Thomas Parker Boyd, D.D., PhD

Lecture One

The Oriental Foundation of Thought

A study of the work of the Indo-European mind reveals its tendency was toward the "other" side of life. The sources of all Philosophical Principles are found there. India has had hundreds of schools, all teaching the way of the One Idea, Brahm, or "That," or God, and other terms for the Absolute Being. Most of these schools owe their existence to the various ways of explaining the phenomenal world in its relation to the "noumenon" or "That."

India, the fountainhead of philosophical thought, contains the whole history of philosophy in brief. The Vedas and Upanishads reference every philosophical conception that the Western mind has evolved.

Spinoza reproduced almost exactly the conception of Hindu philosophy. They had worked out his ideas 2,000 years before him. They taught evolution more than 2,500 years before Darwin. Pythagoras, a father of philosophy, sojourned in India, and based his whole scheme of thought upon their system. Plato was full of Eastern thought, while Neo-Platonism and Christian Gnosticism owe much to India. The great thinkers of the past twenty-five centuries have gone over the same ground the Hindu thinkers canvassed more than thirty centuries ago.

To understand Eastern philosophical thinking, one must remember that much of their thought exists only in oral teaching, and "reading between the lines" in printed books, which contain fundamental oppositions between the basic Hindu conceptions and those of the Christian Theologian.

To the Eastern mind, "Creation" is unthinkable, since it involves the making of something out of nothing, and to them nothing comes from nothing. Everything that is, is either an eternal thing, or else it is a form, manifestation, appearance, emanation or phase of some eternal thing. Therefore they could see evolution as the only method of bringing the universe into appearance, because everything evolved was first involved.

Again, a mortal thing can never become immortal by any means. An immortal thing must have always been immortal, or it can never become so. So that which begins must end. That which is born must die sometime, and everything that dies has been born sometime.

Eternity must exist on both sides of the now, in fact now is but a point in eternity. So the Hindu concedes immortality to the soul only when they concede previous immortality.

The Western tendency is to publish abroad every detail of its thought, even before leading minds accept them. The Eastern tendency is exactly opposite, and the sage or wise man reserved for himself and his close circle of students and followers the cream of the idea, deeming it too important to broadcast to an unthinking, unappreciative public. Their great body of inner teachings has grown in this way. The Western mind tends to take philosophy as a matter of intellectual diversion, which he does not bother to live up to, while the Easterner takes philosophy in the sense of religion itself, which he must live out in everyday life.

The Hindu confines his speculation to the "other side of Life," deeming it the only real one, while the physical and material world is essentially illusion, a thing of a moment, which begins to pass away while it is being formed. The Western mind tends to emphasize the material side of life, to promote material advancement and prosperity. In other words, the tendency of each is to be one-sided. The East leans to the "I AM" side, ignoring the "I DO" side. The West depends on the "I DO" side, almost entirely ignoring the "I AM" phase. The one regards the side of Being and ignores the side of Action. The other regards Action as the essential thing, ignoring the vital importance of Being.

In India, the veil between the Visible and the Invisible is much thinner than in Western lands. The consequent mental and psychic atmosphere produces all sorts of growth, good and bad. The best philosophy and spiritual unfoldment dwells side by side with superstition, credulity, devil worship and frightful debasement of thought and practice. The noxious weeds grow in a tropical climate with fruits and flowers.

Surprise and wonder fills us at the speculative achievement of those people, running back 100 centuries. Unquestionably they are the progenitors of the Aryan or Indo-European race, but legend shrouds their origin. One is that they are remnants of a high civilization in the region of the North pole, from where a cataclysm drove them, which changed it from a tropical to a polar climate.

Another legend is that they are remnants of a high civilization in the great continent of Lemuria, now sunk in the Pacific Ocean. The legend states that many of them, under prophetic direction, took refuge in the higher altitudes, which in the cataclysm became islands, where they lived for centuries before finally migrating to the mainland. They found India inhabited by another people, also driven there by earth’s upheaval.

Through all the centuries these people have survived. In this new world, like all pioneers, they lost much of the veneer of the old civilization. The old truths and knowledge were largely lost, and in its place tradition, legends, they handed down, as vague memories of the old teachings from one generation to another.

They had gods and demigods, etc., but they never entirely lost the main idea of their philosophy: A great Universal One Absolute Being from whom all else emanated, and from whom the individual souls proceeded "as sparks rising from the blazing fire." They taught the immortality of the soul, which was never born, which could never die, which was subject to rebirth, under a Universal Law of Cause and Effect.

Even the idea of the One was at times dimmed under the conception of a great Nature Spirit, of which they were a part in some mysterious way. In spite of the variations, we are indebted to them for the Master Key to all philosophy, namely: The Reality and Being of One Universal Spirit Principle, from which all other life, being and principles were manifested by emanation, reflection or otherwise, which manifestations had their only Real Being in the One Source.

Some 5,000 years before the Christian era, philosophical thought in India underwent a great revival of interest, under the leadership of really great thinkers of the time, called sages, or wise men. The Hindus claim that these were the reincarnations of ancient Masters. They laid the foundation for a philosophy of pure Reason, doing their work so well that while many philosophies have come and gone, the foundation of the sages remains, sound and unhurt, and is still the base upon which we build all philosophy, ancient or modern.

The outline of their work follows:

First, the sages bade their students to observe that nothing is constant, abiding, fixed and imperishable in the phenomenal aspect of nature and the universe. That is, it was not "real" in the sense we use the word, as in "real estate, real property" or "realty." The phenomenal universe was not "real" in the philosophical sense of the word.

Second, they bid the students recognize that something Real and substantial must lie underneath all the changing manifestations of the phenomenal universe, below the face or surface of that which occurred – the constant play of nature, force, and life, as the clouds passed before the blue sky or the wave upon the face of the ocean. They held that pure Reason must convince any rational mind that something Real and substantial must be under and behind the phenomenal universe, else the latter could not exist, even in appearance. A background of Reality or a foundation of Substance must exist. They did not speak or think of this substance as matter, but as the underlying or existing essence. This Universal Substance must be Real, and in its totality, it was necessarily the only Reality.

Third, was the recognition that this substantiality must be but One in its essential being, otherwise that continuity and orderly trend of manifestation as seen in the Phenomenal Universe could not exist. "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is ONE Lord."

Fourth, in logical reasoning, this Ultimate Reality must be above all phenomenal attributes and qualities, including those of man. Consequently, its Inner Nature as Essential Being was beyond the cognition, knowledge, or even the imagination of man, and was beyond definition or name. The sages styled this Ultimate Reality by the Sanscrit word "TAT" or That, referring to something understood, but having no qualities, attributes or name. Similar terms are "Brahman," the "Absolute," "That, as in "I am THAT I am."

Fifth, they applied the Hindu Axiom: "Something can never be caused by, or proceed from, nothing." Since nothing other than That is in Real Existence, or which could have caused it, and since Reality could not have been self-created from nothing, it follows that "TAT" must always have existed and must be eternal. Since "Something cannot be dissolved into nothing," "TAT" cannot cease to be, and must be everlasting.

Sixth. Since there was nothing outside of TAT with which or by which it could be defined, bounded, determined, affected, caused or influenced, it must be held that That is Infinite.

Seventh. Since That was the only Reality, nothing else could act as a Cause in the phenomenal universe. That must be its only official and sufficient Cause – the causeless Cause, the only real cause, from which proceeds the cause and effect in the phenomenal world, in which each object or event is both a cause and an effect. Working by this law, the movements of the phenomenal universe are continuous, regular, uniform, arising from That, the only Real Cause.

Eighth. The next step was to recognize that That was necessarily unchangeable, there being nothing to change it, nothing into which it could be changed, nothing it could change itself into, and even That could not change itself into any reality other than that which it is. By the same reasoning, That was not divisible and is essentially One. Therefore they held that That was Unchangeable and Indivisible.

Ninth. The next step was the truth that as all that truly is, must be real, and that as That, being all that is Real, must be all that is, therefore it follows that other than That, there can be nothing that is.

We must base all truth regarding the universe upon this basic proposition. That could not have created the phenomenal universe or the undivided souls from nothing, nor could That have "created" anything from its own substance or essence, nor was there anything outside of itself that That could have used to create anything. It therefore follows that nothing had been or could have been really "created," so the phenomenal universe and all that it contained, including individual souls, must have "emanated from," or been "manifested by" That, in some manner or by means of processes beyond the mind of men to determine, although not beyond his power to imagine.

This was the sum of their reasoning. And it is the basis of all Hindu philosophy. These are the basic principles of all Hindu Philosophy. Upon them they have constructed several great systems of philosophy.

The Sankhya System: First among these is the Sankhya System formulated by Kapila about 700 B.C. His basic proposition is that there exists in the universe two active principles whose interaction accounts for all that appears. We know them as Prakriti, the primordial Substance or Energy, and Purusha, the Spirit principle, embodied in Prakriti, producing everything from atoms to man. They held that both were emanations of That, or thought-forms in the Mind of the One.

Kapila taught that Purusha is to be thought of, not as one great world Spirit or world Principle of Spirit in the sense of Undivided Unity, but rather as a countless myriad of spirit atoms, bound together by filaments of attraction, giving them harmony, yet individual freedom.

He taught that Purusha is pure Spirit, unaffected by pleasure or pain or other emotions, until it becomes embodied in Prakriti. This in turn produces the "Soul" or as some term it, the subconscious, in which it becomes subject to Samsara, "the cycle of existence," with its chain of Cause and Effect, karmic results and rebirths. Out of this, Purusha struggles to return to its first state of freedom and bliss.

Prakriti, he taught was the cosmic primordial Energy or Substance from which the Universe is evolved. It is a subtle, ethereal Substance, carrying our Western idea of Universal Ether, higher. He taught that it was atomless or continuous, until invaded by Purusha, when it took an atomic form. Out of this conjunction of Spirit and Substance, Chitta, or Mind stuff arose.

Purusha was pictured as a "lame man, possessed of eyesight and the other senses," and Prakriti, as "a man in whom the senses of seeing and hearing, etc., had been omitted, but who possessed a good pair of legs." So they made a combination, and the lame man (Purusha) mounts up on the shoulders of the blind man (Prakriti) and together they move along briskly and intelligently, whereas separately they could make no progress.

It was here that Ernest Haeckel, the German scientist, found his "soul of the atom," and Schopenhauer found his "Will," and Spencer his "Universal Matrix," whence issued all appearance. Kapila taught that true knowledge and right living alone could enable man to grasp the nature of Purusha and Prakriti, and through that understanding to find liberation or freedom.

Happiness sought in material things is a will-o-the-wisp, which man never overtakes. It is found only in the renunciation of material things, and setting the face toward the land of the soul’s desire, Spirit.

Kapila taught that atoms were simply centers of force in the Prakriti Substance, established by the presence of Purusha "Spirit." He set forth the law of "love and hate" of atoms, thus explaining the attraction and repulsion of particles evident in the physical universe, and which action and reaction accounted for the greater part of material phenomena. From this he formulated the doctrine of evolution. He made Spirit the active cause of evolution rather than any inherent quality in Prakriti (Substance) itself.

His is the first recorded attempt to answer the questions of the origin of the world, the nature and relations of man and his future destiny. It differs from our idea of creation. When the great outpouring took place, the Absolute projected its Spirit into the manifestation called matter, from which evolution and the individual consciousness proceeded.

The Vedanta System: The other great Hindu system is called the Vedanta, meaning "the last of the Vedas or what we know as the Upanishads." The Vedas were concerned with ceremonies, ritual, worship, etc. The Upanishads concerns itself with questions of "the inquiry into Brahm," or the Absolute and the Manifestations of the latter in the phenomenal universe. It is a philosophy of pure Reason. It brushed aside all previous conceptions, including Kapila with his Purusha and Prakriti as being nothing in themselves, but merely reflections of the One. In fact it was the first great school of Ideal philosophy.

The One Brahman, the Absolute Substance, is beyond qualities or attributes, subject or object, is the source of Being, Intelligence, Bliss, The Cause of the Universe in all its manifestations. It is both creator and created, doer and deed, cause and effect, etc., nothing outside itself. Since it cannot be divided into parts, or be subject to change, it must follow that the self of each of us must be in some way identical with the Self of the One, instead of being an emanation of it. The Self of Spirit in us must be the identical Spirit of the One, undivided and whole.

Here the system divides, and one part expressed their idea of "manifestation" in symbols. Individual souls were "sparks rising from the fires and returning thereto, being always within the heat-waves of the fire." Other symbols included the perfume of the flower, which is of it, the rays of the Sun, which seemingly apart, are still of it. Others believed that all is a reflection.

The main school reaches the limit of speculative thought. Brahman is all, and nothing else is. Brahman itself imagining itself separated into countless souls building an imaginary universe of the senses. Maya, or the world of appearances, is purely imaginary, yet it must be of Brahman, for He is all.

Right here, this school of Hindu philosophy faces the ultimate question, "Why did God create the universe, since He is not bound by necessity or desire, since it can accomplish nothing, since nothing can be that has not always been, whether the universe is illusion or reality – why was it created? For it they had no answer.

Most of the innumerable systems of Hindu Philosophy hold to the conception of seven "principles" or "husks" of the individual soul.

We find these seven principles in all forms of Hindu thought. Sometimes they applied the same idea to Brahman and His emanations. It would require many volumes to give even an outline of the various schools of Indian Philosophy. Yet after reading them, then studying the course of philosophical thought from the Greeks until today, one is struck by the presence of these ideas in every age.

