fades away, his happiness ceases to be dyna- 
 mic. Self-centered he calls on the universe to 
 give. But the Path to Bliss is by work, and 
 if he is to go ever on he must fit himself for a 
 larger work than has so far fallen to his share. 
 
84 THE LAW OF RENUNCIATION 
 
 He must enter on the next stage, but for that 
 he must change utterly. Hitherto he has 
 measured men and things by the standard of 
 his little self; henceforth the Great Self must 
 be his measure. He must break the sway of 
 himself and realize that evermore what is im- 
 portant in life is not he, not his happiness, 
 but a Work. Before this realization can be- 
 gin there must be a conversion. 
 
 Conversion 
 In many ways are men converted from the 
 interests of the little self to the work of the 
 Great Self. Some, loving Truth in religious 
 garb, open their hearts to a Personality that 
 dazzles their imagination. Thenceforth they 
 must serve Him and be like Him and gone for 
 ever is the standpoint of the little self. Some 
 study science and philosophy and discover a 
 magnificent plan of evolution, with the in- 
 evitable result that they know that the in- 
 dividual is but a unit of the great Whole and 
 not the center of the cosmos; and if they set 
 rightly to study they see, too, that there is a 
 Will at work, and that cost what it may they 
 must co-operate with that Will. A few there 
 are to whom comes some mysterious expe- 
 rience from the hidden side of things, and life 
 
THE LAW OF RENUNCIATION 85 
 
 speaks to them a transforming message. Out 
 of the invisible comes a ^'Saul, Saul, why 
 persecutest thou Me?'' and a persecutor of 
 Christians is changed into an apostle of 
 Christ. Manifold are the ways of conver- 
 sion, the same in all lands and in all faiths. 
 One factor is common, the old personality is 
 disintegrated, and a new one is reintegrated 
 in the service of a Work. 
 
 When through conversion the new per- 
 sonality is ready for a larger work the tools 
 he uses must be made pure. They are his 
 thoughts and feelings, and slowly a process of 
 purification is begun. Disappointment and 
 pain and grief are his lot — the sad harvest of 
 a sowing of selfishness in the unseen past of 
 many lives, for we reap as we have sown. 
 When the worker is ready, swift is Nature's 
 response to free him from the burden of his 
 past, in order that he may be fit to achieve 
 the great work prepared for him. 
 
 The Meaning of Pain 
 With some, sorrow hardens the character, 
 but with those who are ready to enter on the 
 second stage it ever purifies. Does not the very 
 texture of the flesh of a sufferer who has in 
 patience and resignation borne his pain seem 
 
86 THE LAW OF RENUNCIATION 
 
 luminous and pure, as though through every 
 cell there gleamed the light of a hidden fire? 
 How much more is it with mental suffering? 
 Are we not irresistibly drawn to reverence 
 one who has suffered much and nobly, and 
 sometimes to love, too? 
 
 Sorrow was there made fair, 
 Passion wise; tears a delightful thing; 
 Silence beyond all speech a wisdom rare. 
 
 She made her sighs to sing, 
 And all things with so sweet a sadness move 
 As made my heart at once both grieve and love. 
 
 The Stage of Renunciation 
 Life seems full of evil days to those that 
 come to the end of the first stage, but its les- 
 son is clear. That lesson is, "Thou must go 
 without, go without! That is the everlasting 
 song, which every hour, all our life through, 
 hoarsely sings to us.'^ Truly does Carlyle voice 
 the wisdom of the ages when he says, "The 
 Fraction of Life can be increased in value not 
 so much by increasing your numerators as by 
 lessening your denominator. Nay, unless my 
 algebra deceive me, unity itself divided by 
 zero will give infinity. Make thy claim of 
 wages a zero then; thou hast the world under 
 thy feet.^' 
 
THE LAW OF RENUNCIATION 87 
 
 The Law of Renunciation 
 All great workers know that the Law of 
 Renunciation is true and that '^it is only with 
 Renunciation that Life,properly speaking,can 
 be said to begin/' There are no great souls 
 that are completely happy, can never be! 
 Once more let the great apostle of work speak 
 to us: ^The happy man was never yet 
 created; the virtuous man, tho' clothed in 
 rags and sinking under pain, is the jewel of 
 the Earth, however I may doubt it, or deny it 
 in bitterness of heart. never let me forget 
 it! Teach me, tell me, when the Fiend of 
 Suffering and the base Spirit of the World are 
 ready to prevail against me, and drive me 
 from this last stronghold/' 
 
