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THE HIDDEN POWER

To realise fully how much of our present daily life consists in symbols

is to find the answer to the old, old question, What is Truth? and in

the degree in which we begin to recognise this we begin to approach

Truth. The realisation of Truth consists in the ability to translate

symbols, whether natural or conventional, into their equivalents; and

the root of all the errors of mankind consists in the inability to do

this, and in maintaining that the symbol has nothing behind it. The

great duty incumbent on all who have attained to this knowledge is to

impress upon their fellow men that there is an _inner side_ to things,

and that until this _inner_ side is known, the things themselves are not

known.

There is an inner and an outer side to everything; and the quality of

the superficial mind which causes it to fail in the attainment of Truth

is its willingness to rest content with the outside only. So long as

this is the case it is impossible for a man to grasp the import of his

own relation to the universal, and it is this relation which constitutes

all that is signified by the word "Truth." So long as a man fixes his

attention only on the superficial it is impossible for him to make any

progress in knowledge. He is denying that principle of "Growth" which is

the root of all life, whether spiritual intellectual, or material, for

he does not stop to reflect that all which he sees as the outer side of

things can result only from some germinal principle hidden deep in the

centre of their being.

Expansion from the centre by growth according to a necessary order of

sequence, this is the Law of Life of which the whole universe is the

outcome, alike in the one great solidarity of cosmic being, as in the

separate individualities of its minutest organisms. This great principle

is the key to the whole riddle of Life, upon whatever plane we

contemplate it; and without this key the door from the outer to the

inner side of things can never be opened. It is therefore the duty of

all to whom this door has, at least in some measure, been opened, to

endeavour to acquaint others with the fact that there is an inner side

to things, and that life becomes truer and fuller in proportion as we

penetrate to it and make our estimates of all things according to what

becomes visible from this interior point of view.

In the widest sense everything is a symbol of that which constitutes its

inner being, and all Nature is a gallery of arcana revealing great

truths to those who can decipher them. But there is a more precise

sense in which our current life is based upon symbols in regard to the

most important subjects that can occupy our thoughts: the symbols by

which we strive to represent the nature and being of God, and the manner

in which the life of man is related to the Divine life. The whole

character of a man's life results from what he really believes on this

subject: not his formal statement of belief in a particular creed, but

what he realises as the stage which his mind has actually attained in

regard to it.

Has a man's mind only reached the point at which he thinks it is

impossible to know anything about God, or to make any use of the

knowledge if he had it? Then his whole interior world is in the

condition of confusion, which must necessarily exist where no spirit of

order has yet begun to move upon the chaos in which are, indeed, the

elements of being, but all disordered and neutralising one another. Has

he advanced a step further, and realised that there is a ruling and an

ordering power, but beyond this is ignorant of its nature? Then the

unknown stands to him for the terrific, and, amid a tumult of fears and

distresses that deprive him of all strength to advance, he spends his

life in the endeavour to propitiate this power as something naturally

adverse to him, instead of knowing that it is the very centre of his own

life and being.

And so on through every degree, from the lowest depths of ignorance to

the greatest heights of intelligence, a man's life must always be the

exact reflection of that particular stage which he has reached in the

perception of the divine nature and of his own relation to it; and as we

approach the full perception of Truth, so the life-principle within us

expands, the old bonds and limitations which had no existence in reality

fall off from us, and we enter into regions of light, liberty, and

power, of which we had previously no conception. It is impossible,

therefore, to overestimate the importance of being able to realise the

symbol _for_ a symbol, and being able to penetrate to the inner

substance which it represents. Life itself is to be realised only by the

conscious experience of its livingness in ourselves, and it is the

endeavour to translate these experiences into terms which shall suggest

a corresponding idea to others that gives rise to all symbolism.