The Yoga System: Following the Sankhya System of Kapila, with its Purusha and Prakriti, and the Vedanta System with its pure Reason and Idealism, we have the third great school of Philosophy, the Yoga System, meaning yoking or joining. Its central idea is advancement through mental control. Patanjali founded the Yoga System about 200 B.C., based on the system of Kapila with the addition of a Personal God, or World Purusha. There are many forms of Yoga teaching and practice. A yogi or yogin is a practitioner of Yoga methods, one who seeks union, realization and attainment by means of Wisdom, Divine Love, Action or Control, or by all together.

The Gnani Yoga, or the Yoga of Wisdom, was preferred by the Vedantists, who strive for attainment or emancipation by means of Wisdom, Understanding and Knowledge, acquired by the exercise of Pure Reason and Right Thinking.

The Rajah Yoga (Royal), or the Yoga of Absolute Concentration. Its central ideas are mental control, psychic development and the unfoldment of latent forces. Rajah Yoga has eight steps. 1. Self control. 2 Religious duty. 3. Postures. 4. Control of prana or vital force. 5. Control of the senses. 6. Control of the mind. 7. Meditation. 8. Transcendental contemplation, or ecstacy.

They taught the Eight Superior Powers. 1. Power of shrinking to the size of an atom, or invisibility. 2. Power of becoming very light, or levitation. 3. Power of becoming very heavy, or gravitation. 4. Unlimited extension of perception, clairvoyance, clairaudience, etc. 5. Irresistible power of Will. 6. Unlimited dominion over everything. 7. Control over the Powers of Nature. 8. Transporting oneself anywhere at will.

Karma Yoga, followed by the religious sects and cults, is the Yoga of Work, Duty, Action, Devotion, etc., the Path of Right Living and Devotion to Duty and God.

Hatha Yoga is the Yoga of Breath, Physical Well-being or Physical Perfection.

In addition to these three great schools of Hindu thought there were three minor schools: The Vaisheshika of Kanada, the Purva Mimansa of Jaimini, and the Nyaya of Gautama.

The Vaisheshika System: Kanada lived prior to the Christian era. He taught the doctrine of atomic individualities. The phenomenal universe is composed of six categories or final classes. The aim is the science of deliverance from material life by the perception of the true nature of the soul, and the unreality of matter. Categories:

Kanada taught that Understanding was the Guna or Quality of the Soul, and that the instruments of understanding were perception and inference. He included a personal God in his teaching, not a substitute for TAT, but made up of the countless souls who have mastered the flesh, and are become one great World Spirit.

The Purva Mimansa System: The Purva Mimansa System consists of attainment of freedom through observance of rites and ceremonies, and the practice of the Yoga methods. They are the Fundamentalists of the Hindus. The Sutras of Jaimini enquire into and expound law and the duties of ordinary life. A form of predestinationism, the sect claims for the Vedas what Western Fundamentalists claim for the Bible.

The Nyaya System: The Nyaya System is primarily concerned with the conditions of correct knowledge and the means of receiving this knowledge. Nyaya is predominantly based on reasoning and logic. Because this system analyzes the nature and source of knowledge and its validity and nonvalidity, it is also referred to as "the science of critical study." Using systematic reasoning, this school attempts to discriminate valid knowledge from invalid knowledge. Gautama was the Aristotle of the Hindus, using the most minute methods for reasoning.

Lecture Two

Review of the Ancient Thinkers: The Greek Masters

The Milesian (Ionian) Physicists

The Ionian school (named Milesian because they originated in Miletus) made the first, and radical step from mythological to scientific explanation of natural phenomena. They discovered the scientific principles of the permanence of substance, the natural evolution of the world, and the reduction of quality to quantity. These philosophers sought the one, unchanging material principle of all things, and evolved physical theories to explain all existence in terms of primary matter.

Thales of Miletus (624-547 B.C.) is considered the founder of Greek Philosophy. Among the first teachers of mathematics in Hellas, he disputed the attribution of all phenomena to the activities of gods and goddesses, and contended that some fundamental principle must be behind all the flux and change about us, some single primitive substance from which all reality has sprung. Having observed that moisture is necessary to life and motion and that "water is the essential principle whereby moist is moist," he concluded that all things, even the gods, consist of water.

His thought marks the first attempt to separate science and theology, and to explain the world without reference to myth or religion. It is the first statement of the view that natural phenomena are not the products of divine caprice, but are referable to a material principle, the fundamental postulate upon which we base all modern science.

Anaximander (611-547 B.C.) was a mathematician who first calculated the size and distance of various planets, wrote a book on geometry, and invented the sundial. He also thought of life as always and inseparably connected with matter. He traced the universe’s origin to an infinite and indeterminate material called the Boundless, "which surrounds all things and animates all things." The world is a vast cylinder and was originally in a fluid state. All life was generated in sea-slime, and all animals, including man, descended from the fishes. All things at last return to that origin.

Anaximenes (550-528 B.C.) was the third great Milesian. He taught that all substances consist of air, and differ only in the degree of their condensation. The human soul is composed of highly rarified air, and life consists simply in inhaling and exhaling. When this movement ceases, death ensues. The same idea holds concerning the world. Air "differs in essence in accordance with its rarity or density. When it is thinned, it becomes fire, while when it is condensed it becomes wind, then cloud, when still more condensed it becomes water, then earth, then stones. Everything else comes from these."

Diogenes (550 B.C.) taught that an underlying unity must exist in all matter, else how is it that plants convert water into plant tissue, while animals eat the plants and turn them into flesh and bone. He regarded air as the primal element of all things, and the universe as issuing from an intelligent principle, which gave it life and order, a rational, sensitive soul. Yet he did recognize any distinction between matter and mind. At last, all things return to air or vapor, from which all things arise by condensation and rarefaction.

The Eleatics: The Philosophers of Elea

A reflection of the Upanishads, the Eleatics held that the true explanation of things lies in the conception of a Universal Unity of Being. It is by thought alone that we can pass beyond the false appearances of sense and arrive at the knowledge of being, at the fundamental truth that "the All is One." There can be no creation, for being cannot come from not-being; a thing cannot arise from that which is different from it. The Eleatics, being concerned with the problem of logical consistency, laid the basis for the development of the science of logic.

Xenophanes (570-480 B.C.) ridiculed the popular religion and said that man created God in his own image. "Each man represents God as he himself is. The Ethiopian as black and snub nosed, the Thracian as red-haired and blue-eyed, and if horses and oxen could paint, they would no doubt depict the gods as horses and oxen." He reduced the gods of mythology to meteorological phenomena, and especially to clouds. He maintained there was only one god, namely, the world. God is one incorporeal eternal being, and, like the universe, spherical in form, "a vast unchanging, all-embracing sphere, all eye, all ear, all understanding."

He was the father of pantheism and doctrine of the One. God is of the same nature with the universe, comprehending all things within himself, is intelligent, and pervades all things, but bears no resemblance to human nature either in body or mind. He regarded petrified marine animals in the mines in Syracuse as evidence that the sea once covered the land, and from this fact evolved the theory that alternate mixtures and separations of water and earth produced the whole visible universe.

Parmenides (540-480 B.C.) developed the idea of the Unity of God into a systematic Philosophy, contending that Reality or Being is one, immutable and eternal, in the form of a well-rounded sphere, and that the notions of plurality, motion and change are illusions of the senses. He reasoned that since Being is, and non-being is not, being is necessarily a unity. Being is eternal, for how could it have a beginning? It certainly was not produced by the nonexistent, nor by the existent, because being itself is the existent.

His famous argument against motion goes something like this: Empty space is simply nothing and as nothing can be said to exist, space is an illusion. An object could not move without occupying first one space and then another, therefore since there is no space for it to occupy, there is no such thing as motion.

Zeno of Elea (488-425 B.C.) held the same philosophy, and devoted himself to refuting the views of the opponents of Parmenides. He used the reduction ad absurdum, which means tentatively using the opposing thesis, then draws some preposterous conclusions from it. The flying arrow, said he, does not really move at all, because at any particular moment it must be in one particular place. Now if an arrow is in one particular place, it is at rest, and if an arrow is at rest during each moment of its flight, when does it move? ["The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa." -- Heisenberg, uncertainty paper, 1927, Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics] see: http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p08_text.htm

Melissus of Samos (490-430 B.C.) used the idea that nothing comes from nothing. In the beginning he said, everybody must admit either that things exist or they do not exist. If they do not exist, further argument is profitless, but if they do exist, we may proceed to the conclusion that they always existed or else contend that they have been produced. If things have been produced, then they must have come from being or non-being. Nothing can possibly come from non-being, and if we say that being arose from being, we must admit that being was before being came to be, which is nonsense. Therefore we must conclude that all being is eternal – everything that it has always been and always will be. Being is also infinite, changeless, immovable unity. All else is foolishness.

The Pythagoreans

Pythagoras and his disciples comprised an eclectic blend of philosophy, mathematic and religious mysticism. The Pythagoreans believed that the soul is a prisoner of the body; that it is released from the body at death, and reincarnated in a higher or lower form of life, depending on the degree of virtue achieved.

Pythagoras of Samos (569-475 B.C.) was semi-mythical, viewed as a philosopher, mathematician and mystic. It was said that he studied in Egypt and in India, worked miracles, and claimed to remember several previous incarnations or lives.

Pythagoras coined the term philosophia, Greek for "love of wisdom." He discovered the relation between the length of a string and the tone it produces, which led to the discovery of the musical scale. He was the first to postulate that earth was a sphere orbiting around a "central fire." He taught that the natural order could be expressed in numbers, and is known for the Pythagorean theorem.

He wrote nothing, nor did any of his immediate disciples. Theirs was a secret teaching and was memorized by each initiate. All order and system was based upon numbers and vibration, and nothing else existed. They talked about the "music of the spheres" and thought the universe was a sort of lyre, each planet strung on a different length of string, and the swing of the planets on the different lengths or intervals produced the music of the spheres.

Philolaus (480-? B.C.), a contemporary of Socrates, first published an exposition of the sacred doctrines of Pythagoras. Everything is number, and we may reduce all natural laws to numerical relations. God is the Unity that rules the world. From the Unity sprang arithmetical numbers, then geometrical magnitudes, then material objects and finally life, love and intelligence. The world soul comes from the Central Fire around which the earth revolves daily, and spreads everywhere, and invented the concept of a counter-earth for numerological reasons.

Heraclitus of Ephesus (536-470 B.C.) taught that there is no such thing as a changeless motionless Being. The world is a perpetual flux and reflux. Every particle of matter is in constant motion. Nothing is, but all is becoming. Nothing is permanent but the law of change. Fire is the fundamental pattern of existence. Everything comes from fire by a process of condensation and returns to fire by a process of rarefaction. Earth, air and water, are but fire in different forms. Man himself is "kindled and put out like a candle in the nighttime." Fire and heat are always associated with life. Fire is the basis of virtue. The drunkard is wicked because his soul is too moist; warm, dry souls are the best. Everywhere there is duality, being and not-being, truth and falseness, good and evil. It is the conflict of the opposites that brings always into existence. Nothing is permanent.

The Pluralists

The Pluralists developed a philosophy which replaced the assumption of a single primary substance with a plurality of such substances.

Empedocles (492-432 B.C.) believed that all things are composed of four immortal elements, earth, air, fire, and water. A uniting force, called love or attraction, builds up combinations of these elements, and a disintegrating force, called hate or repulsion, breaks them down. Originally the elements were all mixed together in a gigantic sphere in which love and hate did not operate. Finally love and hate entered and the elements became separated and the conflict between the two forces brought individual things into existence. The first living thing to spring from the earth were plants, then animals in monstrous forms incapable of surviving. Those now existing are the descendants of those that did survive because of their fitness and adaptability, (including men), which is Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest, taught 2,000 years earlier. Thought was a recent development generated by the blood’s activity.

Anaxagoras (500-430 B.C.) was the first teleologist. There are not merely four elements but an unlimited number. All substances, except mind, are mixtures containing all sorts of atoms, or "elementary seeds." Mind is unmixed passionless matter, the thinnest and purest of things, which gives motion and order to all other material. Faith or chance does not govern the world, but Divine Reason, and according to intelligent purpose or design.

The Atomists

Atomism is a theory which proposed that all matter is composed of tiny, indivisible particles differing only in simple physical properties. http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p13e_text.htm

Leucippus of Elea (480-420 B.C.) formulated the philosophy of Atomism. He stated that atoms are "imperceptible, individual particles that differ only in shape and position." The mixing of these particles produces the world we experience. He was the first philosopher to affirm the existence of empty space, really a vacuum. The solitary fragment of Leucippus that remains, says "Naught happens for nothing, but all things from a ground (logos) and of necessity."

Democritus of Abdera (460-362 B.C.) was a bald materialist. Nothing exists but matter and space. The full is no more real than the empty. The world is made up of atoms and the void and there is no third thing. Atoms are eternal and uncaused and differ only in size, shape and arrangement. As to quality, they are alike. Atoms are brought together not by fortune or divine intelligence but by Natural Necessity. There is no free will in man, and no plan or purpose in the Universe. Everything happens through a cause and of necessity. The human soul consists of very small, smooth, round atoms, like those in fire, and are distributed to every part of the body. Rational thought is a higher kind of perception and is sealed in the brain. Anger is located in the heart, while desire is a function of the liver. All knowledge comes to use through the senses and these are a modification of the sense of touch. Death is a scattering of the Soul atoms.

The Sophists

Specializing in rhetoric, the Sophists were more professional educators than philosophers. The whole Sophistic tendency of thought, which identifies knowledge with sense-perception, ignores the rational element. They acquired a reputation for deceit, insincerity, and demagoguery. Thus, the word sophistry has come to signify these moral faults.

