William E. Gates
October 10, 1915
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NOTE |
William E. Gates (1863-1940) was an American Mayanist and Theosophist. After joining the Theosophical colony at Point Loma, Calif., Gates became a professor of history at its affiliated college. After 1920, he would go on to a distinguished career as a Mayanist for the Carnegie Institution for Science and Tulane University, but he never gave up the Theosophical beliefs that colored his work. In October 1915, Gates delivered a lecture originally entitled "H. P. Blavatsky and Archaeology" at the Panama-California Exposition in San Diego in which he attempted to make a case, familiar from later authors like Graham Hancock, that science was wrong to take a materialist approach, that ancient civilizations were thousands of years older than previously thought (he dated the Great Pyramid of Cheops to 68,000 BCE), and that the ancients had advanced knowledge of the precession of the equinoxes and other sciences. As an early example of the application of Theosophy to archaeology, this lecture anticipates much of modern fringe archaeology.
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PAPERS OF THE SCHOOL OF ANTIQUITY
UNIVERSITY EXTENSION SERIES
NUMBER ONE
UNIVERSITY EXTENSION SERIES
NUMBER ONE
THE SPIRIT OF THE HOUR IN ARCHAEOLOGY
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BY
WILLIAM E. GATES PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGY AND LINGUISTICS SCHOOL OF ANTIQUITY, POINT LOMA, CALIFORNIA POINT LOMA THE ARYAN THEOSOPHICAL PRESS DECEMBER, 1915 THE SCHOOL OF ANTIQUITY shall be an Institution where the laws of universal nature and equity governing the physical, mental, moral and spiritual education will be taught on the broadest lines. Through this teaching the material and intellectual life of the age will be spiritualized and raised to its true dignity; thought will be liberated from the slavery of the senses; the waning energy in every heart will be reanimated in the search for truth; and the fast dying hope in the promise of life will be renewed to all peoples.
--From the School of Antiquity Constitution,
New York, 1897 |
THE SPIRIT OF THE HOUR IN ARCHAEOLOGY
A COMPARISON OF PRESENT BIOLOGICAL AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL METHODS AND RESULTS
We are facing in the world of thought a division which is destined to have profound consequences not only in the scientific world, but in man’s understanding of himself as well. Neither the situation itself nor the way in which it is developing are at all new to the student of events. It is quite easy to study history in either of two ways: we may hunt out and commit to memory the mere outward events themselves as they are thrown on the screen of time, the rise and fall of persons and nations, the never-ending battles, the continual changing of political and social conditions, the shifting of dynasties. Or else we may look behind all this and study history as the accentuation and interplay of forces whose inner meaning we can only realize (and even then but partly) after their work has been done, and human life and progress definitely modified by their presence. It is doubtful if we can ever estimate and appraise properly any of these epochal introductions at the time of their first appearance on the scene; that occasion is perhaps always like the planting of seed in the fall-time, to grow into grain and bread in a succeeding season, and after intervening rains.
The student of events, working along these lines, often comes to find much similarity in the histories of these fundamental changes. They very often start in a field outside the dominant one of the day; they seem most unlikely to start within the lines of the established order. Then too they usually start by some concrete discovery, made either by what looks like pure chance, or else arrived at by the earnest search of one or a few people working earnestly in a temporarily neglected field. By field, we may here understand either some territorial political division, a country; or else a field of thought or action, social, scientific, or whatever.
It is quite as if a nation, a state, a system of thought, a department of science, a social movement, were born energized to play its future part, and then to yield on the torch to the next. And from this point it is most natural that we should not find these changes starting within the established order. The established order of the day (whether that “day” be a generation or a cycle of two thousand years) is made up either of the former pioneers grown old, or else of their simple followers. Their work has been done, their creative ideas put into application, used, systematized, crystalized, recorded. And whether political, social or scientific, when we reach this stage, the original type, however revolutionary at first, has settled to well-fitting, comfortable clothes, clothes mental or clothes bodily. And at that stage the wearers, the exponents, usually spend their time trimming and ornamenting the edges of these garments, perfecting the fit.
Nature is often charged with wastefulness; it is probable that she knows what she is about, and while she gives us all our chance, it is doubtful if she really wastes anything worth while using. But in her methods here she is certainly far from it. For instead of going to all the trouble of a frontal attack on the nicely systematic lines and thought-habits of the current styles, or trying to reform some nation which already has all the good things of the day and has well intrenched itself in their enjoyment; or some branch of science whose reputation is made and followers plenty, and little effort to keep up needed; instead of that she seeds and energizes with new life some other quiet corner of her great earth garden, plants the new urge or opens the new discovery there. And soon that field, protected by its very apparent unimportance to the established order, begins to be so interesting that more and more workers come, and before long all the defenses of the older city are let to go to ruin, because no one cares to live there any more. Read this metaphor in terms of nations, continents, political and social affairs, or fields of science and thought as you will.
This process has been so often repeated that the instances we could select in illustration are numberless. As a good one the course of geological science for the past fifty years will serve us excellently. For the geological history of the globe it could well be said in Hutton’s time that there was “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.” Then some time after this Darwin’s work and theories began to influence thought, and they were held to push back to an immeasurably remote epoch the beginning of life on the globe. There are always two schools — those who foreshorten everything, and always tend to pinch evolution and especially the period of human greatness and civilization on the globe, into the smallest and shortest time-compass possible; and those who see both of these in greater terms. Darwin himself belonged to the latter, and believed that almost unlimited time must have been required for the working out of “Natural Selection.” So that then, to quote a recent writer: “geologists and biologists alike saw no reason for limiting their prodigal drafts on the bank of time.”
Then came researches in an allied field of science, that of mathematico-physics. And Sir William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, working from one particular set of calculated phenomena at hand, drew from the observed temperature-gradient of the earth’s mass a mathematical deduction that the planet must be undergoing an irrevocable loss of energy in the form of heat. The outcome of this was the mental picture which soon filled all the public prints, of a time of a running down of the solar clock, the last man dying of cold in what was after him to be a dead globe forever revolving in a universe which also was in time to run down, and stop. In forming this conclusion Kelvin laid down a holding point in physics, a proposition which was accepted as fundamental, but which has since then been completely overturned and shown to have been a pure assumption on his part, namely (he said): “Since the store of energy cannot be inexhaustible.” And the result of this was that, only fifteen years ago, Science settled down to the belief that the
The student of events, working along these lines, often comes to find much similarity in the histories of these fundamental changes. They very often start in a field outside the dominant one of the day; they seem most unlikely to start within the lines of the established order. Then too they usually start by some concrete discovery, made either by what looks like pure chance, or else arrived at by the earnest search of one or a few people working earnestly in a temporarily neglected field. By field, we may here understand either some territorial political division, a country; or else a field of thought or action, social, scientific, or whatever.
It is quite as if a nation, a state, a system of thought, a department of science, a social movement, were born energized to play its future part, and then to yield on the torch to the next. And from this point it is most natural that we should not find these changes starting within the established order. The established order of the day (whether that “day” be a generation or a cycle of two thousand years) is made up either of the former pioneers grown old, or else of their simple followers. Their work has been done, their creative ideas put into application, used, systematized, crystalized, recorded. And whether political, social or scientific, when we reach this stage, the original type, however revolutionary at first, has settled to well-fitting, comfortable clothes, clothes mental or clothes bodily. And at that stage the wearers, the exponents, usually spend their time trimming and ornamenting the edges of these garments, perfecting the fit.