The nearer those we address have approached to the actual experience,

the more transparent the symbol becomes; and the further they are from

such experience the thicker is the veil; and our whole progress consists

in the fuller and fuller translation of the symbols into clearer and

clearer statements of that for which they stand. But the first step,

without which all succeeding ones must remain impossible, is to convince

people that symbols _are_ symbols, and not the very Truth itself. And

the difficulty consists in this, that if the symbolism is in any degree

adequate it must, in some measure, represent the form of Truth, just as

the modelling of a drapery suggests the form of the figure beneath. They

have a certain consciousness that somehow they are in the presence of

Truth; and this leads people to resent any removal of those folds of

drapery which have hitherto conveyed this idea to their minds.

There is sufficient indication of the inner Truth in the outward form to

afford an excuse for the timorous, and those who have not sufficient

mental energy to think for themselves, to cry out that finality has

already been attained, and that any further search into the matter must

end in the destruction of Truth. But in raising such an outcry they

betray their ignorance of the very nature of Truth, which is that it can

never be destroyed: the very fact that Truth is Truth makes this

impossible. And again they exhibit their ignorance of the first

principle of Life--namely, the Law of Growth, which throughout the

universe perpetually pushes forward into more and more vivid forms of

expression, having expansion everywhere and finality nowhere.

Such ignorant objections need not, therefore, alarm us; and we should

endeavour to show those who make them that what they fear is the only

natural order of the Divine Life, which is "over all, and through all,

and in all." But we must do this gently, and not by forcibly thrusting

upon them the object of their terror, and so repelling them from all

study of the subject. We should endeavour gradually to lead them to see

that there is something interior to what they have hitherto held to be

ultimate Truth, and to realise that the sensation of emptiness and

dissatisfaction, which from time to time will persist in making itself

felt in their hearts, is nothing else than the pressing forward of the

spirit within to declare that inner side of things which alone can

satisfactorily account for what we observe on the exterior, and without

the knowledge of which we can never perceive the true nature of our

inheritance in the Universal Life which is the Life Everlasting.

What, then, is this central principle which is at the root of all

things? It is Life. But not life as we recognise it in particular forms

of manifestation; it is something more interior and concentrated than

that. It is that "unity of the spirit" which _is_ unity, simply because

it has not yet passed into diversity. Perhaps this is not an easy idea

to grasp, but it is the root of all scientific conception of spirit; for

without it there is no common principle to which we can refer the

innumerable forms of manifestation that spirit assumes.

It is the conception of Life as the sum-total of all its undistributed

powers, being as yet none of these in particular, but all of them in

potentiality. This is, no doubt, a highly abstract idea, but it is

essentially that of the centre from which growth takes place by

expansion in every direction. This is that last residuum which defies

all our powers of analysis. This is truly "the unknowable," not in the

sense of the unthinkable but of the unanalysable. It is the subject of

perception, not of knowledge, if by knowledge we mean that faculty which

estimates the _relations_ between things, because here we have passed

beyond any questions of relations, and are face to face with the

absolute.

This innermost of all is absolute Spirit. It is Life as yet not

differentiated into any specific mode; it is the universal Life which

pervades all things and is at the heart of all appearances.

To come into the knowledge of this is to come into the secret of power,

and to enter into the secret place of Living Spirit. Is it illogical

first to call this the unknowable, and then to speak of coming into the

knowledge of it? Perhaps so; but no less a writer than St. Paul has set

the example; for does he not speak of the final result of all searchings

into the heights and depths and lengths and breadths of the inner side

of things as being, to attain the knowledge of that Love which passeth

knowledge. If he is thus boldly illogical in phrase, though not in fact,

may we not also speak of knowing "the unknowable"? We may, for this

knowledge is the root of all other knowledge.

