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

We are told that while every other heresy against Modern Science may be disregarded, this, our denial of the Darwinian theory as applied to man, will be the one “unpardonable” sin. The Evolutionists stand firm as rock on the evidence of similarity of structure between the ape and man. The anatomical evidence, it is urged, is quite overpowering in this case; it is bone for bone, and muscle for muscle, even the brain conformation being very much the same.

Well, what of that? All this was known before King Herod; and the writers of the Râmâyana, the poets who sang the prowess and valour of Hanumân, the Monkey-God, “whose feats were great and wisdom never rivalled,” must have known as much about his anatomy and brain as does any Hæckel or Huxley in our modern day. Volumes upon volumes have been written upon this similarity, in antiquity as in more modern times. Therefore, there is nothing new given to the world or to philosophy in such volumes as Mivart's Man and Apes, or Messrs. Fiske and Huxley's defence of Darwinism. But what are those crucial proofs of man's descent from a pithecoid ancestor? If the Darwinian theory is not the true one, we are told, if man and ape do not descend from a common ancestor, then we must explain the reason of:

(ii) The presence of rudimentary organs in man, i.e., traces of former organs now atrophied by disuse. Some of these organs, it is asserted, could not have had any scope for employment, except in a semi-animal, semi-arboreal monster. Why, again, do we find in man those “rudimentary” organs—as useless as its rudimentary wing is to the apteryx of Australia—the vermiform appendix of the cæcum, the ear muscles,1620 the “rudimentary tail” with which children are still sometimes born, etc.?

Furthermore, the latter—with their great leader Mr. Huxley, and such eminent Zoologists as Mr. Romanes and others—while defending the Darwinian theory, are the first to confess the almost insuperable difficulties in the way of its final demonstration. And there are as great men of Science as the above-named, who deny, most emphatically, the uncalled-for assumption, and loudly denounce the unwarrantable exaggerations on the question of this supposed similarity. It is sufficient to glance at the works of Broca, Gratiolet, Owen, Pruner-Bey, and finally at the last great work of de Quatrefages, Introduction à[pg 720]l'Étude des Races Humaines, Questions Générales, to discover the fallacy of the Evolutionists. We may say more: the exaggerations concerning this alleged similarity of structure between man and the anthropomorphous ape have become so glaring and absurd of late, that even Mr. Huxley has found himself forced to protest against the too sanguine expectations. It was that great Anatomist personally who called the “smaller fry” to order, by declaring in one of his articles that the differences between the structure of the human body and that of the highest anthropomorphous pithecoid, were not only far from being trifling and unimportant, but were, on the contrary, very great and suggestive:

Finally, the absurdity of such an unnatural descent of man is so palpable in the face of all the proofs and evidence as to the skull of the pithecoid compared to that of man, that de Quatrefages resorted unconsciously to our Esoteric theory by saying that it is rather the apes that can claim descent from man than vice versâ. As proven by Gratiolet, with regard to the cavities of the brain of the anthropoids—in which species that organ develops in an inverse ratio to what would be the case were the corresponding organs in man really the product of the development of the said organs in the apes—the size of the human skull and its brain, as well as the cavities, increase with the individual development of man. His intellect develops and increases with age, while his facial bones and jaws diminish and straighten, thus becoming more and more spiritualized; whereas with the ape it is the reverse. In its youth the anthropoid is far more intelligent and good-natured, while with age it becomes duller; and, as its skull recedes and seems to diminish as it grows, its facial bones and jaws develop, the brain being finally crushed, and thrown entirely back, to make with every day more [pg 721] room for the animal type. The organ of thought—the brain—recedes and diminishes, entirely conquered and replaced by that of the wild beast—the jaw apparatus.

Thus, as wittily remarked in the French work, a gorilla could with perfect justice address an Evolutionist, claiming its right of descent from him. It would say to him: We, anthropoid apes, form a retrogressive departure from the human type, and therefore our development and evolution are expressed by a transition from a human-like to an animal-like structure of organism; but in what way could you, men, descend from us—how can you form a continuation of our genus? For, to make this possible, your organization would have to differ still more than ours does from the human structure, it would have to approach still closer to that of the beast than ours does; and in such a case justice demands that you should give up to us your place in nature. You are lower than we are, once that you insist on tracing your genealogy from our kind; for the structure of our organization and its development are such that we are unable to generate forms of a higher organization than our own.