Nature is often charged with wastefulness; it is probable that she knows what she is about, and while she gives us all our chance, it is doubtful if she really wastes anything worth while using. But in her methods here she is certainly far from it. For instead of going to all the trouble of a frontal attack on the nicely systematic lines and thought-habits of the current styles, or trying to reform some nation which already has all the good things of the day and has well intrenched itself in their enjoyment; or some branch of science whose reputation is made and followers plenty, and little effort to keep up needed; instead of that she seeds and energizes with new life some other quiet corner of her great earth garden, plants the new urge or opens the new discovery there. And soon that field, protected by its very apparent unimportance to the established order, begins to be so interesting that more and more workers come, and before long all the defenses of the older city are let to go to ruin, because no one cares to live there any more. Read this metaphor in terms of nations, continents, political and social affairs, or fields of science and thought as you will.
This process has been so often repeated that the instances we could select in illustration are numberless. As a good one the course of geological science for the past fifty years will serve us excellently. For the geological history of the globe it could well be said in Hutton’s time that there was “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.” Then some time after this Darwin’s work and theories began to influence thought, and they were held to push back to an immeasurably remote epoch the beginning of life on the globe. There are always two schools — those who foreshorten everything, and always tend to pinch evolution and especially the period of human greatness and civilization on the globe, into the smallest and shortest time-compass possible; and those who see both of these in greater terms. Darwin himself belonged to the latter, and believed that almost unlimited time must have been required for the working out of “Natural Selection.” So that then, to quote a recent writer: “geologists and biologists alike saw no reason for limiting their prodigal drafts on the bank of time.”
Then came researches in an allied field of science, that of mathematico-physics. And Sir William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, working from one particular set of calculated phenomena at hand, drew from the observed temperature-gradient of the earth’s mass a mathematical deduction that the planet must be undergoing an irrevocable loss of energy in the form of heat. The outcome of this was the mental picture which soon filled all the public prints, of a time of a running down of the solar clock, the last man dying of cold in what was after him to be a dead globe forever revolving in a universe which also was in time to run down, and stop. In forming this conclusion Kelvin laid down a holding point in physics, a proposition which was accepted as fundamental, but which has since then been completely overturned and shown to have been a pure assumption on his part, namely (he said): “Since the store of energy cannot be inexhaustible.” And the result of this was that, only fifteen years ago, Science settled down to the belief that the
globe was a molten mass some 24,000,000 years ago. It is rather remarkable that so many geologists were found willing to submit to this narrow limitation,
says Prof. Alfred Harker, one of the world’s leading geologists today. And he then goes on:
Doubtless they were impressed by the prestige of Lord Kelvin’s authority, and perhaps some of them were influenced by a vague feeling that a result arrived at by strict mathematical reasoning is thereby entitled to credence.
On which a recent reviewer comments:
But what you get out of the mathematical mill depends upon what you put into it. The reasoning may be unimpeachable, but it merely proves that, if certain assumptions be granted, certain consequences will follow.
Kelvin, it will be remembered, had dismissed chemical affinities within the earth’s mass as an extremely improbable part of the problem, and had proceeded on the theory that simple heat was the only element to be considered. And so the case then stood, a pure amplification of a small set of admitted facts within the physico-mathematical branches of general science.
Of course this led to the foreshortening of everything. Within that 24,000,000 years the earth had to cool, geological periods come and pass, vegetable, animal and human life develop. The very biological evolutionary processes for which Darwin had demanded practically unlimited time, simply had to pack themselves into a restricted period; to get into a bed quite as Procrustean as human history previously had to do in order to account for all the population of the earth and the great migrations, the rises and falls of empires, during the 4264 years that have passed since Noah’s deluge. (See the marginal information in any copy of the Authorized Version of the English translation of the Bible.)
We might note here also that this Noachian deluge scheme was also founded exactly like Lord Kelvin’s, on pure mathematical calculations. Archbishop Ussher, an unimpeachable dignitary and authority in his day, quite as Kelvin was in his, started with the theory that the Patriarchs were plain ordinary men — even if they did live unheard-of years, and did impossible or questionable things — and not symbols of world-ages; and so there was naught to do but add their life-years together to find out just when God created the earth. And when in time modern science showed such conclusions impossible, we at once had the cry that the foundations of knowledge were attacked and that God and the Bible were being denied. They got over that.
And then once more, just as the neglected physical science took away the field from the previous religio-dogmatic science so-called, at a time when the latter had finallv shut itself within impregnable walls which it thought were built to keep out attacks, but really only served to keeps its followers themselves shut in — so again.
The physico-mathematicians spun their unattackable theory, out of two or three acknowledged data. By their previous victories they had occupied the citadels of science, and taken the limelight, and the cathedra. Then came two quiet earnest chemists, working in another branch of science which Kelvin had dismissed as a negligible contributor to the problem — M. and Mme. Curie — and without even a blow, the walls fell.
Of course this led to the foreshortening of everything. Within that 24,000,000 years the earth had to cool, geological periods come and pass, vegetable, animal and human life develop. The very biological evolutionary processes for which Darwin had demanded practically unlimited time, simply had to pack themselves into a restricted period; to get into a bed quite as Procrustean as human history previously had to do in order to account for all the population of the earth and the great migrations, the rises and falls of empires, during the 4264 years that have passed since Noah’s deluge. (See the marginal information in any copy of the Authorized Version of the English translation of the Bible.)
We might note here also that this Noachian deluge scheme was also founded exactly like Lord Kelvin’s, on pure mathematical calculations. Archbishop Ussher, an unimpeachable dignitary and authority in his day, quite as Kelvin was in his, started with the theory that the Patriarchs were plain ordinary men — even if they did live unheard-of years, and did impossible or questionable things — and not symbols of world-ages; and so there was naught to do but add their life-years together to find out just when God created the earth. And when in time modern science showed such conclusions impossible, we at once had the cry that the foundations of knowledge were attacked and that God and the Bible were being denied. They got over that.
And then once more, just as the neglected physical science took away the field from the previous religio-dogmatic science so-called, at a time when the latter had finallv shut itself within impregnable walls which it thought were built to keep out attacks, but really only served to keeps its followers themselves shut in — so again.
The physico-mathematicians spun their unattackable theory, out of two or three acknowledged data. By their previous victories they had occupied the citadels of science, and taken the limelight, and the cathedra. Then came two quiet earnest chemists, working in another branch of science which Kelvin had dismissed as a negligible contributor to the problem — M. and Mme. Curie — and without even a blow, the walls fell.
Since the discovery of radium we have learned that the earth possesses a vast store of energy in a highly concentrated form then unsuspected. Strutt has calculated from data of a very simple kind that the observed temperatures can be wholly accounted for by radio-activity if the rocks to the depth of forty-five miles contain as much radium as those at the surface.
And so, passing all of Kelvin’s single facts, and all his computations based thereon, and the logic of his conclusions in consequence, as quite accurate and correct, still the position he took thereupon, and that of those who followed him, both was wholly incorrect, and now is universally known to be so. And it took less than fifteen years to do it.
And of course, as we may well note in passing, the qualities of radium were simply denied even after they had been proven; it could not be, because “it would destroy Science.” Just as geology had been rejected because it would destroy “Religion.”
There was another quite parallel case about a hundred years ago, now conveniently forgotten, where Dugald Stewart, another great scientific authority, also starting from and logically following out other dogmatic preconceptions, denied the reality of Sanskrit altogether, because of the conclusions which inevitably followed. And he wrote an essay to prove that it had been artificially put together by those “arch-forgers” the Brahmans, after the known model of the Greek and Latin; that there was no such thing as a Sanskrit language and so the whole Sanskrit literature was a pure imposition, and the Bible saved again. That is, his understanding of the Bible.
