The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 2 of 4 The Synthesis of...

It is argued that Universal Evolution, otherwise the gradual development of species in all the kingdoms of Nature, works by uniform laws. This is admitted, and the law is enforced far more strictly in Esoteric than in Modern Science. But we are also told, that it is equally a law that:

Esoteric Science agrees with this, but adds that this law applies only to what is known to it as the Primary Creation—the evolution of Worlds from Primordial Atoms, and the Pre-primordial Atom, at the first differentiation of the former; and that during the period of cyclic evolution in Space and Time, this law is limited and works only in the lower kingdoms. It did so work during the first geological periods, from simple to complex, on the rough material surviving from the relics of the Third Round, which relics are projected into objectivity when terrestrial activity recommences.

No more than Science, does the Esoteric Philosophy admit “design” or “special creation.” It rejects every claim to the “miraculous,” and accepts nothing outside the uniform and immutable laws of Nature. But it teaches a cyclic law, a double stream of Force (or Spirit) and of Matter, which, starting from the Neutral Centre of Being, develops by its cyclic progress and incessant transformations. The primitive germ from which all vertebrate life has developed throughout the ages, being distinct from the primitive germ from which vegetable and animal life [pg 773] have evolved, there are side laws whose work is determined by the conditions in which the materials to be worked upon are found by them, and of which Science—Physiology and Anthropology especially—seems to be little aware. Its votaries speak of this “primitive germ,” and maintain that it is shown beyond any doubt that:

The design [and the“designer”], if there be any [in the case of man, with the wonderful structure of his limbs, and his hand especially], must be placed very much farther back, and is, in fact, involved in the primitive germ, from which all vertebrate life certainly, and probably all life, animal or vegetable, have been slowly developed.1718

This is as true of the “primitive germ” as it is false that that “germ” is only “very much farther back” than man is; for it is at an immeasurable and inconceivable distance, in Time, though not in Space, from the origin even of our Solar System. As the Hindû philosophy very justly teaches, the “Aniyâmsam Anîyasâm,” can be known only through false notions. It is the “Many” that proceed from the “One”—the living spiritual germs or centres of forces—each in a septenary form, which first generate, and then give the primary impulse to the law of evolution and gradual slow development.

Limiting the teaching strictly to this our Earth, it may be shown that, as the ethereal forms of the first Men are first projected on seven zones by seven Dhyân-Chohanic Centres of Force, so there are centres of creative power for every root or parent species of the host of forms of vegetable and animal life. This is, again, no “special creation,” nor is there any “design,” except in the general “ground-plan” worked out by the Universal Law. But there are certainly “designers,” though these are neither omnipotent nor omniscient in the absolute sense of the term. They are simply Builders, or Masons, working under the impulse given them by the ever-to-be-unknown (on our plane) Master Mason—the One Life and Law. Belonging to this sphere, they have no hand in, nor possibility of working on any other, during the present Manvantara, at any rate. That they work in cycles and on a strictly geometrical and mathematical scale of progression, is what the extinct animal species amply demonstrate; that they act by design in the details of minor lives (of side animal issues, etc.) is sufficiently proved by natural history. In the “creation” of new species, departing sometimes very widely from the parent stock, as in the great variety of the genus Felis—like the lynx, the tiger, the cat, etc.—it is the “designers” [pg 774] who direct the new evolution by adding to, or depriving the species of certain appendages, either needed or becoming useless in the new environments. Thus, when we say that Nature provides for every animal and plant, whether large or small, we speak correctly.

For it is these terrestrial Spirits of Nature, who form the aggregated Nature—which, if it fails occasionally in its design, is neither to be considered blind, nor to be taxed with the failure; since, belonging to a differentiated sum of qualities and attributes, it is in virtue of that alone conditioned and imperfect.

Were there no such thing as evolutionary cycles, as an eternal spiral progress into Matter with a proportionate obscuration of Spirit (though the two are one) followed by an inverse ascent into Spirit and the defeat of Matter—active and passive by turn—how could we explain the discoveries of Zoology and Geology? How is it that, on the dictum of authoritative Science, one can trace the animal life from the mollusc up to the great sea-dragon, from the smallest land-worm up again to the gigantic animals of the Tertiary period; and that the latter were once crossed is shown by the fact of all those species decreasing, dwindling down and becoming dwarfed. If the seeming process of development working from the less to the more perfect, and from the simpler to the more complex, were a universal law indeed, instead of being a very imperfect generalization of a mere secondary nature in the great cosmic process, and if there were no such cycles as those claimed, then the Mesozoic fauna and flora ought to change places with the latest Neolithic. It is the plesiosauri and the ichthyosauri that we ought to find developing from the present sea- and river-reptiles, instead of these giving place to their dwarfed modern analogies.

It is, again, our old friend, the good-tempered elephant, that would be the fossil antediluvian ancestor, and the mammoth of the Pliocene age who would be in the menagerie; the megalonyx and the gigantic megatherium would be found instead of the lazy sloth in the forests of South America, in which the colossal ferns of the carboniferous periods would take the place of the mosses and the present trees—dwarfs, even the giants of California, in comparison with the Titan-trees of past geological periods. Surely the organisms of the megasthenian world of the Tertiary and the Mesozoic ages must have been more complex and perfect than those of the microsthenian plants and animals of the present age? The dryopithecus, for instance, is more perfect anatomically, is more fit for a greater development of brain power, than the modern gorilla [pg 775] or gibbon. How is all this, then? Are we to believe that the constitution of all those colossal land- and sea-dragons, of the gigantic flying reptiles, was not far more developed and complex than the anatomy of the lizards, turtles, crocodiles, and even of the whales—in short, of all those animals with which we are acquainted?

Let us admit, however, for argument's sake, that all those cycles, races, septenary forms of evolution, and the tutti quanti of Esoteric teaching, are no better than a delusion and a snare. Let us agree with Science and say that man—instead of being an imprisoned “spirit,” and his vehicle, the shell or body, a gradually perfected and now complete mechanism for material and terrestrial uses, as claimed by the Occultists—is simply a more developed animal, whose primal form emerged from one and the same primitive germ on this Earth as the flying dragon and the gnat, the whale and the amoeba, the crocodile and the frog, etc. In this case, he must have passed through the identical developments and through the same process of growth as all the other mammals. If man is an animal, and nothing more, a highly intellectual “ex-brute,” he should at least be allowed to have been a gigantic mammal of his kind, a “meganthropus” in his day. This is exactly what Esoteric Science shows to have taken place in the first three Rounds, and in this, as in most other things, it is more logical and consistent than Modern Science. It classifies the human body with the brute creation, and maintains it in the path of animal evolution, from first to last, while Science leaves man a parentless orphan born of sires unknown, an “unspecialized skeleton” truly! And this mistake is due to a stubborn rejection of the doctrine of cycles.