Another difficulty: These people come upon earth not as Soul-Images but as veritable Souls; yet, by great stress and strain, one or two of them are able to stir beyond the limits of the world, and when they do attain Reminiscence barely carry with them some slight recollection of the Sphere they once knew: on the other hand, this Image, a new-comer into being, is able, they tell us- as also is its Mother- to form at least some dim representation of the celestial world.It is an Image, stamped in Matter, yet it not merely has the conception of the Supreme and adopts from that world the plan of this, but knows what elements serve the purpose.How, for instance, did it come to make fire before anything else? What made it judge fire a better first than some other object?
Again, if it created the fire of the Universe by thinking of fire, why did it not make the Universe at a stroke by thinking of the Universe? It must have conceived the product complete from the first; the constituent elements would be embraced in that general conception.
The creation must have been in all respects more according to the way of Nature than to that of the arts- for the arts are of later origin than Nature and the Universe, and even at the present stage the partial things brought into being by the natural Kinds do not follow any such order- first fire, then the several other elements, then the various blends of these- on the contrary the living organism entire is encompassed and rounded off within the uterine germ.Why should not the material of the Universe be similarly embraced in a Kosmic Type in which earth, fire and the rest would be included? We can only suppose that these people themselves, acting by their more authentic Soul, would have produced the world by such a process, but that the Creator had not wit to do so.
And yet to conceive the vast span of the Heavens- to be great in that degree- to devise the obliquity of the Zodiac and the circling path of all the celestial bodies beneath it, and this earth of ours-and all in such a way that reason can be given for the plan- this could never be the work of an Image; it tells of that Power [the All-Soul] next to the very Highest Beings.
Against their will, they themselves admit this: their "outshining upon the darkness," if the doctrine is sifted, makes it impossible to deny the true origins of the Kosmos.
Why should this down-shining take place unless such a process belonged to a universal law?
Either the process is in the order of Nature or against that order.If it is in the nature of things, it must have taken place from eternity; if it is against the nature of things, then the breach of natural right exists in the Supreme also; evil antedates this world;the cause of evil is not the world; on the contrary the Supreme is the evil to us; instead of the Soul's harm coming from this sphere, we have this Sphere harmed by the Soul.
In fine, the theory amounts to making the world one of the Primals, and with it the Matter from which it emerges.
The Soul that declined, they tell us, saw and illuminated the already existent Darkness.Now whence came that Darkness?
If they tell us that the Soul created the Darkness by its Decline, then, obviously, there was nowhere for the Soul to decline to; the cause of the decline was not the Darkness but the very nature of the Soul.The theory, therefore, refers the entire process to pre-existing compulsions: the guilt inheres in the Primal Beings.
13.Those, then, that censure the constitution of the Kosmos do not understand what they are doing or where this audacity leads them.They do not understand that there is a successive order of Primals, Secondaries, Tertiaries and so on continuously to the Ultimates; that nothing is to be blamed for being inferior to the First; that we can but accept, meekly, the constitution of the total, and make our best way towards the Primals, withdrawing from the tragic spectacle, as they see it, of the Kosmic spheres- which in reality are all suave graciousness.
And what, after all, is there so terrible in these Spheres with which it is sought to frighten people unaccustomed to thinking, never trained in an instructive and coherent gnosis?
Even the fact that their material frame is of fire does not make them dreadful; their Movements are in keeping with the All and with the Earth: but what we must consider in them is the Soul, that on which these people base their own title to honour.
And, yet, again, their material frames are pre-eminent in vastness and beauty, as they cooperate in act and in influence with the entire order of Nature, and can never cease to exist as long as the Primals stand; they enter into the completion of the All of which they are major Parts.
If men rank highly among other living Beings, much more do these, whose office in the All is not to play the tyrant but to serve towards beauty and order.The action attributed to them must be understood as a foretelling of coming events, while the causing of all the variety is due, in part to diverse destinies- for there cannot be one lot for the entire body of men- in part to the birth moment, in part to wide divergencies of place, in part to states of the Souls.
Once more, we have no right to ask that all men shall be good, or to rush into censure because such universal virtue is not possible:
this would be repeating the error of confusing our sphere with the Supreme and treating evil as a nearly negligible failure in wisdom- as good lessened and dwindling continuously, a continuous fading out;it would be like calling the Nature-Principle evil because it is not Sense-Perception and the thing of sense evil for not being a Reason-Principle.If evil is no more than that, we will be obliged to admit evil in the Supreme also, for there, too, Soul is less exalted than the Intellectual-Principle, and That too has its Superior.
14.In yet another way they infringe still more gravely upon the inviolability of the Supreme.