At this point in our discussion I wish to quote from The Secret Doctrine, at Vol. II, page 663, the definition which H. P. Blavatsky there gives of the true province and business of the man of science. She says:
And of course, as we may well note in passing, the qualities of radium were simply denied even after they had been proven; it could not be, because “it would destroy Science.” Just as geology had been rejected because it would destroy “Religion.”
There was another quite parallel case about a hundred years ago, now conveniently forgotten, where Dugald Stewart, another great scientific authority, also starting from and logically following out other dogmatic preconceptions, denied the reality of Sanskrit altogether, because of the conclusions which inevitably followed. And he wrote an essay to prove that it had been artificially put together by those “arch-forgers” the Brahmans, after the known model of the Greek and Latin; that there was no such thing as a Sanskrit language and so the whole Sanskrit literature was a pure imposition, and the Bible saved again. That is, his understanding of the Bible.
At this point in our discussion I wish to quote from The Secret Doctrine, at Vol. II, page 663, the definition which H. P. Blavatsky there gives of the true province and business of the man of science. She says:
The business of the man of exact Science is to observe, each in his chosen department, the phenomena of nature; to record, tabulate, compare and classify the facts, down to the smallest minutiae which are presented to the observation of the senses with the help of all the exquisite mechanism that modern invention supplies, not by the aid of metaphysical flights of fancy. All he has a legitimate right to do, is to correct by the assistance of physical instruments the defects or illusions of his own coarser vision, auditory powers, and other senses. He has no right to trespass on the grounds of metaphysics and psychology. His duty is to verify all the facts that fall under his direct observation; to profit by the experience and mistakes of the Past in endeavoring to trace the working of a certain concatenation of cause and effects, which, but only by its constant and unvarying repetition, may be called A LAW. This it is which a man of science is expected to do, if he would become a teacher of men and remain true to his original program of natural or physical sciences. Any sideway path from this royal road becomes speculation.
Instead of keeping to this, what does many a so-called man of science do in these days? He rushes into the domains of pure metaphysics, while deriding it. He delights in rash conclusions and calls it “a deductive law from the inductive law “of a theory based upon and drawn out of the depths of his own consciousness: that consciousness being perverted by, and honeycombed with, one-sided materialism. He attempts to explain the “origin” of things, which are yet embosomed only in his own conceptions. He attacks spiritual beliefs and religious traditions millenniums old, and denounces everything, save his own hobbies, as superstition. He suggests theories of the Universe, a Cosmogony developed by blind mechanical forces . . . and tries to astonish the world by such a wild theory; which, being known to emanate from a scientific brain, is taken on blind faith as very scientific and the outcome of SCIENCE.
The final crux of all Science is, at last analysis, evolution, and the history and “Science of Man.” This is our special subject here this evening. And so now to go back for a moment to the early days of Darwinism, shall we forget that Huxley himself characterized the mental barrier between man and ape as “an enormous gap, a distance practically immeasurable”? Or shall we not say with one other most careful and experienced naturalist: “Nowhere is caution more to be advocated, nowhere is premature judgment more to be deprecated than in the attempt to bridge over the Mysterious Chasm which separates man and beast”?
There is a something in the essence of things which seems to force even the most hide-bound of men to use exactly descriptive words that at times destroy the very fundamental beliefs the users profess. Of all modern materialists it is probable that one could hardly pick one more typical, self-convinced, and sternly logical than Sir Ray Lankester; and certainly he is a man of great ability and achievements. But note a few of the phrases which forced themselves into a recent paper of his, on the very interesting “scientific” subject of why the courtship of man is different from that of the lower animals:
There is a something in the essence of things which seems to force even the most hide-bound of men to use exactly descriptive words that at times destroy the very fundamental beliefs the users profess. Of all modern materialists it is probable that one could hardly pick one more typical, self-convinced, and sternly logical than Sir Ray Lankester; and certainly he is a man of great ability and achievements. But note a few of the phrases which forced themselves into a recent paper of his, on the very interesting “scientific” subject of why the courtship of man is different from that of the lower animals:
Man is the only truly “educable” animal. Monkeys and dogs have only small educability as compared with man, though more than fishes and reptiles have. Man’s mind, therefore, is in this essential feature of it, very different from that of other animals.
The third step in the development of mind is the Arrival (for one can call it by no other term) of that condition which we call “consciousness”— the power of saying to oneself “I am I” and of looking on as a detached existence not only at other existences but at one’s own mental processes, feelings, and movements. With it COMES thought, knowledge, reason and will. We may speak of Consciousness as invading or spreading gradually over the territory of mind. (Italics added)
About fifty years ago there began a phase of science and literature in the West, in which to gain certain things of value, other things also of great value were sacrificed, at least temporarily. Prior to that our horizons both mental and physical were smaller; it was possible to study and treat the different branches of knowledge comparatively and synthetically. Scholarship of those days was broader in its methods; it was able to and did include the study of principles and philosophy.
Then began the era of specialization, forced on by means of universal communication, the invention of instruments, the discovery of archaeological, geological, and similar facts, which at once both widened the horizons of study, and nailed investigation down to mere details. The fields of research became too many and too vast for single minds, and Science split up into separate sciences, just as Religion can split up into separate religions, mutually ignorant. Study of principles yielded to gathering of material; synthetic thought to analytic; the mere handling of scientific tools usurped the field; research became mechanicalized, and science classificatory. And then each separate field of work became more and more a cage in which its workers lived, and thought, rejecting all done before them, and naturally seeking to explain as much as possible, even the whole of the universe and Life, in terms of the phenomena they were familiar with. The very words Philosophy, Speculation, Metaphysics, became changed in meaning and naturally lost caste.
The whole attention being focused on fact-gathering and phenomena, the external and not the inner became the “real.” The greatest science of all, the Science of Man, and of Life, ceased to be the science of that which constitutes man as Man, or of the universal life by which he lives while he lives; it became the mere study of the processes and changes of the physical organism which the Thinker is, and must ever have been, working to develop for his own use. And as the final and greatest degradation of all, Psychology is made naught but a branch of Biology. No, there is one step more: the psychologist becomes chiefly the alienist, his study the aberrations of mind, his search not for the real Man, the guiding and overshadowing Self, but the subliminal. And the end of all is that all the inner and higher faculties of man, even his intellect and Himself, are proclaimed to be but the functioning of an organism, as if music were created by the instrument which plays it.
Our scientists are very fond of tracing problems of heredity and descent, and before passing to the relation sustained by Archaeology to the Science of Man, I would like the privilege of also tracing down some of the human results of this arrogation to itself by Biology of being the “Science of Man.” Following on this incorporation of “Psychology” as a sub-phase of the development of man’s body, we have had in these latter years an overgrown literature seeking to explain human customs, beliefs, culture, mythology and religion by a set of word-descriptions which have been held to constitute a theory of all these things and their causes, generically denominated “animism.” By a very general device of making ourselves believe a thing is so and so by calling it that, this term taken from “anima” is accepted as being the knowledge of Soul, but accurately defined it is a set of hypothetical and purely formal and dogmatic assertions of “animal survivalism” in all departments of human life and thought. About everything we can put our finger on is a “survival” of some sort; but always a survival of something animal, or sub-mental. Divine survivals have no place in the scheme whatever. Man (including his “anima”) is “an animal,” and all these things his inheritance; though for convenience and other reasons they are painted up or wear now a mask to hide the fact that they are after all not good to look at.
