(17) The Process of Evolution is caused by the constant striving of the Life and Mind within the sheaths of matter—the striving to express more and still more of themselves, and to mould and use the sheaths of matter in the work of self-expression. Protoplasm, the physical basis of plant and animal life, was evolved in this way. Then came the single-celled creature which dwelt in the slime of the ancient ocean beds. Then forms of life composed of colonies of cells appeared. Then more complex forms of cell-combination, and so on, and on, until the highest forms of life known to us today were evolved.

(34) Both science, and the occult teachings, inform us that animal life had its origin in the slime of the primeval ocean beds, and took the form of the "single cell" creatures. The best known form of single-cell animal is the Moneron (plural, monera), which is composed of but a single cell, and is like a tiny drop of glue. It belongs to the lowest class of animal-life, known as the Protozoa. The Moneron lives in water, and is a very minute shapeless, colorless, slimy, sticky, drop of protoplasmic substance. It has no organs of any kind, and all of its parts are similar—it lacks the separate organs or parts with which to perform the offices of the living creature as found in the higher forms of life. And yet this organless creature performs the processes of like known, respectively, as nutrition, reproduction, sensation, and will-action. Every part of the Moneron is capable of absorbing food and oxygen—it is all stomach and all lungs. Moreover, it is all reproductive organism. It envelops its prey by enclosing the latter as a drop of glue encloses a tiny gnat; and it then absorbs the nourishment from its food through every portion of its surface coming in contact with the food. It moves by prolonging a portion of itself outward, like a tiny tail or finger—this constitutes the "false foot" by which it propels, pushes, or pulls itself forward or backward, or sidewise. When it gets ready, it pulls back the "false foot" into its general substance, and is the same as before. It has no distinction of sex, but reproduces itself by simply growing larger and then dividing itself into two—and the process is over, there being two Monera where only one Moneron was the moment before. And yet this simple creature receives impressions from outside, and responds thereto. It seeks its food, and escapes its enemies. It has all the mind it needs.

(8) This changed conception of science is picturesquely expressed by Luther Burbank, the " wizard of plant life," as follows: "All my investigations have led me away from the idea of a dead material universe tossed about by various forces, to that of a universe which is absolutely all force, life, soul, thought, or whatever name we may choose to call it. Every atom, molecule, plant, animal, or planet, is only an aggregation of organized unit forces, held in place by stronger forces, thus holding them for a time latent, though teeming with inconceivable power. All life on our planet is, so to speak, just on the outer fringe of this infinite ocean of force. The universe is not half-dead, but all alive." Prof. Dolbear goes back even to the Ether of Space in his assumption of Omnipresent Life, when he says: The Ether has besides the function of energy and motion, other inherent qualities, out of which could emerge under proper circumstances, other phenomena, such as life, mind, or whatever may be in that substratum." Prof. Cope has intimated that "the basis of Life lies back of the atoms and may be found in the Universal Ether." Saleeby, in his well-known work of Evolution, in which he carries to its logical conclusions the work of Herbert Spencer, says: "Life is potential in matter; life-energy is not a thing unique and created at a particular time in the past. If evolution be true, living matter has been evolved by natural processes from matter which is, apparently, dead. But if life is potential in matter, it is a thousand times more evident that mind is potential in life. The evolutionist is impelled to believe that mind is potential in matter. (I adopt that form of words for the moment, but not without future criticism.) The microscopic cell, a minute speck of matter that is to become man, has in it the promise and germ of mind. May we not draw the inference that the elements of mind are present in those chemical elements—carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulphur, phosphorus, sodium, potassium, chlorine—that are found in the cell. Not only must we do so, but we must go further, since we know that each of these elements, and every other, is built up out of one invariable unit, the electron, and we must therefore assert that mind is potential in the unit of matter—the electron itself. It is to assert the sublime truth first perceived by Spinoza, that mind and matter are the warp and woof of what Goethe called 'the living garment of God.' Both are complementary expressions of the Unknowable Reality which underlies both." Flammarion has said: 'The universe is a dynamism. Life itself, from the most rudimentary cell up to the most complicated organism, is a special kind of movement, a movement determined and organized by a directing force. Visible matter, which stands for us at the present moment for the universe, and which certain classic doctrines consider as the origin of all things—movement, life, thought—is only a word void of meaning. The universe is a great organism, controlled by a dynamism of the psychical order. Mind gleams through its every atom. There is mind in everything, not only in human and animal life, but in plants, in minerals, in space." [The student must always remember that where there is "mind," there must be "life;" and where "life," there must be "mind." Hence the importance of these admissions of modern science.] Haeckel in his "Riddle of the Universe," sometimes called "The Bible of Materialism," makes the following statement, remarkable coming from such a source: "I cannot imagine the simplest chemical and physical process, without attributing the movements of the material particles to unconscious sensation." Again, he says: "The idea of chemical affinity consists in the fact that the various chemical elements perceive the qualitative differences in other elements—experience 'pleasure' or 'revulsion' at contact with them, and execute specific movements on this ground." He adds, at another point: "The sensations and responses in plant and animal life are connected by a long series of evolutionary stages with the simpler forms of sensation that we find in the inorganic elements, and that reveal themselves in chemical affinity." He quotes with approval the statement of Nageli that: "If the molecules possess something that is related, however distantly, to sensation, it must be uncomfortable to be able to follow their attractions and repulsions; uncomfortable when they are forced to do otherwise." But not only is modern science giving approval to the oldest conceptions of the occultists concerning Universal Life in the manner mentioned above, i.e. by general statements; it is also quoting with approval the experiments and discoveries of leading scientists along the same line—experiments which go to prove the general statements above quoted. Let us consider a few of these experiments and discoveries in the laboratories of modern science.

