THE EDINBURGH LECTURES ON MENTAL SCIENCE. Thomas Troward

there can be no conception of anything as being at

      a distance from us. When the elements of time and space are eliminated all

      our ideas of things must necessarily be as subsisting in a universal here

      and an everlasting now. This is, no doubt, a highly abstract conception,

      but I would ask the student to endeavour to grasp it thoroughly, since it

      is of vital importance in the practical application of Mental Science, as

      will appear further on.

      The opposite conception is that of things expressing themselves through

      conditions of time and space and thus establishing a variety of _relations_

      to other things, as of bulk, distance, and direction, or of sequence in

      time. These two conceptions are respectively the conception of the abstract

      and the concrete, of the unconditioned and the conditioned, of the absolute

      and the relative. They are not opposed to each other in the sense of

      incompatibility, but are each the complement of the other, and the only

      reality is in the combination of the two. The error of the extreme idealist

      is in endeavouring to realize the absolute without the relative, and the

      error of the extreme materialist is in endeavouring to realize the relative

      without the absolute. On the one side the mistake is in trying to realize

      an inside without an outside, and on the other in trying to realize an

      outside without an inside; both are necessary to the formation of a

      substantial entity.

      THE HIGHER MODE OF INTELLIGENCE CONTROLS THE LOWER.

      We have seen that the descent from personality, as we know it in ourselves,

      to matter, as we know it under what we call inanimate forms, is a gradual

      descent in the scale of intelligence from that mode of being which is able

      to realize its own will-power as a capacity for originating new trains of

      causation to that mode of being which is incapable of recognizing itself at

      all. The higher the grade of life, the higher the intelligence; from which

      it follows that the supreme principle of Life must also be the ultimate

      principle of intelligence. This is clearly demonstrated by the grand

      natural order of the universe. In the light of modern science the principle

      of evolution is familiar to us all, and the accurate adjustment existing

      between all parts of the cosmic scheme is too self-evident to need

      insisting upon. Every advance in science consists in discovering new

      subtleties of connection in this magnificent universal order, which already

      exists and only needs our recognition to bring it into practical use. If,

      then, the highest work of the greatest minds consists in nothing else than

      the recognition of an already existing order, there is no getting away from

      the conclusion that a paramount intelligence must be inherent in the

      Life-Principle, which manifests itself _as_ this order; and thus we see

      that there must be a great cosmic intelligence underlying the totality of

      things.

      The physical history of our planet shows us first an incandescent nebula

      dispersed over vast infinitudes of space; later this condenses into a

      central sun surrounded by a family of glowing planets hardly yet

      consolidated from the plastic primordial matter; then succeed untold

      millenniums of slow geological formation; an earth peopled by the lowest

      forms of life, whether vegetable or animal; from which crude beginnings a

      majestic, unceasing, unhurried, forward movement brings things stage by

      stage to the condition in which we know them now. Looking at this steady

      progression it is clear that, however we may conceive the nature of the

      evolutionary principle, it unerringly provides for the continual advance of

      the race. But it does this by creating such numbers of each kind that,

      after allowing a wide margin for all possible accidents to individuals, the

      race shall still continue:--

      "So careful of the type it seems

      So careless of the single life."

      In short, we may say that the cosmic intelligence works by a Law of

      Averages which allows a wide margin of accident and failure to the

      individual.

      But the progress towards higher intelligence is always in the direction of

      narrowing down this margin of accident and taking the individual more and

      more out of the law of averages, and substituting the law of individual

      selection. In ordinary scientific language this is the survival of the

      fittest. The reproduction of fish is on a scale that would choke the sea

      with them if every individual survived; but the margin of destruction is

      correspondingly enormous, and thus the law of averages simply keeps up the

      normal proportion of the race. But at the other end of the scale,

      reproduction is by no means thus enormously in excess of survival. True,

      there is ample margin of accident and disease cutting off numbers of human

      beings before they have gone through the average duration of life, but

      still it is on a very different scale from the premature destruction of

      hundreds of thousands as against the survival of one. It may, therefore, be

      taken as an established fact that in proportion as intelligence advances

      the individual ceases to be subject to a mere law of averages and has a

      continually increasing power of controlling the conditions of his own

      survival.

      We see, therefore, that there is a marked distinction between the cosmic

      intelligence and the individual intelligence, and that the factor which

      differentiates the latter from the former is the presence of _individual_

      volition. Now the business of Mental Science is to ascertain the relation

      of this individual power of volition to the great cosmic law which provides

      for the maintenance and advancement of the race; and the point to be

      carefully noted is that the power of individual volition is itself the

      outcome of the cosmic evolutionary principle at the point where it reaches

      its highest level. The effort of Nature has always been upwards from the

      time when only