Protagoras of Abdera (490-420 B.C.) was a dialectician, the first to distinguish between the different modes of the verb. He held that logic was the right use of words. Later (425 B.C.) he was condemned for impiety and banished from Athens. Agnostic, he believed that man is the measure of all things, and denied the existence of any absolute or objective truth or absolute standards of value. His teaching that all depends on the viewpoint, led to the position that knowledge is relative to the knower. Expediency is the only factor to be considered in belief or conduct. Metaphysics, to him, was a total failure, and logic a collection of theoretical tricks.

Gorgias (483-375 B.C.) His philosophical studies ended in nihilism, the denial of all existence. All statements are equally false and differ only in plausibility. We can sum his position up in three propositions: (1) Nothing exists; (2) If anything existed, it could not be known; (3) If anything did exit, and could be known, it could not be communicated.

Hippias, Prodicus and Critias were all famous Sophists.

The Philosophy of Socrates

Socrates (354-399 B.C.) believed himself appointed of the gods to expose ignorance and pretension wherever found, and to awaken in his followers desire for genuine knowledge. So he gave up stone cutting and devoted his time to heckling teachers and orators. So great was his skill that he discomfitted them all. He wrote nothing and did not fit his doctrines into a definite philosophical system.

To him, ethics was the only subject worth studying. The supreme good for humanity is happiness, the only way to be happy is to be virtuous, and the only way to be virtuous is to be wise. Virtue is identical unto knowledge and ignorance is the only vice. Virtue is not innate but must be taught like arithmetic, etc. To be happy one must become relatively independent of physical needs. Happiness is not found in the mere possession of worldly goods. It is best for a man to worship the gods of his own city. Polytheistic. He regarded the phenomenon of adaptation in animal life, and the intricate harmony of the physical universe, as evidence that some sort of Divine Intelligence governs the world.

Euclides of Megara (430-360 B.C.) held that mind and not matter is the ultimate reality, which makes his system the connecting link between Socrates and Plato.

Plato (427-348) was a pupil of Socrates, the founder of Idealism. He believed that general concepts or ideas are more real and true than anything else in the world. All changing things exist only as they resemble ideas. (His contributions will be discussed more fully under Aristotle.)

Aristippus (435-390 B.C.), a pupil of Socrates, carried Socrates’ idea that happiness is the supreme good to the idea that it is the only good possible for mankind. In fact, he builds his whole philosophy upon hedonism, the gospel of pleasure.

Theodorus (465-398 B.C.) carried out the gospel of pleasure to its limit; that to avoid the ills of life one should commit suicide and obtain peace.

The Cynics

Following Socrates and his pupils, the Cynic School arose.

Antisthenes (441-371 B.C.) and Diogenes of Sinope (404-323 B.C.): The essence of their teaching was that virtue is the only thing that matters, and the virtuous man is always happy because he cares for nothing and fears nobody. The philosopher should reduce the number of his desires as far as possible because the less a man wants, the more apt he is to get it.

The Peripatetics

Greek philosophers who followed the principles of Aristotle, so-named because they learned from the master while strolling about (Gk. peripate) in the covered walkways of the Lyceum.

Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) condemned Plato’s subjectivism and based his philosophy on sensation rather than reason or intuition. He believed that one must proceed from the particular to the general (which is the modern scientific method). The general truth of Idea exists in the particular object and not apart from it. Each individual thing is a combination of form (the idea), and matter, except God who is pure form (or Idea). He summarized the scientific knowledge of his time, pointed out the importance of Observation and inductive reasoning and rescued philosophy from the introspective method of Socrates and Plato.

His was a colossal mind, and we find most terms of science and philosophy in his writings. He covered the whole range of human thought from the beginning until now. Yet crudities fill his astronomy, logic, biology, botany, and metaphysics, which we could not understand unless we know the limitations under which he lived and worked.

He was "compelled to fix time without a watch, to compare degrees of heat without a thermometer, to observe the heavens without a telescope and the weather without a barometer." Of all our mathematical, optical and physical instruments, he possessed only the rule and compass and a few imperfect substitutes for others. Chemical analysis, correct measurements and weights, and a thorough application of mathematics to physics, were unknown.

One of his greatest achievements was the overthrow of Plato’s idea of "universals." Plato held that man the individual did not really exist, but that man the universal was the only reality. Aristotle held that man the individual was the idea embodied and that man, the universal, was a handy mental abstraction. Plato loved the universal to such an extent that in his "Republic" he destroyed the individual to make a perfect state.

Aristotle met Plato’s communism with such a statement as this. Individual quality, privacy and liberty are above social efficiency and power. He would not care to call every contemporary, "brother or sister," nor every elderly person, "father or mother." If all are your brothers, none is. How much better it is to be the real cousin to somebody than to be a son after Plato’s fashion (i.e., not know who your father was). In a state having women and children in common, love will be watery. Neither of the two qualities that inspire regard and affection that a thing is your own, and that it awakens real love in you, can exist in such a state as Plato’s.

Aristotle was the creator of the syllogism. A trio of propositions of which the third (the conclusion) follows from the conceded truth of the other two, e.g., man is a rational animal. Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is a rational animal. Things equal to the same thing are equal to each other.

His biology is illuminating. "In the midst of this bewildering richness of structure certain things stand out convincingly. That life has grown steadily in complexity and power; that intelligence has grown in correlation with complexity of structure and mobility of form; that there has been an increasing specialization of function and a continuous centralization of physiological control. Slowly life created for itself a nervous system and a brain and mind moved resolutely onward toward the mastery of its environment."

In his metaphysics, Divine Providence coincides completely with the operation of natural causes. Development is not accidental or haphazard, but everything is guided in a certain direction from within by its structure, nature and inner purpose. The egg of the hen is internally designed or destined to become not a duck but a chick. The acorn becomes not a willow but an oak. The design is internal and arises from the type, function and purpose of the thing.

God does not create but He moves the world, moves it not as a mechanical force, but as the total motive of all operations in the world. God moves the world as the beloved object moves the lover. He is the final cause of nature, the drive and purpose of things, the form of the world, the principle of its life, the sum of its vital processes and powers, the inherent goal of its growth, the energizing purpose of the whole.

His psychology is fascinating. We cannot directly will to be different from what we are, but we can choose what we shall be, by choosing now the environment that shall mold us, so we are free in the sense that we mold our own characters by our choice of friends, books, occupations and amusements.

His ethics seem as fresh as if thought out yesterday. The best in life consists in happiness through fulfillment. The chief condition of happiness is the life of reason. Virtue or excellence will depend on clear judgment, self-control, symmetry of desire, artistry of means. Life’s best is found in the means and not the extremes. Between cowardice and rashness is courage, between stinginess and extravagance is liberality, between sloth and greed is ambition, between humility and pride is modesty, between secrecy and loquacity is honesty, between moroseness and buffoonery is good humor, between quarrelsomeness and flattery is friendship. Between Hamlet’s indecisiveness and Quixote’s impulsiveness, is self-control.

Right in the ethical sense is the same as right in mathematics. We do not act right because we have virtue or excellence, but rather we have these because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Virtue is not then an act but a habit. It is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day, or act, or short time that makes a man blessed and happy.

Aristotle’s Ideal Man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since he cares for few things sufficiently. Yet he is willing in a great crisis to give his life, knowing that under certain circumstances it is not worthwhile to live. He is disposed to do men service, though he is ashamed to have a service done him. To confer a kindness is a mark of superiority, to receive one is a mark of subordination. He does not take part in public displays, he is open in his likes and dislikes, he talks and acts frankly because of his contempt for men and things. He is never fired with admiration, since there is nothing great in his eyes. He cannot live in complaisance with others, except it be a friend, for complaisance is the characteristic of slaves. He never feels malice and always forgets and passes over injuries. He is not fond of talking. It is no concern of his that he should be praised or that others should be blamed. He does not speak evil of others, even his enemies, unless it be to themselves. His carriage is sedate, his voice deep, his speech measured. He is not given to hurry, for he is concerned only about a few things. He is not prone to vehemence, for he thinks nothing very important. A shrill voice and hasty steps come to a man through care. He bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of his circumstances. He is his own best friend and takes delight in privacy whereas the man of no virtue or ability is his own worst enemy and is afraid of solitude. This is the superman of Aristotle.

His statements in the realm of political economy, sociology, domestic life, birth control, and a hundred other subjects still challenge the thought of the world. True inventions and betterment of the means of the observation and analysis have changed a few incidentals, but Aristotle’ s creation of a true discipline of thought and his firm establishment of its essential lines, remain among the lasting achievements of mind. His categories or metaphysical classifications, somewhat worked over by Kant, are still the standards of human thinking.

Theoprastus (373-287 B.C.) held fast to the teachings of Aristotle, but placed a greater emphasis on the natural sciences, particularly botany. He also softened Aristotle’s rigid moral code, conceding that violating the laws of the land may be right at times.

Strato of Lampsacus (340-270 B.C.) succeeded Theophrastus and laid the emphasis on materialistic science. There is no mind or intelligence apart from the body. He was the first to note that falling bodies accelerate. His main interest was physics, and he described methods for forming a vacuum.

The Epicureans

The Epicureans, like the Stoics, recognized only that knowledge which originates and stops in the senses as valid. All other cognition is only the result of sensations and combinations of many sensations.

Epicurus (342-270 B.C.) His ethical doctrines were those of Aristippus: Pleasure, and he adopted the physical science of the Atomists. There is no plan or purpose behind the world. Science is valuable only as it makes people happier by destroying their fear of death and the gods. Virtue is an asset only as far as it is pleasure to be virtuous. Honesty is the best policy, not because stealing is wrong, but because punishment is painful. He did not favor marriage or the rearing of children.

Lucretius (98-55 B.C.) was a Roman Epicurean who taught that religion is the cause of all human suffering, and the only fight worthwhile is the struggle against fear of the gods.

Horace (65 B.C.), a Roman poet, was also an Epicurean. His was a philosophy of take things as they come. Don’t worry about tomorrow, be happy, young or old. Death is the ultimate boundary of our woes, and a man can die whenever he pleases.

The Stoics

Stoicism is essentially a system of ethics, guided by a logic as theory of method, and rests upon physics as foundation. Their view of morality is stern, living a life in accord with nature and controlled by virtue. It is an ascetic system, teaching perfect indifference to everything external, for nothing external could be either good or evil. Both pain and pleasure, poverty and riches, sickness and health, were equally unimportant.

Zeno (340-265 B.C.) was a Jewish merchant from Cyprus, founder of the school that met in the Stoa or porch in the marketplace in Athens. He was a materialist. The world is a rational animal and God is the soul or reason of the world. What is to be will be. Everything is ordained by fate or the Divine Reason that knows all things. He was succeeded by

Cleanthes (300- 225 B.C.) was an ex-pugilist, who sought to rationalize Ethics. All individual acts are sinful. To move a finger without sufficient reason is as wicked as murder.

Chrysippus (282-209 B.C.) was a dialectic and logician, who refined and restated the precepts of Zeno.

Panaetus (180-111 B.C.) abandoned many philosophical doctrines and moral precepts of the earlier Stoics.

Seneca (3 B.C.-A.D. 65) His philosophy was a system of moral maxims, such as "There is but one way of getting into this world, but many ways of getting out of it."

Epictetus (AD 55?-135?) was a Phrygian-born philosopher who popularized the Stoic ethical doctrine of limiting one's desires, believing that one should act in life as at a banquet by taking a polite portion of all that is offered.

Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121-180) was a Roman Emperor, the last of the great Stoics, and a man of sterling character, intent on leading a good life and trying to live up to his position. He loved a quiet and studious career, but couldn’t follow it. His view in his "Meditations" was rather pessimistic.

The Skeptics

Skepticism maintains that human being can never arrive at a certain knowledge, because there is no such thing as certainty in knowledge, and that most knowledge is only probably true. The modern word for this is agnosticism.

Pyrrho of Elis (360-270 B.C.), according to his disciple Timon, declared that "(1) things are equally indifferent, unmeasurable and inarbitrable. For this reason (2) neither our sensations nor our opinions tell us truths or falsehoods. Therefore, for this reason we should not put our trust in them, but we should be unopinionated, uncommitted and unwavering, saying concerning each individual thing that it no more is than is not, or it both is and is not, or it neither is nor is not. (3) The outcome for those who actually adopt this attitude will be first speechlessness, and then freedom from disturbance."

Timon of Philas (325-235 B.C.) showed his agnosticism by saying that people need only know three things: What is the nature of things, how we are related to them, and what we can gain from them. However, since our knowledge of things must always be subjective and unreal, we can only live in a state of suspended judgment.

Arcesilaus (318-243 B.C.) who was the sixth head of Plato’s Academy, was responsible for turning it into a form of skepticism.

Carneades of Cyrene (213-129 B.C.) developed a wider array of skeptical arguments against any possible dogmatic position.

The Skeptical movement killed rational philosophy in Greece. Men began to suspect that some unseen spiritual world might be just as real and true as anything else, so they abandoned reason, and took up Neo-Platonism or one of the new Christian cults. Faith alone ruled for 1,000 years of darkness.

Lecture Three

Review of the Ancient Thinkers: The Patristic Masters of Thought

When Greek speculative Philosophy died under the knife of the Skeptics, various efforts followed it to revive the old teachings under such Schools as Greco-Judaic, Neo-Pythagoreans, Neo-Platonists and others. These were at best but short lived and limited. The only two of the old schools of Greek thought that survived and held a place in the Christian period were the Epicureans and Stoics.

The Epicureans, "Philosophers of the Garden," so called because they met in the garden of Epicurus in Athens, regarded pleasure as the absolute good. While this led to the charge of sensuality, it was not true because Epicurus advocated and aimed at the happiness of a tranquil life, as free from pain as possible, undisturbed by social conventions or political excitement or superstitious fears.

