THE

HE DISCIPLES of the Absolute Philosophy have held that through the secret of Hegel is attained that fulness of truth which will remedy the ills of life. Of his own attaining Hegel never doubted. Had he not found that "Thingin-itself" which Kant had placed beyond the bounds of human understanding, beyond the utmost reach of human reason, in the realms of the unconditioned, the abode of beings mentally more endowed than man? Had he not demonstrated what to the cautious Kant were but articles of faith, to wit, God and the soul? Beginning with those abstractions, Nothing and mere empty Being, he, by a dialectic process of his own, had arrived at the perfected selfconsciousness of the Absolute. On his journey he had gathered to his philosophizing the arts and sciences; at his conjuring had returned the old Aristotelian times enriched with the glories of the modern world. By his vast intellectual effort he had solved the problem of the thinker, the metaphysical riddle of the ages; because of this, Philosophy was now complete.

But later days brought doubt, distrust of Hegel's principle. Schopenhauer scorned that ultimate truth should be realized by a rationalizing method. After all, Bacon's estimate of Philosophy may be just, "Like a virgin consecrated to God she bears no fruit." Probably Aristotle has warrant for saying that philosophy itself produces nothing new. Many will agree with Fichte that Philosophy is but a means to the knowledge of life.

In human nature is an irrepressible craving which mere logic, however exhaustive and convincing, can never satisfy. Man is born from mystery into mystery, and unto mystery he returns. Through

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life he repeats the dying words of Goethe, 'More light!" Hegel, the man of method, was broad enough to acknowledge this universal need of definite knowledge, but it ill became the logician to usurp the province of the seer; it is much that he acknowledged the legitimacy of such mystics as Jacob Bohm; and yet the prosaic teacher of Jena and Heidelberg was inwardly the intuitional dreamer. The laborious thinker, creeping inch by inch to the very summit of human thought had, ere his ascent, beheld a vision that allied him with the sages of old India.

He had seen the beginning and the end of things, the primorial Being devoid of attributes, the one and the many, the many and the one indistinguishable, undifferentiated in their multitude. He had seen their self-externalization in the world of sense; the growing illusion of separateness necessary to the concretion of their individualities; and he had watched them, in their great cycle of necessity, rising from the earthly and returning whence they came bearing each the freight of its world experience, converging each to one center there to render into the common fund of wisdom the result of every separate attainment. Beholding all this he had comprehended the consummation, the self-conscious many unified as the self-conscious One.

Becoming, the process whereby Infinite Unity results in finite diversity, was from the pure monism of Spinoza, wholly unaccountable. Moreover a pantheism which makes of man but a momentary wave on the ocean of Being, satisfies in

pantheism of Spinoza arose the modology of Leibnitz.

In this system the monad is a positive center of consciousness whose power to repell proves the existence of something repelled, namely a plurality of monads. Each is a microcosm capable of reflecting the universe of monads; each is a focal point for all others. The monad is not in three-dimensional space, therefore size enters not into consideration of it.

The monads exist in an ever-ascending series from mineral to man. Monadic consciousness "sleeps in the mineral, dreams in the plant, wakes to consciousness in the animal, and to self-consciousness in man." The monad of man is the self-conscious dweller in his body itself the congeries of less-developed monads. Physical death is only the loss of the coarser and by no means indispensable monads of the outer body. The various organs and general structure are maintained though no longer perceived by physical sense. What is true of man's life and death applies in less and less degree in the descending scale of physical being. Inasmuch as matter is to Liebnitz but crassified spirit he cannot well be accused of materialism though he demands a vehicle for every grade of consciousness.

In the time of Hegel attention was already turning to the religio-philosophical writings of the remote-East. Possibly in lands other than that of Thales and Pythagoras, the eye of Reason had looked inward, and the introspection had been to some purpose.

Hegel's estimate of Hindoo thought as voiced in his Philosophy of History, would by any pundit be deemed absurd. The German philosopher's excuse lies in the then insufficient knowledge of the sacred texts which in many instances caution that a teacher is necessary. Schopenhauer arrived nearer the truth when, as he searched the Vedas and the Upanishads he half devined the secret science there hidden beneath an exoteric dress.