The actual present influence not only on science and education, but on society and the very foundations of thought of all these “animal-survival” theories honeycombing Biology, Psychology, and all the related branches of university teachings and writings is evil beyond belief. And the worst phase of the whole is the rampant mis-denomination. Of course that is the direct outcome of Biology overstepping its natural province, and trying to explain everything in the universe in terms of its own phenomena, as we saw before.
Forgetting altogether Huxley’s immeasurable gap made by the mental barrier, the mysterious chasm between man and beast, even the self-revealing and half-conscious recent words of Sir Ray Lankester, the whole “science of Man” is held wrapped up in Biology. Taking up any standard work of the day on Psychology, supposed to be a study of those higher faculties which distinguish man from the animal, and include at least the efforts of his better nature to gain the mastery over the animal impulses, we find it filled from cover to cover with naught but a rayless wandering in the fields of the j«&-liminal, the aberrational processes of mind, the diseases of the organism; not one word of knowledge or inspiration to right living from the beginning to the end.
And, still tracing our heredity of ideas, let us see what this bastard science does at last with our concepts of the two greatest things we know — Law, and Religion. Take up a volume of reports of a Congress of today which will meet to study the History of Religious Growth and “Evolution.” There was one published a few years ago of a great international gathering — two thick volumes, with not a word about actual Religion from the first to the last. It was all speculation and gathering of details about rites, showing how peoples had done so and so because they were afraid to do otherwise. Not one word could be found in recognition of the divine reason for religion; there were gods innumerable, but no God. There were discussions on fetichism and all such old things that are no longer understood, and that at their best were but the worn-out formalism of previous wisdom or else are only part of the lower phases of man, in whatever age. For there are plenty of fetiches today; only we do not call them so, since they are just a little different. Fetichism, more truly and inwardly defined, is only the worship of something for the procurement of selfish or physical ends. Thus then we have the “ religious instinct” explained: Animal fear becomes modified to what we call Awe; that leads men to imagine that not only the forces but the objects of Nature are alive, and have a purposeful inimical consciousness requiring his propitiation of them; this ensouling of Nature by timid (and of course ignorant) “primitive man “ is Animism; the spirits of Animism become gods, among whom one finally graduated to supremacy; “original fear” finally begets reverence and love, the crudest selfishness begets the loftiest altruism, the struggle for life and the gratification of appetites and desires begets self-sacrifice and renunciation; and so comes at last Religion. That used to be thought of as compound of all that was noble and inspiring and divine; but Animism of course knows better than that, for it has traced the heredity of the religious instinct and knows its ancestors. Of course Animism understands the mind of “primitive man,” for Biology has measured his skulls — half a dozen or a dozen of them.
But in the mind of the day, all these words whose very presence in our language used to help men to be men and to aspire, have lost their hearts; there is no divinity left in them, or aught but earth.
Shall we see also what has been the effect upon our institutions by the like degradation of Law? Well, here this same “science” starts with the social instincts of animals, which of course seek nothing but the gratification of bodily appetites and impulses. As (the animal) man develops, these instincts grow less crude, and he learns to develop better means and systems for their gratification. There is a current writer who carries all this out so logically and fully that the temptation to couch a lance with her is always irresistible. That is Dr. Elsie Clews Parsons, and she has lately been publishing a book and a number of articles, the title of the book being Fear and Convention. Starting with the animalistic theories she carries them to a wholly delicious extent. She begins of course as usual with “primitive man” and with the principle that everything is based somewhere on fear; and shows how all modern habits are examples of that — derived from the past. You will doubtless recall how another scientist showed us some time ago that the sensations we at times have of falling from a height, in dreams, were “survivals” propagated through cell-transmission as memories of times when in leaping from tree to tree our ancestors lost their balance and fell. Or how another explained the alleged fear of open spaces that some people have, as like “memories” of times when we had to lurk hidden in forests, and feared to cross open spaces lest something catch us. Dr. Parsons explains all our modern social conventions that way.
As Society developed, protective “barriers” became necessary, both for the individual and for the larger units. The usefulness of these was soon recognized not only for Society, but by the strongest individuals who “naturally” soon rose to the top, and found how much more enjoyment they could get out of existence by making others live for them. These protective regulations became “things that must not be done,” and as animistic conceptions of personified unseen forces evolved, tabus, sanctions and conventions came naturally, and just as naturally were quickly seen by the “ones on top” to be far simpler and more effective than crude force, in keeping people in their place. In this way Dr. Parsons shows us that it “is now an axiom that the relation between religion and morality is a late cultural fact.” Think of that! Religion is scientifically shown to have arisen out of fear through propitiation of animistically imagined “intelligences “; barriers, first necessary and then most convenient, to keep everybody in the places his stronger neighbors wanted to keep him, became conventions, and they became customs, and customs “ morals” by the addition of tabus and sanctions superadded either by the craft of those who sought to profit by them and used them to delude the ignorant, or the hypocrisy of men in general who (being altogether animal and selfish) wished to pretend that their selfishness was something else — something indeed holy.
The limits to which this thing can be carried is shown by one illustration which I take from a late review of Fear and Convention, not having the book by me. But setting out with her idea that all our conventions are easily explainable as barriers, of course the author cannot avoid unlocking every door she sees with her fine new key. And among all the rest she also explains for us how all the fine and gracious things too in our life are only disguised “survivals” (again that ever-useful word) of the barriers which people had to put up to keep others away (I think she includes the sanctity of marriage and the home, and reverence for old age in the list). Finally she reaches that delightful custom we have when, at those social functions of such serious and graceful dignity we make our dinner parties, the gentleman offers his arm to escort the lady to the table. I confess I had always supposed the arm was accepted as symbolizing friendliness or confidence, or at least in courtesy. But it is not so; the habit is just a convention, and is done to raise an impalpable barrier between the two — an unconscious memory-survival of a period when the “primitive woman” was used to building some more substantial and physical barrier in order to make the male of the species keep his distance.
Do you tell me that these are only the dry speculations in scientific periodicals read only by a few specialists, who are supposed to be able to stand them, and do not affect our daily life and society, and our children? Not at all, for these ideas started in this “fetich and tabu-guarded” circle of people who because they have joined the learned societies and written books are supposed to have studied and thought and to know, permeate the whole of our current press, they reach our text-books to the very primary classes, and they give the tone to the very structure and supposed essence of our social organization. And their natural and inevitable outcome is at last reached in a dictum I heard some years ago included as the fundamental basis of a decision by a Federal Judge, namely, that “Behind Law stands the power to enforce it”; not divine harmony nor justice nor the inherent sanction within those potencies, but “ the power to enforce,” the parent of all unbrotherliness and wars, and the very denial of society and civilization.
That dictum is not true; behind Law stands Right. And Right is not the outgrowth of selfishness, fear or convention.
Thus we have another genealogical heredity series: From the social instincts (of animals) arise conventions (for selfish convenience); those becoming customs result in (so-called) morals; and the upholding of morals is the function of Law. No one can question the correctness of that series, without the parentheses. But look at the destructive effect they import, arguing out of existence every bit of reason and goodness in Life. And they are the immediate and sole result of these animal-survivalism and animistic “theories” which spring directly from this arrogation to itself by Biology of the title, the “Science of Man” and the incorporation thereinto of Psychology, as we have seen.