 Take whom you will who has done a great 
 work, and he knows that renunciation is the 
 law. In bitterness of heart Ruskin cries out: 
 "IVe had my heart broken ages ago, when I 
 was a boy, then mended, cracked, beaten in, 
 kicked about old corridors, and finally, I 
 think, flattened fairly out." But he per- 
 severed in his work all the same. There is no 
 greater name in the world of art than Michael 
 Angelo, ^^this masterful and stern, life- 
 wearied and labor-hardened man,'' whose his- 
 
88 
 
 THE LAW OF RENUNCIATION 
 
 tory ''is one of indomitable will and almost 
 superhuman energy, yet of will that had 
 hardly ever had its way, and of energy con- 
 tinually at war with circumstance/' It is the 
 same with all who have been great. 
 
 The Meaning of Life 
 But through renunciation the soul on the 
 threshold of greatness discovers life's mean- 
 ing. If religious, he will state it, ''Thy will be 
 done;" if scientific or artistic he will say, 
 "Not I, but a Work.'' He is now as Faust who 
 sought happiness in knowledge, and failed; 
 sought it in the love of Marguerite and reaped 
 a tragedy ; and only as he planned to reclaim 
 waste lands for men, and lost himself in the 
 dream of that work, found that long-sought- 
 for happy moment when he could say, "Ah, 
 tarry a while, thou art so fair!" 
 
 So, renouncing, live the souls at the second 
 stage, lovers of a Work. Sad at heart they 
 are ; but if they are loyal to their work, then 
 comes to them in fleeting moments more than 
 happiness, the joy of creation. Such won- 
 ders they now body forth that to themselves 
 their masterpieces are enigmas. In fitful 
 gleams they see a Light, and know that now 
 
THE LAW OF RENUNCIATION 89 
 
 and then it shines through them to the world. 
 Perfect masters of technique they are now, 
 in religion, in art, in science, in every depart- 
 ment of life. But, alas! just as they have dis- 
 covered what it is to live, what it is to create, 
 they are old, and life comes to a close, before 
 it seems hardly begun. Shall the path of re- 
 nunciation bring nothing but despair? 
 
 Despair was never yet so deep, 
 
 In sinking as in seeming; 
 Despair is hope just dropp'd asleep 
 
 For better chance of dreaming. 
 
 The Stage of Transfiguration 
 
 "Hope just dropp'd asleep for better chance 
 of dreaming'' — that, truly, is death. The 
 great worker leaves life but to return again, 
 with every dream old and new nearer realiza- 
 tion. He returns with the inborn mastery of 
 technique of the genius to achieve where he 
 only dreamed. The joy of creation is now his 
 sure and priceless possession, that wondrous 
 joy which only those know who can offer all 
 gifts of heart and mind and stand apart from 
 them while a Greater than they creates 
 through them. "Seeking nothing, he gains 
 all; foregoing self, the universe grows I." 
 
90 THE LAW OF RENUNCIATION 
 
 Now has he found that life which he lost in 
 the stage of Renunciation; henceforth, in all 
 places and at all times, is he become "a 
 pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall 
 no more go out/' 
 
 The Path of Bliss 
 So life gives of its best to all — ^happiness to 
 some, renunciation to others, and, to a few, 
 transfiguration. What if now most of us who 
 love Truth must "do without?" Let us but 
 dedicate heart and mind to a Work, and we 
 shall find that renunciation leads to trans- 
 figuration. There is but one road to God, for 
 all to tread. It is the Path of Bliss. It has 
 its steps — ^happiness, renunciation, and trans- 
 figuration. Whoso will offer up all that he is 
 to a Work, though he "lose his life" thereby, 
 yet shall he find it soon, and "come again 
 rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him." 
 
THE HIDDEN WORK OF NATURE^ 
 
 Never, in the history of mankind, has there 
 been a time as to-day when it could be so 
 truly said that. 
 
 The old order changeth, yielding place to new, 
 
 And God fulfils Himself in many ways, 
 
 Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. 
 