Modern Theosophy purports to be the sacred, esoteric wisdom of old Egypt and India. Like most ancient systems it includes Science, Religion and Philosophy. Unlike Socrates it centers not attention on man, for it claims that prior to the days of Socrates man was the object of its exhaustive study. Dealing not with the categories of Kant it yet claims as its oldern possession all of value in his Critical Philosophy. Though ignoring the dialectic of Hegel, it asserts its ascent of the Himalyas of reason when as yet his ancestors roamed savage amidst the northern forests. It accords not with much in our modern empyrical science, yet professes to possess the key to riddles whose solution will reverse the attitude of the physicist. Its astounding claims to knowledge it would substantiate with a vast and elaborated cosmogony which dwarfs the dreams of Swedenborg.

The monadology of Leibnitz, and the scheme and outcome of Hegel, exhibit much in common with the teachings of Theosophy; nevertheless the Absolute of Hegel is not the Absolute of Theosophy or of the Vedante philosophy, that more exoteric explanation of man and the universe. The Absolute of Theosophy is the "Secondless Eternal" of Vedante; it is the concealed Logos author of the spoken word which itself is the manifested universe in its aspect as the undifferentiated monadic essence from which the totality of monads was gradually unfolded. In its primal condition this essence is mere Being, empty of meaning as any digit if considered apart from its relation to numbers; this essence, is, in fact, what to Hegel is equivalent to nothing. The Unmanifested Word is the Father, the Manifested Word is the Son in whom are the Divine Imminence and the Divine Transcendence until the great day "Be with Us," when the universe is merged in its ultimate

source.

The Manifested Word, the Original Emanation, the Primal Substance, is the sole reality, the steadfast nomenion which

by projecting its phenomenal shadow, creates both time and space and the material conditions wherein Reality may unfold its latent possibilities. This original emanation hovers around the mineral world in well-nigh unconscious nebulosity; half awakened it projects the life and shapes of trees that wave in the wind, and all of the green and varied color that springs from earth into the shining of the sun. Seeing now the animal kingdom, its own shadow, it becomes identified with that evolution; and now its gradually disrupting oneness, wholly sundering into the many, surrounds each animal form. In man it realizes itself as soul, and eventually as ego. Passing beyond the human stage it knows itself as free ego permitted to return as world teacher and uplifter, or to pursue its way toward the highest Nirvana.

But what of Nirvana? Of what import this word of mystery? Theosophy teaches that whosoever deems Nirvana to be the Buddhistic vaccum has lost himself on the metaphysical heights. Nirvana is the fruition of individual unfolding; the coming into touch with the "thing-initself" of Kant the clear cognition of sole reality the eternal union with "the silent watcher," that original substance which enveloped the animal form ere

man was man.

Since the beginning of the universal cycle evolution has been from mere potentiality to complete unfolding; this process necessitated the gradual individualizing of consciousness. What an absurd supposition that the result of ages of becoming is negated at the moment of consummation! Nirvana is the center in which converging individualities meet; the selfconscious realization that the many are One. Individual attainment is there merged in general attainment; seemingly each consciousness gathers into itself all others. This consummation is not unlike that of the Absolute Philosophy wherein the ego reaching the focus of thought, knows itself as all truth attained.

Kant argues that certain ideas or notions or judgments are a priori in man. Worldly experience furnishes the matter to which these judgments are the matrix. But that gatherer of knowledge, the mind, cognizes through a brain which only knows reality as conditioned by time and space, that to which even the pure intellect must submit.

The limitation of mere brain ability to perception of the phenomenal world has been sharply defined by all Indian thinkers, and in accord with these Theosophy teaches that only by rising superior to the physical senses into the "higher mind," only by sundering the ties of time and space does the sage attain unto the noumena. Evidently this results from more than that pure feeling, that inmost conviction, that intuitive cognition, for which Jacobi declares is his polemic against philosophy in general.

In direct opposition to Locke, and more in accord with Fichte, Theosophy teaches that all knowledge is innate in the ego. Other egos impinge upon it and the resulting friction excites the ego to active unfolding of universal wisdom inherited from its divine Source. In every monad the divine Imminence and Transcendence announces itself as the law of Cause and Effect, the law of "Karma," the law of Absolute Wisdom and Justice; therefore, every thought and act, whether good or bad, returns to the magnetic sphere of the monad from which it emanated. The perpetual adjustments of the Karmic law are to the monads of Theosophy what the preestablished harmony is to the monads of Leibnitz.

These latter, like those of Theosophy, are eternal and indestructable and, as has been said, some have only mineral consciousness, others plant consciousness, others again are at the human stage while the highest enjoy perfected selfconsciousness. Although the higher monads dwell in physical bodies composed of lesser monads, all pursue an independent development, but, because