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situation as the ground of man's whole moral struggle.
The Promethean gift, the sacrifice of the devas for the apotheosis of humanity,
was received 18,000,000 years ago.
It is significant that it came at the epoch of the separation of the sexes. This
fact would appear to indicate that the independent privilege of procreation,
involving the free action of two organisms, could not well be vouchsafed to man
until he was possessed of the power of discriminative wisdom. This middle period
of the Third Race thus marks the definite beginning of human life on the globe,
as the principle of manas (Sanskrit man, to think) was essential to constitute
the complete thinking entity.
These Titans or Kumaras were themselves of seven grades of development, and as
they took birth in different racial and national groups, their varying natures
at once gave differentiation to the human divisions. Madame Blavatsky uses this
situation to explain the origin of racial differences.
It will be noted that Madame Blavatsky's account of human racial progression
explains how the first life came onto the earth. Her postulations enable her to
declare that life came hither not from the outside, from another planet, but
emerged from the inner or ethereal vestures of its physical embodiment. Life
does not come from a place, but from a state or condition. Life and its
materials are everywhere; but the two need to pass from a static to an active
relation to each other, and wherever certain processes of interaction between
the two take place, there living things appear. They emerge from behind the veil
of invisibility. Their localization on earth or elsewhere is simply a matter of
some fundamental principle of differentiation. A great cosmical process
analogous to a change of temperature will bring a cloud before our eyes where
none was before. Life, says Madame Blavatsky, comes here in ethereal forms, from
ethereal realms, and takes on physical semblance after it is here. All life
evolved by concretion out of the fire-mist. The pathway of life is not from the
Moon, Mars, Venus, or Mercury to the Earth, but from the metaphysical to the
physical.
Esoteric ethnology extends the periodic law to world geography in keeping with
the moral evolution of the races.
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"Our globe is subject to seven periodical entire changes which go pari passu
with the races. For the Secret Doctrine teaches that during this Round there
must be seven terrestrial pralayas, three occasioned by the change in the
inclination of the earth's axis. It is a law which acts at its appropriate time
and not at all blindly, as science may think, but in strict accordance and
harmony with karmic law. In occultism this inexorable law is referred to as "the
Great Adjuster."28
There have already been four such axial disturbances; when the old continents-
save the first one-were sucked in the oceans. The face of the globe was
completely changed each time; the survival of the fittest races and nations was
secured through timely help; and the unfit ones-the failures-were disposed of by
being swept off the earth.
"If the observer is gifted with the faintest intuition, he will find how the
weal and woe of nations is intimately connected with the beginning and close of
this sidereal cycle of 25,868 years."29
In each case the continent destroyed met its fate in consequence of racial
degeneration or degradation. This was notably the lot of Atlantis, the Fourth
Race home. As Lemuria succumbed to fire and Atlantis to water, the Aryan Race
may expect that fiery agencies (doubtless subterranean convulsions of the
earth's crust) will prove its undoing.
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CHAPTER IX.
EVOLUTION, REBIRTH, AND KARMA
The spiral sweep of Madame Blavatsky's grandiose cosmology carries with it an
elaborate rationale of human life. Life is a continuum, says Theosophy, and
reincarnation is its evolutionary method, Karma its determinant.
Theosophists feel that in fostering the renaissance in modern Western thought of
the idea of rebirth they are presenting a conception of evolution which makes
Darwinism but an incident in a larger process. It becomes but a corollary of a
more general truth. Darwinism, according to Theosophy, conceives of the
evolution of a species or class through the successive advances of a line of
individuals, who live and die in the effort to carry some new development
forward for their successors. For themselves, they reap no reward-save the
precarious satisfaction, while living, of having fought the good fight and kept
the line intact.
But reincarnation makes evolution significant for the only thing that does
evolve-the individual. The race does not evolve, as it is nothing but a mental
figment, and has no permanent organic individuality. It does not exist apart
from its individual constituents. The latter are the real and, for Theosophy,
permanent existences, and hence, if evolution is to have solid relevance, it
must appertain to the continuing life of the conscious units or Monads. It is a
conclusion that can be deduced from empirical observation that growth at any
stage leads to conditions out of which continued growth springs in the future.
In short, the effect of growth, and its significance, is-just more growth.1 The
entire program of universal activity is just the procedure of endless growth.
with halts and rests at relay stations, but with no termini. The meaning of
present growth only comes to light in the products of later growth. But it is a
matter of infinite importance whether the growth accruing from the individual's
exertions in his life span are effects for him or for another. It is not growth-
if one struggle only to die. How can race history have significance if the
history of the individuals in it has none? Under Madame Blavatsky's thesis the
evolutionary reward of effort will go to the rightful party.
Theosophists base their endorsement of the reincarnation theory upon a number of
dialectical considerations.
First there is the "argument from justice." Briefly, this holds that the concept
of justice as applicable to mundane affairs can not be upheld on the basis of
the data furnished by a one-life existence of human beings, and that if justice
is to be predicated of the mundane situation, reincarnation is dialectically a
necessary postulate to render the concept tenable. Looking at the world we see
conditions that force us to admit the presence of inequalities which, on the
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