 It is true that "the man in the street^' 
 knows of no such great change; life for him 
 moves as of old in its fixed grooves, and if the 
 world's progress has multiplied for him life's 
 conveniences, it has also multiplied for him 
 life's needs. Change to him is largely a mat- 
 ter of a surplus of comforts over pains, and 
 in this regard the old order has changed but 
 little for him. But the man in the library, 
 the laboratory, the studio, the pulpit, is 
 aware of this great change, and he knows that 
 it began with the work of Darwin and his 
 school. 
 
 lA lecture delivered at the Small Queen's Hall, London, 
 October 26th, 1913. 
 
92 THE HIDDEN WORK OF NATURE 
 
 The importance of the work of modern 
 scientists lies in the fact that they have mar- 
 shalled for us the events of nature into an 
 orderly pageant of evolution. What mere re- 
 ligion has not been able to do, science has 
 achieved, which is to show Life as one. 
 Theological trinities of Creator, Creation, and 
 Creature, or dualities of God and Man, have 
 not unified life for us in the way science has 
 done; Mysticism alone, with its truth of 
 Immanence, has revealed to men something 
 of that unified existence of all that is, that is 
 the logical deduction from modern evolution- 
 ary theories. 
 
 When we contemplate the pageant of na- 
 ture, we see her at a work of building and un- 
 building. From mineral to bacterium and 
 plant, from microbe to animal and man, na- 
 ture is busy at a visible work, step by step 
 evolving higher and more complex struc- 
 tures. Though she may seem at first sight to 
 work blindly and mechanically, she has in re- 
 ality a coherent plan of action; this is to 
 evolve structures stage by stage, so that the 
 amount of time needed by a given creature 
 for its self -protection and sustenance may be 
 less and less with each successive generation. 
 
THE HIDDEN WORK OF NATURE 93 
 
 The higher a structure is in its organization 
 and adaptability, the more time, and hence 
 more energy, there is free for other purposes 
 of life than sustenance and procreation. 
 
 Two elements in life arise from the perfec- 
 tion of the structural mechanism that the 
 higher orders of creatures reveal. First, they 
 have time for play, for it is in play that such 
 energy manifests as is not required for gain- 
 ing food and shelter. The second element 
 manifests itself only when human beings ap- 
 pear in evolution, and men begin to show a 
 desire for adaptability. Adaptability to en- 
 vironment exists in the plant and in the an- 
 imal, but it is in them purely instinctive or 
 mechanical; with man on the other hand 
 there is an attempt at conscious adaptability. 
 
 When this desire for adaptability increases, 
 nature reveals a new principle of evolution. 
 To the principle of the survival of the fittest 
 by a struggle for existence, she adds the new 
 one of evolution by inter-dependence. Hence 
 we find human units aggregating themselves 
 into groups, and primitive men organizing 
 themselves into families and tribes. 
 
 Once more this means a saving of labor and 
 
94 THE HIDDEN WORK OF NATURE 
 
 time in the material struggle for existence; 
 some of both is now at nature's disposal to 
 train men to discover new ways of life and 
 action. To the play of the individual there is 
 added a communal life that makes civiliza- 
 tion possible. For civilization means that 
 some individuals in a community are dis- 
 satisfied with what contents all the others, 
 and that therefore they are burning with a 
 zeal for reform; and the spirit of reform 
 sooner or later is inevitable in evolution. The 
 survival of the fittest can only come about by 
 that mysterious arrival of the fittest that no 
 scientist can explain; nature now ushers in 
 ^^the fittest'' in the few that are planning for 
 reform. For reform means that slowly or- 
 ganisms will adapt themselves more and more 
 to the possibilities of environment, for to 
 each successive change to greater adaptability 
 nature has something new to give. 
 
 Thus individual men and women become 
 nature's tools; she works with their hearts 
 and minds and hands to create social and 
 political activities. Religion and science and 
 art appear among men; the struggle for ex- 
 istence is no longer nature's sole means for 
 bringing to realization her aim; inter-depen- 
 
THE HIDDEN WORK OF NATURE 95 
 
 dence of units, and therewith reform, are the 
 means she uses now. 
 
 Then it is that nature proclaims to men 
 that message she has kept for them through 
 the ages. It is the joy of social service. 
 Strange and unreal, as yet, to most men is the 
 thought of such a joy; but evolution has but 
 lately entered on this phase of her work, and 
 ages must yet elapse before social service be- 
 comes as instinctive in men as are now self- 
 assertion and selfishness. But that day must 
 inevitably be; the handful of reformers to- 
 day are as the "missing links^' of a chain that 
 stretches forward from man to superman. As 
 from the isolation and selfishness of the brute, 
 nature has evolved the inter-dependence of 
 men, so too is self-sacrifice the next logical 
 step in her evolutionary self-revelation. 
 