I doubt not that every one in the audience has been to the Exposition and has been through a department referred to as the “Science of Man.” You will find nearly all the exhibits in the room are careful, accurate and instructive exhibits of the world of physical man as we know it today, selected and well selected out of a great store that has been gathered. But in one corner are a few very old things representative of a time as to which we pretend even to know but little, and have but a handful of material. You will find reproductions of skulls that have been found in various strata, built up in an artistic manner, decorated of course with skin, the faces filled over with flesh and hair, and an expression put into the eyes. All this latter part is theoretical. You can put into the eyes of these reproductions — for they claim to be nothing else — any expression you please, thoughtful and conscious, or bestial.
Among the skulls is a reconstruction of the lately found Galley Hill skull. Scientists of equal authority and repute of the day have reconstructed the pieces of that skull in two different ways, one showing a man of high, even “modern” intelligence, the other making the original “man” little more than an animal ape in capacity. Perhaps you can guess which of the two reconstructions is exhibited: the animal type, the lowest one, only. And not a word nor a card to tell that the authorities disagree totally on a point acknowledged by them all to be at the very crux of the whole issue.
But that is not all. On the wall at the side are a number of pictures of “early man” of those periods; one of these shows a man in the “occupation of the period “ with skin garments and a club, and in all nothing is portrayed except accentuated brutality. There is a picture of a supposed Pithecanthropus no longer accepted by any biologist, yet added to the collection, one is told, out of justice to the memory or the views of his “creator,” the biologist of a generation ago who “reconstructed” him. School children go there with their teachers or alone, they see and gather from the exhibit that such is what Science tells was the early stage of man. There is no explanation that all is speculative; yet the controlling environment to the pictures came all from the mind of the person who put them there.
And yet, in another room in the Exposition are perhaps a dozen engravings, portraits of the leading scientists of the age, Virchow, and others. And perhaps half of those scientists totally disagree with the general view of what man was at that period, as shown by the “reconstructions “in the main exhibit building. Some of them hold even that in those far-off geological days man was just as civilized as he is today, and that such degraded animal-men, if there were such, were no more types than are the degenerates and criminals of our cities, or the black-fellows of Australia today.
So let us now return to our thesis, of the Spirit of the Hour in Archaeology; for in spite of the biological arrogation of the field, there are two other great branches of science by which the Science of Man can be approached, Archaeology and Linguistics. There is no Linguistics in the world of science today; true linguistics is the study of the constant effort of the Self to express its thought in speech and to communicate with other Selves in their joint work in life. It is a true creative molding and unifying social function of the real Self, the Man; but instead we have today naught but Philology: the mere study and classification of the external forms of words. Yet true Linguistics, united to true Archaeology, are the two sciences which have preserved, and hold for us when we can read them, the real past history of Man; how his thought has found forms for expression, and what he has done. Archaeology and Linguistics are the sciences of man’s past social history; what he has done, and therefore, what he must be.
But what have we done with Archaeology? Well, first we have separated it from the other subjects with which above all it should be studied: Mythology and Symbolism, and Astronomy. Practically at least we have, for we proceed with the fixed assumption that the ancients had no great and long civilizations, their astronomy rudimentary, their symbolism factitious and of no real use or meaning, their mythology silly fancies. Then each set of workers stays in his own geographical field and hunts small discoveries for museum shelves and monographs. And finally we plump the whole science into the biological “thought-cage,” which as yet knows naught, and will know naught of past cycles of great civilizations.
Nevertheless, if I were to take up even a few of the discoveries that within the last two decades have been gradually forcing themselves to the front in Archaeology, I think we would see once more the beginning of the same process we referred to at first, whereby Nature easily gets rid of the “barren fig-trees.” Archaeology can indeed be a very dry subject, with the best of them; it can have its magazines with pretty pictures, and mostly catalogs of a few small things added to this or that museum; comments on a new inscription in an already full and well-worked subject; and so on, and so on; all amounting to nothing, and yet rather interesting. But that older school of archaeology has served as an outpost in a neglected field, and now a new energy is coming in. I will quote just one writer, to whom no one can deny the value of the work he has so loyally done throughout his long life. One could hardly ask for anything more to the point than what Gaston Maspero has to say as regards his work in Egyptian excavations.
Then began the era of specialization, forced on by means of universal communication, the invention of instruments, the discovery of archaeological, geological, and similar facts, which at once both widened the horizons of study, and nailed investigation down to mere details. The fields of research became too many and too vast for single minds, and Science split up into separate sciences, just as Religion can split up into separate religions, mutually ignorant. Study of principles yielded to gathering of material; synthetic thought to analytic; the mere handling of scientific tools usurped the field; research became mechanicalized, and science classificatory. And then each separate field of work became more and more a cage in which its workers lived, and thought, rejecting all done before them, and naturally seeking to explain as much as possible, even the whole of the universe and Life, in terms of the phenomena they were familiar with. The very words Philosophy, Speculation, Metaphysics, became changed in meaning and naturally lost caste.
The whole attention being focused on fact-gathering and phenomena, the external and not the inner became the “real.” The greatest science of all, the Science of Man, and of Life, ceased to be the science of that which constitutes man as Man, or of the universal life by which he lives while he lives; it became the mere study of the processes and changes of the physical organism which the Thinker is, and must ever have been, working to develop for his own use. And as the final and greatest degradation of all, Psychology is made naught but a branch of Biology. No, there is one step more: the psychologist becomes chiefly the alienist, his study the aberrations of mind, his search not for the real Man, the guiding and overshadowing Self, but the subliminal. And the end of all is that all the inner and higher faculties of man, even his intellect and Himself, are proclaimed to be but the functioning of an organism, as if music were created by the instrument which plays it.
Our scientists are very fond of tracing problems of heredity and descent, and before passing to the relation sustained by Archaeology to the Science of Man, I would like the privilege of also tracing down some of the human results of this arrogation to itself by Biology of being the “Science of Man.” Following on this incorporation of “Psychology” as a sub-phase of the development of man’s body, we have had in these latter years an overgrown literature seeking to explain human customs, beliefs, culture, mythology and religion by a set of word-descriptions which have been held to constitute a theory of all these things and their causes, generically denominated “animism.” By a very general device of making ourselves believe a thing is so and so by calling it that, this term taken from “anima” is accepted as being the knowledge of Soul, but accurately defined it is a set of hypothetical and purely formal and dogmatic assertions of “animal survivalism” in all departments of human life and thought. About everything we can put our finger on is a “survival” of some sort; but always a survival of something animal, or sub-mental. Divine survivals have no place in the scheme whatever. Man (including his “anima”) is “an animal,” and all these things his inheritance; though for convenience and other reasons they are painted up or wear now a mask to hide the fact that they are after all not good to look at.
The actual present influence not only on science and education, but on society and the very foundations of thought of all these “animal-survival” theories honeycombing Biology, Psychology, and all the related branches of university teachings and writings is evil beyond belief. And the worst phase of the whole is the rampant mis-denomination. Of course that is the direct outcome of Biology overstepping its natural province, and trying to explain everything in the universe in terms of its own phenomena, as we saw before.
Forgetting altogether Huxley’s immeasurable gap made by the mental barrier, the mysterious chasm between man and beast, even the self-revealing and half-conscious recent words of Sir Ray Lankester, the whole “science of Man” is held wrapped up in Biology. Taking up any standard work of the day on Psychology, supposed to be a study of those higher faculties which distinguish man from the animal, and include at least the efforts of his better nature to gain the mastery over the animal impulses, we find it filled from cover to cover with naught but a rayless wandering in the fields of the j«&-liminal, the aberrational processes of mind, the diseases of the organism; not one word of knowledge or inspiration to right living from the beginning to the end.