Epicurus did not deny the existence of the gods, but taught that if we knew and lived according to our knowledge of the physical world, there was no place for the interference of the gods. He relegated them to a realm of their own. It was a negative system, but its founder’s personal charm and the conditions of the time made it run parallel with Christianity for several centuries.

Stoicism was at full tide when Paul spoke at Athens. He quoted from their philosophy when he said, "we also are his offspring," for the Stoics conceived a sort of world spirit as an all-pervading essence, forming and animating the whole, and the soul of man. Stoic morality was rigid and cold but insistent. Its moral earnestness made it run long parallel with Christianity. Yet it lacked an element of power in its teaching of God. Its ethics were lame, so that it finally dissipated and was lost.

The Greco-Judaic school arose out of the effort to combine the philosophical ideas of the Hebrews and the Greeks. It centered around the Logos. The Hebrews conceived the Logos as the divine self-revelation by the personified Wisdom or Word of Jehovah, while to the Greek the Logos was the Divine Reason and Idea. The two were near enough together to offer a strong resistance to the Christian teaching of the Logos that Jesus Christ was the divine revealing Word of God. After a time the three merged into what we call Gnosticism.

Gnosticism, as a school, busied itself with such problems as (1) how to reconcile the creation of the world by a perfectly good God, with the presence of evil. (2) How the human spirit became imprisoned in matter, and how it was to be emancipated.

They solved the first problem by assuming a series of emanations starting from a perfectly good supreme God, and coming down in stages to a world spirit, an imperfect being who created the world with its evils. They solved the second problem by advocating a life of asceticism in which everything material was avoided as far as possible, or else a licentious life in which everything that was material was used indiscriminately. In other words, all was good. A strain of Gnosticism runs throughout the Epistles, although it was essentially a Christian view of it.

Patristic or Systematic Theology

Meanwhile a system of thought was arising, formulated by the great Church teachers, and culminating in the speculations of the schoolmen of the Church, called Patristic, and classed as Systematic Theology.

To illustrate the method of thought of this school’s adherents, at the Great Ecumenical or Universal Church Council at Nicea, 225 A.D., a debate was between two of the giants of that day. Athenaeus and Arius battled on the question about whether the Creed should say that Jesus Christ was "One substance" with the Father or "Like substance" with the Father.

Arius contended that the creed should say, "Homoousion" or Like substance, while Athenaeus contended for "Homoiousion," meaning One substance. The latter won, and from that time was laid the modern metaphysical contention that the substance of Being is undivided, and that we are all of the one substance. That was the origin of the phrase, "an iota’s difference."

In the year 529 A.D., the Emperor Justinian closed the great school in Athens, and from that time Pagan Philosophy, as a system, ceased to interfere with the speculations of the Fathers of the Church. Yet such writers as Celsus, Porphyry, and Julian (called the Apostate, because he had once espoused the Christian faith), were active, and interjected questions that drove the Catholic theologians to an extreme position. So much so that the Catholic Church claimed their great body of doctrine to be the Absolute and unmixed Truth of God. They stamped out all dissent to this fixed standard of belief with the most terrible intolerance.

From that started the Scholastic reaction, which commenced with Porphyry’s Introduction and restatement of Aristotle’s Categories. The battle raged furiously for two hundred years. Then arose Scotus Erigina, who died in 880 A.D. He resurrected Plato’s Idealism, and the old battle was on again between the two forms of Realism. This ran for nearly two centuries.

In about 1085 A.D., Roscelenus, canon of Compiegne, originated or promulgated a doctrine called Extreme Nominalism, the essence of which was that everything is but an empty name, having no reality whatever. However, when he applied it to the interpretation of the Trinity, Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, forced him to recant. This was a mental battleground for two centuries.

Then arose Peter Abelard (1079-1142 A.D.) and William of Occam (1285-1349 A.D.), who originated Moderate Nominalism, modifying the extreme form by providing for an inner meaning for names. Moderate Nominalism was as unworkable as its predecessor, Extreme Nominalism.

Albert Magnus (1206-1280 A.D.), Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 A.D.), and Duns Scotus (1270-1308 A.D.) during the same period, fused all these differing points into one system of thought. The entire conflict was on the question of Universals and particulars, Genera and species, such as appears in Causation and all appearances, Reality and all manifestation, the Predicate and the subject.

Realism maintained the objective reality of Universals and particulars, Genera and species, while Nominalism maintained that they were mere, names having no reality at all. Duns Scotus and his associates affirmed that universals exist in a threefold manner: First, as things in the Mind of God, second, as the essence of things, and third, as concepts in the mind.

Nominalism is essentially the philosophy of the Catholic Church of today. Nominalists taught that Universals have no substantive existence, i.e., in objective form, but they exist subjectively as concepts in the mind, of which words are the vocal symbols. This is the prevalent idea of the Protestant world until today.

For purposes of contrast, let me state the purely scientific formula, that Universal, or Genera and species are: First, subjective relations of resemblance among objectively existing things. Second, they are subjective concepts of these relations, determined in the mind by the relations themselves. Third, names are representations of both the relations and concepts, and are applicable to both.

This view is logically implied in all scientific classifications of mutual objects or subjects of scientific research, and if generalized will apply equally well to all questions of thought. This scientific form of Relationism gathers up every element of Truth, eliminates every element of error, and accounts for all the facts of knowing or the Origin of Knowledge. However, this Scientific Realism had not yet been born.

Three great streams of thought, set in to solve the old conflict. Voltaire inaugurated the Age of Reason, the "Enlightenment," in which faith in anything unseen was practically wicked. Such thinkers as Sir Francis Bacon, M. Condorcet, Christian Wolff, Gotthold Lessing, Bernard Spinoza, Claude Helvetius, Thomas Hobbes and David Hume, prepared the way for a Master of the Art of Reason, found in Immanuel Kant.

John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume prepared another road for such a giant. The essence of Locke’s philosophy was that at birth the mind is a clean sheet, and there are no inherent ideas. The stimulus of things through our senses produces all our ideas. Therefore, we can know nothing but matter.

Berkeley refuted the whole of Locke’s scheme by showing that because we derive all our knowledge of matter through our sensation of it, and the ideas arising from sensation, all material things are a bundle of sensations and matter has no reality, save as a condition of mind.

After Berkeley had destroyed matter, arose David Hume, who proceeded to wipe mind from the slate. We know the mind only as we know matter. We never perceive such an entity as mind. We merely perceive separate ideas, memories, feelings. The mind is not a substance or organ that has ideas. It is an abstract name for a series of ideas. In other words, sensations, perceptions, memories and feelings are the mind. There is no observable soul behind ideas, and Hume has as effectively destroyed mind, as Berkeley had destroyed matter. One wit advised that the whole controversy be abandoned, saying, "No matter, never mind." Hume likewise assaulted the idea of law and laws. We never perceive causes or laws. We only perceive events and sequences, and infer causation and necessity.

Law is our observed custom in the sequence of events. There is no necessity in custom, only mathematical formulas have necessity. They are inherently true, because the subject already contains the predicate. 3 x 3 = 9 is an eternal and necessary truth because they are the same thing, differently expressed.

When Kant read Hume, he was shocked out of his "dogmatic slumbers."

Rousseau blazed the second great path. He declared that reason was no final test. There are some theoretical conclusions against which our whole being revolts. We have no right to presume to stifle the demand of our nature at the dictates of logic. How often our instincts and feelings push aside the little syllogisms that would like us to behave like geometrical figures and make love with mathematical precision.

Sometimes in the complexities of material existence, reason is the better guide. Yet in the great crises, of life and in the great problems of conduct and belief, we trust our feelings rather than to logic. Thus, Rousseau fought the materialism and atheism of the Enlightenment started by Voltaire.

Abandoning our overly rapid development of the intellect and aiming at training the heart and the affections would be better. Education does not make a man good, it only makes him clever, usually for mischief. Instinct and feeling are more trustworthy than reason. Though reason might be against belief in God and immortality, feeling was overwhelmingly in their favor.

When Kant read Rousseau’s Epochal Essay on Education, he omitted his daily walk to finish his book, then began the thirteen years of study to save religion from reason, and to save science from scepticism.

Lecture Four

The Philosophy of Jesus

The student is apt to think that the teachings of Jesus are in some way exempted from analysis. That we should accept them without even trying them out by the approved standards of thought of today. Maybe we fear that they might not stand the acid test of today’s knowledge.

In fact Jesus’ teachings submit themselves to analysis without the slightest chance of detracting from their value. His whole teaching was purely philosophical in its character. The two great divisions of philosophical speculation embrace all that he ever said. First, he was concerned with the comprehension of being, second, with the interpretation of experience.

The basic idea of his philosophy was the Unity of Being. "I and my Father are one. That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me and I am in thee; that they also may be one in us. At that day ye shall know that I am in the Father and ye in me, and I in you. I pray that they may be one as we are one."

These and many other of his statements tell us that the Unity of Being was the basic idea in his teaching, and that Unity was one of essence. It was and is an eternal fact. The atonement was not something taking place external to ourselves by some power or agent apart from us, but it was forever a fact. It was to restore to us the awareness of the fact that he came showing the way of life and salvation. This is a process of the mind and spirit within us.

That brings us to the second of the purely metaphysical concepts of Jesus. God is Spirit. Spirit is beyond analysis. It is the ultimate essence of Being. "There is a Spirit in man and the inspiration of the Almighty gives him understanding."

"That which is born of the spirit is spirit. They that worship Him must worship in spirit." Thus the Spirit is the only life, intelligence, substance – hence is my life intelligence, substance. When the Master sought to explain his ministry, he said, "The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor, to heal the broken hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord."

"As many as are led by the spirit of God, they are the sons of God." Nothing can be clearer than that while there was a marvelous human knowledge of human life and the effects of various ways of living, the real source of his wonderful teaching was the teaching of the Spirit. He listened to his intuition and knew how to correlate it with mundane affairs.

The third element was the Omnipresence of God. The Jewish people then thought that Jerusalem or Samaria was the only place where God could be found. He said the time has come when "neither in Jerusalem nor Samaria, but wherever men shall worship in spirit." This accords with the Psalmist’s statement, "Whither shall I flee from thy spirit? If I ascend into heaven, thou art there, if I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning and fly to the uttermost parts of the sea, thou art with me and thy right hand shall hold me."

This is not the beginning of that conception of Being, for the masters and the sages of long ago held the same idea. He is everywhere, evenly present. The Master found Him present in the desert, on the mountain, on the sea, in the garden, and in every possible place where His life was placed, the Spirit was consciously there.

Power is essentially spiritual. It is Spirit in action and Spirit is Omni-active. All the action there is, is that of Spirit. "Neither is he that plants anything nor he that waters, but God that gives the increase."

"My Father works hitherto, and I work." "I work in the seen. He works in the unseen." "The Father that dwells in me He does the works. Thou give us each day our daily bread. Thy will is done in earth as it is in heaven. Work out your own salvation for it is God that works in you both to will and to do."

The next great metaphysical factor in his teaching was the Omnipotence of God. "All power in heaven and earth is given me." "Know ye not that I can ask my Father and presently He will give me more than twelve legions of angels." "You would have no power against me, except it were given you from above." "My Father works hitherto and I work." That is, I work in the seen and my Father works in the unseen. All the way through his teachings runs this golden thread of Power as the prerogative of the Most High alone. No man has any Power of himself. Even the Son of man is receiving Power from the Father.

In other words, there is a fundamental Principle of Power, whose nature is eternal action, and there is no other Power. Yet its direction and effect is committed to us. The power in electricity ran wild for ages, terrifying people as if it were the finger of an angry god, until man learned how to harness it and make it do his will. The waterfalls of earth thundered their anthem of power for ages in a splendor of waste until man found a method of harnessing them for his use.

The power inherent in man’s mind ran to waste for ages, doing nothing more than devising ways for the most primitive expression of man’s impulses. It was only when we found out how to develop these mental powers and harness them for progress that we found a new world of enjoyment and efficiency. Occasionally a seer or prophet caught a glimpse of the higher powers available and used it and became a seven-day wonder, but we waited for the Son of man to declare that this Power, directly from the power house of Omnipotence, was available for mankind.

One has only to be still and meditate on the fact that the Power that operates in his functional activities, and carries on the metabolism in his body, is not a human but a divine thing – and he multiplies its efficiency a thousandfold.

The next great metaphysical factor in his teaching was the Omniscience of God. He knows the end from the beginning. There must be some method of knowing which is different from ours. It is a knowing apart from the necessary time and space factors that enter into our thinking. "A thousand years is to Him as a day to us" is a figurative way of putting it. We cannot consciously think without the time factor. It is an essential to our objective thinking. Sometimes one can catch a hint of it when his intuitive power goes into action and he sees and knows things in a way not analyzable by the reasoning mind. "Of that hour knows no man, nor the Son, but the Father only," meaning the end of the ages and the consummation of the earthly order.

When they asked to sit, one on his right hand and one on the left, he said, "it is not mine to give, but is reserved for them for whom it is prepared." In other words, it could not be had by any personal or political pull, but it had to be earned, and who would earn it, God alone could know.

The idea of Omniscience and the presence of evil has been the greatest problem that thinking minds have had to wrestle. They have met it in various ways. One of them is, the prescience of future contingencies is impossible. Every action has two or more possible outcomes. When we know that outcome, several contingencies immediately arise as to the next step, and so on until the final action. From this fact they argue that God Himself cannot know the outcome of individual action, especially where the factor of human choice enters. Therefore, infallible principles carry on the Divine Rule, operating by what we know as laws. The causal results are unimportant as compared with the final outcome. The explanation also calls for the statement that our ideas of good and bad, right and wrong, are criterions of purely human making. The things we esteem as badly wrong are really only negative good. God himself sees nothing of what we call evil.

