(17) On the Hypothetical Absolute and Infinite Final Cause.
The absolute and infinite is composed of the conditioned and finite. Causes are conditioned in their modes of existence and attributes, and as individual aggregates — unconditioned and eternal in their sum or as a collective aggregation.
(18) If the Absolute is a blind law, how can it give birth to intelligence?
But passive latent intelligence, or that principle diffused throughout the universe which in its pure immateriality is non-intelligence and non-consciousness, and which as soon as it becomes imprisoned in matter is transformed into both — can.
(19) The Absolute if intelligent, must be omnipotent, omniscient, and all-good?
Please give your reasons why?
In the East the Absolute, itself non-conscious, is linked to intelligence by emanations, supposed to be conditioned. "How far this hypothesis satisfies the mind as to the possibility of intelligence evolving out of non-intelligence," depends on the mind addressed.
What do you know of the gradual development of brain ever since the Silurian period?
(20) The Origin of Evil difficulty, dealt with by means of the sugar refinery simile.
And the more the sugar refined the greater the fermentation produced in the stomach and the more worms.
It is useless . . .
Show me the philosopher who would prove it useless!
. . . to say that evil is as necessary to make good apparent as darkness is to make light cognisable. To the conditioned it may be — to the omnipotent nothing is necessary.
Prove him first.
But clearly a conditioned agency is not the final cause. Above it is the law or principle that conditions it. . . .
How is this? Where? Not unless you create something outside the absolute and limitless.
Problems lying behind the veil that separates the non-manifested final cause from the manifested universe are beyond the grasp of minds conditioned in that universe.
Indeed they are not!
. . . The absolute infinite is unthinkable and we can neither comprehend it nor justify its ways to man.
Then why lose time over it? Who commissioned you to do so?
Your all-pervading surpreme power exists, but it is exactly matter, whose life is motion, will, and nerve power, electricity. Purush can think but through Prakriti.
(21 ) What you would say would be: —
"Whether this be so or not (as regards the hypothesis of an Absolute beyond the conditioned) it is and intelligences in the universe know nothing of it — so far as they can explore, the manifested universe is boundless and infinite. Our philosophy admits only of what is known — and knowable. This is admittedly unknowable even to Planetaries, and it is ex-hypothese non-existent — why then consider it. . . .
"Even were this conception correct, how does it concern us? For thousands of years the highest planetaries have explored the universe; they have found no limits to it, and nothing in it guided or governed by any external impulse, everything on the contrary proceeding from internal impulses which they understand and which suffice to explain everything they have ever had cognisance of. A qui bon then to introduce this unnecessary conception of a something (which as non-existent for us is a nothing) outside and beyond what for us is limitless and eternal, when whether it exists or not it plays no discoverable part in anything that concerns us."
"The fact is your western philosophical conceptions are monarchical; ours democratic. You are only able to think of the universe as governed by a king, while we know it to be a republic in which the aggregate indwelling intelligence rules."
We might say more — never better. That is just what we would say.
(22) Who are the artificers of the world?
Dyan Chohans — Planetaries.
(Pinned to next essay.)
Gyu-thog — Phenomenal or Material Universe (secret name) Ajasakti. Viswam Zigten — jas — cosmogony, from Zigten = living world, and jas — to make. Chh = rab — genesis.
(23) The universe may primarily be conceived as space pervaded by an infinite and eternal and homogeneous congery of molecules, in which motion, their latent unconscious life, is inherent. (In this its passive unmanifested state it may be regarded as chaos?)
Yes; if only people were capable of conceiving what real chaos is, which they are not.
Though truly an unity it may be conceived in its various aspects as (Thog) space, in regard to its boundless extension co-existing with (Nyng) eternity, in regard to its endless duration (Zhi-gyu), cosmic matter in regard to its molecules, and Khoriva — cosmic force in regard to its all-pervading motion.
But these four conceptions must be held to indicate not four elements composing a compound, but rather four properties or attributes of one single thing, just as on earth one thing may be hot, luminous, heavy, and in motion. This universe one and indivisible in its passive unmanifested form, this chaos is for us non-existent —
For you, but why speak for others?
but throughout it are scattered centres of activity or evolution, and wherever and whenever activity prevails, there portions of the whole differentiate, and where this occurs, homogeneity ceases. Thus differentiation is due
(1) To the greater or less proximity of the molecules.
(2) To their greater or less attenuation.
(What does (2) mean? How can the primal molecules grow thinner or fatter — ex nihil, etc.?)
I was not aware that atoms were considered by you as something nihil. Are not the molecules considered in science as compound atoms? Your science knows only of such compound molecules, and a primal atom is and will remain for ever as a hypothetical abstraction for it. Science can know nothing of the nature of atoms outside the region of effects on her globe and even that atom she calls indivisible, which we do not, for we know of the existence and properties of the universal solvent — the essence of the Panchamahabutam — the five elements. Even the existence of the atoms which compose the unseen medium through which the power which magnetises instantly a short iron rod placed across the centre of a hoop two yards in diameter around which a wire thickly covered with indict rubber is coiled — even the existence of such atoms I say, remains an open question and science remains puzzled and embarrassed to decide whether it is an action at a distant without. or with some mysterious medium — or what?
(3) To chances in their polarity.
This differentiation in activity is manifestation, and everything so differentiated comes into existence or becomes conceivable for us. Each centre of activity (and these centres are countless) marks a solar system, but these are still rari nantes in gurgite vasto, hanging in the all-pervading ocean of the unmanifested universe, out of which new manifestations are perpetually evolving, and into the oblivion of which others whose cycle has been completed are ever returning.
Alternations of activity and passivity constitute the cyclic law of the universe. As the microcosm man has his days and nights, his waking and his sleeping hours, so has the earth, which, a macrocosm to him is a microcosm to the solar system, and so has this latter, which, a macrocosm to a single globe, is itself a microcosm to the universe. That the universe itself must similarly have its days and nights of activity and passivity, is probable by analogy, but if so these cover periods unthinkable, and the fact remains unknowable by the highest intelligences conditioned in the universe.