Sixth Form

“ The men of the sixth race were a much more powerful set of people, with a considerable amount of will and determination. They soon dominated the fifth, taking up its civilization and carrying it much further. They succeeded in subduing the whole of the planet and brought it under one rule, although the enormous majority of its inhabitants belonged to the fifth race. These people had much more mind than the others, and possessed some inventive genius, but it was their tendency to do everything by fits and starts, and not take up a piece of work and carry it through. ”

“ During this time, representing the sixth part of human life, we are obliged to admit that the sixth part or less of our total male population and the sixth part which is the most vigorous is placed in a position which is perpetually exhausting for them, and dangerous for society. ”

“ By the Sixth Sense I mean the Mystic Sense, or that inner perceptive faculty which distinguishes man from the highest below him and allies him to the highest above him. So distinctive among created objects is it of man that it might, not inaptly, be characterized as the Human Sense. It is used for no one exclusive purpose; on the contrary it is only under its operation that man’s activities, one and all, become human. ”

“ These three groups are called intrinsic accidents, to distinguish them from the remaining six groups—action, passion, location, duration, position, habiliment—which, as their names sufficiently suggest, are simply extrinsic denominations accruing to a substance because of its bearings on some other substance. Quantity and quality, and, in a restricted sense, relation are said to be absolute accidents, because they are held to superadd some special form of being to the substance wherein they reside. ”

“ The most reckless of their disciples, having shut out from their thoughts all communication with the world of reality, would make it impossible for six men to pull effectively on a rope because five of them would be obliged to recognize the authority of the sixth, when he, at the proper moment, should call “Heave, ho.” ”

“ The Sixth Principle has already been touched upon in the preceding discussion, but it needs the emphasis of special statement, because of its importance. "Development is from within, out, through what is absorbed, not from without, in, through external application without absorption." ”

“ The more decidedly a particular world-picture shows the traits of “Nature,” the more unconditionally law and number prevail in it; and the more purely intuitive the picture of the world as eternally becoming, the more alien to numbers its manifold and intangible elements. “Form is something mobile, something becoming, something passing. The doctrine of formation is the doctrine of transformation. ”

“ Life in the sixth subdivision is simply like our ordinary life on this earth minus the physical body and its necessities while as it ascends through the fifth and fourth divisions it becomes less and less material and is more and more withdrawn from our lower world and its interests. ”

“ These degrees are opened successively in all who become regenerate: and with the opening of each degree, the individual is introduced or born into a new and higher degree of life. The lowest or natural degree is opened by simple obedience to a low or natural form of truth—the literal sense of the Word. ”

“ In the development of number into class, unity becomes kind and plurality becomes series. In the development of space into form, extension becomes figure and position becomes structure. In the development of motion into force, speeds becomes velocity and path becomes inertia. In the development of time into causation, persistence becomes state and change becomes event. In the development of judgment into conception, consciousness becomes recollection and inference becomes conception. Hence the classific properties are class, form, force, causation, and conception. ”

“ The times and states of man's regeneration in general and in particular, are divided into six, and are called the days of his creation. For by degrees he is elevated out of a state in which he possesses none of the qualities which properly constitute a man, until by little and little he attains to the sixth day, in which he becomes an image of God. ”

“ I believe in the scheme, in the Project of all things, in the significance of myself and all life, and that my defects and uglinesses and failures, just as much as my powers and successes, are things that are necessary and important and contributory in that scheme, that scheme which passes my understanding—and that no thwarting of my conception, not even the cruelty of nature, now defeats or can defeat my faith, however much it perplexes my mind. ”

“ It is said that we are possibly in want of a sixth sense belonging to our nature, by means of which our knowledge would be greatly augmented. This sense is most likely in some other world, where one of our five is wanting. ”

“ But in the Heavenly Man, as in the man on earth, there are seven centres, and each of these centres is represented by an official of the Occult Hierarchy. Some men will be drawn to one of these centres, and some to another, so that there is the fullest possibility of development for all possible types and dispositions. ”

“ The sixth class is the mode of life of the best election. The habit of saints is set forth; of those, to wit, who are lowly in the world, and unskilled in the Scriptures, and who hold the faith immoveably, and are not at all broken down by any chance, or withdrawn from the faith by any fear. ”

“ Of course I can but reflect that to bring this splendid economy off it must have been practised up to VII with the most intense and immense art: the scheme I have already sketched for I and II leaving me therewith but III, IV, V, and VI to arrive at the completeness of preparation for VII, which carries in its bosom the completeness of preparation for VIII—this last, by a like grand law, carrying in its pocket the completeness of preparation for IX and X. But why not? Who's afraid? and what has the very essence of my design been but the most magnificent packed and calculated closeness? ”

“ In the Experience belonging to this space a point will form a progressive figure of the first order, a timeless line a progressive figure of the second order, a timeless surface a progressive figure of the third order, and a timeless body a figure of the fourth order. ”

“ For instance, a circle existing in nature, and the idea of a circle existing, which is also in God, are one and the same thing displayed through different attributes. Thus, whether we conceive nature under the attribute of extension, or under the attribute of thought, or under any other attribute, we shall find the same order, or one and the same chain of causes—that is, the same things following in either case. ”

“ And often this passion is so intense that system after system in the philosophic tradition is constructed to satisfy it, and even the most disillusioned of systems—for example, Spinoza's—will preserve its form if not its substance. ”