And, still tracing our heredity of ideas, let us see what this bastard science does at last with our concepts of the two greatest things we know — Law, and Religion. Take up a volume of reports of a Congress of today which will meet to study the History of Religious Growth and “Evolution.” There was one published a few years ago of a great international gathering — two thick volumes, with not a word about actual Religion from the first to the last. It was all speculation and gathering of details about rites, showing how peoples had done so and so because they were afraid to do otherwise. Not one word could be found in recognition of the divine reason for religion; there were gods innumerable, but no God. There were discussions on fetichism and all such old things that are no longer understood, and that at their best were but the worn-out formalism of previous wisdom or else are only part of the lower phases of man, in whatever age. For there are plenty of fetiches today; only we do not call them so, since they are just a little different. Fetichism, more truly and inwardly defined, is only the worship of something for the procurement of selfish or physical ends. Thus then we have the “ religious instinct” explained: Animal fear becomes modified to what we call Awe; that leads men to imagine that not only the forces but the objects of Nature are alive, and have a purposeful inimical consciousness requiring his propitiation of them; this ensouling of Nature by timid (and of course ignorant) “primitive man “ is Animism; the spirits of Animism become gods, among whom one finally graduated to supremacy; “original fear” finally begets reverence and love, the crudest selfishness begets the loftiest altruism, the struggle for life and the gratification of appetites and desires begets self-sacrifice and renunciation; and so comes at last Religion. That used to be thought of as compound of all that was noble and inspiring and divine; but Animism of course knows better than that, for it has traced the heredity of the religious instinct and knows its ancestors. Of course Animism understands the mind of “primitive man,” for Biology has measured his skulls — half a dozen or a dozen of them.
But in the mind of the day, all these words whose very presence in our language used to help men to be men and to aspire, have lost their hearts; there is no divinity left in them, or aught but earth.
Shall we see also what has been the effect upon our institutions by the like degradation of Law? Well, here this same “science” starts with the social instincts of animals, which of course seek nothing but the gratification of bodily appetites and impulses. As (the animal) man develops, these instincts grow less crude, and he learns to develop better means and systems for their gratification. There is a current writer who carries all this out so logically and fully that the temptation to couch a lance with her is always irresistible. That is Dr. Elsie Clews Parsons, and she has lately been publishing a book and a number of articles, the title of the book being Fear and Convention. Starting with the animalistic theories she carries them to a wholly delicious extent. She begins of course as usual with “primitive man” and with the principle that everything is based somewhere on fear; and shows how all modern habits are examples of that — derived from the past. You will doubtless recall how another scientist showed us some time ago that the sensations we at times have of falling from a height, in dreams, were “survivals” propagated through cell-transmission as memories of times when in leaping from tree to tree our ancestors lost their balance and fell. Or how another explained the alleged fear of open spaces that some people have, as like “memories” of times when we had to lurk hidden in forests, and feared to cross open spaces lest something catch us. Dr. Parsons explains all our modern social conventions that way.
As Society developed, protective “barriers” became necessary, both for the individual and for the larger units. The usefulness of these was soon recognized not only for Society, but by the strongest individuals who “naturally” soon rose to the top, and found how much more enjoyment they could get out of existence by making others live for them. These protective regulations became “things that must not be done,” and as animistic conceptions of personified unseen forces evolved, tabus, sanctions and conventions came naturally, and just as naturally were quickly seen by the “ones on top” to be far simpler and more effective than crude force, in keeping people in their place. In this way Dr. Parsons shows us that it “is now an axiom that the relation between religion and morality is a late cultural fact.” Think of that! Religion is scientifically shown to have arisen out of fear through propitiation of animistically imagined “intelligences “; barriers, first necessary and then most convenient, to keep everybody in the places his stronger neighbors wanted to keep him, became conventions, and they became customs, and customs “ morals” by the addition of tabus and sanctions superadded either by the craft of those who sought to profit by them and used them to delude the ignorant, or the hypocrisy of men in general who (being altogether animal and selfish) wished to pretend that their selfishness was something else — something indeed holy.
The limits to which this thing can be carried is shown by one illustration which I take from a late review of Fear and Convention, not having the book by me. But setting out with her idea that all our conventions are easily explainable as barriers, of course the author cannot avoid unlocking every door she sees with her fine new key. And among all the rest she also explains for us how all the fine and gracious things too in our life are only disguised “survivals” (again that ever-useful word) of the barriers which people had to put up to keep others away (I think she includes the sanctity of marriage and the home, and reverence for old age in the list). Finally she reaches that delightful custom we have when, at those social functions of such serious and graceful dignity we make our dinner parties, the gentleman offers his arm to escort the lady to the table. I confess I had always supposed the arm was accepted as symbolizing friendliness or confidence, or at least in courtesy. But it is not so; the habit is just a convention, and is done to raise an impalpable barrier between the two — an unconscious memory-survival of a period when the “primitive woman” was used to building some more substantial and physical barrier in order to make the male of the species keep his distance.
Do you tell me that these are only the dry speculations in scientific periodicals read only by a few specialists, who are supposed to be able to stand them, and do not affect our daily life and society, and our children? Not at all, for these ideas started in this “fetich and tabu-guarded” circle of people who because they have joined the learned societies and written books are supposed to have studied and thought and to know, permeate the whole of our current press, they reach our text-books to the very primary classes, and they give the tone to the very structure and supposed essence of our social organization. And their natural and inevitable outcome is at last reached in a dictum I heard some years ago included as the fundamental basis of a decision by a Federal Judge, namely, that “Behind Law stands the power to enforce it”; not divine harmony nor justice nor the inherent sanction within those potencies, but “ the power to enforce,” the parent of all unbrotherliness and wars, and the very denial of society and civilization.
That dictum is not true; behind Law stands Right. And Right is not the outgrowth of selfishness, fear or convention.
Thus we have another genealogical heredity series: From the social instincts (of animals) arise conventions (for selfish convenience); those becoming customs result in (so-called) morals; and the upholding of morals is the function of Law. No one can question the correctness of that series, without the parentheses. But look at the destructive effect they import, arguing out of existence every bit of reason and goodness in Life. And they are the immediate and sole result of these animal-survivalism and animistic “theories” which spring directly from this arrogation to itself by Biology of the title, the “Science of Man” and the incorporation thereinto of Psychology, as we have seen.
I doubt not that every one in the audience has been to the Exposition and has been through a department referred to as the “Science of Man.” You will find nearly all the exhibits in the room are careful, accurate and instructive exhibits of the world of physical man as we know it today, selected and well selected out of a great store that has been gathered. But in one corner are a few very old things representative of a time as to which we pretend even to know but little, and have but a handful of material. You will find reproductions of skulls that have been found in various strata, built up in an artistic manner, decorated of course with skin, the faces filled over with flesh and hair, and an expression put into the eyes. All this latter part is theoretical. You can put into the eyes of these reproductions — for they claim to be nothing else — any expression you please, thoughtful and conscious, or bestial.
Among the skulls is a reconstruction of the lately found Galley Hill skull. Scientists of equal authority and repute of the day have reconstructed the pieces of that skull in two different ways, one showing a man of high, even “modern” intelligence, the other making the original “man” little more than an animal ape in capacity. Perhaps you can guess which of the two reconstructions is exhibited: the animal type, the lowest one, only. And not a word nor a card to tell that the authorities disagree totally on a point acknowledged by them all to be at the very crux of the whole issue.