(15) When the temperature of the earth was at a point at which life is commonly believed to be impossible, there were present certain strange forms of life, which may be described as half mineral—half plant. These crystals reproduced themselves by a splitting up process, and grew from the inside as do plants. These life forms were composed of the same materials as the crystals from which they evolved—but they possessed a greater degree of life and mind, and while from one point of view they may be said to have been minerals, yet from another they may truly be said to have been plants. These strange creatures have disappeared as have all other "intermediate forms" which have played the parts of bridges in the evolutionary process. But they have left their traces in the material bodies of both plants and animals. For it must be remembered that even the bodies of the highest forms of plant or animal life are composed of certain chemical elements which were derived from the mineral kingdom, as for instance, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, sulphur, phosphorus, etc.

(8) "Therefore, since neither all things are produced fortuitously, or by the unguided mechanism of matter, nor God himself may be reasonably thought to do all things immediately and miraculously, it may well be concluded that there is a Plastic Nature under him, which, as an inferior end subordinate instrument, doth drudgingly execute that part of his providence which consists in the regular and orderly motion of matter; yet so as there is also besides this a higher providence to be acknowledged, which, presiding over it, doth often supply the defects of it, and sometimes overrules it, forasmuch as the Plastic Nature cannot act electively nor with discretion." Other schools of philosophy, notably that founded by Schopenhauer, have postulated the presence of a Universal Spirit (whose chief attribute is Desire-Will) from whom the universe of creatures has proceeded. This Universal Spirit is held to be filled with a longing, craving, seeking, striving desire to express itself in phenomenal existence. Schopenhauer calls it "The Will to Live." It is described as instinctive rather than intellectual, and as creating intellect with which to better serve its purposes of self-expression. Other philosophers have proceeded along the main lines of the concept of Schopenhauer, with various modifications. The same idea is expressed by some of the old Buddhistic philosophers, the very term "The Will-to-Live" being used to express the essential nature of the Universal Spirit. But, it must be noted, in such philosophies the Universal Spirit is considered rather as the Eternal Parent than as its First Manifestation. In the same way a certain school of thinkers postulate the existence of a "Living Nature," which expresses itself in innumerable living creatures and things—all Things in the universe being held to possess Life in some form and degree, as, indeed, the Rosicrucian creatures also hold.

(2) But of what nature is this sovereign principle?

If material, then definitely it must fall apart; for every material entity, at least, is something put together.

If it is not material but belongs to some other Kind, that new substance must be investigated in the same way or by some more suitable method.

But our first need is to discover into what this material form, since such the soul is to be, can dissolve.

Now: of necessity life is inherent to soul: this material entity, then, which we call soul must have life ingrained within it; but it must be made up of two or more bodies; that life, then, will be vested, either in each and all of those bodies or in one of them to the exclusion of the other or others; if this be not so, then there is no life present anywhere.

If any one of them contains this ingrained life, that one is the soul. But what sort of an entity have we there; what is this body which of its own nature possesses soul?

Fire, air, water, earth, are in themselves soulless- whenever soul is in any of them, that life is borrowed- and there are no other forms of body than these four: even the school that believes there are has always held them to be bodies, not souls, and to be without life.

None of these, then, having life, it would be extraordinary if life came about by bringing them together; it is impossible, in fact, that the collocation of material entities should produce life, or mindless entities mind.

No one, moreover, would pretend that a mere chance mixing could give such results: some regulating principle would be necessary, some Cause directing the admixture: that guiding principle would be- soul.