A second view is that other methods might have been chosen that would have made it impossible for man to err. However, that is at once ruled out by the simple observation that such a status would have made man an automaton and would not in any sense have answered the need of the Divine Nature to have beings like himself who were good because they chose to be so. Second, the fact that Infinite Wisdom chose the way of self-determinism for the individual indicates that it was the only way in which God could work out the Divine Purpose – God sovereign and man free.

It is further explained that the ancient idea that (1) the earth life is the one and only chance for man’s unfoldment. (2) Failing here, there is no further opportunity or chance or hope. These ideas are archaic and a more rational view of human life as the individualized life of God must supercede them. (3) Being born is not primarily to make life a probationary period but to give a spirit cell the human form divine and by that achieve the chief end of incarnation.

Length of life, whether one lives a day or a hundred years, is immaterial to the outcome, which is to attain Godlikeness. This view is born out in the simple fact that a small percentage do manage to master material conditions and attain high spiritual consciousness and character, while the vast mass stand still and material ills of one sort and another swamp the multitudes.

The mind attains knowledge by the apprehension of the Truth, and this does not depend primarily upon material conditions. So, the divine intelligence in us can apprehend truth in a realm devoid of material conditions and in that action may grow and unfold without the hindering elements of materialism. That life is not one stage or a return to repeat the one stage with probably as little hope of success as the preceding one, but that life moves on from one realm of existence to another as it receives and digests truth.

In this study, we have learned that within us is a power to assimilate and to hold secure the results of our knowing, which are available for our next stage of existence in whatever form it may follow. I have taken this much time to explain this metaphysical factor because it was a fundamental in the teaching of Jesus, and there seemed to be no conflict in his mind between the all-knowing of God and the freedom of the individual.

God is the only Reality. Jesus lived and taught and acted as if the material life was something changing and passing, a shadow of the unseen Reality whose order material things imperfectly reflected. The Will of God was to be done in earth as it is in heaven, yet he could not fail to see that men very imperfectly did the Divine Will. It was the idea for the earth because it was the Actual in the World of Reality. The activities of spiritual reality comprise the kingdom of heaven, and even in that realm tradition tells us that Lucifer, an archangel, fell from his high state through ambition to rival God. In any event, many limitations beset the kingdom of heaven on earth, and it comes far short of its heavenly pattern.

Reality predicates an intelligence of infinite activity, whose nature is to create or become. It suggests that innumerable universes have risen and disappeared and probably will continue to do. Reality is the infinite changeless Principle of Being, which abides invariable and constant, preceding and surviving all changes and conditions. Reality is infinite substance, energy, life, law, mind. It is the unconditioned ground of all that exists conditionally. It is the support and background of all that appears. In its creation, it is all that appears. Reality, considered as infinite Mind, creates the universe and all that it contains. All creation exists in the idea of Reality.

The Will of Reality is Universal Energy. The Pure Logic of Reality is Universal Law. The Being of Reality is Universal Life. The Substance of Reality is Universal Substance. The Infinite Mind of Reality, in its Ideative and Volitional Activities, is the Creative and Striving Power of the Universe. Reality is Immanent in its Creation.

In the character of its conscious creations it manifests itself as the artist in his work. The created universe is the cosmic dramatization of the Ideas of Reality, through which it lives and plays its infinitude of parts.

Reality, being indivisible and immutable, is immanent in its creations in the totality of Being. In and back of each conscious being is the presence and power of Reality.

Reality is immanent in you. You are identical with it in the totality of its nature, essence and substance.

The recognition of this identity by the intellect constitutes the Perception of Truth or Initiation.

The realization of this identity by the intuition constitutes Illumination.

The manifestation of this identity by choice or volition constitutes Mastery.

This outline is necessary to understand the teaching of Jesus.

We turn now to the interpretation of experience in the light of this metaphysical truth. The study of man’s relationship and his experiences as he becomes conscious of who and what he is.

Divine Offspring. This is stated as the prerogative of the Master and implied as the privilege of all men and women. Because we are what we are in the nature and essence of Being, we cannot be made the sons or daughters of God. We are that already and have eternally been. However, we may become conscious of the fact and enter a state of living accordingly. The prodigal son was his father’s boy, no matter his prodigality. We are His sons and daughters, even if we never hear of it or become aware of it in this world, but that is really our task here. In working out this relationship, certain attitudes of mind are essential.

The Doctrine of Nonresistance. The Master has told us not to resist nor to strive nor to emulate those who do so. "If thy enemy hungers, feed him." "If any man takes thy coat, give him thy cloak also. If he compels thee to go a mile, go with him twain. If he smites thy cheek turn the other one." "He that taketh the sword shall perish by the sword." His followers put it into practice and the invincible Roman Empire crumbled to dust. Naturally, every movement toward world disarmament is in substance a gesture toward fulfillment of this teaching of the Master. Its effectiveness depends on disarming the heart of humanity first.

The forgetfulness of self. In other words, the submerging self-interest in the larger welfare-overall. "When you have done all, count yourselves as unprofitable servants." It almost seems a contradiction to say that our chief purpose here is to magnify the life of God in each of us and then to say forgetfulness of self. Yet the Master himself interpreted it in his own life. With all his attainments he said, "I am among you as one that serves." Altruism is the only possible cure for fatty enlargement of the ego. "Blessed are you when men shall persecute and revile you and say all manner of things against you falsely for my sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad." We resort to law, then we place ourselves in line with human law and practice. We resort to armed conflict, then we expose ourselves to all the dread results of such resort. However, I doubt if he meant literally that we should not defend our personal or national life when endangered by others.

Non-attachment to results. "Rejoice not that devils are subject unto you, but rather rejoice that your names are written in heaven." "Paul may plant and Apollos may water but God gives the increase. So he that plants is nothing and he that waters is nothing, but God who gives the increase." His disciples were never held responsible for results. "As ye go, preach, the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand and the King is coming. If they receive you, enter in. If not, shake off the dust of your feet, but leave the results to God."

Love of self. Strangely enough we are never commanded not to love ourselves, but to make our self-love the measure and standard of our love for our neighbor. We can each measure the love we have by how much service we are willing to give, for the language of loving is giving. James asked, "If you see a man hungry or naked and say to him, be clothed or be ye fed, yet give him none of those things, how dwells the love of God in that man?"

Love of a friend or neighbor. One of his parables told of a man who would not arise and give three loaves because it was his friend who asked, but he finally did because he kept knocking. It is an implication that the right motive for the action was lacking, but like many other things in human life something else seems to work better. The story of the unjust judge gives the same idea. These two stories really emphasize the love of a friend or neighbor, which was a vital factor in Jesus’ teaching. The story of the Good Samaritan was to the point. The true neighbor was he who showed compassion.

Love of Enemies. "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, and do good to them that despitefully use you." It was the contrast with the old idea of poetic justice "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." Yet humanity has proven it a thousand times that while force and combat will not win, kindness will end the conflict between people who are at enmity. Try it sometime by sitting in the silence and inviting Love in, and treating him or her with the same consideration that you would a friend. That is the test and it will work inevitably.

Personal responsibility for the investment of influence. The parable of the talents makes clear the obligation to use sensible means that will assure success. The man who failed to invest his talent was condemned for his failure. However, it was not punitive justice but the simple operation of the law of cause and effect.

Open-mindedness toward the spiritual universe. This was last but most vital of all. The habitual frame of mind that looked toward the unseen realities instead of the appearance of things. The fact that "not even a sparrow falls to the ground without your Father taking notice of it." The feeding of the fowls of the air was his declaration that as for the supply, there was no failure. Of course the birds had to get out and hustle for it. There has never been any change in that law. As far as God’s supply is concerned, it is unlimited. The economies of the universe have never failed and we cannot question the objectification in material form. In the present Depression there has never been so great abundance.

The same principle is true regarding health. The spiritual attitude of mind opens us to the operation of the spiritual forces, which are always healing and constructive. To keep our minds open to the healing power and action of the unseen forces will turn the tide when everything else has failed. It was this attitude of mind to which Jesus referred when he said, "I ascend to my Father and your Father." It was an ascension in thought. "No man hath ascended into heaven save the son of man who came down from heaven, even the son of man who is in heaven."

Living in full obedience to the laws of material life, but in full consciousness of the presence and power of the spiritual forces that play upon us and in us. This is the Philosophy of Jesus. It embraces the tried and proved principles of metaphysics and interprets human experiences in the light of those principles and the facts of experience. They work, and a thing that works can be set down as at least having much truth in it. This phrase is in essence the philosophy of Pragmatism formulated by Professor William James.

Lecture Five

Immanuel Kant

All philosophers take themselves seriously, too much so. They talk as if the Almighty were waiting breathlessly while they decide whether He exists or not. The seriousness with which they take themselves is as amusing as the rooster who believed that the sun could not rise without the magic of his lusty crowing.

Philosophy has degenerated into a sort of indoor sport, a parlor game, but unlike most parlor games designed to give the thinking faculties a rest, such as bridge clubs, the country club and others, it tends to awaken the thinking powers. Few philosophers are concerned about whether you accept their thinking and its results. They are concerned with making you think and think for yourself.

Omar Khayyam said that one went into philosophy about as he went into a room with a single door, then turned around and came right out again. That is a bit of poetic licence. You go into a museum or a library or other place of gathered values and then come out again. However, you bring something with you. No one can walk down the stately cathedral aisles of philosophy and ever be the same again. He loses something of life’s littleness and gains a new vista of its greatness.

The real purpose of philosophy is not to prove a thing true, but rather to find out by correct methods of thinking whether it is true or not. Kant’s famous question with which he confounded the thinkers of his time was, How do you know?" To facilitate this proposal to test their thinking, he formulated the "Theory of Knowledge." To facilitate correct thinking further, so that we may know that what we think is correct, he presented the famous Categories by which we may test our thought processes.

For example, no one who had ever read and grasped his category of Relation, whose first section deals with substance and attribute, would ever be guilty of saying, "God is Love and Love is God," or "God is Good and Good is God." God is good, but good is not God, it is a quality of His character. Or those who stretch the Master’s words, "I and my Father are one," until they say, "I am God." True each of us is God, individualized, but none of us can truly say in the light of correct thinking, "I am God."

I recommend my students to read Professor William James, the chapter, "The Will," in his "Talks to Teachers." (Available to read at): http://www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/tt15.html

Also his book on Pragmatism, (avilable to read at): http://spartan.ac.brocku.ca/%7Elward/james/James_1907/James_1907_toc.html

All philosophical roads lead to Kant, and we may truly say that all modern streams of philosophical thought are traceable back to Kant. He was an adventurer in thinking, a knight of mental combat. His work was a rampart against the advance of materialism on one hand and atheism and pessimism on the other.

True we have traveled far since the "Critique of Pure Reason," and Kant’s other writings called a halt to the wild speculation of his day. Yet the presence of his three immortal questions and his answers are in every modern philosophical work. His questions involving the whole interest of philosophy were:

The old method of metaphysics was dogmatic. It started with the observation that when the mind starts to investigate its own contents, it discovers within itself the presence of certain necessary ideas. It has concepts of space, time, matter, movement, unity, plurality, substance, cause and effect, reciprocal action, reality, possibility, actuality and necessity, all of which relate the mind to the outside world. The mind has a consciousness of itself and from that forms the conception of a soul, which it would like to know to be immortal.

From the ideas of cause and effect, the mind ascends until it comes to rest in the idea of a first cause of the necessary and most real being, and so it gets the idea of God, Creation, Infinity, and Eternity. All this thinking proceeded on the assumption that whatever the mind thinks clearly and as necessary, must be real irrespective of whether we can verify it in experience.

It was this proposition that Kant tested by his criticism. His proceeds that the mind can know its own ideas, irrespective of their truth or error, was not questioned. Such knowledge is purely a priori that is, independent of objective experience.

Kant sought to find how far the concepts that are true of the mind are also true of things. Nor does this content of the mind have any external validity for objects. The essence of his answer was that time and space with their derivatives, though brought forth by the mind, have an objective validity because the space and time within us are identical with the space and time without us. Our intuitive knowledge has objective validity because our function of intuition brings forth the objects of our intuition. Such ideas as the categories or forms of the logical faculty have objective validity, because the self-activity of the understanding brings forth their objects.

When Kant comes to treat of the concepts of the pure reason in theology, soul, immortality, God, etc., he finds that these ideas have no objective validity because they are not treated as ideas brought forth by the reason, but are realities having an existence independent of thought. So that a science of mathematics was possible, and a science of physics was possible because their concepts can be tested by objective experience, while a science of metaphysics was not possible, because our concepts of God, etc., cannot be tested by objective experience. Kant, however, covered that point by declaring that if it is possible to form synthetic judgments or universal and necessary judgements, i.e., if we can form rational conclusions in their realm of knowing, without the help of sense-experience, we have in fact a science of metaphysics.

In unfolding the principles of our intuitive faculty, he says there are two elements, namely, the matter and the form. (He uses the term matter in the sense of the subjective matter of a book or the substance of a line of thought.) The matter is what is perceived. The form is that which reduces the varied reports of appearance to order, and that which gives order to our sensations does not belong to the phenomena, but are the pure forms belonging to the mind.

The inherent forms of sense perception are space and time. Both space and time are pure intuition, by which the mind presents to us objects outside ourselves. Abstract all that belongs to the matter of sensation, yet space and time remain. The space that the object occupied still remains in its relation to all other space. Likewise the time element of the experience remains in its relation to the timing of all other experiences.

