1nCnVqgFI

27S
THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
mained the same since the commencement of the evolution of our
Chain. Everything in the Universe progresses steadily in the Great
Cj'cle, while incessantly going up and down in the smaller Cycles.
Nature is never stationary during Manvantara, as it is ever becoming,^
not simply behig; and mineral, vegetable, and human life are always
adapting their organisms to the then reigning Elements ;
and therefore
those Elements were then fitted for them, as they are now for the life
present humanity. It will only be in the next, or Fifth, Round that
the fifth Element, Ether—the gross body of Akasha, if it
of
can be called
even that—will, by becoming a familiar fact of Nature to all men, as
Air is familiar to us now, cease to be, as at present, hypothetical and an
"agent" for so many things. And only during that Round will those
A
higher senses, the growth and development of which Akasha subserves,
be susceptible of a complete expansion. As already indicated, o. partial
familiarity with the characteristic of matter—Permeability—which
should be developed concurrently with the sixth sense, may be expected
to develop at the proper period in this Round. But with the
next Element added to our resources, in the next Round, Permeability
will become so manifest a characteristic of matter, that the
densest forms of this Round will seem to man's perceptions as obstructive
to him as a thick fog, and no more.
Eet us now return to the Eife-Cycle. Without entering at length
upon the description given of the Higher EiVES, we must direct our
attention, at present, simply to the earthly Beings and the Earth itself.
The latter, we are told, is built up for the First Round by the "Devourers,"
which disintegrate and differentiate the germs of other Eives
in the Elements pretty much, it must
;
be supposed, as in the present
stage of the world, the aerobes do, when, undermining and loosening the
chemical structure in an organism, they transform animal matter, and
generate substances that vary in their constitutions. Thus Occultism
disposes of the so-called Azoic Age of Science, for it shows that there
never was a time when the Earth was without life upon it. Wherever
there is an atom of matter, a particle, or a molecufe, even in its most
gaseous condition, there is life in it, however latent and unconscious.
Whatsoever qidts the Laya State, becomes active Life ; it is drawn into the
vortex of Motion \Jhe Alchemical Solvent of Life'] ;
Spirit and Matter are
* According to the great metaphysician Hegel ^Iso. For him Nature was a perpetual becoming. A
purely SIsoteric conception. Creation or Origin, in the Christian sense of the term, is absolutely
unthinkable. As the above-quoted thinker said: "God (the Universal Spirit) objecUvizes himself as
Nature, and again ri.ses out of it."