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348 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Hindu sage alone "perceived the true relation of earthly beauty and
eternal truth"—the uneducated of every nation understood neither, at
any time.
They do not understand it even now. The evolution of the God-idea
proceeds apace with man's own intellectual evolution. So true is it
that the noblest ideal to which the religious spirit
of one age can soar,
will appear but a gross caricature to the philosophic mind in a succeeding
epoch !
The philosophers themselves had to be initiated into perceptive
mysteries, before they could grasp the correct idea of the Ancients
in relation to this most metaphysical subject.
Otherwise—outside such
Initiation—for every thinker there will be a "thus far shalt thou go
and no farther" mapped out by his intellectual capacity, as clearly and
as unmistakably as there is one for the progress of any nation or race
in its cycle by the law of Karma. Outside of Initiation, the ideals of
contemporary religious
thought must always have their wings clipped,
and remain unable to soar higher; for idealistic, as well as realistic,
thinkers, and even free-thinkers, are but the outcome and the natural
product of their respective environments and periods. The ideals of
each are but the necessary results of their temperaments, and the outcome
of that phase of intellectual progress to which a nation, in its
collectivity, has attained. Hence, as already remarked, the highest
flights of modern Western metaphysics have fallen far short of the
truth.
Much of current Agnostic speculation on the existence of the
"First Cause" is little better than veiled Materialism—the terminology
alone being different. Even so great a thinker as Mr. Herbert
Spencer speaks of the "Unknowable" occasionally in terms that
demonstrate the lethal influence of materialistic thought, which, like
the deadly Sirocco, has withered and blighted all current ontological
speculation.
For instance, when he terms the "First Cause" the "Unknowable,"
a "power manifesting through phenomena," and "an infinite eternal
energy''' it is clear that he has grasped solely 'ds.^ physical aspect of the
Mystery of Being—the Energies of Cosmic Substance only. The coeternal
aspect of the One Reality, Cosmic Ideation, is absolutely omitted
from consideration, and as to its Noumenon, it seems non-existent in
the mind of the great thinker. Without doubt, this one-sided mode of
dealing with the problem is due largely to the pernicious Western
practice of subordinating Consciousness to Matter, or regarding it as
a "bj^e-product" of molecular motion.