The presence of this undifferentiated universal life-power is the final

axiomatic fact to which all our analysis must ultimately conduct us. On

whatever plane we make our analysis it must always abut upon pure

essence, pure energy, pure being; that which knows itself and recognises

itself, but which cannot dissect itself because it is not built up of

parts, but is ultimately integral: it is pure Unity. But analysis which

does not lead to synthesis is merely destructive: it is the child

wantonly pulling the flower to pieces and throwing away the fragments;

not the botanist, also pulling the flower to pieces, but building up in

his mind from those carefully studied fragments a vast synthesis of the

constructive power of Nature, embracing the laws of the formation of all

flower-forms. The value of analysis is to lead us to the original

starting-point of that which we analyse, and so to teach us the laws by

which its final form springs from this centre.

Knowing the law of its construction, we turn our analysis into a

synthesis, and we thus gain a power of building up which must always be

beyond the reach of those who regard "the unknowable" as one with

"not-being."

_This_ idea of the unknowable is the root of all materialism; and yet no

scientific man, however materialistic his proclivities, treats the

unanalysable residuum thus when he meets it in the experiments of his

laboratory. On the contrary, he makes this final unanalysable fact the

basis of his synthesis. He finds that in the last resort it is energy of

some kind, whether as heat or as motion; but he does not throw up his

scientific pursuits because he cannot analyse it further. He adopts the

precisely opposite course, and realises that the conservation of energy,

its indestructibility, and the impossibility of adding to or detracting

from the sum-total of energy in the world, is the one solid and

unchanging fact on which alone the edifice of physical science can be

built up. He bases all his knowledge upon his knowledge of "the

unknowable." And rightly so, for if he could analyse this energy into

yet further factors, then the same problem of "the unknowable" would

meet him still. All our progress consists in continually pushing the

unknowable, in the sense of the unanalysable residuum, a step further

back; but that there should be no ultimate unanalysable residuum

anywhere is an inconceivable idea.

In thus realising the undifferentiated unity of Living Spirit as the

central fact of any system, whether the system of the entire universe or

of a single organism, we are therefore following a strictly scientific

method. We pursue our analysis until it necessarily leads us to this

final fact, and then we accept this fact as the basis of our synthesis.

The Science of Spirit is thus not one whit less scientific than the

Science of Matter; and, moreover, it starts from the same initial fact,

the fact of a living energy which defies definition or explanation,

wherever we find it; but it differs from the science of matter in that

it contemplates this energy under an aspect of responsive intelligence

which does not fall within the scope of physical science, as such. The

Science of Spirit and the Science of Matter are not opposed. They are

complementaries, and neither is fully comprehensible without some

knowledge of the other; and, being really but two portions of one whole,

they insensibly shade off into each other in a border-land where no

arbitrary line can be drawn between them. Science studied in a truly

scientific spirit, following out its own deductions unflinchingly to

their legitimate conclusions, will always reveal the twofold aspect of

things, the inner and the outer; and it is only a truncated and maimed

science that refuses to recognise both.

The study of the material world is not Materialism, if it be allowed to

progress to its legitimate issue. Materialism is that limited view of

the universe which will not admit the existence of anything but

mechanical effects of mechanical causes, and a system which recognises

no higher power than the physical forces of nature must logically result

in having no higher ultimate appeal than to physical force or to fraud

as its alternative. I speak, of course, of the tendency of the system,

not of the morality of individuals, who are often very far in advance of

the systems they profess. But as we would avoid the propagation of a

mode of thought whose effects history shows only too plainly, whether in

the Italy of the Borgias, or the France of the First Revolution, or the

Commune of the Franco-Prussian War, we should set ourselves to study

that inner and spiritual aspect of things which is the basis of a system

whose logical results are truth and love instead of perfidy and

violence.

Some of us, doubtless, have often wondered why the Heavenly Jerusalem is

described in the Book of Revelations as a cube; "the length and the

breadth and the height of it are equal." This is because the cube is the

figure of perfect stability, and thus represents Truth, which can never

be overthrown. Turn it on what side you will, it still remains the

perfect cube, always standing upright; you cannot upset it. This figure,

then, represents the manifestation in concrete solidity of that central

life-giving energy, which is not itself any one plane but generates all

planes, the planes of the above and of the below and of all four sides.

