The Law and the Word by Thomas Troward

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If then we posit this impersonal Soul of the Universe as the living
principle dwelling in the substance of the etheric Universal Medium it
will account for a good many things. If it be asked why we should assume
the presence of a living principle in the Universal Substance the answer
is in the maxim "Quod ex Vivo Vivum," what proceeds from Life is living.
Then as we see by our diagram, Anima Mundi equally with Animus Dei
proceeds from the original Substantive of Life, and therefore, on the
principle of the above maxim, that like produces like, Anima Mundi must
also be a living thing whose vehicle is the Universal Substance.

We may picture then, the response of the indwelling Soul of the
Universal Medium to our Thought, as starting corresponding vibrations in
the Substance of the Medium, just as our own thought, acting through the
vibratory system of our nerves, causes our body to make the movement we
intend. But perhaps you will say: How can this be, seeing that by the
hypothesis the Soul of the Universe is Impersonal, and therefore
unintelligent? Well, it is just this fact of having no thought of its
own, that enables us to impress our thought upon it and cause it, so to
say, to "take on" an intelligence relatively to the subject of our
thought, much in the same way that the impersonal soul in the human
subject "takes on" or reflects the thought of the hypnotist, and not
infrequently develops it to a far greater extent than the original
thought of the operator expressed. Such a hypothesis--and I think some
such hypothesis is needed to account for any creation at all--throws
light on the _modus operandi_ of the Bible Promises. We plant the Word
of the Promise in the womb of Anima Mundi, and if we do not uproot it by
using the same power adversely, it is bound to come to fruition in due
course, by the same Law by which the world-systems are formed; and if we
are to believe that the Word of the Promise is not our own word, but the
Word of God, then our Thought of it is imbued with a corresponding power
as we hand it over to Anima Mundi. Thus the Promises fulfil themselves
automatically, in accordance with the principles of the relations
between Law and Personality, and they do so, _not in our own power_, but
by the Power of the Word of God.

This, then, gives us at least an intelligible working hypothesis of the
rationale of the Bible Promises. The measurement of their fulfilment is
exactly proportional to our belief in them, not from any unintelligible
cause, and still less from any unreasoning feat of a capricious Deity,
but by the working of an intelligible Law. If any of my readers happens
to be an electrician, he will find an exact parallel in what is known as
Ohm's Law. Such readers will be familiar with the formula C = E/R, but
for the benefit of those to whom this formula may be unintelligible, I
will give a few words of explanation. C means the current of electricity
which is to be delivered for any work that is to be done. E stands for
the Electro-motive force which generates the current; and R is the
Resistance offered to the current by the conductor, such as the wires
through which it flows. If there be no resistance, the full amount of
current generated would be delivered. But without any conductor no
current could be delivered, and therefore there must be _some_
resistance, and so the full power of the Electro-motive force can never
be delivered by the Current. The amount that will be delivered is the
original power of the Electro-motive force divided by the Resistance.
The Resistance therefore acts as a restricting force, limiting the
extent to which the power of the original Electro-motive force shall be
delivered at the point where the work is to be done, but at the same
time no delivery at that point could be effected without it; so the
Resistance also has a necessary part to play in the working of the
circuit. Now if we want to translate the formula C = E/R into terms of
spiritual force we may put it thus: E stands for the limitless Potential
of the Eternal Spirit; C stands for the current flowing from it; and R
stands for the localizing quality of our thought. We cannot entirely
dispense with this localizing quality, for our whole purpose is to
transmute the _unlimited_, undifferentiated power, which subsists in the
Eternal Substantive of Spirit, into a particular differentiated mode of
action, which therefore implies a corresponding centralization. This is
the proper function of our thought. It is this compressing power which,
as I said above, the Hebrew renders by the word "_hoshech_" in the
opening verses of Genesis, and which is the necessary complementary to
the converse expanding power or "_rouah_." It takes the co-operation of
the two to produce any results.