Space and time are the indispensable factors in all our perceptions. Things can only be known to us through the forms of space and time. Space is the form of all outer sense perception while time is the form of all inner experience. No outer object nor state of feeling can become a part of consciousness unless it is either localized or timed. The interval between two experiences produces the idea of time, while the succession of experiences produces the sense of time.

It follows that we do not see things as they are but only as they appear to us through time and space. Kant concedes that phenomena may have realities behind them, but we cannot get at the reality because we cannot get outside our own minds. "That is true but it also is true that we can get outside our previous reports to find other facts which alter the reports. For instance, we see a blue, inverted bowl when we look upward to the sky, but further investigation shows us that there is no bowl up there and there is nothing blue. Or we see our image in a mirror, and it reports as a three dimensional object. Reasoning shows us that it in fact is only a two dimensional object, and that the mind furnishes the third."

To constitute our knowledge, the mind must not only be able by its two forms, space and time, to receive outward objects, but it must have power to coordinate them and give them intelligibility. This power is understanding, which unifies the objects of sense. It is the business of logic to exhibit the special form in which this general intellectual synthesis is exercised and to exhibit these forms in their application to the elements of sense.

He takes the four traditional classifications of logic – Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Modality – and from them deduces twelve categories.

Every judgment in reference to Quantity is universal, particular, or singular.

Every judgment in reference to Quality is affirmative or negative.

Every judgment in reference to Relation is categorical, hypothetical, or disjunctive.

Every judgment in reference to Modality is problematic, assertive or apodictic [incontrovertible].

To these judgments there correspond an equal number of categories from which all their pure principles may be derived. They are:

Quantity, embracing unity, plurality, totality.

Quality, embracing reality, negation, limitation.

Relation, embracing substance and attribute, cause and effect, action and reaction.

Modality, embracing possibility, actuality, necessity.

It is by means of these thought forms that we are enabled to think of objects as thought in a proper manner. Experience of any sort presupposes a formal unity of consciousness, and the categories express the special rules under which this Primal Unity presents itself for the guidance of the imagination. Each category has a time element of its own through which the matter of sensation is taken up and transformed into thought.

The time scheme for Quantity is succession of units.

That of Quality is the contents of time.

That of Reality is that which fills time. The negative is empty time.

That of Relation is the order of time.

That of Substantiality is permanence in time.

That of Reciprocity is co-existence in time.

That of Modality sets forth the relation of objects to time as a whole.

That of Possibility is agreement with the conditions of time generally.

That of Actuality is existence in a particular time.

That of Necessity is existence in all time.

Analysis of Principles

In his formula showing how experience results from the categories, Kant enumerates certain principles by which all our perceptions are raised to cognition (or things known). They are four in number.

Hypothetical reasoning implies supposition which embraces the whole of the conditions of phenomena or the universe.

Categorical reasoning presupposes a subject that is not itself an attribute.

Disjunctive reasoning assumes the ultimate ground of totality, vis., the supreme Being, God.

This is the essence of the Critique of Pure Reason. Upon it Kant built his Critique of Practical Reason, developing a moral philosophy, setting forth man’s duties to the laws and constitution of the State and his duties to himself and to others. These constitute his Theory of Virtue. Kant first clearly formulated the idea of morality as "Duty for Duty’s Sake," similar to Spinoza’s "Intellectual Love of God."

The distinctive feature of his moral theory was his statement of the Categorical Imperative, the absolute obligation of every man to live up to the highest reason within himself.

Lecture Six

Modern Philosophical Formulas

From Kant to recent times, the gap is bridged by such names as Henri Bergsen [1859-1941], Herbert Spencer [1820-1903], Arthur Schopenhauer [1788-1860], Friedrich Schelling [1775-1854], Georg Hegel [1770-1831], George Berkeley [1685-1753] and Karl Von Hartmann (1842-1906).

Bergsen’s "Creative Evolution" was his masterpiece. In it he admits the doctrine of transformism as involved in all growth development or evolution. He concedes that adaptation to environment enters into the windings of evolutionary progress, but has nothing to do with the general direction of the movement, stillness the movement itself.

The essential factor is a kind of interior urge, an original and undefined vital surge (elan vital). This vital impulse pertains to an immanent principle, which is life, intelligence, and substance. It transcends them all – past, present or future. It presupposes them, contains them, and pre-creates them. This immanent principle however has no final completeness in itself: It comes into existence progressively as it creates the Universe. This principle Bergsen called "Duration," which with its vital impulse is the essential cause of evolution. This is the center, in a sense, of a continuous outflow.

It is God, but God, so defined has no completed existence. He is ceaseless life. He is action. He is liberty. His creation, we perceive in ourselves as soon as we act freely.

There is no predetermined finality, or end. No scheme of evolution laid down in advance; there are only immediate objectifications, which involve and succeed each other, or a creation that proceeds without end, in virtue of an initial impulse. This creation brings forth, not only the forms of life, but the ideas that allow the intellect to understand it, and the terms by which it is expressed.

The vital surge of Bergsen contains an impulse to create. Life in its humblest stage is a spiritual activity, and its efforts start a current of ascending objectification, which in turn directs the countercurrent of matter. Thus, Reality appears as a double movement of ascent and descent. Spirit and Matter are not opposed unities, but movements in an inverse direction. So speaking of their relations as spiritualization and materialization is better, the latter resulting from an interruption of the direction of the former.

In other words, the whole creative process is like a skyrocket that goes up in an illumination, and the burned out "dud" that falls back is matter. Bergsen’s philosophy has no place for the Void, or Nothingness. His "Duration" fills all space. Matter is defined as a species of descent, caused by the interruption of ascent, the ascent itself a process of growth and thus a Creative Principle inherent in all things.

In connecting life and consciousness with matter, he makes brain to occupy the relationship to consciousness that a bolt has to an engine. Consciousness is not bound to the organism but enjoys liberty in a wide sense. We are free when our acts emanate from our whole personality. Liberty is a function of our power of introspection. It is prepared and weighted in our whole past and falls like ripe fruit from our precious life. Our character is the condensation of our history since birth including our prenatal dispositions. We desire and will and act from the whole of that past, including the original bent of the soul.

Evolution does not take place in a direct line. From the center, many lines flow out, close and parallel, often interpenetrating, then separate and divergent.

On earth the chief lines of evolution end in the production of plant life, of instinctive animal life, and mental life. These forms are absolutely distinct, the difference between instinct and intelligence. The essential characteristic of the animal is instinct; that of the man is intelligence. All other forms of life have remained captive to the mechanism that they invested. Man alone reached the freedom of intelligence.

All humanity is an immense army that presses forward in space and time, before, behind, and by the side of us all, in an impulsive charge that can overcome every resistence and clear many an obstacle, perhaps even death.

This is a summary of Bergsen’s teaching. Its method is appeal to intuition and not to understanding. He allots the task of finding the solutions of all problems of the relations of self to the universe, and material and inorganic existence to intelligence – the domain of science.

However, the world of life and the Soul is amenable neither to thought nor to scientific knowledge, but to Intuition. He defines intuition as instinct conscious of itself, able to consider its purpose indefinitely. In a word, it continues the work by which life organizes matter.

Bergsen’s method is open to this fair criticism. According to Bergsen, the great philosophical problems in life, the nature of Being, and the Universe, lie outside science, and their solution depends entirely upon intuition.

It is clear to any thinker that all men of genius, all inventors, all the great minds that have added something new to human resources, were intuitive by nature. Intuition cannot be reserved to philosophy. It belongs to many departments of life, philosophical, artistic, industrial, scientific. Science depends as much on intuition as it does on reasoning. The great scientific discoveries existed in the understanding of men of genius before being adapted to the facts and shown to be true.

The only real distinction between philosophical and scientific method is that men of science remain within the limits of fact as much as possible, and take as their criterion concordance with facts or with rational inferences, while philosophers, although endeavoring to keep their intuitions in accord with facts, sometimes allow themselves to propose bold hypotheses, which go beyond them. This is the only contrast and in both, there is but one method of reaching Truth, that which brings the results of intuition into accord with logic and the study of facts. The one point in the Bergsen philosophy that is in accord with facts is: The existence of an essential factor with some kind of internal creative impulse producing the "vital surge."

He has many contradictions and inexact statements. His struggle to harmonize intuition and intelligence results in making intuition supreme. He invests a new metaphysical entity – "Duration" which is founded on that which is least certain and most subjective to our understanding – the concept of time. It includes such contrasts as "whatever may be the deepest essential nature of things we are a part thereof," and "it presents the idea of a God freely creating both matter and life, whose creative work is continued by the evolution of species, and by the constitution of human personalities." Finally, "this work is the categorical refutation of both monism and pantheism." Three more contradictory statements could not be found.

Bergsen made one claim, which is contrary to the facts as we know them today. That the distinction between animals and man is one of nature and not of degree. Every psychic consideration is against it. The automatism of the main functions of life is identical in animals and man.

The great instinctive impulses of self-preservation, reproduction, etc., are equally potent in animals and man. Subconscious psychology dominates animal and man alike. The subconscious governs both. Animal instinct obeys neither logic, conscious reasoning nor will. It attains results superior to those of intentional and conscious thought. It is essentially mysterious and follows no known psychological laws. In all these respects its operation is identical with human subconsciousness, so that the two are alike in nature and differ in degree.

There remain two ideas of value in Bergsen. The primordial Cause of evolution, and the need of recognizing an essential and creative vital impulse.

Contrasted with Bergsen’s system came a system based on the "Unconscious." The expression, "The Philosophy of the Unconscious" was invented by Von Hartmann, but the foundation of that philosophy, the notion of a creative, immanent and omnipresent Unconsciousness, belongs to all ages and all civilizations. The metaphysical deductions based upon this concept easily fall into two classes.

One class admits a Creator and a creation, and understands the creation as carrying out of the design of a sovereign and conscious will. This view meets with two insolvable difficulties. (1) The providential foresight and the presence of evil. (2) The soul of man as immortal but not eternal, having a beginning but no end.

The other class places the Divine Idea in the universe itself: Its theories seek to disentangle the one sole permanent divine essence from the infinite varieties of passing ephemeral phenomena. The latter class considers that the universe of matter, energy, and mind is made up of "representations" or "objectifications" of the creative immanence, but that these do not necessarily proceed from deliberately willed design, because consciousness does not appear as a primordial attribute of unity.

The One, the Real, is the divine principle of the religions of India. It is the single principle of Pantheism and Monism. It is the "Idea" of Plato, the "Active Intellect" of Averroes, the "Nature Naturans" of Spinoza, the "Thing in Itself" of Kant, the "Will" of Schopenhauer, the "Unconscious" of Von Hartmann. It adapts itself so well to facts that it has entered the domain of scientific Philosophy.

Schopenhauer was first to seek to adapt this idea to facts. His primary idea was to reduce the innumerable appearances of things to one single, essential and permanent principle, which he termed "Will." Will is the sole thing that really exists. It is the Divine Absolute. It is one, eternal, outside space and time. It implies neither individualization nor beginning, nor end nor origin, nor annihilation.

Will, in objectifying itself, produces the innumerable appearances of things. In all the phenomena, coexisting or succeeding one another, Will only is manifested. Will is primitively and essentially unconscious. It needs no motives for action. It is active in animals under the impulsion of blind instinct.

In man, Will is unconscious in all the organic functions, digestion, secretion, growth, reproduction, and all vital processes. In fact, the whole body is the phenomenal expression of Will; it is Will objectified and become concrete, hence everything that happens in it must have emerged from Will and this Will acts blindly. Will shows itself as Unconscious in all its representations, in the inorganic world, in the plant world, and in nearly the whole of animal life.

Through all its manifestations, Will comes to know that it desires and what it desires. This objective conscious substitutes an intentional am limited activity for Will’s unconsidered and boundless impulses. That which is really superior in man, his eternal essence, his genius, his inspiration, his creative power – all these are impersonal, all belong to the unconscious Will.

All that pertains to this objective consciousness is subject to death, but Will, which as the essence of Being is unaffected by death.

Unfortunately the trend of Schopenhauer’s philosophy was toward a confirmed pessimism. "The will to live is a misfortune." "The value of life consists in learning not to desire it."

Von Hartmann took up Schopenhauer’s thesis, adding certain data to it, derived from the natural sciences and psychology. Nevertheless, with both of them there is an abyss between the unconscious and the conscious. One is divine, the other purely human, and the human finite cannot participate in the divine Infinite. Out of this notion all their pessimism arose. It did not occur to them that everything that falls within the domain of conscious existence, may in the light of psychological knowledge, be registered, assimilated and preserved by the eternal essence of Being.

They attributed all potentialities except one to the Divine Principle or Will, and that the most important of all – the power to acquire and retain the knowledge of itself. This is the true conception that while the human personality, with its development from the birth to the death of the body, is destined to have an end as it had a beginning. The real individuality, the essential being, keeps and assimilates to itself, deeply engraved in its memory, all states of consciousness of the transitory personality.

Schopenhauer, after the manner of Hindu thought, allowed some such survival. In his theory of Palingenesis or rebirth, the permanent in man builds up another personality, bringing to it all its permanent gains, further enriched by the experiences of its new objectification. Thus, in his system, the Will, originally unconscious, becomes a conscious Will.

Those who see no necessity for any rebirth see the truth that in the next stage of adventure, the self holds all its permanent gain, as the basis of its further unfoldment.

Schelling and Hegel, whose systems predated Bergsen and Schopenhauer, were less precise than the latter. Schelling’s universe is the result of an essentially unconscious "Activity." This activity becomes at least partially self-conscious in man.

For Hegel, the essential unconscious activity possesses some kind of Reason. It brings a rational Creation into existence, and we may find in evolution, and the process it implies, some reasonable finality. Thus, reason gradually grows into consciousness. Evolution is the means that the universal and creative reason uses to acquire self-consciousness.