But it is at the same time a city, a place of habitation; and this is

because that which is "the within" is Living Spirit, which has its

dwelling there.

As one plane of the cube implies all the other planes and also "the

within," so any plane of manifestation implies the others and also that

"within" which generates them all. Now, if we would make any progress in

the spiritual side of science--and _every_ department of science has its

spiritual side--we must always keep our minds fixed upon this "innermost

within" which contains the potential of all outward manifestation, the

"fourth dimension" which generates the cube; and our common forms of

speech show how intuitively we do this. We speak of the spirit in which

an act is done, of entering into the spirit of a game, of the spirit of

the time, and so on. Everywhere our intuition points out the spirit as

the true essence of things; and it is only when we commence arguing

about them from without, instead of from within, that our true

perception of their nature is lost.

The scientific study of spirit consists in following up intelligently

and according to definite method the same principle that now only

flashes upon us at intervals fitfully and vaguely. When we once realise

that this universal and unlimited power of spirit is at the root of all

things and of ourselves also, then we have obtained the key to the whole

position; and, however far we may carry our studies in spiritual

science, we shall nowhere find anything else but particular developments

of this one universal principle. "The Kingdom of Heaven is _within_

you."

I have laid stress on the fact that the "innermost within" of all things

is living Spirit, and that the Science of Spirit is distinguished from

the Science of Matter in that it contemplates Energy under an aspect of

responsive intelligence which does not fall within the scope of physical

science, as such. These are the two great points to lay hold of if we

would retain a clear idea of Spiritual Science, and not be misled by

arguments drawn from the physical side of Science only--the livingness

of the originating principle which is at the heart of all things, and

its intelligent and responsive nature. Its livingness is patent to our

observation, at any rate from the point where we recognise it in the

vegetable kingdom; but its intelligence and responsiveness are not,

perhaps, at once so obvious. Nevertheless, a little thought will soon

lead us to recognise this also.

No one can deny that there is an intelligent order throughout all

nature, for it requires the highest intelligence of our most

highly-trained minds to follow the steps of this universal intelligence

which is always in advance of them. The more deeply we investigate the

world we live in, the more clear it must become to us that all our

science is the translation into words or numerical symbols of that order

which already exists. If the clear statement of this existing order is

the highest that the human intellect can reach, this surely argues a

corresponding intelligence in the power which gives rise to this great

sequence of order and interrelation, so as to constitute one harmonious

whole. Now, unless we fall back on the idea of a workman working upon

material external to himself--in which case we have to explain the

phenomenon of the workman--the only conception we can form of this power

is that it is the Living Spirit inherent in the heart of every atom,

giving it outward form and definition, and becoming in it those

intrinsic polarities which constitute its characteristic nature.

There is no random work here. Every attraction and repulsion acts with

its proper force collecting the atoms into molecules, the molecules into

tissues, the tissues into organs, and the organs into individuals. At

each stage of the progress we get the sum of the intelligent forces

which operate in the constituent parts, _plus_ a higher degree of

intelligence which we may regard as the collective intelligence superior

to that of the mere sum-total of the parts, something which belongs to

the individual _as a whole_, and not to the parts as such. These are

facts which can be amply proved from physical science; and they also

supply a great law in spiritual science, which is that in any collective

body the intelligence of the whole is superior to that of the sum of the

parts.

Spirit is at the root of all things, and thoughtful observation shows

that its operation is guided by unfailing intelligence which adapts

means to ends, and harmonises the entire universe of manifested being in

those wonderful ways which physical science renders clearer every day;

and this intelligence must be in the generating spirit itself, because

there is no other source from which it could proceed. On these grounds,

therefore, we may distinctly affirm that Spirit is intelligent, and that

whatever it does is done by the intelligent adaptation of means to ends.