This is where the Occult Sciences agree entirely with de Quatrefages. Owing to the very type of his development man cannot descend from either an ape or an ancestor common to both apes and men, but shows his origin to be from a type far superior to himself. And this type is the “Heavenly Man”—the Dhyân Chohans, or the Pitris so-called, as shown in the first Part of this Volume. On the other hand, the pithecoids, the orang-outang, the gorilla, and the chimpanzee can, and, as the Occult Sciences teach, do, descend from the animalized Fourth human Root-Race, being the product of man and an extinct species of mammal—whose remote ancestors were themselves the product of Lemurian bestiality—which lived in the Miocene age. The ancestry of this semi-human monster is explained in the Stanzas as originating in the sin of the “mind-less” races of the middle Third Race period.

When it is borne in mind that all forms which now people the Earth are so many variations on basic types originally thrown off by the Man of the Third and Fourth Round, such an evolutionist argument as that insisting on the “unity of structural plan” characterizing all vertebrates, loses its edge. The basic types referred to were very few in number in comparison with the multitude of organisms to which they ultimately gave rise; but a general unity of type has, nevertheless, been preserved throughout the ages. The economy of Nature does [pg 722] not sanction the coëxistence of several utterly opposed “ground plans” of organic evolution on one planet. Once, however, that the general drift of the Occult explanation is formulated, inference as to detail may well be left to the intuitive reader.

Similarly with the important question of the “rudimentary” organs discovered by Anatomists in the human organism. Doubtless this line of argument, when wielded by Darwin and Hæckel against their European adversaries, proved of great weight. Anthropologists, who ventured to dispute the derivation of man from an animal ancestry, were sorely puzzled how to deal with the presence of gill-clefts, with the “tail” problem, and so on. Here again Occultism comes to our assistance with the necessary data.

The fact is that, as previously stated, the human type is the repertory of all potential organic forms, and the central point from which these latter radiate. In this postulate we find a true “evolution” or “unfolding”—in a sense which cannot be said to belong to the mechanical theory of Natural Selection. Criticizing Darwin's inference from “rudiments,” an able writer remarks:

Why is it not just as probably a true hypothesis to suppose that man was first created with these rudimentary sketches in his organization, and that they became useful appendages in the lower animals into which man degenerated, as it is to suppose that these parts existed in full development, activity and practical use, in the lower animals out of whom man was generated?1622

So far as our present Fourth Round terrestrial period is concerned, the mammalian fauna are alone to be regarded as traceable to prototypes shed by Man. The amphibia, birds, reptiles, fishes, etc., are the resultants of the Third Round, astral fossil forms stored up in the auric envelope of the Earth and projected into physical objectivity subsequent to the deposition of the first Laurentian rocks. “Evolution” has to deal with the progressive modifications, which Palæontology shows to have affected the lower animal and vegetable kingdoms in the course of geological time. It does not, and from the nature of things cannot, touch on the subject of the pre-physical types which served as the basis for future differentiation. Tabulate the general [pg 723] laws controlling the development of physical organisms it certainly may, and to a certain extent it has acquitted itself ably of the task.

To return to the immediate subject of discussion. The mammalia, whose first traces are discovered in the marsupials of the Triassic rocks of the Secondary period, were evolved from purely astral progenitors contemporary with the Second Race. They are thus post-human, and, consequently, it is easy to account for the general resemblance between their embryonic stages and those of Man, who necessarily embraces in himself and epitomizes in his development the features of the group he originated. This explanation disposes of a portion of the Darwinist brief.

But how to account for the presence of the gill-clefts in the human fœtus, which represent the stage through which the branchiæ of the fish are developed;1623for the pulsating vessel corresponding to the heart of the lower fishes, which constitutes the fœtal heart; for the entire analogy presented by the segmentation of the human ovum, the formation of the blastoderm, and the appearance of the“gastrula”stage, with corresponding stages in lower vertebrate life and even among the sponges; for the various types of lower animal life which the form of the future child shadows forth in the cycle of its growth?... How comes it to pass that stages in the life of fishes, whose ancestors swam [æons before the epoch of the First Root-Race] in the seas of the Silurian period, as well as stages in that of the later amphibian, reptilian fauna, are mirrored in the“epitomized history”of human fœtal development?

This plausible objection is met by the reply that the Third Round terrestrial animal forms were just as much referable to types thrown off by Third Round Man, as that new importation into our planet's area—the mammalian stock—is to the Fourth Round Humanity of the Second Root-Race. The process of human fœtal growth epitomizes not only the general characteristics of the Fourth, but of the Third Round terrestrial life. The diapason of type is run through in brief. Occultists are thus at no loss to “account for” the birth of children with an actual caudal appendage, or for the fact that the tail in the human fœtus is, at one period, double the length of the nascent legs. The potentiality of every organ useful to animal life is locked up in Man—the Microcosm of the Macrocosm—and abnormal conditions may not unfrequently result in the strange phenomena which Darwinists [pg 724] regard as “reversion to ancestral features.”1624 Reversion, indeed, but scarcely in the sense contemplated by our present-day empiricists!