Restricted, then, to its proper function our R or condensing quality is
an essential factor in the work. But if it be allowed to take the form
of doubt or unbelief, then it renders the flow of the current from the
Spirit ineffective to the extent to which the doubt is entertained; and
if doubt be allowed to degenerate into total unbelief and denial of the
Power of the Spirit, we thereby cancel the originating force altogether.
To put it in terms of the electrical formula, we make R greater than E,
in which case no current can flow. We thus find that the words
"According to your faith be it unto you" are actually the statement of a
Mathematical Law, having nothing vague about them. This may be a
somewhat original application of Ohm's Law, but the parallel is so
exact, that I cannot help thinking it will appeal to some of my readers
who may be conversant with Electrical Science. For those who are not, a
simpler simile may be, that you cannot deliver a more powerful stream of
water than the bore of the pipe through which it flows will admit of;
or, to employ a legal truism, delivery on the part of the donor must be
met by acceptance on the part of the donee before a deed of gift can
become operative; or, in still simpler language, "you may take a horse
to the water but you can't make him drink."

We see, then, that there is a Law of Faith, and that Faith is not a
denial of the universal reign of Law, but the perception of its widest
generalization, and therefore giving scope to its highest
specialization. The opposition between Faith and Law, of which St. Paul
so often speaks, is the opposition between this broad view of the
ultimate Principle of the Creative Law and that narrower view of
restriction by particular laws, which prevents us from grasping the Law
of Faith; but that he does not deny the _Principle_ of Law, that is the
relation between C and E, is clear from his own statement in Rom. viii,
where he says: "The Law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus sets me
free from the law of Sin and Death;" in other words: the Law of the Good
sets us free from the Law of Evil; and for the same reason St. James
says, that the perfect law is the law, of Liberty (Jas. i, 25).

Of course if we suppose that faith is something contrary to the law of
the Universe we at once import into our thought the negative quality
which entirely vitiates our action. We rightly perceive that the laws of
the Universe can never be altered, and if our notion of Faith be, that
it is an attempt to work in contradiction to these laws, the best
definition we can give it is that given by the little girl in the
Sunday school, who said that "Faith is trying to make yourself believe
what you know is not true." The reason for such a misconception is, that
it entirely omits one of the factors in the calculation. It considers,
only the Law, and gives no place to the Word in the scheme of things.
Yet we do not carry this misconception into the sciences of chemistry
and electricity. We take the immutability of the Law as the basis of
these sciences, but we do not expect the immutable Law to produce a
photographic apparatus, or an electric train, without the intervention
of a reasoning and selective power which specializes the fundamental
general Law into particular uses. We do not look to the Law for those
powers of reasoning and selection, through which we make it work in all
the highly complex ways of our ordinary commercial applications of
it--we know better than that. We look to Personality for this. In our
every-day pursuits we always act on the maxim that "Nature unaided
fails," and that the infinite possibilities stored up in the Law, can
only be brought to light by a power of reasoning and selection working
through the Law. This co-operation of the Personal with the Impersonal
is the Law _of_ the Law; and since the Law is unchangeable, this Law
_of_ the Law must also be unchangeable, and must therefore apply on all
planes, and through all time--the Law, that without co-operation of the
Law and the Word nothing can be brought into existence, from a solar
system to a pin; while on the other hand there is no limit to what can
be got out of the Law by the operation of the Word.

If the student will look at the Bible Promises in the light of the
general principles, he will find that they are perfectly logical,
whether from the metaphysical or from the scientific standpoint, and
that their working is only from the same Law through which all
scientific developments are made. If this be apprehended it will be
clear that the Word of Faith is not "trying to make ourselves believe
what we know is not true," but, as St. Paul puts it, it is "giving
substance to things not yet seen" (Heb. xi, 1, R.V.).

