THE EDINBURGH LECTURES ON MENTAL SCIENCE. Thomas Troward

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СКАЧАТЬ physical history of our planet shows us first an incandescent nebula

      dispersed over vast infinitudes of space; later this condenses into a

      central sun surrounded by a family of glowing planets hardly yet

      consolidated from the plastic primordial matter; then succeed untold

      millenniums of slow geological formation; an earth peopled by the lowest

      forms of life, whether vegetable or animal; from which crude beginnings a

      majestic, unceasing, unhurried, forward movement brings things stage by

      stage to the condition in which we know them now. Looking at this steady

      progression it is clear that, however we may conceive the nature of the

      evolutionary principle, it unerringly provides for the continual advance of

      the race. But it does this by creating such numbers of each kind that,

      after allowing a wide margin for all possible accidents to individuals, the

      race shall still continue:--

      "So careful of the type it seems

      So careless of the single life."

      In short, we may say that the cosmic intelligence works by a Law of

      Averages which allows a wide margin of accident and failure to the

      individual.

      But the progress towards higher intelligence is always in the direction of

      narrowing down this margin of accident and taking the individual more and

      more out of the law of averages, and substituting the law of individual

      selection. In ordinary scientific language this is the survival of the

      fittest. The reproduction of fish is on a scale that would choke the sea

      with them if every individual survived; but the margin of destruction is

      correspondingly enormous, and thus the law of averages simply keeps up the

      normal proportion of the race. But at the other end of the scale,

      reproduction is by no means thus enormously in excess of survival. True,

      there is ample margin of accident and disease cutting off numbers of human

      beings before they have gone through the average duration of life, but

      still it is on a very different scale from the premature destruction of

      hundreds of thousands as against the survival of one. It may, therefore, be

      taken as an established fact that in proportion as intelligence advances

      the individual ceases to be subject to a mere law of averages and has a

      continually increasing power of controlling the conditions of his own

      survival.

      We see, therefore, that there is a marked distinction between the cosmic

      intelligence and the individual intelligence, and that the factor which

      differentiates the latter from the former is the presence of _individual_

      volition. Now the business of Mental Science is to ascertain the relation

      of this individual power of volition to the great cosmic law which provides

      for the maintenance and advancement of the race; and the point to be

      carefully noted is that the power of individual volition is itself the

      outcome of the cosmic evolutionary principle at the point where it reaches

      its highest level. The effort of Nature has always been upwards from the

      time when only the lowest forms of life peopled the globe, and it has now

      culminated in the production of a being with a mind capable of abstract

      reasoning and a brain fitted to be the physical instrument of such a mind.

      At this stage the all-creating Life-principle reproduces itself in a form

      capable of recognizing the working of the evolutionary law, and the unity

      and continuity of purpose running through the whole progression until now

      indicates, beyond a doubt, that the place of such a being in the universal

      scheme must be to introduce the operation of that factor which, up to this

      point, has been, conspicuous by its absence--the factor, namely, of

      intelligent individual volition. The evolution which has brought us up to

      this standpoint has worked by a cosmic law of averages; it has been a

      process in which the individual himself has not taken a conscious part. But

      because he is what he is, and leads the van of the evolutionary procession,

      if man is to evolve further, it can now only be by his own conscious

      co-operation with the law which has brought him up to the standpoint where

      he is able to realize that such a law exists. His evolution in the future

      must be by conscious participation in the great work, and this can only be

      effected by his own individual intelligence and effort. It is a process of

      intelligent growth. No one else can grow for us: we must each grow for

      ourselves; and this intelligent growth consists in our increasing

      recognition of the universal law, which has brought us as far as we have

      yet got, and of our own individual relation to that law, based upon the

      fact that we ourselves are the most advanced product of it. It is a great

      maxim that Nature obeys us precisely in proportion as we first obey Nature.

      Let the electrician try to go counter to the principle that electricity

      must always pass from a higher to a lower potential and he will effect

      nothing; but let him submit in all things to this one fundamental law, and

      he can make whatever particular СКАЧАТЬ