These great thinkers contributed one or more ideas, which when separated from their errors, take their place in a new system, similar in its premises and its essence, but leading, by a different development of thought, to conclusions far different from the pessimism of Schopenhauer and his fellow thinkers.

Lecture Seven

The Development of the Doctrine of the Trinity

The idea of the Trinity is very ancient. In the very beginnings of the records of human thinking, there appears the notion that God, as God, manifests Himself in more than one personal expression.

Probably the ancient Egyptian records are the oldest in existence. Here we have the notion of the Trinity. Osiris was the Father, Isis the Mother, and Horus the Son. In one Egyptian poem, they represent Osiris as looking down upon Horus, who stands with his feet on the backs of two crocodiles, suggesting boundless vigor of life, and the Egyptians called him Lord of the Sacred Bark. In other words this Son of the Egyptian Trinity was the savior or preserver. It is fitting therefore that they called God the Father and Mother of all that was made.

In passing we should say, that the most ancient and most deeply metaphysical idea of Deity they named Amon. Later there came Aten. Amon was the Absolute and impersonal Being, while Aten was something more of a personal conception. Aten was the Giver of life by means of Ra, the Sun God. It is interesting that while they followed Amon the one, they reached the greatest height of unfoldment, and when they turned to Aten, a lesser conception of God, they began to decline.

Further, the very first idea they perfected and proclaimed was the soul’s immortality. Their Books of the Dead were in reality descriptions of the soul’s progress in the future, with directions on how to meet each succeeding condition that arose. They buried their book of the Breaths of Life with every priest and high-born person. It proclaimed the steady advancement of the soul under the care of the Gods.

Following their declaration of the soul’s immortality, they formulated their ideas of the Supreme Being. In the face of death’s immutable records and monuments, they wrote on the walls of the tombs a thousand declarations of life, as if to defy death.

The teaching of the Hindus was the next factor in the development of the idea of the Trinity. With much of the same high discernment, they did not speak or think of the Absolute – the Brahman – as part of the Trinity, but three phases of Brahman. Brahman was the Supreme Self of the Universe, a Trinity made up of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. The manifestation and interaction of the three causes the Universal Creation and Life.

They conceived Brahma to be the personification of the Brahman. He was the Creative Principle of the Trinity, the creative Divinity, somewhat akin to the Greek demiurge or divine agent of the Supreme Being, employed to create the material universe and man. They regarded Vishnu as the preserving Principle of the Trinity or the Savior. Shiva was the third person of the Trinity, and acted as the Destructive Principle of the Trinity.

The idea of the Trinity never lost its hold on the Hindu mind, although it changed with the rise of the worship of Vishnu, or of Shiva as the Supreme Being. The Trinitarian idea remains as a part of the Hindu religious conception. It dates very far back as is shown by some most ancient scriptures, for instance the well-known rock sculpture at Elphanta, which shows the Trinity as having one body with three heads emerging from it.

Vishnu was from the first pictured as gracious deity, filled with goodness, righteousness and love, and a desire for order and peace – his symbol was the moving sun. Shiva, the third person of the Trinity, represented the Principle of Destruction and strife, having a malevolent and revengeful nature, but being capable of propitiation and flattery, for which he rewarded his worshipers with prosperity, health, etc. He had the storm for his symbol. This idea of Vishnu and Shiva presented the world wide and world-old conception of the Good Spirit and the Bad Spirit, God and Devil, which all races and religions have had at some time in their history.

The conception of Vishnu as the Lord of Righteousness and Goodness, grew until at last he became regarded as the Supreme Principle in the Trinity. Gradually the conception grew, until they identified him with the Supreme Being or Brahman Itself. The idea of Brahman lost its original metaphysical significance among the people, and they regarded Brahman as the nature of Vishnu. In other words, Vishnu had become the One God, from whom all the universe, with its individual souls, flowed or was emanated. In other words, Vishnu became a personified "THAT."

Simultaneously, the worship of Shiva, the destroyer, the God of change and dissolution grew apace. Shiva represents the earliest and universal impression of nature upon men, the expression of endless and pitiless change. He is the destroyer and rebuilder of various forms of life. He had charge of the whole circle of animated creation, the incessant round of birth and death in which all nature eternally revolves. Symbols emblematic of death and man’s desire indicate his attributes. He presides over the ebb and flow of sentient existence.

Shiva exhibits by images and emblems the two primordial agencies, the striving to live and the forces that destroy, the inexorable law of the alternate triumph of life and death, the unending circle of indestructible animation. He wore the lingam (male generative organ) as a symbol of the Reproductive Principle of nature, and as a symbol of subtle and malignant power he wore a garland of twined serpents.

Rising along with the development of Shiva, the Shakti worship sprang up. Shakti is the name of the principle of Cosmic Energy, the Life Activities in the Universe, as contrasted with the Principle of Being. Shiva became regarded as Being itself, while they knew his bride or consort as Parvati, representing Shakti or the Creative Energy. In other words, they saw the necessity of some representation of the Feminine Principle in the Trinity. So far they were all masculine, so Shiva took a bride. Shiva became the male God and Shakti the female God. The worship is solely that of the Female Principle of the Universe, or the Universal Mother.

Plato taught a trinity of the soul, in which we may readily see analogies pointing to a higher form of the doctrine. The Good, the True, and the Beautiful easily take on the personification of the Trinity.

The third person in the Hindu system was the Holy Breath, by which living creatures were made. The Holy Ghost became visible in the forms of a dove, a tongue of fire and other forms familiar to us in Christian teaching. Among some peoples, the Holy Spirit was the agent in immaculate conceptions. In the ancient Mexican trinity, Y Zona was the father, Bascal was the Word or Son, and Echvah was the Holy Ghost, by whom Chimalman conceived and brought Quetzalcoatl (Mexican Antiquities, Vol. 6., p. 1650). When the Pharaoh Sesostris invoked the oracle to know who could subjugate all things, the answer was, "First God, then the Word, and with them, the Holy Spirit."

This is a brief review of the unfolding of the idea of the Trinity among various peoples, throughout the ages. The source of the idea lies deeply hidden in our efforts to understand and explain the operation of the Eternal Principle of Being. The Christian doctrine is embedded in the same necessity.

They mention the Trinity nowhere in the Scripture. Yet statements concerning the activities of God the Eternal Spirit produced the idea that while the Eternal Spirit of God is One, He manifests in the Unity of Being, a distinction of persons whom we call the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Father as the Primal Source, the Son as the Redemptive Mediator, and the Holy Spirit as the personal applier of life and grace.

Thinking of God apart from relationships seems impossible. For instance, we say that God is Love, meaning that God is the infinite home of all moral emotions, the fullest and most differentiated life. Love implies relationships, as He could realize himself as love only through relationships within his own being.

We can help ourselves to grasp some necessity for this universal conception of Being. Suppose that some magician’s wand would enable us to banish all that appears, what would be left? The answer must be – nothing but absolute empty space. That was the actual situation sometime in the far off past, if we may believe the facts. Yet that space could not have been empty, for the whole material universe has come out of it. Now we have learned that out of nothing, nothing comes. Yet here we have form, order and intelligent procedure, life, and action. Since these could not by any possible chance come out of absolutely empty space, it follows that life, law and intelligence and everything else in completeness fills apparently empty space, which is here expressed in limited form.

We have then a form idea of Absolute Intelligence and nothing to whom it can make itself known, Absolute Power and nothing to whom it could exhibit itself, Absolute Love and no one on whom to lavish it, and so on through the list. In other words, we have the picture of a lonely Being. It became a necessary to think that some sort of relationship must exist in the Eternal Being. So every philosophy of earth has eventually premised the necessity, and provided for it by the notion of the Trinity. That while the Eternal Unity is undisturbed, there is a diversity of personal expression and activity as provided in the Trinity.

Strangely enough, without much exception, the idea has been of three instead of another number. This is set forth in our Christian idea of the Trinity. Three personal expressions of God, but perfect Unity of Being. These three each acting out their own perfectly defined offices, yet in perfect unison of purpose. This is about the idea as held by all Christian believers. Outside the Trinitarian idea, only two possible interpretations of God's relationship to the Universe exist. Either He is transcendent, above and outside all, or He is Immanent, within or identical with all. The Trinitarian idea combines the two, makes God both Transcendent and Immanent, and provides for this perfect relationship by the presence and action of the Spirit, the administrator of all relations.

Right here enters a point that most of the theologians have overlooked of all religions. If manifesting Himself in three personal forms of expression without disturbing the Unity of Being is possible for God, then what in the name of logic is to hinder Him from expressing Himself in countless forms of personal expression with the same results?

In other words, when we accept the fact of the Trinity as a necessity of thinking, we also, by implication, accept the countless individual expressions of Divine Being, which holds us each as one with the essence of Being. Two observations are pertinent here.

One is, every school of thought has found it necessary to present in their Trinity some provision for the feminine elements of personality. Our Christian Trinity is about the only exception. The Father is presented as masculine, the Spirit as masculine, and the Son as masculine. We have here an anomaly of thought, a complete masculinity of ideas and the presence of feminine qualities everywhere. We can only explain it by the dominant masculine type of mind through which they formulated the idea of the Trinity, and who appeared not to see that sometime the incongruity would appear to other thinkers without such prejudice. If God is purely masculine, then there is no explanation of the source of feminine qualities.

It really took a woman to emphasize this fact and to provide for it in her statement, "Our Father-Mother God." I nearly fell off the Christmas tree when I first read that. Yet on looking it up, I found that the very first reference to the Spirit is distinctly feminine. "The Spirit of God brooded over the face of the waters." That is the imagery of the feminine. So it is most of the way through the Bible. This interpretation of the Trinity has spread until most of us think of the Spirit as the feminine aspect and expression of Being.

The Hindus made the Spirit, or third person of their trinity, combine both the masculine and feminine qualities. This, if carried over into our thought, would take care of a most embarrassing predicament of thought. When we say that "He was conceived of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary," we have the picture of two feminines producing something that is contrary to all the facts of life as we know them.

Another observation that is pertinent here is, that in all religions there is the tendency to exalt one person of the Trinity above the rest. That was peculiarly true, both in Egypt and India, insomuch that the other persons in the Trinity assumed very secondary relative value.

The Christian Trinity has not escaped this tendency. First was the exaltation of the Father as Supreme, and assigning a secondary place and influence to the Son and the Spirit. Then they exalted the Son as God, giving the Father and the Spirit a secondary value and place. This is true in both Catholic and Protestant usage. It runs not only through the churches, but creeps out in the use of many schools of New Thought. Jesus Christ is set forth almost exclusively in their teaching concerning God. Still others have emphasized the fact that all action is that of the Spirit. These are the extremes to which the untrained mind is apt to go. We can avoid this limited form of thought by returning to the original conception that the Father is the Primal Source of all that is, the Son or Word is the Redemptive Mediator between God and man, and the Spirit is the personal applier of Life and Grace.

Man himself is a trinity, body, soul, and spirit. Man is the combination of the Father Principle and the Mother Principle, and he is the Son or third factor in the Trinity. Many such combinations of thought, such as the above, show how deeply and profoundly the idea of the Trinity is rooted in the very nature of man.

The Father is the eternal embodiment of Truth, Life and Power. The Son is the eternal embodiment and expression of Love and Goodness. The Spirit is the eternal expression as action and the agent by which these are operative in human life.

Lecture Eight

Outline for Right Thinking

Many things may be true for cosmic thought that are not true for our human understanding. The mental life considered as fact belongs to psychology, but considered as apprehending truth, it belongs to Logic. Thought may signify mental activity, or the contents grasped through that activity.

The human mind never rests in the impressions of the sensibility, but works them over into forms inherent in its own nature. Mind transcends sense entirely. For instance, I am struck by a stone. The sense fact is simply certain visual, tactile and painful sensations. If I say, the stone hit me, I have transcended the sensual experience and attributed objective existence and causal efficiency to a stone. Yet the mind does not stop there. It knows that a stone has no power to throw itself, so it brings in the man who threw the stone. However, men are not around just throwing stones promiscuously, so mind begins to hunt for a motive.

In other words, these ideas are not sensations, nor any possible modifications of them. They belong to the unpicturable notions of intelligence. Yet the sensations become an intelligible object of thought when we super-induce these ideas upon them by the action of the understanding.

This gives us a starting point for the lesson. Without any arguing, the mind holds certain essential necessities for thinking. First, in the mind is the necessary idea of an Ultimate Source of thought, beyond which we cannot go and do not need to go. Names for this Ultimate Something are immaterial.

Certain thought forms in the mind are inherent. That is, they are native to the mind. Some of these are Time, Space, Number, Motion, Quantity. Whether we will or no, they are present in all our objective thought.

We often meet with the statement that there is no time or space in mind. That is true, in Cosmic or Universal Mind, but it is not true in our objective power of thinking. Thought has no form or significance apart from these ideas, in this material and objective world.

Likewise, we have certain fundamental categories or classifications for any intelligent understanding of God and the economies of the universe. When we think of God, such thought forms as Unity, Quality, Relation and Modality are always present. The very thought of God, the Absolute, calls up the form of Unity or One.

Then comes the idea of Quality. He is perfect, yet in a world of imperfect appearances, the mind naturally holds the two ideas of Reality, and Negation and Limitation. The moment we turn to the material world and its processes, the idea of Relation enters the mind, Substance and Attribute, Cause and Effect, Action and Reaction. Then naturally the fourth form of thought appears, Modality, or the method of our thought about the movements of the universe, Possibility, Actuality, and Necessity.

Another apparently inherent tendency of the mind is to generalize. The recognition is that what is true in the individual is true overall. For instance, the instinct of direction in the homing pigeon, is attributed to all homing pigeons, and in some degree to all living things.