But that is not all. On the wall at the side are a number of pictures of “early man” of those periods; one of these shows a man in the “occupation of the period “ with skin garments and a club, and in all nothing is portrayed except accentuated brutality. There is a picture of a supposed Pithecanthropus no longer accepted by any biologist, yet added to the collection, one is told, out of justice to the memory or the views of his “creator,” the biologist of a generation ago who “reconstructed” him. School children go there with their teachers or alone, they see and gather from the exhibit that such is what Science tells was the early stage of man. There is no explanation that all is speculative; yet the controlling environment to the pictures came all from the mind of the person who put them there.
And yet, in another room in the Exposition are perhaps a dozen engravings, portraits of the leading scientists of the age, Virchow, and others. And perhaps half of those scientists totally disagree with the general view of what man was at that period, as shown by the “reconstructions “in the main exhibit building. Some of them hold even that in those far-off geological days man was just as civilized as he is today, and that such degraded animal-men, if there were such, were no more types than are the degenerates and criminals of our cities, or the black-fellows of Australia today.
So let us now return to our thesis, of the Spirit of the Hour in Archaeology; for in spite of the biological arrogation of the field, there are two other great branches of science by which the Science of Man can be approached, Archaeology and Linguistics. There is no Linguistics in the world of science today; true linguistics is the study of the constant effort of the Self to express its thought in speech and to communicate with other Selves in their joint work in life. It is a true creative molding and unifying social function of the real Self, the Man; but instead we have today naught but Philology: the mere study and classification of the external forms of words. Yet true Linguistics, united to true Archaeology, are the two sciences which have preserved, and hold for us when we can read them, the real past history of Man; how his thought has found forms for expression, and what he has done. Archaeology and Linguistics are the sciences of man’s past social history; what he has done, and therefore, what he must be.
But what have we done with Archaeology? Well, first we have separated it from the other subjects with which above all it should be studied: Mythology and Symbolism, and Astronomy. Practically at least we have, for we proceed with the fixed assumption that the ancients had no great and long civilizations, their astronomy rudimentary, their symbolism factitious and of no real use or meaning, their mythology silly fancies. Then each set of workers stays in his own geographical field and hunts small discoveries for museum shelves and monographs. And finally we plump the whole science into the biological “thought-cage,” which as yet knows naught, and will know naught of past cycles of great civilizations.
Nevertheless, if I were to take up even a few of the discoveries that within the last two decades have been gradually forcing themselves to the front in Archaeology, I think we would see once more the beginning of the same process we referred to at first, whereby Nature easily gets rid of the “barren fig-trees.” Archaeology can indeed be a very dry subject, with the best of them; it can have its magazines with pretty pictures, and mostly catalogs of a few small things added to this or that museum; comments on a new inscription in an already full and well-worked subject; and so on, and so on; all amounting to nothing, and yet rather interesting. But that older school of archaeology has served as an outpost in a neglected field, and now a new energy is coming in. I will quote just one writer, to whom no one can deny the value of the work he has so loyally done throughout his long life. One could hardly ask for anything more to the point than what Gaston Maspero has to say as regards his work in Egyptian excavations.
For more than twenty years the study of the Memphian tombs has led me to teach that the Egypt of the Pyramids was the end, and even the decadence of an earlier Egypt. The language was perishing of old age, art was revealing itself as nearer perfection the farther back it went into the past, political organization and social life tended to grow slack. The discoveries of Negadeh and Abydos enable us to put our finger on the civilization I only guessed at. Ideas and customs prevail there of which later generations only preserved a vague memory. And yet it must be confessed that we are still far from the very beginning. The writing exists, and its system is already complete. As we already felt the Egypt of Menes, always powerful, always civilized, behind the Egypt of the Pyramids, so now we catch a glimpse of a still more primitive Egypt behind the Egypt of Menes. And even that prior Egypt was past its early youth, and well equipped for existence. And somewhere beneath the sand lie its monuments waiting for us to call them forth. — New Light on Ancient Egypt, p. 126
These words may prove to be even more significant as time goes on; for there are at least suggestions in The Secret Doctrine that the Denderah Zodiac by a very evident symbology shows a clear knowledge of three precessional cycles, and that the Great Pyramid may be rather 70,000 years old than five or ten.
But I believe that Central America is going to bring us still more and greater surprises. I believe that the Mayas of Central America possessed the tradition and history of the existence of Atlantis, and that when we need and can use that sort of inspiration, the proofs are there to be discovered to give independent and irrefutable confirmation to the story told by the Egyptians to Solon — and more.
Behind man at the point where he is today lies an immense past of rising and falling civilizations; when we shall have begun to throw away this animal-survival obsession, to look for greater things in life, then I think the time will come when these things will be given us, but not until we can make worthy use of them. All over the world of society as well as of science there are a great many other beliefs, and they are all going the same way.
Let us separate the Science of Man from the mere science of his body; let us study Man in his works, and let them speak for themselves, free from egotistic pre-conceptions. While biologists are quarreling, as they are, over the brain possibilities of each new skull, Archaeology is uncovering layer after layer of past cycles of civilization; and note this fact, for it is crucial. In spite of the fact that we see Nature working everywhere in cycles and spirals, in seasonal periods, times of work and rest and renewed effort, modern biology, a science in its very infancy, with the very fewest of working facts, generalizes a single ascending line. But the plotted line of Archaeology is one of constant rise and fall, civilization and oblivion, and with constantly growing evidence that the major curve has been for ages a descending one. None but a great race could have conceived or created the Maya monuments we have left, and yet that was at only the very end of that race. Nature herself works ever along lines of cycles, and now Archaeology is showing us history recorded in those same terms. And it is easily to be suggested that it is being energized to take over the field of the Science of Man for greater and worthier results.
We are in crucial times in 1915. The race must find its greater self, or go out. In this present address, I have endeavored to present what I believed was the spirit of the relation in which Archaeology stands to human life, the Science of Man, in the books and in the mind of H. P. Blavatsky. The views and position are my own, but they were first hers. And in writing her books her standpoint was always that of drawing towards a recognition of the greater possibilities. If there is no divine background to Life, it is nothing.
We have seen what is happening to our civilization, what is coming of our continued attention to fear, and the animal side of man. The biologist, the religionist, he who studies religion, all study man as an animal. Suppose now I try to draw, weakly — I cannot begin to draw it as it should be — but do you try to draw for yourselves the picture of what civilization and man might have been today had the higher side of man’s nature been accentuated, thought of as working behind all, animating all; instead of considering man only as an animal. Suppose for the last fifty years men had been thinking of themselves as of divine descent, and had come somehow into their present state. Suppose they had been doing that all along the way, would not our science and our life, and our social ideals and our laws, be very different?
We are passing out of the stage of many separate, mutually ignoring branches, a true age of superficial sciolism, however great its mechanical achievements. We are to enter a broader age, of correlation, co-ordination, true scholarship, instead of mere data-hunting. Archaeology with its sister science Linguistics, will give us true respect for our selves of the past. Taking help from all other sciences in their proper balance — biology, geology and geodesy, mythology, astronomy, we shall see evolution as not mere machinery, but as the working of the Knower, the proof that there must be something greater than the external forms, and that we are true participants in it. And when we come to reach that knowledge, we shall find that the ancients were there with us. That not only is living a serious business, but it has always been a serious business — not in the mere geting a living, which is our association of the idea, but the knowing and helping the problems of the Science of Man and Life. That there were culture and morals, poetry and music and every art and science. And when we get to a point where we are ourselves patriotic enough to realize the possibility of such a thing, I think we shall find symbolism to be a real thing, and that there were in the past some of view so broad as to have left monuments or records for later ages to find, after descending cycles of darkness; actual keys to history or truths of nature, perhaps even to serve a double purpose of arousing men in some great time of need to an understanding of their own possibilities, and of preserving knowledge to a time when men could be trusted not to prostitute it to selfish aggrandizement and war, as they certainly would today. So that man, really knowing Himself, as something quite distinct from his biological reactions, might do his work, helping the work of evolution; playing his part and coming back again to play it; playing it like a man because he is one; and so passing through learning to knowledge and Wisdom.