But Spirit is also responsive. And here we have to fall back upon the

law above stated, that the mere sum of the intelligence of Spirit in

lower degrees of manifestation is not equal to the intelligence of the

complex _whole_, as a whole. This is a radical law which we cannot

impress upon our minds too deeply. The degree of spiritual intelligence

is marked by the wholeness of the organism through which it finds

expression; and therefore the more highly organised being has a degree

of spirit which is superior to, and consequently capable of exercising

control over, all lower or less fully-integrated degrees of spirit; and

this being so, we can now begin to see why the spirit that is the

"innermost within" of all things is responsive as well as intelligent.

Being intelligent, it _knows_, and spirit being ultimately all there is,

that which it knows is itself. Hence it is that power which recognises

itself; and accordingly the lower powers of it recognise its higher

powers, and by the law of attraction they are bound to respond to the

higher degrees of themselves. On this general principle, therefore,

spirit, under whatever exterior revealed, is necessarily intelligent and

responsive. But intelligence and responsiveness imply personality; and

we may therefore now advance a step further and argue that _all_ spirit

contains the elements of personality, even though, in any particular

instance, it may not yet be expressed as that individual personality

which we find in ourselves.

In short, spirit is always personal in its nature, even when it has not

yet attained to that degree of synthesis which is sufficient to render

it personal in manifestation. In ourselves the synthesis has proceeded

far enough to reach that degree, and therefore we recognise ourselves as

the manifestation of personality. The human kingdom is the kingdom of

the manifestation of that personality, which is of the essence of

spiritual substance on every plane. Or, to put the whole argument in a

simpler form, we may say that our own personality must necessarily have

had its origin in that which is personal, on the principle that you

cannot get more out of a bag than it contains.

In ourselves, therefore, we find that more perfect synthesis of the

spirit into manifested personality which is wanting in the lower

kingdoms of nature, and, accordingly, since spirit is necessarily that

which knows itself and must, therefore, recognise its own degrees in its

various modes, the spirit in all degrees below that of human personality

is bound to respond to itself in that superior degree which constitutes

human individuality; and this is the basis of the power of human thought

to externalise itself in infinite forms of its own ordering.

But if the subordination of the lower degrees of spirit to the higher is

one of the fundamental laws which lie at the bottom of the creative

power of thought, there is another equally fundamental law which places

a salutary restraint upon the abuse of that power. It is the law that we

can command the powers of the universal for our own purposes only in

proportion as we first realise and obey their generic character. We can

employ water for any purpose which does not require it to run up-hill,

and we can utilise electricity for any purpose that does not require it

to pass from a lower to a higher potential.

So with that universal power which we call the Spirit. It has an

inherent generic character with which we must comply if we would employ

it for our specific purposes, and this character is summed up in the one

word "goodness." The Spirit is Life, hence its generic tendency must

always be lifeward or to the increase of the livingness of every

individual. And since it is universal it can have no particular

interests to serve, and therefore its action must always be equally for

the benefit of all. This is the generic character of spirit; and just as

water, or electricity, or any other of the physical forces of the

universe, will not work contrary to their generic character, so Spirit

will not work contrary to its generic character.

The inference is obvious. If we would use Spirit we must follow the law

of the Spirit which is "Goodness." This is the only limitation. If our

originating intention is good, we may employ the spiritual power for

what purpose we will. And how is "goodness" to be defined? Simply by the

child's definition that what is bad is not good, and that what is good

is not bad; we all know the difference between bad and good

instinctively. If we will conform to this principle of obedience to the

generic law of the Spirit, all that remains is for us to study the law

of the proportion which exists between the more and less fully

integrated modes of Spirit, and then bring our knowledge to bear with

determination.

The law of spirit, to which our investigation has now led us, is of the

very widest scope. We have followed it up from the conception of the

intelligence of spirit, subsisting in the initial atoms, to the

aggregation of this intelligence as the conscious identity of the

individual. But there is no reason why this law should cease to operate

at this point, or at any point short of the whole. The test of the

soundness of any principle is that it can operate as effectively on a