Theory of life

“ Life gives motion to matter, life organizes, life causes sensation, consciousness, and all intellectual and moral power. Life creates the brain and uses it as its most perfect instrument and means of manifesting its nature and power. The size and quality of the instrument would necessarily determine the measure and quality of life manifested by it. This doctrine is adequate to its effects. ”

“ Or, again, since we can recognize three grades of life in man—vegetative, sentient, and rational—we conceive the one principle of life, his soul, as virtually three principles; and so we distinguish mentally or virtually between three souls in man, although in reality there is only one. ”

“ Or, shall I state it thus?—The astonishment of life, is, the absence of any appearance of reconciliation between the theory and practice of life. ”

“ This something—reason, consciousness, soul, call it what you will—unites us to the world; for everywhere in the world reason is at home, and gradually finds itself; it makes us aware of a great order in which we move; it breaks down the barriers of sense between us and the absolute consciousness, the eternal life—"not ourselves," yet in us and akin to us!—whence, if there is any validity in human logic, that order must spring. ”

“ To answer such questions we must revert to the definition of life. The distinction between individual in its biological sense, and individual in its more general sense, must consist in the manifestation of Life, properly so called. ”

“ The phrase "principle of life" is deceptive; the expression "manifestation of life" means something definite, since life may be regarded as the sum of the forces manifested by certain forms of matter brought into certain relations with each other, and with the environment ”

“ Or, at least, life is the source from which both the external object of material existence and the inner thought, life, or consciousness, alike take their rise—in this one common notion of life, that which exists and that which is conscious meet together and are fused into one. ”

“ But habits and instincts are as strongly inherited as structure, so that, as it appears to me, the study of life is, even from the orthodox scientific point of view, as important as the study of death. ”

“ If you would understand the philosophy of Mental and Spiritual Creation, Generation, and Re-generation, you must understand and study this Hermetic Principle. It contains the solution of many mysteries of Life. ”

“ Having myself long since recognized the three categories of an elevated consciousness—faith, hope, and love—to be also the essential elements and primary foundation of all higher thought and knowledge, so far at least as the latter, having life for its matter and subject, must take life for its starting-point and foundation, I have therefore publicly advanced this doctrine. ”

“ Let us now proceed to determine the second fundamental form of the manifestation of life—the individual form—by applying the same principle.
I. The contemplation of the one and universal power exists in the individuals as such. The totality of the power, or nature, is contemplated through them as the focus of knowledge; and by each of them, of course, in the same manner, for in regard to the contents of that contemplation they are not individual, but are the one and universal life itself. ”

“ There are three kinds of lives, corresponding to the three kinds of metempsychosis, ascending, circular, descending: the aspiring life of progress in wisdom and goodness; the monotonous life of routine in mechanical habits and indifference ”

“ But the results of psychical research, the deductions which we may draw, and the lessons we may learn, teach us of the continued life of the soul, of the nature of that life, and of how it is influenced by our conduct here. ”

“ This eternal world is about us and within us while we live here. 'Heaven is nearer to our souls than the earth is to our bodies.' The world which we ordinarily think of as real is an arbitrary selection from experience, corresponding roughly to the average reaction of life upon the average man. ”

“ If then, I repeat, there is to be mental advance, it must be mental advance in the construction of a definite philosophy of life. And that philosophy of life must be right and the other philosophies wrong. ”

“ And now, as to the true serial order of this world of Life, we have, from the outset of our exposition of our Fourth Concept, recognized that, whatever the world contains, it contains in the form of a Self-Conscious Being. ”

“ It will eventually be seen too, that the laws of life are essentially the same throughout the whole organic creation; and further, that they cannot be properly understood in their complex manifestations until they have been studied in their simpler ones. ”

“ THE development of the human consciousness, according to the triple principle of its existence, or of its nature as compounded of spirit or mind, soul, and animated body, must begin with the soul, and not with the spirit, even though the latter be the most important and supreme. For the soul is the first grade in the progress of development. In actual life, also, it is the beginning and the permanent foundation, as well as the primary root of the collective consciousness. ”

“ If we regard the human subject, in the ordinary psychological way, as a being whose conscious life runs parallel with the highest physical processes of his organism, we get a view of the relation between the intellect and the will which is far more just, at once to the natural history of the mind, and to the deeper meaning of the inner life of our consciousness. View man as a natural being, and you find him adjusting himself to his environment, acting, as they say, in response to stimuli. ”

“ Abstract considerations about the soul and the reality of a moral order will not do in a year what the glimpse into a world of new phenomenal possibilities enveloping those of the present life, afforded by an extension of our insight into the order of nature, would do in an instant. ”

“ I still defend, and, in the fourth lecture of this volume I expound afresh, the thesis that the contrast between our “descriptive” knowledge of the physical world and our “appreciative” knowledge of the facts of finite life, is determined precisely by this difference between our social consciousness of what is “valid for all individuals” and our personal consciousness of what is valid for the Self. ”

“ Each comes out of the second or theoretic stage of mental functioning, with its definition of the essential nature of things, its formula of formulas prepared. The whole array of active forces of our nature stands waiting, impatient for the word which shall tell them how to discharge themselves most deeply and worthily upon life. ”

“ You see here the origin of the division of the One Life of Reason into individual life, and the ground of the necessity which there is, for all who have not raised themselves by Knowledge above mere Earthly and Finite perception, to continue in the faith of this personal existence. ”