Body- not merely because it is a composite, but even were it simplex- could not exist unless there were soul in the universe, for body owes its being to the entrance of a Reason-Principle into Matter, and only from soul can a Reason-Principle come.

(12) The term "Mineral" of course means "inorganic substances having a definite chemical composition; neither animal nor vegetable substances." We need scarcely to call the attention of the student to the fact that the substance of which the physical body is composed is, itself, composed of certain chemical or mineral substances, such as oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulphur, phosphorus, iron, and other chemical elements. Cremate a body and the greater part of it will disappear as the vapor of water (composed of oxygen and hydrogen), and other gases; the remainder being composed of other chemical or mineral elements. The physical body is built up of mineral and chemical elements transformed by the action of plant chemistry into protoplasm, and then absorbed by man as food in the form of vegetables or animal meat. The basis of all organic matter is chemical or mineral substance. Protoplasm, the basis of organic substance, vegetable or animal, was evolved from carbon—that same element which manifests as coal, diamond, graphite, etc. The physical basis of the bodies of animals and plants is solely mineral or chemical, and all such bodies are built up from the chemical material originally furnished by earth, air, and water.

(37) If we will be still so very earthly minded, as to think that God made all the Beasts of a Lump of Earth, of what then is their Spirit made? Seeing that Earth is not very Flesh, and the Blood is not mere Water. Besides, the Earth and the Water is not Life; and though the a Air comes in it, yet it still remains such an Essence as springs only in the Fiat, and the Tincture which rises up in the Fire, and from whence the noble Life is stirred is hidden.

(14) Other scientific laboratory experiments have revealed most interesting facts concerning the production of living things from "non-living matter." Dr. Charles Bastian, of London, England, has prepared and exhibited more than five thousand microphotographs showing the evolution of organic living forms from the inorganic "non-living" (so-called). He claims to have produced certain microscopic black spots from a previously perfectly clear liquor, which spots gradually enlarge and are transformed into certain forms of lowly bacteria. Professor Burke, of Cambridge, England, claims to have produced from sterilized bouillon, by the action of sterilized radium chloride, certain minute living bodies which manifest subsequent growth and reproduction by subdivision.

(3) Anyone who rejects this view, and holds that either atoms or some entities void of part coming together produce soul, is refuted by the very unity of soul and by the prevailing sympathy as much as by the very coherence of the constituents. Bodily materials, in nature repugnant to unification and to sensation, could never produce unity or self-sensitiveness, and soul is self-sensitive. And, again, constituents void of part could never produce body or bulk.

Perhaps we will be asked to consider body as a simple entity : they will tell us, then, that no doubt, as purely material, it cannot have a self-springing life- since matter is without quality- but that life is introduced by the fact that the Matter is brought to order under Forming-Idea. But if by this Forming-Idea they mean an essential, a real being, then it is not the conjoint of body and idea that constitutes soul: it must be one of the two items and that one, being outside of the Matter, cannot be body: to make it body would simply force us to repeat our former analysis.

If on the contrary they do not mean by this Forming-Idea a real being, but some condition or modification of the Matter, they must tell us how and whence this modification, with resultant life, can have found the way into the Matter: for very certainly Matter does not mould itself to pattern or bring itself to life.

It becomes clear that since neither Matter nor body in any mode has this power, life must be brought upon the stage by some directing principle external and transcendent to all that is corporeal.

In fact, body itself could not exist in any form if soul-power did not: body passes; dissolution is in its very nature; all would disappear in a twinkling if all were body. It is no help to erect some one mode of body into soul; made of the same Matter as the rest, this soul body would fall under the same fate: of course it could never really exist: the universe of things would halt at the material, failing something to bring Matter to shape.

Nay more: Matter itself could not exist: the totality of things in this sphere is dissolved if it be made to depend upon the coherence of a body which, though elevated to the nominal rank of "soul," remains air, fleeting breath , whose very unity is not drawn from itself.

All bodies are in ceaseless process of dissolution; how can the kosmos be made over to any one of them without being turned into a senseless haphazard drift? This pneuma- orderless except under soul- how can it contain order, reason, intelligence? But: given soul, all these material things become its collaborators towards the coherence of the kosmos and of every living being, all the qualities of all the separate objects converging to the purposes of the universe: failing soul in the things of the universe, they could not even exist, much less play their ordered parts.