 A more inspiring picture there could hardly 
 be than this of nature at work at her building 
 and unbuilding. Yet there are not a few of 
 dark shadows in the picture. So long as the 
 individual lives only the few brief years of 
 his life, so long as nothing of him remains as 
 an individual after his death, there is a ruth- 
 lessness about nature that is appalling. Where 
 is to-day "the glory that was Greece and the 
 
96 
 
 THE HIDDEN WORK OF NATURE 
 
 grandeur that was Rome?" Some day there 
 must be an end to nature's work, in this 
 planet at least where we live. There are dead 
 suns in space and some day our sun will die 
 out and every satellite of his will be a frozen 
 world. Careful of the type, nature truly 
 builds form after form, and will build for 
 many an age yet to come. There is indeed a 
 far-off event "to which the whole creation 
 moves,'' but it is to that state when living 
 organisms shall lack what they need for their 
 life. 
 
 So long as we contemplate nature's visible 
 work only, not the greatest altruist but must 
 now and then feel the shadow of a great 
 despair. That which alone makes life and 
 self-sacrifice real and inspiring to great souls, 
 the thought and the feeling that their work 
 will endure for ever, is lacking when we con- 
 sider nature's work in the light of modern 
 science alone. Yet many an altruist would be 
 content to die, and be nothing thereafter, if he 
 could but feel that nature had some pity for 
 his fate. Well the poet voices this feeling 
 arising from this conception of nature, or of a 
 Deity who is as passionless as nature: 
 
THE HIDDEN WORK OF NATURE 97 
 
 Life is pleasant, and friends may be nigh, 
 
 Fain would I speak one word and be spared; 
 
 Yet I could be silent and cheerfully die, 
 If I were only sure God cared; 
 
 If I had faith and were only certain 
 
 That light is behind that terrible curtain. 
 
 It is here that Theosophy steps in to con- 
 tinue the work of science and explain the true 
 significance of nature's self-revelations. As 
 modern science points to nature's visible 
 work, so Theosophy points to a Hidden Work 
 of Nature. There is a Hidden Light that re- 
 veals to men that nature is but one expression 
 of a Consciousness at work; that this Con- 
 sciousness is at work with a Plan of evolu- 
 tion; and that this Consciousness carries out 
 its plan through us and through us alone. The 
 moment we realize the significance of this 
 message of the Hidden Light that men are 
 immortal souls and not perishable bodies, we 
 begin to see that while careful of the type, na- 
 ture is not less careful of the single life too. 
 For then we see that nature's latest phase, a 
 fullness of life through social service, neces- 
 sarily involves the recognition of men as 
 souls; for it would be useless for nature to 
 slowly fashion a reformer unless she could 
 utilize his ability and experience for greater 
 
98 THE HIDDEN WORK OF NATURE 
 
 reforms in the future. That his specialized 
 abilities shall not be dissipated would surely 
 then be logical in a nature for which we 
 postulate an aim that persists from age to 
 age. 
 
 It does not require much profound thought 
 or speculation to deduce from this view of 
 nature's work that men live for ever as souls, 
 and that through reincarnation they become 
 fitter tools in nature's hands to achieve her 
 purpose of evolution. Let but reincarnation 
 be considered a part of nature's plan, and at 
 once the tragedy of nature transforms itself 
 into an inspiring and stately pageant. For 
 then the future is ourselves; it is we that 
 shall make the glorious Utopias of dreams ; we 
 that painfully toil to-day to fashion bricks 
 for nature's beautiful edifice in far-off days, 
 we, and not others, shall see that edifice in its 
 splendor, and be its very possessors. Though 
 the spirit of action of the best of us is ever a 
 sic vos sed non vobis, yet in reality, like bread 
 cast upon the waters, our work shall greet us 
 ages hence, and we shall then be glad that we 
 have toiled so well now. 
 
 So comes to us the message of the Hidden 
 Light that nature is consciously going from 
 
THE HIDDEN WORK OF NATURE 99 
 
 good to better, from better to best, and that 
 she works out her splendid purpose through 
 us, who may become her ministers or must be 
 her slaves. 
 
