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DIVINE THOUGHT. 349
From the early ages of the Fourth Race, when Spirit alone was worshipped
and the Myster}' w^as made manifest, down to the last palmy
days of Grecian art, at the dawn of Christianity, the Hellenes alone
had dared publicly to raise an altar to the " Unknown God." Whatever
St. Paul may have had in his profound mind, when declaring to
the Athenians that this "Unknown," which they ignorantly worshipped,
was the true God announced by himself—that Deity was not
"Jehovah," nor was he "the maker of the world and all things." For
it is not the "God of Israel" but the "Unknown" of the ancient and
modern Pantheist that "dwelleth not in temples made with hands:"^-
Divine Thought cannot be defined, nor can its meaning be explained,
except by the numberless manifestations of Cosmic Substance, in which
the former is se7ised spiritually by those who can do so. To say this,
after having defined it as the Unknown Deity, abstract, impersonal,
sexless, which must be placed at the root of ever>' Cosmogony and its
subsequent evolution, is equivalent to sa5dng nothing at all. It is like
attempting a transcendental equation of conditio»ns, having in hand
for deducing the true value of its terms only a number of unknown
quantities. Its place is found in the old primitive symbolic charts, in
which, as already shown, it is represented by a boundless darkness, on
the ground of which appears the first central point in white—thus symbolizing
coeval and coeternal Spirit-Matter making its appearance in
the phenomenal world, before its first differentiation. When " the One
becomes Two," it may then be referred to as Spirit and Matter. To
"Spirit" is referable ever>^ manifestation of Consciousness, reflective
or direct, and of "unconscious purposiveness"—to adopt a modern
expression used in Western philosophy,
so-called—as evidenced in the
Vital Principle, and Nature's submission to the majestic sequence of
immutable Law. "Matter" must be regarded as objectivity in its
purest abstraction, the self-existing basis, whose septenary manvantaric
differentiations constitute the objective reality underlying the
phenomena of each phase of conscious existence. During the period
of Universal Pralaya, Cosmic Ideation is non-existent ;
and the variously
differentiated states of Cosmic Substance are resolved back again
into the primary state of abstract potential objectivity.
Manvantaric impulse commences with the reawakening of Cosmic
Ideation, the Universal Mind, concurrently with, and parallel to, the
primary emergence of Cosmic Substance—the latter being the manvau-
* Acts, xvii. 23, 24.