(13) Then is THE ALL mere Energy or Force? Not Energy or Force as the materialists use the terms, for their energy and force are blind, mechanical things, devoid of Life or Mind. Life and Mind can never evolve from blind Energy or Force, for the reason given a moment ago: "Nothing can rise higher than its source--nothing is evolved unless it is involved--nothing manifests in the effect, unless it is in the cause. " And so THE ALL cannot be mere Energy or Force, for, if it were, then there would be no such things as Life and Mind in existence, and we know better than that, for we are Alive and using Mind to consider this very question, and so are those who claim that Energy or Force is Everything.

(33) For all Things are come to be Something out of Nothing: And every Creature has the Center, or the Circle of the Birth of Life in itself; and as the Elements lie hid in one another in one only Mother, and none of them comprehends the other, though they are Members one of another, so the created Creatures are hidden and invisible to one another. For every Creature looks but into its Mother that is fixed [or predominant] in it. The material Creature sees a material Substance, but an immaterial Substance (as the Spirits in the Fire and in the Air) it sees not; as the Body sees not the Soul, which yet dwells in it; or as the third Principle does not comprehend, nor apprehend the second Principle wherein God is; though indeed itself is in God, yet there is a Birth between: As it is with the Spirit of the Soul of Man, and the elementary Spirit in Man, the one being the Case, [Chest,] or Receptacle of the other; as you shall find, about the Creation of Man.

(12) We see around us that which is called "Matter," which forms the physical foundation for all forms. Is THE ALL merely Matter? Not at all! Matter cannot manifest Life or Mind, and as Life and Mind are manifested in the Universe, THE ALL cannot be Matter, for nothing rises higher than its own source--nothing is ever manifested in an effect that is not in the cause--nothing is evolved as a consequent that is not involved as an antecedent. And then Modern Science informs us that there is really no such thing as Matter--that what we call Matter is merely "interrupted energy or force," that is, energy or force at a low rate of vibration. As a recent writer has said "Matter has melted into Mystery." Even Material Science has abandoned the theory of Matter, and now rests on the basis of "Energy."

(8) The best teachings of modern science is that there is a stimulating or fertilizing activity in nature which acts upon a generative force, the latter reacting upon the former. And, at the other end of the material scale, we find the teaching that the atom (once supposed to be the ultimate form of matter) is now discovered to be composed of a multitude of electrons, corpuscles, or ions (different names for the same thing) revolving around each other at a tremendous rate of motion. It was formerly supposed that the electrons simply revolved one around another, and that all were alike in character and nature; but the later discoveries show that the formation of the atom is due rather to the action of numerous circling positive (or "male") electrons around a central negative (or "female") electron, the positive (or "male") electrons seemingly exerting a peculiar effect upon the negative (or "female") electron, causing her to put forth certain energies which result in the "generation" of the atomic structure.

(3) And of the matter stored beneath it , the Father made of it a universal body, and packing it together made it spherical - wrapping it round the life - [a sphere] which is immortal in itself, and that doth make materiality eternal. But He, the Father, full-filled with His ideas, did sow the lives as in a cave, willing to order forth the life with every kind of living. So He with deathlessness enclosed the universal body, that matter might not wish to separate itself from body's composition, and so dissolve into its own [original] unorder. For matter, son, when it was yet incorporate , was in unorder. And it doth still retain down here this [nature of unorder] enveloping the rest of the small lives - that increase-and-decrease which men call death.

(2) There is, obviously, no question here of hands or feet, of any implement borrowed or inherent: Nature needs simply the Matter which it is to work upon and bring under Form; its productivity cannot depend upon mechanical operation. What driving or hoisting goes to produce all that variety of colour and pattern?

The wax-workers, whose methods have been cited as parallel to the creative act of Nature, are unable to make colours; all they can do to impose upon their handicraft colours taken from elsewhere. None the less there is a parallel which demands attention: in the case of workers in such arts there must be something locked within themselves, an efficacy not going out from them and yet guiding their hands in all their creation; and this observation should have indicated a similar phenomenon in Nature; it should be clear that this indwelling efficacy, which makes without hands, must exist in Nature, no less than in the craftsman- but, there, as a thing completely inbound. Nature need possess no outgoing force as against that remaining within; the only moved thing is Matter; there can be no moved phase in this Nature-Principle; any such moved phase could not be the primal mover; this Nature-Principle is no such moved entity; it is the unmoved Principle operating in the Kosmos.

We may be answered that the Reason-Principle is, no doubt, unmoved, but that the Nature-Principle, another being, operates by motion.

But, if Nature entire is in question here, it is identical with the Reason-Principle; and any part of it that is unmoved is the Reason-Principle. The Nature-Principle must be an Ideal-Form, not a compound of Form and Matter; there is no need for it to possess Matter, hot and cold: the Matter that underlies it, on which it exercises its creative act, brings all that with it, or, natively without quality, becomes hot and cold, and all the rest, when brought under Reason: Matter, to become fire, demands the approach not of fire but of a Reason-Principle.