“ The mistake is in supposing that Life can be generated in ourselves by an intellectual process; but, as we have seen in the preceding lectures, Life is the primary movement of the Spirit, whether in the cosmos or in the individual. ”

“ Thus have we endeavoured to pre-figure the whole Earthly Life of Man by a comprehension of its purpose;—to perceive why our Race had to begin its Existence here, and by this means to describe the whole present Life of humankind:—this is what we wished to do,—it was our first task. ”

“ And, taught as we have been to regard these definitions as complete, we naturally and rightly reject the monstrous notion that out of such matter any form of life could possibly arise. But are the definitions complete? Every thing depends on the answer to be given to this question. Trace the line of life backward, and see it approaching more and more to what we call the purely physical condition. ”

“ It expresses, therefore, the highest ascent of the rational intelligence, where, overlooking the whole realm of existence and relations known in other forms of knowledge, it sees, and through the emotional nature, feels, how to live as life ought to be lived. ”

“ Now, this antithesis of life and death, vitality and mechanism, the conception of the spirit of things, and the perception of the forms of things, is a distinction available in every department of human thought and action, and divides minds into two distinct classes, the living and the lifeless. The test of the live mind is, that it communicates life. ”

“ If I study a living being, under what heads does the knowledge I obtain fall? I can learn its structure, or what we call its Anatomy; and its development, or the series of changes it passes through to acquire its complete structure. Then I find that the living being has certain powers resulting from its own activities, and the interaction of these with the activities of other things—the knowledge of which is Physiology. Beyond this, the living being has a position in space and time, which is its Distribution. ”

“ But, when consciousness is restored to its primitive harmony, the internal life of man is three-fold in mind, soul, and sense; and to expound and demonstrate this truth, was the purport and object of the Philosophy of Life, which I treated of in a former course of lectures. ”

“ As life, that is, implies a body and living principle, so knowledge implies faculties and mind; and health the liability to sickness; but as Vital Principle is said to be the cause of life and feeling, it is, as such, a creative energy, and cannot, therefore, be matter and subject. ”

“ Among these further questions, the most fundamental and the most obvious are those concerning the laws of ;ocomotion, the meaning of life, the meaning of mentality, and the interrelations of matter, life, and mentality. When we examine the procedures of the great men in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we find them presupposing this general common-sense notion of the universe, and endeavouring to answer all questions in the terms it supplies. ”

“ The reader who recalls certain passages in First Principles, in the Principles of Biology, and in the Principles of Psychology, will perceive above a restatement, in another form, of generalizations set forth in those works. Especially will he be reminded21 of the proposition that Life is "the definite combination of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and successive, in correspondence with external co-existences and sequences;" and still more of that abridged and less specific formula, in which Life is said to be "the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations." ”

“ This conception of life, which I have given only in its barest outline, is a very common one. For thousands of years it has persisted in the philosophical field, the nourishment and the torment of the greatest intellects of humanity. ”

“ The balance of mental and social, as well as of physiological, functions, is implied in the complex life of whose evolution we form a part. To say that we are to promote this balance of various functions, is to say nothing more than that we are to promote the life into which physical and mental and social factors enter. ”

“ In accepting the challenge to employ these three facts—God, the soul, a future life—in a rational development of the present phase of existence, Reason would reply that deductions from experience suggest that the future life must necessarily prove an advance on the old. ”

“ The emotional and rationalistic elements which enter into these various concepts are entirely distinct; and we can readily perceive how the various forms of the idea of a future life may have come into existence by psychological processes that are not at all comparable. ”

“ Just in proportion as I become aware of, and acknowledge in the domain of my inward experience and through my capacity of estimating values, the worth of the spiritual and moral life of man, so, with the confidence of this peculiar mode of conviction, I subordinate the concatenations of events and causes on which the possibility and the occurrence of the spiritual and moral life depend, to an eternal teleology, and see the order of the world that leads to this illuminated by everlasting meaning and by providence. ”

“ The great point, is to understand the Principle of being,—the Life that is eternal, without beginning and without end, and this study will absorb the attention of sage and philosopher at a not far-distant day ”

“ Before proceeding to indicate to what laws our theories and interpretations of nature and moral ideals are subject, we may note that there are sundry activities of man, the outcome of his conceptual thought and emotion, which are also, under the conditions of social life, to a large extent beyond the pale of elimination. ”

“ The process of judgment and choice, in which different elements are brought together, considered in one conscious universe, evaluated or measured, thereby giving rise reciprocally to a self on the one hand and to approved or chosen objects on the other.
(1) Life. Life is at least the raw material of all values, even if it is not in itself entitled to be called good without qualification. For in the process of nourishing and protecting itself, the plant or animal selects and in the case of higher animals, manipulates; it adapts itself to nature and adapts nature to itself ”

“ Having treated these conditions broadly, and explained why they are important and even indispensable for life, we next proceed to show how they are fulfilled upon the earth, and how numerous, how complex, and often how exact are the adjustments needed to bring them about, and maintain them almost unchanged throughout the vast æons of time occupied in the development of life. ”

“ Thus, in the proposition, All men are mortal, the word man connotes the attributes which we ascribe to a certain kind of living creatures, on the ground of certain phenomena which they exhibit, and which are partly physical phenomena, namely the impressions made on our senses by their bodily form and structure, and partly mental phenomena, namely the sentient and intellectual life which they have of their own. ”