in all religions and philosophies, seeing in them the recorded experience, as a check on our own, of those who have sought and obeyed the Light; recognizing, too, that all true science comes by inspiration, revealing the working methods of the Logos; the third Object, with its promise of the spiritual unfolding that comes by following the Light.

So in Theosophy, Divine Wisdom penetrating the soul, and applied to the conduct of life, we see an inspiration for every one, the best ally and friend of religion and of all religions, the completing element of every science, the power destined to still all social turmoil, driving out envy through aspiration and love.

Finally, the practical bearing on the life of each one of us: illumined by that benignant Light, our life becomes the Great Adventure. The Great Adventure-and something more. For all the delight of the finest artistic creation, the best embodiment of beauty; the high ecstasy of the scientific search for truth; best of all, the passionate love and adoration of the Highest, which has enkindled all human love; these shall be our heritage as we rise toward the Living Divinity.

Count each affliction, whether light or grave, God's messenger sent down to thee. Do thou with courtesy receive him.-ENGLISH Messenger.

You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments that stand out above everything else are the moments when you have done things in a spirit of love.-HENRY DRUMMOND.

FORCE AND CAUSE

P

HYSICS, the science of materialized phenomena, has become the least materialistic of our sciences. The atom, once so hard and compact, is now an unstable aggregate of "electrons". And the electrons are mere waves, "strains", "swirls" of Ether. Etherbe it understood-is not matter, not physical matter, at least, but the zone where the attractions and repulsions of forces set the electrons in motion. It is the medium in which force can act.

So far have the physicists come. They have risen from the many to the one, from the phenomenal to the noumenal, from the gross to the subtle. But they have hesitated, as if in fear of the consequences of their thought. They were forced to leave behind them a solid-seeming substance, but this new substance of their discovery, the Ether, is so rarified, so undefinable, so full of unknown potencies. It contains matter within Itself, but It is not matter. What is It?

There is a suggestive statement in the Secret Doctrine (Vol. I, p. 493): "The Occultist sees in the manifestation of every force in Nature, the action of the quality or the special characteristic of its noumenon, which noumenon is a distinct and intelligent Individuality on the other side of the manifested universe."

If the Physicist turned his contemplation inward, he would find the key to what he seeks. For, in his consciousness, he would find the microcosmic correspondence of the Cosmic Ether, whose outer robe he has barely touched.

It is significant that the first signs of this inward research in the laboratory comes from France. M. Frédéric Houssay, Dean of the Faculty of Sciences of Paris, has published a little book, Force et Cause,1 which must chill the marrow of old-fashioned agnostics, if there be any left.

M. Houssay's theorem is that the concept of force is more intelligible than that of matter, as the active cause of phenomena. It is more intelligible, because it is more akin to the domain of consciousness, which we know by immediate experience. He proceeds to correlate force and consciousness. He concludes that a Cosmic Consciousness produces and directs all the forces, which mould the worlds.

M. Houssay is an excellent metaphysician, but the peculiar value of his work consists in its rapprochement between intuition and the laboratory. M. Bergson has accustomed us to the constant testing of metaphysical intuition by physical experiment. He is a philosopher seeking

1 Force et Cause, by Frédéric Houssay, Bibliothèque de Philosophie scientifique; Ernest Flammarion, Editor, Paris, 1920.

support from science. M. Houssay belongs to the rarer species of the scientist seeking support from philosophy.

As the basis of his inquiry he asks how we can represent to ourselves a Cosmic Consciousness, which generates Force.

"If we may succeed in conceiving, if not yet in proving precisely, the creation of matter and the appearance of life by the single action of a directed force, we shall still be faced by these two terms, directed force and mind (pensée). Or are they reducible to a single term?

"In an irreversible fashion, yes; that is to say, in one sense and not in the other. One can easily conceive mind as capable of directing a force and even of producing it. The inverse is not conceivable at all.

"For us, however, who do not make an interior examination but who look about us, mind manifests itself in phenomena only at the end of terrestrial history. It is an end. It is very evident in man, rudimentary in certain animals, mammals, birds, a few insects.

"It is certainly not this recent (manifestation of) consciousness, which is justly called epiphenomenal, that has been able to direct and produce the force, which caused all the phenomena anterior to the manifestation. It is necessary . . . to admit a primordial mind, which is above space and time, which is the only cause of force and of all things, and of which the last work is a return to itself, a return whose stages we mark in the rudimentary animal mind, and finally in the higher and larger human mind, weak, indeed, in creative power, but capable of discovering the creative process. . If we return to the rigorous determinism of phenomena, which has banished chance and inconsequence, this Mind appears to us as Intellect and Will" (pp. 141-142).

M. Houssay insists upon the need of regarding the Cosmic Mind as impersonal. We may deify It, if we will, but we must not endow It lightly with our desires and prejudices. Because a certain end seems desirable or useful to the human mind at present, it does not thereby represent the real purpose of the Divine Mind. In order to learn that purpose, we must study and reflect upon experience carefully and slowly, having faith in the "rigorous determinism" underlying all that happens to us, for what is the external order of events, if not the projection of the Universal Will? Above all, we must not generalize prematurely, we must not assume that we know even a little more than we do. The old Judäized theology was one such premature generalization, and Darwinism is another, with its loose talk of chance variations and selectionmere words, nomina non res, which represent a modern form of a very old illusion, that a word can signify the infinite.