This is no slight evidence that in the animal and vegetable realms the Reason-Principles are the makers and that Nature is a Reason-Principle producing a second Reason-Principle, its offspring, which, in turn, while itself, still, remaining intact, communicates something to the underlie, Matter.

The Reason-Principle presiding over visible Shape is the very ultimate of its order, a dead thing unable to produce further: that which produces in the created realm is the living Reason-Principle- brother no doubt, to that which gives mere shape, but having life-giving power.

(9) (14) Over against that body, stands the principle which is self-caused, which is all that neither enters into being nor passes away, the principle whose dissolution would mean the end of all things never to be restored if once this had ceased to be, the sustaining principle of things individually, and of this kosmos, which owes its maintenance and its ordered system to the soul.

This is the starting point of motion and becomes the leader and provider of motion to all else: it moves by its own quality, and every living material form owes life to this principle, which of itself lives in a life that, being essentially innate, can never fail.

Not all things can have a life merely at second hand; this would give an infinite series: there must be some nature which, having life primally, shall be of necessity indestructible, immortal, as the source of life to all else that lives. This is the point at which all that is divine and blessed must be situated, living and having being of itself, possessing primal being and primal life, and in its own essence rejecting all change, neither coming to be nor passing away.

Whence could such a being arise or into what could it disappear: the very word, strictly used, means that the thing is perdurable. Similarly white, the colour, cannot be now white and now not white: if this "white" were a real being it would be eternal as well as being white: the colour is merely white but whatsoever possesses being, indwelling by nature and primal, will possess also eternal duration. In such an entity this primal and eternal Being cannot be dead like stone or plank: it must be alive, and that with a life unalloyed as long as it remains self-gathered: when the primal Being blends with an inferior principle, it is hampered in its relation to the highest, but without suffering the loss of its own nature since it can always recover its earliest state by turning its tendency back to its own.

(17) As has been stated elsewhere in this chapter, modern science now stands on the threshold of the discovery (by actual laboratory proof) that there is no such thing as "lifeless" matter—and that Everything is Alive. This has been the contention of the occultists for thousands of years. As a writer has said, it would seem that as in the case of the great Tunnel of the Alps, the two bands of workers, each on its own side of the mountain, were fast approaching the place where only a thin partition separated them one from another; and that already they can faintly hear the sounds of each others' picks penetrating the thin dividing wall between the two camps. The occultist may now safely await the day when modern science will actually "prove for him the old teaching of the esoteric schools." Moreover, science is coming very near to the place when it will perceive the truth of the old occult axiom that "All Power is Will-Power," and that the movements of electrons, atoms, molecules, and masses of matter are in response to an inward "feeling" resulting from the attraction or repulsion to or from other forms of matter, and the "will" action in response thereto, as Haeckel and Nageli (materialistic scientists though they may be called) have claimed for half a generation past. The contention of the Materialists that Life and Mind are but qualities of Matter, and are to be found in all forms of material objects, needs but to be inverted in order to show the Truth, long since uttered by the ancient occultists, namely that Matter is but the Outer Garment of Soul (Life-Mind), and that all material forms are ensouled by Life and Mind. The conception of the Materialists is but the Inverted Pyramid of Error, while the conception of the Occultists is the firmly placed, and soundly resting, true Pyramid of Truth—that Rock of Ages which can never be overturned, for it rests squarely and firmly on the Eternal Base of Being.

(73) Timaeus: the position was this. All these had their origin in the generation of the marrow. For it was in this that the bonds of life by which the Soul is bound to the body were fastened, and implanted the roots of the mortal kind; but the marrow itself was generated out of other elements. Taking all these primary triangles which, being unwarped and smooth, were best able to produce with exactness fire and water and air and earth, God separated them, each apart from his own kind,

(15) Whereas in all the rest of composed bodies, of each there is a certain number; for without number structure cannot be, or composition, or decomposition. Now it is units that give birth to number and increase it, and, being decomposed, are taken back again into themselves. Matter is one; and this whole Cosmos - the mighty God and image of the mightier One, both with Him unified, and the conserver of the Will and Order of the Father - is filled full of Life. Naught is there in it throughout the whole of Aeon, the Father's [everlasting] Re-establishment - nor of the whole, nor of the parts - which doth not live. For not a single thing that's dead, hath been, or is, or shall be in [this] Cosmos. For that the Father willed it should have Life as long as it should be. Wherefore it needs must be a God.