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In our last lesson we have seen that at the dawn of a Brahmic Day, the Absolute begins the creation of a new Universe. The Teachings inform us that in the beginning, the Absolute forms a Mental Image, or Thought-Form of an Universal Mind Principle, or Universal Mind-Stuff, as some of the teachers express it. Then this Universal Mind Principle creates within itself the Universal Energy Principle.
The fact is that the mind-stuff doctrine is a castle in the air. It is too fanciful and arbitrary to take seriously. It is much better to come back to a more sober view of things, and to hold that there is evidence that other minds exist, but no evidence that every material thing is animated.
Manas or Mind is held to be something like a Mind-Stuff, from which all individual minds are built up and which Mind-Stuff is held to be eternal. Atman, or Spirit, is held to be an eternal principle, from which the Selves or Souls are differentiated. The Atman, or Spirit, or Self, is regarded as much higher than Mind, which is its tool and instrument of expression.
The Mills had spoken of mental chemistry; Wundt of a 'psychic synthesis, which might develop properties not contained in the elements; and such writers as Spencer, Taine, Fiske, Barratt, and Clifford had propounded a great evolutionary theory in which, in the absence of souls, selves, or other principles of unity, primordial units of mind-stuff or mind-dust were represented as summing themselves together in successive stages of compounding and re-compounding, and thus engendering our higher and more complex states of mind.
But conceivably there might come to be such. confluence; for, in the case of my HAND, the visual sensations and the inward feelings of the hand, its mind-stuff, so to speak, are even now as confluent as any two things can be. There is, thus, no breach in humanistic epistemology.
When molecules are so combined together as to form the film on the under side of a jellyfish, the elements of mind-stuff which go along with them are so combined as to form the faint beginnings of Sentience.
But I see no reason why Materialism should be restricted to this "its present shape." Even if we admit to the fullest extent the validity of Mr. Spencer's argument, and conclude with Professor Clifford as a matter of probability that "the universe consists entirely of Mind-stuff," I do not see that the admission would affect Materialism in any essential respect.
If the supposed talker is a profound philosopher, altho they may not BE the real dog for him, they MEAN the real dog, are practical substitutes for the real dog, as the representation was a practical substitute for them, that real dog being a lot of atoms, say, or of mind-stuff, that lie WHERE the sense-perceptions lie in his experience as well as in my own.
They evinced the simpler forms of reason, of which monkeys are no doubt capable. Animals are wise as Nature is wise; they partake, each in its own measure, of that universal intelligence, or mind-stuff, that is operative in all things in the vegetable as well as in the animal world.
But, believing, as he did, that all nature is animated, he held that every material thing, every perception, may be taken as a revelation of something not in our consciousness, of a mind or, at least, of a certain amount of mind-stuff. How shall we conceive the relation between what is in our mind and the something corresponding to it not in our mind?
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