 The spirit of reform then being a part of 
 the evolutionary process, the next point to 
 note is that in all effective reform there are 
 two elements: first, the reform is brought, 
 about by individuals working as a group, and 
 second, the group has a leader. It is fairly 
 easy to understand the grouping of individ- 
 uals co-operating for a common aim as a part 
 of nature's evolutionary plan; their united 
 action but expresses the social instinct. But 
 it is perhaps less easy to see that nature 
 selects the leader and sends him to a particu- 
 lar group to crystallize dreams and plans into 
 organization and action. Yet this is the mes- 
 sage of the Hidden Light — that a leader does 
 not appear by a mere concatenation of 
 chance circumstances, but only because he is 
 selected for a particular work and is sent to 
 do it. For a leader does not come in evolu- 
 tion as a ^^sport,'' a passing variant produced 
 nobody knows how ; he is fashioned by a slow 
 laborious process lasting thousands of years. 
 Life after life, in a process of rebirth, the 
 
100 THE HIDDEN WORK OF NATURE 
 
 would-be leader must earn his future posi- 
 tion by dedication to works of reform; by lit- 
 tle actions for reform as a savage, by larger 
 actions as a civilized man, he trains himself 
 for the role that nature has written for him. 
 
 If we look at reformers in the light of rein- 
 carnation, we shall see that their present abil- 
 ity to lead is simply the result of work done 
 in past lives. Since biologists are agreed that 
 acquired characteristics are not transmissible, 
 we must look for that rare inborn capacity to 
 lead, not in the heredity of the organism, but 
 in a spiritual heredity that is in the life and 
 consciousness of the individual. This is ex- 
 actly what reincarnation says; the individual 
 acquired his ability to lead today by en- 
 deavors to lead in many a past life, and by 
 succeeding so to do. 
 
 Furthermore the Hidden Light reveals to 
 us that each present movement for reform 
 was rehearsed in many a primitive setting 
 long ago, with the present leaders and their 
 coadjutors as actors. We need but look at the 
 reform movements for the amelioration of 
 the lot of the working classes in Europe to see 
 how the leaders to-day in the various coun- 
 tries were tribunes of the plebs in Rome or 
 
THE HIDDEN WORK OF NATURE 101 
 
 demogogues in Athens or leaders of the masses 
 in Carthage. Nay, furthermore, it is not 
 difficult to note how some of the politicians 
 and statesmen of Greece and Rome and else- 
 where, that worked to abolish abuses and to 
 free the oppressed, have changed sex in their 
 present incarnations, and are with us today as 
 leaders of the various suffragists and feminist 
 movements of the world. Where else, but in 
 past lives, did these women learn the tactical 
 strategy and mastery of leadership that they 
 evince in their campaigns for reform? Why 
 should certain men and women, and not all, 
 labor and toil for their fellow-men, renounc- 
 ing all and coveting martyrdom, unless those 
 same men and women had learned by past ex- 
 periences the glory of action for reform? 
 For the born leaders in every reform are gen- 
 iuses in their way; they go unerringly to an 
 aim with the conviction of success; where did 
 they develop this faith in themselves? They 
 are in reality the "missing links'' from men 
 to-day to the supermen of the future, and it 
 is nature herself with her Hidden Work that 
 has so fashioned them life after life. 
 
 So nature plans and achieves, and the 
 stately pageant moves on. But her purpose 
 
102 THE HIDDEN WORK OF NATURE 
 
 is not achieved slowly and leisurely, adding 
 change to change; she does not bring about a 
 new order of things by an accumulation of 
 small changes. Nature goes by leaps, per 
 saltum; and as in the biological world crises 
 appear and nature makes a leap and ushers in 
 new species, so too is it in the world of human 
 affairs. Though there is a slow steady upward 
 movement for progress through reform, yet 
 now and then there is a crisis in the affairs of 
 men ; then things happen, and after the crisis 
 is over there is, as it were, a new species in 
 human activity. Reform takes a new trend, 
 and a whole host of new reforms are ushered 
 in to make life fuller and nobler. 
 