Therefore, M. Houssay draws no conclusions as to what must be the exact nature of Cosmic Thought, nor does he ask why it operates according to Its chosen way, and not otherwise. He accepts Its reality, because Its reality makes the world more intelligible and explains certain fundamental facts, and he considers, in the light of this attitude, a series of factors, ranging from physics to sociology.

First, he examines the "ultimate particle" of physics, the atom, that thing which is half-phenomenon and half-hypothesis. The atom has become exceedingly diaphanous, but it has been hard to give up all idea of its materiality.

"In order not to discard altogether the old notion of matter solid by essence and not by existence or by result, physicists admit still in the midst of zones of force or of spheres of protection, a point infinitely small, on which is fixed all the mass of the atom. This point, the veritable centre of the figure, this geometrical entity appears to me altogether superfluous. But although I have no difficulty, I ask myself whether it will be easy for everyone to imagine pure force and movement without a thing which moves. It is, however, a simple result of abstraction operating upon an image accessible to all, by removing progressively all that is variable, the medium which is unimportant, the particular thing which is moving, which is no more important; and by conserving that which is constant in the vortex: a force and a form, we must add that" (pp. 101-102).

The atom is to be regarded as a swirl, an elementary whirling motion (tourbillon). But it has a form, because its force decreases as it spirals away from the centre, so that the mind draws an arbitrary barrier across its lines of force, and designates as the atom only that force which is contained within the barrier. None the less, though this representation of the atom as a hardened and separate entity is an illusion admitted even by physicists, yet it is in a measure justified, since the One Motion appears when manifested as if broken up into an infinite number of forcecentres. Therefore, every atom is to be regarded as an aspect of Universal Nature, as a basis of individuality. M. Houssay says profoundly that "if phenomena are given as discontinuous, that is to say, as numerical, it is the most profound, the most penetrating, the most decisive legitimization of the scientific method, an Ultra-Pythagorean justification of the value of Number" (p. 102).

The material world is, thus, the result of a struggle for individuality. The atoms war upon one another, capture one another, are held in systems, which in turn war upon other systems. The force contained in these systems is recognized by us as mass, hardness, cohesion, weight, inertia, all the phenomenal complex which is included in our concept of

matter.

But matter is constructed at a frightful cost. The force which is free in the primordial atom is chained, when that atom becomes involved with another. And the force becomes the feebler, the more complex the system of which it forms a part. The force, indeed, must remain constant at the centre of the atom, must be ever renewed there. But it loses its freedom of action, when it is in contact with other force-centres,

According to one modern theory, an atom is to be compared to a tiny solar system, with a positive electron in the centre and one or more negative electrons revolving around this centre.

because it must expend so much "work" in the struggle to capture the others or to escape from them.

Physicists, glimpsing this cosmic shambles of forces, have ventured to describe it as the expression of a universal law of the degradation of all energies. This law states that all the differing motions of the universe tend to resolve themselves into one type of motion, that the universe is "running down" and will some day be all reduced to the state of molecular heat, all the infinite hosts of atoms being brought into absolute bondage to one another. This imago mundi would have a certain sombre poetry, if it did not suggest too closely certain modern ideals of democracy! Something tells us that the Universe is not made like that.

M. Houssay accepts the evidence for the degradation of energy, but he asks whether there is any evidence for the reverse process of a rehabilitation of energy. "The order of the various aspects under which physical energy manifests itself is not arbitrary, but proceeds from superior to inferior forms. A superior energy, mechanical energy, for example, can be integrally transformed into another, the energy of heat. The inverse transformation, that of heat into mechanical work, is difficult and incomplete. It is difficult, because it involves a fall of temperature from a warm body to a cold body, from the boiler to the condenser; without this rigorous condition there can be no steam engine. It is incomplete because in practice 10 per cent or 15 per cent only of caloric energy is transformed into mechanical work, the remainder. being lost in reheating the condenser. . . There is not complete reversibility; there are superior and degraded forms of energy. These latter, returning to the former, effect a rehabilitation of energy "and, in the physical world, this rehabilitation is hard and always accompanied by a larger loss of dissipated energy" (p. 147).

But "in this prodigious destruction, in this terrible return to nothingness, life seems to me an arrest, partial, indeed, for it includes manifest degradations", but an arrest just the same and more than that, "for it is a rehabilitation of energy, transforming chemical into mechanical energy, without an interposed fall of temperature, permitting even the appearance of new energies, which the inanimate world ignores and which are manifestly superior forms, I mean, the psychic energies" (p. 148).

The individual creature may exhibit in its death all the signs of dissipating energy, but in the resurgent life of its offspring, above all in the immortality and growth of the species, we are face to face with a process only faintly suggested in the inorganic world, the process whereby the world stops "running down" and starts "winding up". One recalls certain occult references to the great turning point of evolution in the mineral kingdom. M. Houssay is, I think, the first scientist to develop those occult suggestions into an experimental theory. If he