These inherent thought forms are universal. They are not given to just a few. Therefore, the first step to right thinking is to accept your right and the power to think for yourself. Any quality of mind that is apparent in any individual must of necessity be in all individuals of that species, in some degree.

The second step in right thinking is to test your thought by the thought of others on the same subject. In this way you can check over anything that may be lacking in your thought processes.

Next, realize the immanence of mind. It is present and identical in all living forms. In all rational life, it follows certain methods. In irrational life, mind is also present in a manner suited to that life. Then get a clear idea of the Power of Mind.

No particle of matter has any power to act. No bit of muscle, bone, or nerve has any power to grow a lump, produce a pain, or have an inflamation, or any other kind of invasion. Matter can act only as the life forces act upon it, and Mind controls these. Therefore Mind is the only power there is. This of course means Mind in the general sense and in the particular. The forces of nature are the operation of the Cosmic Mind through nature.

Now get an outline of the whole process: First, there is a Dynamic Power, Universal, Omnipotent, whose nature is to act. We do not have to try to make it work. Its nature is action.

Second, there is a Universal Substance, Primordial, Unseen, of a molding, plastic nature, of which all things are made. It is limitless, and so there is never any less or any more of it.

Third is the inevitable plan, pattern, or mold, fashioned as Idea, into which the dynamic Power forms the unseen Substance. We do not have to concern ourselves about the Power or Substance of the Power, but our sole part is to furnish the idea as a mold into which Power fashions Substance and brings our idea into form.

This is not just a metaphysical notion. It is based upon and borne out by the facts of life everywhere.

Science knows what it calls the mimetic power of nature, a remarkable power in life to take on the form and color of surroundings. Little insects, bugs, animals, take on the form of the leaves and bark on which they live. They also take on the color, insomuch so that often you look right at them without seeing them. The larger forms of life also use this power. The Polar bear is white as to skin and hair because that is the color scheme always presented to him. Some deer are white in winter and brown in summer, adjusting to the color scheme prevailing. Jacob used striped rods and produced a preponderance of ring-streaked and striped calves. This action is automatic.

This is all unconscious action. However, when we come to human life, it is not conscious and unconscious. The power of a child to mimic has passed into a proverb, "monkey see, monkey do." The power of association is based upon the operation of the mimetic power. Good or bad examples owe their power over us to the presence of this power.

We take on other people’s ills, aches, and complaints. We take on the apparent qualities of those with whom we associate, their voices, their mannerisms, and actual physical likeness. These all show that the formula that we have learned is based upon the presence and operation of a principle of life that is universal. It follows that since we solely relate to the idea or picture, that the more perfect and constant that picture, the more definite will be the coming into form that which we have pictured. This depends on our practice and power of concentration, or the ability to hold the mind to a single thing and shut out everything else.

I will give you a little drill in concentration that will help you if you will practice it. Use the fingers. Laying the back of the hand flat on the knee, close first the thumb, then each finger, making all the others lay still.

Do not practice denying the reality of anything that may be bothering you. Denial only tends to emphasize the thing. Turn the mind away from that which reports, to the Divine Ideal and keep your attention on that.

Remember that the agent that puts things into operation is the organic mind within you. It is the sole officer in charge of all your functional activities, and superintends all the metabolism or changes that are forever taking place in the body. It does the work according to the plan it has in hand. If years of wrong thinking have changed the original Divine Plan, then you must change the plan to His Ideal.

A state of confidence is essential. That confidence must rest upon the knowledge not only that your body responds to your mind, but also that the organic mind never fails to carry out what you steadily hold before it. It is a faithful servant in the house, which only needs to know the will of the Master of the house, to carry it out. If you add to this the fact that the Organic Mind is the agent of the Eternal Creative Mind, you have laid a foundation for greater confidence.

This confidence is identical with the "belief" that Jesus accounted so important. It really means the steadfast confidence in the means you are using, and the power that works through them. It is well to remember that belief is always associated with the conscious or objective mind, while faith properly applies to the action of the superconscious. Faith is the knowing of our intuition, which does not depend upon any apparent material agencies. It looks steadfastly to the Unseen.

When once you have fully and clearly given the perfect idea to the inner builder, count on its fidelity to what you have given it. Once clearly grasping the idea, it continues to work it out whether you repeat it or not. If you have given it a perfect idea, it will give you immediate results. If the picture is dim or hesitant and wandering, then you may need to repeat it often and many days. This explains why one person will get healing at a single treatment while another must treat or be treated often.

Having given the idea clearly, then leave it there for the builder to work out, and busy yourself giving thanks for what it is doing. I do not know anything more helpful than the steady giving thanks for the finished work. For when it is finished in your mind it will be finished in your body and affairs.

Develop the habit of thinking constructively. Avoid negative thoughts and statements or negative pictures. Cultivate the right mental habit by reading books that have an uplifting tendency. It is not worth your while to spend your time reading trash, except for a diversion. Daily reading a chapter from some author of standing, will soon get the mind in the habit of right thought and correct expression. Such books as the Bible, especially the Psalms and the Gospels, saturate the mind with the substance of the truth in correct literary form and the right metaphysical outlook.

The daily habit of entering the Silence is invaluable. It is an inner experience. It consists in getting your objective mind still while you contemplate things of high spiritual meaning. While you are acquiring the habit, it is well to be alone, until you find the Silence within yourself. Then you can enter it anytime or anywhere. In fact, you can let the other person talk, and you can answer if needful, and carry on the inner activity. The first step is to get still physically. Relax, let every part of your body be free from any stress. Then still your mind, not by trying to think of nothing, but turn it to the greatest idea that it can possibly grasp – the idea of God.

You know that the eye is set for the vanishing point on the horizon. When you want to rest your eyes, you lift them to the farthest point away. So when you would bring the mind to rest, you get it as far from yourself as possible. When you have done this, take the attitude of listening. Listen for the still small voice. You may not hear it for a time, and it will not occur in the same way with all people.

To some, the still small voice will bring up some word or phrase you have read or heard. Maybe from the Bible or any of the sacred books, or from the poets, or it may be something about which you have read nothing nor thought anything at all. Just let it stay in your mind and it will lead to other ideals of the inner spiritual life.

Lecture Nine

The Outline of Philosophical Attainment

The persistent effort of thinkers in all ages to find some rational solution to the Mysteries of Being and its manifestation is impressive. The ancient thinkers posited as a starting point, the existence of an Absolute Being. This was the finding of pure reason. They did not present the idea of a personal Being, but rather an intelligent impersonal force, passing through vast stages of emanation and subsidence apparently in an effort to find itself.

Their problem was how to make this Absolute intelligible to the finite mind. The process consisted in studying the economies of the material universe, the creative processes of development, the action of mind, and other observable sources of information.

The first point in their thinking, which has survived all speculation, was the Unity of all spiritual existence, second is the unity of all Substance, whatever its form might be. The use of the modern scientific method has confirmed these two concepts.

In wrestling with the problems of varieties in form and organization in material substance, the doctrine of evolution was announced some 2,500 years before the time of Darwin. They discovered the atomic nature of matter also some 2,000 years before science announced the molecular theory of physics.

Another ancient conception was the atomic nature or structure of Spirit, the Essence of the Absolute. While overlooked, disregarded or forgotten, in many respects it furnishes a more rational view than that of Spirit en masse. Their ideas of uniting an atom of spirit and an atom of matter will hold a place among thinkers, especially when science faces the fact that matter never acts of itself, and the organization of an atom can have no adequate explanation apart from t he presence of mind as the crux determining its organization.

Coming down to a more modern period, in the Greek Age, we have the picture of mental giants seeking to explain the universe from observable phenomena. One contended that all things proceed from the eternal fire, and that fire was the one basic element. Another held that all things arise from air, and that air was the basic element. Another contended that all things came from water, and that water was the original basic element, while another declared that earth was the basic element. Out of this contention one arose, presenting the idea that there was not just one basic element, but innumerable ones. It was a mighty advance in knowledge about the material world. Science today announces the discovery of ninety-six of these simple or basic elements, and they will discover others.

One of these thinkers was the first teleologist, arguing the presence of design and purpose in all creation, which presupposed an intelligent designer. Most of the Greek thinkers avoided the notion of a supreme directing intelligence in the universe, but some of them conceived a basic intelligence as a necessary part of the scheme of materialization. The outstanding three among these giants of thought are Plato, Socrates and Aristotle, whose works have profoundly influenced the world’s thought until today. The general trend of the later Greek thought was toward scepticism and downright atheism.

Two schools of Greek thought survived into the Christian era – the Epicureans and the Gnostics. The Epicureans owed their survival to their rigid moral code, while the Gnostics survived through their claim to positive knowledge. In fact both had something in common with Christian Philosophy, enabling them to continue for centuries.

The early Christian Philosophy differed from all others in that its central figure was the person of Jesus Christ. In their system he was the Logos, the incarnate Idea and Life of God. For many early centuries of Christian times, the Catholic theologians maintained this in the most rigorous manner, their own philosophy being essentially right, all others were essentially wrong.

In the 9th and 10th Centuries, their speculations led them far from their original ideas. They battled over such questions as "Nominalism" and "Realism." They debated such questions as whether names were things in themselves, or just the sign of things in reality. Meanwhile, the so called "Dark Ages" came along, during which there was no positive declaration of truth.

Then a new school of thinkers arose, covering several centuries of time. Among these such names as Bergsen, Von Hartmann, Schopenhauer, Rousseau, Berkeley, Locke, Hume and others of equal attainment appeared. Some of them were constructive and some destructive, but they made definite contribution to the advancement of knowledge.

Out of all this intellectual turmoil arose the immortal Kant, the knight of mental combat, who confronted them with the question, "How do you know that your thinking is correct? He set about the task of clearing up the whole field of thought by analyzing the processes of mental lite, and formulating the principles of correct thinking. Kant made what was probably the greatest contribution to knowledge, whose influence survives to this day.

With the birth of scientific method applied to thinking, many fallacies of philosophical thought were at once apparent. Since then the trend has been to make Philosophy scientific while science has become more philosophical. Today any philosophical finding that does not accord with the facts as found in scientific exactness is subject to what is often a painful analysis. All this has resulted into a scientific philosophy at least as far as it concerns the phenomenal world.

The basic idea in modern procedure is that a system of intelligible relations is observable in the material world. There must be therefore a faculty of knowing, devising, and maintaining these relations. Since these marks of intelligence are everywhere, there must be a universal Principle of Intelligence or Mind.

The new conception does not involve the direct and immediate action of this Universal Mind, in the ordinary processes of existence, but its intelligence and power are graduated to fit the needs of all forms and processes of life.

Every form is equipped with an intelligent, working dynamism, which has all power to work and perform within the radius of its existence. This dynamism, in producing any form, uses a plastic mounding form of Substance out of which everything is made. The dynamism is subject to a central dominating idea, which acts as a plan or mold or pattern to determine the form that is to be produced.

It is true that the central dynamism, the universal substance, and the dominant idea are all forms of the infinite intelligence, but they are antonymous in their action. Being elements of the Creative Being, they need no special supervision, but do their creative producing work by virtue of the inherent forces within them.

Thus has the mind wrestled with the problems of existence, discarding outworn notions, and establishing other more rational ideas until at last we have a rather complete philosophical outline of truth as we have deduced it from the phenomenal world.

No study of philosophy can be complete without a careful analysis of the Philosophy of Jesus. He did not build his system upon the indications of appearance in the observable phenomena of the objective world. To him these were but parables, similes, old symbols illustrating the world of noumena, the real world of spirit. He did not appear to use the usual processes of thinking from appearances back to fact, but from direct knowledge of Reality. It is the philosophy of Intuition paralleling that of Reason. Its basic ideas are directly discerned, not reasoned out. While his philosophy’s principles are perfectly adapted to the needs of spiritual man, their application to everyday life does violence to all the native impulses in humanity’s biological pattern.

Such an idea as the forgetfulness of self seemed to militate against the normal sense of self preservation. In fact, it was the only way to insure self-preservation. His teaching about nonresistance diametrically opposed the fighting instincts of that age or, for that matter, of any age. The teaching that love is the universal solvent of all problems in respect to our brothers, neighbors, and enemies, did violence to an age taught to hate your enemies, and get an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The sanctity of the body, the obligation to keep it in health, and to seek healing as the normal procedure ran squarely into the ingrained idea of neglect and punishing the body as a sinful thing, and the cause of all human ill-being.

His injunction to keep a receptive attitude toward the spiritual universe was unwelcome to people who centered their whole life upon appearances. In fact, his whole philosophy concerns itself with the welfare of the man within as the means of promoting his outward well being. It is wholly devoid of human wisdom, and contrary to the trend of human nature. Upon this tenuous and fragile base he built a kingdom that has held the allegiance and challenged the imagination of men in every age since he announced it.

The two systems do not contradict each other, one is the philosophy of the natural man, and the world of phenomena, the other is the philosophy of the spiritual man and the world of noumena. We can trace the present state of philosophical development, step by step, in its evolution through the minds of the thinkers of every age.

Similarly, Jesus, in his life and teachings organized the glimpses of Reality by the prophets, seers, and illumined ones of all times and races as a complete spiritual philosophy. They are complementary, one dealing with the natural world, the other with the spiritual world, each supplementing the other, and together presenting a rational statement of spiritual reality and its manifestation.

We encourage you to go over this course of lessons repeatedly until the outline is clearly fixed in mind. We further recommend reading some standard books on Philosophy, and to become familiar with the full work of such men as those mentioned herein. We have given only the barest possible outline to show the path of the evolution of knowledge.

San Francisco, California, 1930

More information about how to think without error can be found here.