 One such crisis in human affairs came in 
 Palestine, with the coming of Christ. For 
 though men knew not that it was a crisis, 
 though Greece and Rome dreamed and 
 planned of philosophy and dominion without 
 end, a dawn had begun of a new era, and an 
 age was ushered in, in the heyday of which 
 Greece and Rome should be a mere name. 
 Christ ministered in Palestine, spoke to peas- 
 ant and priest, and gave His sermons ^'on the 
 Mount;" and men knew not then that with 
 His message He gave birth to new species of 
 
THE HIDDEN WORK OF NATURE 103 
 
 idealism in action. But after two thousand 
 years have elapsed, we of another generation 
 can see that when Christ lived in Palestine, 
 and the Roman Empire was but just then be- 
 ginning its day of glory, then indeed was the 
 beginning of the end of a world of thought 
 and action — of that "glory that was Greece 
 and the grandeur that was Rome'^ — and that 
 Christ gave His message not so much to the 
 men of His day as to those that were to come. 
 
 So too was it in India, six centuries before 
 Christ; another "dreamer^' appeared, Sid- 
 dhartha, Prince of the Sakya Clan; men lis- 
 tened to Him and loved Him and followed 
 Him, but they little dreamed that He was in 
 reality building an Empire of Righteousness, 
 which even after twenty-five centuries should 
 embrace within it five hundred millions of 
 souls. To the critics of His time. He was but 
 another "Teacher,^' one of hundreds then liv- 
 ing in India pointing out "the Way;'' it is 
 only after the lapse of centuries that later 
 generations know that He was a Teacher of 
 Teachers, a Flower on our human tree the like 
 of which had never been. 
 
 Every so often then, there is a climax in 
 human affairs, and always such a climax is 
 
104 THE HIDDEN WORK OF NATURE 
 
 preceded by an age when men "dream 
 dreams." In Palestine prophet after prophet 
 dreamed of "the great and dreadful day of the 
 Lord" before Christ came, and proclaimed its 
 coming and worked for it; in India many a 
 sage and philosopher with his solutions pre- 
 pared the way for the message of the Buddha. 
 And in every such climax, small or great, 
 the resolution comes through the inter- 
 mediary of a Personality. For nature weaves 
 the tangled knot of human fate, "nowise 
 moved except unto working out of doom;" 
 but she plans too the Solver of the knot, and 
 for every crisis which is of her planning, she 
 has prepared the Man who holds the solution 
 in his heart and brain. 
 
 In this our twentieth century, men dream 
 dreams as never heretofore. East and west, 
 north and south, the machinery of human life 
 grates on the ear, and there is not a single 
 man or woman of true imagination who can 
 say, "God's in his heaven, alFs right with the 
 world!" 
 
 De profundis clamavi better describes the 
 wail of every nation. Millions are spent on 
 armies and navies, while the poor are clamor- 
 
THE HIDDEN WORK OF NATURE 105 
 
 ing for bread; and statesmen themselves are 
 wringing their hands that they cannot give a 
 nation^s wealth back to the nation in hospitals 
 and schools and fair gardens and clean habita- 
 tions. For there are ^Vars and rumors of 
 wars." The spirit of charity grows year by 
 year, but it seems as though charity but added 
 patches to a rotting garment, and the more 
 the patches that are put on the more the rents 
 that appear. Strife between capital and la- 
 bor, race hatred between white and brown and 
 yellow and black, a deadlock between science 
 and religion, and more than all else the in- 
 creasing luxury of the few and the increasing 
 misery of the many, these are but a few of the 
 problems facing philanthropists to-day. But 
 every reformer realizes, in whatever depart- 
 ment he works, that for lasting reform a com- 
 plete reconstruction is needed of the whole 
 social structure, if poverty and disease and 
 ignorance and misery shall be as a nightmare 
 that has been but shall never be again. All 
 are eager for reform ; thousands are willing to 
 co-operate. But none knows where to begin, 
 in the true reconstruction. Each is indeed 
 terrified lest in trying to pull one brick out of 
 the present social edifice, to replace it by a 
 
106 THE HIDDEN WORK OF NATURE 
 
 better, he may not pull the whole structure 
 down, and so cause misery instead of joy. 
 
 This is the crisis present before our eyes, 
 confronting not one nation but all. ^^Out of 
 the depths have I cried unto Thee, Lord," 
 is true to-day as never before. 
 
 Everywhere, in every department where 
 men work for reform, men are looking for a 
 Leader. Where is He that nature has selected, 
 in Whose mind is the Plan, in Whose heart is 
 the Spirit, and in Whose hand is the Power? 
 Let Him but appear, let Him but say, "This is 
 how you shall work,'^ and thousands will flock 
 to Him in joy. And it is the message of the 
 Hidden Light that He is ready, for from the 
 hearts of men a cry has gone forth, and from 
 the bosom of God a Son shall come. The 
 world is in the birth-throes once again for the 
 coming of a Son of Man, and the young men 
 that see visions to-day shall in their prime 
 find Him in their midst, the Wonderful, the 
 Counsellor, the Prince of Peace. 
 