I feel honored at the privilege of having part in a series of university extension lectures under the auspices of the School of Antiquity, because I believe it will be the purpose of that School of Antiquity always to hold to true science, enlightened by a recognition of the higher, of the greater and divine part of man’s nature.
But I believe that Central America is going to bring us still more and greater surprises. I believe that the Mayas of Central America possessed the tradition and history of the existence of Atlantis, and that when we need and can use that sort of inspiration, the proofs are there to be discovered to give independent and irrefutable confirmation to the story told by the Egyptians to Solon — and more.
Behind man at the point where he is today lies an immense past of rising and falling civilizations; when we shall have begun to throw away this animal-survival obsession, to look for greater things in life, then I think the time will come when these things will be given us, but not until we can make worthy use of them. All over the world of society as well as of science there are a great many other beliefs, and they are all going the same way.
Let us separate the Science of Man from the mere science of his body; let us study Man in his works, and let them speak for themselves, free from egotistic pre-conceptions. While biologists are quarreling, as they are, over the brain possibilities of each new skull, Archaeology is uncovering layer after layer of past cycles of civilization; and note this fact, for it is crucial. In spite of the fact that we see Nature working everywhere in cycles and spirals, in seasonal periods, times of work and rest and renewed effort, modern biology, a science in its very infancy, with the very fewest of working facts, generalizes a single ascending line. But the plotted line of Archaeology is one of constant rise and fall, civilization and oblivion, and with constantly growing evidence that the major curve has been for ages a descending one. None but a great race could have conceived or created the Maya monuments we have left, and yet that was at only the very end of that race. Nature herself works ever along lines of cycles, and now Archaeology is showing us history recorded in those same terms. And it is easily to be suggested that it is being energized to take over the field of the Science of Man for greater and worthier results.
We are in crucial times in 1915. The race must find its greater self, or go out. In this present address, I have endeavored to present what I believed was the spirit of the relation in which Archaeology stands to human life, the Science of Man, in the books and in the mind of H. P. Blavatsky. The views and position are my own, but they were first hers. And in writing her books her standpoint was always that of drawing towards a recognition of the greater possibilities. If there is no divine background to Life, it is nothing.
We have seen what is happening to our civilization, what is coming of our continued attention to fear, and the animal side of man. The biologist, the religionist, he who studies religion, all study man as an animal. Suppose now I try to draw, weakly — I cannot begin to draw it as it should be — but do you try to draw for yourselves the picture of what civilization and man might have been today had the higher side of man’s nature been accentuated, thought of as working behind all, animating all; instead of considering man only as an animal. Suppose for the last fifty years men had been thinking of themselves as of divine descent, and had come somehow into their present state. Suppose they had been doing that all along the way, would not our science and our life, and our social ideals and our laws, be very different?
We are passing out of the stage of many separate, mutually ignoring branches, a true age of superficial sciolism, however great its mechanical achievements. We are to enter a broader age, of correlation, co-ordination, true scholarship, instead of mere data-hunting. Archaeology with its sister science Linguistics, will give us true respect for our selves of the past. Taking help from all other sciences in their proper balance — biology, geology and geodesy, mythology, astronomy, we shall see evolution as not mere machinery, but as the working of the Knower, the proof that there must be something greater than the external forms, and that we are true participants in it. And when we come to reach that knowledge, we shall find that the ancients were there with us. That not only is living a serious business, but it has always been a serious business — not in the mere geting a living, which is our association of the idea, but the knowing and helping the problems of the Science of Man and Life. That there were culture and morals, poetry and music and every art and science. And when we get to a point where we are ourselves patriotic enough to realize the possibility of such a thing, I think we shall find symbolism to be a real thing, and that there were in the past some of view so broad as to have left monuments or records for later ages to find, after descending cycles of darkness; actual keys to history or truths of nature, perhaps even to serve a double purpose of arousing men in some great time of need to an understanding of their own possibilities, and of preserving knowledge to a time when men could be trusted not to prostitute it to selfish aggrandizement and war, as they certainly would today. So that man, really knowing Himself, as something quite distinct from his biological reactions, might do his work, helping the work of evolution; playing his part and coming back again to play it; playing it like a man because he is one; and so passing through learning to knowledge and Wisdom.
I feel honored at the privilege of having part in a series of university extension lectures under the auspices of the School of Antiquity, because I believe it will be the purpose of that School of Antiquity always to hold to true science, enlightened by a recognition of the higher, of the greater and divine part of man’s nature.
SCHOOL OF ANTIQUITY—UNIVERSITY EXTENSION COURSE
The foregoing paper is the opening lecture of a University Extension Course, inaugurated by Mme. Katherine Tingley under the auspices of the School of Antiquity, of which she is Foundress and President. The address was delivered in Isis Theater, San Diego, on October 10th, 1915.
The course includes lectures by different professors and students of the School of Antiquity, and other prominent speakers of the city of San Diego, upon Archaeology, Art, Peruvian and Central American Antiquities, China and the Far East, in earlier and later times, Egyptology, History, Psychology, Sociology, Law, Higher Education, Literature, Biology, Music and Drama. Many of the lectures are illustrated, from original and other material in the collections of the School of Antiquity and elsewhere.
Besides the foregoing paper, the following are now also in course of publication in the present series:
Notes on Peruvian Antiquities (illustrated), by Frederick J. Dick, M. Inst. C. E., Professor of Astronomy and Mathematics, School of Antiquity
The Relation of Religion to Art in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, by Osvald Siren, Professor of the History of Art, University of Stockholm, Sweden.
Prehistoric Aegean Civilization (illustrated), by F. S. Darrow, Ph. D., Professor of Greek in the School of Antiquity.
Early Chinese Painting (illustrated), by Prof. William E. Gates.
Others will follow in due course.
The course includes lectures by different professors and students of the School of Antiquity, and other prominent speakers of the city of San Diego, upon Archaeology, Art, Peruvian and Central American Antiquities, China and the Far East, in earlier and later times, Egyptology, History, Psychology, Sociology, Law, Higher Education, Literature, Biology, Music and Drama. Many of the lectures are illustrated, from original and other material in the collections of the School of Antiquity and elsewhere.
Besides the foregoing paper, the following are now also in course of publication in the present series:
Notes on Peruvian Antiquities (illustrated), by Frederick J. Dick, M. Inst. C. E., Professor of Astronomy and Mathematics, School of Antiquity
The Relation of Religion to Art in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, by Osvald Siren, Professor of the History of Art, University of Stockholm, Sweden.
Prehistoric Aegean Civilization (illustrated), by F. S. Darrow, Ph. D., Professor of Greek in the School of Antiquity.
Early Chinese Painting (illustrated), by Prof. William E. Gates.
Others will follow in due course.
Source: William E. Gates, The Spirit of the Hour in Archaeology (Point Loma: Aryan Theosophical Press, 1915).
