Section II. The Ancestors Mankind is Offered by Science.
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Blavatsky, H. P. (Helena Petrovna)
Nevertheless, we have one thing in common with the Darwinian school, that is the law of gradual and extremely slow Evolution, embracing many million years. The chief quarrel, it appears, is with regard to the nature of the primitive “ancestor.” We shall be told that the Dhyân Chohan, or the “progenitor” of Manu, is a hypothetical [pg 707] being unknown on the physical plane. We reply that it was believed in by the whole of Antiquity, and is by nine-tenths of the present humanity; whereas not only is the pithecoid man, or ape-man, a purely hypothetical creature of Hæckel's creation, unknown and untraceable on this Earth, but further its genealogy—as invented by him—clashes with scientific facts and all the known data of modern discovery in Zoology. It is simply absurd, even as a fiction. As de Quatrefages demonstrates in a few words, Hæckel “admits the existence of an absolutely theoretical pithecoid man”—a hundred times more difficult to accept than any Deva ancestor. And it is not the only instance in which he proceeds in a similar manner in order to complete his genealogical table. In fact he very naïvely admits his inventions himself. Does he not confess the non-existence of his Sozura (fourteenth stage)—a creature entirely unknown to Science—by confessing over his own signature, that:
The proof of its existence arises from the necessity of an intermediate type between the thirteenth and the fourteenth stages[!].
If so, we might maintain with as much scientific right, that the proof of the existence of our three ethereal Races, and of the three-eyed men of the Third and Fourth Root-Races, “arises also from the necessity of an intermediate type” between the animal and the Gods. What reason would the Hæckelians have to protest in this special case?
Of course there is a ready answer: Because we do not grant the presence of the Monadic Essence. The manifestation of the Logos as individual consciousness in the animal and human creation is not accepted by exact Science, nor does it cover the whole ground, of course. But the failures of Science and its arbitrary assumptions are far greater on the whole than any “extravagant” Esoteric doctrine can ever furnish.1595 Even thinkers of the school of Von Hartmann have become tainted with the general epidemic. They accept the Darwinian Anthropology (more or less), though they also postulate the individual Ego as a manifestation of the Unconscious (the Western presentation of the Logos or Primeval Divine Thought). They say the evolution of the physical man is from the animal, but that mind in its various phases is altogether a thing apart from material facts, though organism, as a Upâdhi, is necessary for its manifestation.