 Never an age, when God has need of him, 
 
 Shall want its man, predestined by that need. 
 To pour his life in fiery word and need. 
 
 The great Archangel of the Elohim. 
 
THE HIDDEN WORK OF NATURE 107 
 
 When He that the world waits for, and 
 Whom nature has planned to come *^unto this 
 hour/' shall appear, what will be His work? 
 What but to carry on nature's work one step 
 further? The day is past when men can go 
 forward with competition as their cry of 
 progress; nothing lasting can now come for 
 men unless it is brought about by inter- 
 dependence and co-operation. The best of 
 men to-day see the inevitable coming of this 
 new age and when men shall be sons of God 
 in deed and not merely in name ; but their cry 
 for altruism and co-operation is as a voice 
 hurled against a tempest. They can but 
 gather round them here an enthusiast and 
 there a disciple; but they accomplish little, 
 for they lack the character that compels a 
 world to listen. Till comes that Personality 
 Who is not of one nation but of all, 
 Whose message is not for this century 
 alone but for all others to come, till 
 then the dawn of the new day will 
 drag its slow length along. But when He 
 comes, then indeed what He says and 
 what He does will be the proof to us that it is 
 He, and not another, that nature has planned 
 to be the Shadow of God upon earth to men, 
 the Saviour that is born unto them this day. 
 
108 THE HIDDEN WORK OF NATURE 
 
 Then once more shall the Hidden Light be 
 revealed to men, that Light *^that shineth in 
 darkness, and the darkness comprehended it 
 not." Then science shall be our religion, and 
 religion our art; then shall we cease to be 
 nature's slaves and enter upon our heritage 
 and become her councillors and guides. Then 
 shall we know, not merely believe, that be- 
 hind the seeming pitiless plan of nature there 
 is a most pitiful Mind, careful of the type and 
 careful of the single life too. Nevermore 
 shall our eyes be blinded by passionate tears 
 as we look at the misery of men and feel the 
 utter hopelessness of its effective diminution; 
 for we shall know that nature but veils an Eye 
 that sees, a Heart that feels, and a Mind that 
 plans, for One shall be with us to be a 
 Martyros, a Witness, of that Light that shin- 
 eth in darkness, even when the darkness com- 
 prehends it not. 
 
 He will call on the many to co-operate in 
 all good works '^in His name and for the love 
 of mankind;" He will teach them the next 
 lesson that nature has planned for them, the 
 joy of neighborly service. But to a few He 
 will give the call to follow Him through the 
 ages. For He comes but to usher in a new 
 
THE HIDDEN WORK OF NATURE 109 
 
 age; that age must be tendered and fostered 
 decade after decade, century after century, 
 till the seed becomes the tree and the tree 
 bears flowers, and by the perfecting of man 
 comes the fulfilment of God. As He is na- 
 ture's husbandman, so will He need helpers 
 in those fields whence alone comes the Daily 
 Bread for men. 
 
 The many will love Him for the peace and 
 joy He brings; but a few will answer the call 
 to follow him life after life, toiling, toiling in 
 a world seemingly without end. But to these 
 few alone will it be given to know the inward- 
 ness of the message of the Hidden Light, that 
 nature keeps her diadems not for those that 
 reap happiness in her pleasant fields and gar- 
 dens, but for those that co-operate with her 
 in her Hidden Work, and try '^to lift a little 
 of the heavy karma of the world.'' For this 
 is nature's Hidden Work, to weave a vesture 
 out of the karmas of men that shall reflect the 
 pattern given her from on high; and the 
 weaving halts, unperfected, till through the 
 actions of all men there shall shine one great 
 Action. When the perfect vesture is woven 
 for Him Who desires it, and the karmas of all 
 men act in unison, then, and not before, will 
 
110 THE HIDDEN WORK OP NATURE 
 
 come "that day'' when Nature can say to men, 
 as now to her God, "I am in my Father, and 
 ye in me and I in you." Unto that hour she 
 toils at her Hidden Work, and it is the Hid- 
 den Light that reveals to men her process of 
 evolution as she shapes from out the dust im- 
 mortal Sons of God. 
 
Printed on the Press of 
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