“ They seek to discover whether they cannot explain the facts better or as well, or approximately as well, by the traditional views. And that, too, is justified. But at times some extremely artless animadversions are heard that almost nonplus us. "If a sixth sense existed it could not fail to have been discovered thousands of years ago." ”

“ The respect for the Sixties was an article of faith, a dogma of dogmas in the Nineties. If the now younger generation write articles and books about the Nineties—those amazing documents in which I scarcely recognise an age I thought I knew by heart—we were still more zealous in writing books about the Sixties. ”

“ A subject will many times arrange itself almost spontaneously into several different parts, which thus form the proper divisions, and these again may be easily analyzed into their subdivisions. Even when this is not the case, we will see, as we examine our jottings, that a few of the ideas stand out in especial prominence, and with a little close study of relations and affinities, all the others may be made to group themselves around these. The individual ideas which we put down on the first study of the subject, usually form the subdivisions, and some generalization of them the divisions. ”

“ I saw, on that mystic scroll, the simulacræ of every person I had ever known, and found that there, in the Soul-world, people and things passed at their true, and by no means at a fictitious value, like men and money do on the earth. All mankind are divisible into seven great Orders, to each of which there are three sub-orders or classes. ”

“ For us, the third class, which includes spirits of pygmy-like form, is the most important in this present discussion. All its members are of four kinds, according as they inhabit one of the four chief elements of nature. ”

“ It will be seen, by a glance at the above table, that the three great divisions of society, namely, High Life, Low Life, and Middle Life, are subdivided, or more properly, sub-classed, into the Superior, Transition, and Metamorphic classes. ”

“ When the sixth, between the eye-brows, becomes vivified, the man begins to see things, to have various sorts of waking visions, sometimes of places, sometimes of people. In its earlier development, when it is only just beginning to be awakened, it often means nothing more than half-seeing landscapes and clouds of color. ”

“ No other theoretical fact precedes the act of will: the so-called practical judgments or practical concepts, which some thinkers consider as a necessary intermediate step between the historical judgment and the volition, are nothing but classes of historical judgments relating to volitions in the past, mental formations similar to the rhetorical categories in the domain of art, and, therefore, do not really precede but follow the actual volitions. ”

“ If, on the contrary, I choose a class,—a class being understood to be something chosen by free will, according to the common use of language, if I choose a class, I must first have become subject to Nature before it was possible for me to choose; for to that end different impulses must be awakened within me, different capacities elevated into consciousness ”

“ Who ever divided that Life into two parts, and then put particular names to each half of the Life, so that to the division which the one name fitted the other could not be said to apply? This is the result of your dialectic sharpness; to say that the Life which has no beginning is perishable, and that what is imperishable cannot be associated with what is unbeginning! ”

“ We may, then, add to our experience on the assumption of a uniformity in nature; we may fill in our picture of what is and has been, as experience gives it us, in such a way as to make the whole consistent with this uniformity. ”

“ XXI. Yet this division does not proceed from ignorance; for the soul admits of a twofold division, one of which partakes of reason, the other is without it. When, therefore, we are ordered to give a law to ourselves, the meaning is, that reason should restrain our rashness. ”

“ Such a complete and exact division is called classification.
Nearly every term may be divided according to more than one principle. We may divide the term books into ancient and modern, or into religious and secular, or in any one of a dozen other ways. Which principle of division we shall choose will depend upon our purpose. If we wish to discuss sponges with reference to their shapes, our division will be different from what it would be if we were to discuss them with reference to their uses. When a principle of division has once been chosen it is essential that it be followed throughout. ”

“ There is a very good and simple description of man’s constitution in one of the Pauline epistles, where a triple division is given, and a perfectly accurate division, although subdivisions again are possible and practicable; but for my [158] purposes now that division into three, and then certain subdivisions of each, will be sufficient to give you a very clear and definite idea of consciousness in man ”

“ The more deeply we perceive, the more striking becomes the evidence that a uniform plan links every form in manifold nature.” ”

“ Every new quality or circumstance which can belong to an object, subdivides each combination or class, so that the number of such combinations, when unrestricted by logical conditions, is represented by an infinitely high power of two. The extremely rapid increase in the number of subdivisions obliges us to confine our attention to a few qualities at a time. ”

“ If we look abroad to other arts, we may observe the same distinction, the same division into two classes; each of them acting under the influence of two different principles, in which the one follows nature, the other varies it, and sometimes departs from it. ”

“ For again we divide that which walks into rational and irrational; and then selecting from the species, apprehended by division, those next to man, and combining them into one formula, we state the definition of a man, who is an animal, mortal, terrestrial, walking, rational.
Whence Division furnishes the class of matter, seeking for the definition the simplicity of the name; and the definition of the artisan and maker, by composition and construction, presents the knowledge of the thing as it is; not of those things of which we have general notions. ”

“ As the several circumstances that determine the early or late recognition of uniformities, are circumstances that determine the number and strength of the impressions which these uniformities make on the mind; it follows that the progression conforms to a certain fundamental principle of psychology. We see à posteriori, what we concluded à priori, that the order in which relations are generalized, depends on the frequency and impressiveness with which they are repeated in conscious experience. ”

“ In the one class, that of our internal affections, the phenomena depend on the laws which regulate the successive changes of state of the mind itself. In the other class, that of our external affections, they depend on the laws of the mind, indeed, which is susceptible of these peculiar changes of state; but they depend, in an equal degree, on the laws which give to matter its peculiar qualities, and, consequently, its peculiar influence on this mental susceptibility. ”