CHAPTER VII

DEATH AND IMMORTALITY

I think most of my readers will agree with me, that the greatest of all
the promises is that of the overcoming of death, for, as the greater
includes the less, the power which can do _that_ can do anything else.
We think that there are only two things that are certain in this
world--death and taxes, and no doubt, under the ordinary past
conditions, this is quite true; but the question is: are they really
inherent in the essential nature of things; or are they not the outcome
of our past limited, and often inverted modes of Thought? The teaching
of the Bible is that they are the latter. On the subject of taxes the
Master says: "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" (Matth.
xxii, 21), but on another occasion he said that the children of the King
were not liable to taxation (Matth. xvii, 26). However we may leave the
"taxes" alone for the present, with the remark that their resemblance to
death consists in both being, under present conditions, regarded as
compulsory. Under other conditions, however, we can well imagine "taxes"
disappearing in a unity of thought which would merge them in
co-operation and voluntary contribution; and it appears to me quite
possible for death to disappear in like manner.

In whatever way we may interpret the story of Eden, whether literally,
or if, like some of the Fathers of the church such as Origen, we take it
as an allegory, the result is the same--that Death is not in the essence
of man's creation, but supervened as the consequence of an inverted mode
of thinking. The Creative Spirit thought one way, and Eve thought
another; and since the Thought of the Creating Spirit is the origin of
Life, this difference of opinion naturally resulted in death. Then, from
this starting-point, all the rest of the Bible is devoted to getting rid
of this difference of opinion between us and the Spirit of Life, and
showing us that the Spirit's opinion is truer than ours, and so leading
us to adopt it as our own. The whole thing turns on the obvious
proposition, that if you invert the cause you also invert the effect. It
is the principle that division is the inversion of multiplication, so
that if 2 x 2 = 4 then you cannot escape from the consequence that 4/2 =
2. The question then is, which of the two opinions is the more
reasonable--that death is essentially inherent in the nature of things,
or that it is not?

Probably ninety-nine out of a hundred readers will say, the whole
experience of mankind from the earliest ages proves that Death is the
unchangeable Law of the Universe, and there have been no exceptions. I
am not quite sure that I should altogether agree with them on this last
point; but putting that aside, let us consider whether it really is the
essential Law of the Universe. To say that this is proved by the past
experience of the race, is what logicians call a _petitio principii_--it
is assuming the whole point at issue. It is the same argument which our
grandfathers would have used against aerial navigation--no one had ever
travelled in the air, and that proved that no one ever could. My father,
who was a junior officer in India when the first railway was run in
England, used to tell a story of one of his senior officers, who, on
being asked what he thought of the rapidity of the new mode of
travelling, said he thought it was "all a damned lie," which opinion
appeared to him to settle the whole question. But I hope that none of my
readers will hold the same opinion regarding the overcoming of death,
even though they might express it in more polite language. At any rate
it may be worth while to examine the theoretical possibility of the
idea.

To begin with, it involves a self-contradiction to say that the energy
of any force can stop the working of that force. If a force stops
working, it is for one of two reasons, either that the supply of it is
exhausted, or that it is overcome by an opposite and neutralizing force.
But we have seen that the Originating Cause of all things can only be an
inexhaustible Power of Life, and therefore the hypothesis of it becoming
exhausted is eliminated; and similarly, since all the forces of the
Universe proceed from this Source, it is impossible for any of them to
have a nature diametrically opposite to that of the source from which
they flow. So the alternative must be eliminated also. Accordingly, the
outflow, undifferentiated, of Life and Energy from the Eternal
Substantive of Spirit, is never stopped _by its own current_ in any of
its differentiated streams; it is impossible for a current to be
stopped by its own flow, whether it be a current of electricity, steam,
water, or anything else. What then does stop the flow of any sort of
current? It is the Resistance or _inertia_ of the channel through which
it flows; so that we come back to the formula of Ohm's Law, C = E/R as a
general proposition applicable to any conceivable sort of energy.

The neutralizing power then, is not that of the flowing of any sort of
energy, but the rigidity, or inertia of the medium through which the
energy has to make its way; thus bringing us back to _rouah_ and
_hoshech_, the expansive and compressive principles of the opening
verses of Genesis. It is the broad scientific generalization of the
opposition between Ertia, or Energy, and Inertia, or Absence of Energy;
and since, for the reasons just given, Ertia cannot go against itself,
the only thing that can stop it is Inertia.

Now the components of the human body are simply various chemical
elements--so much carbon, so much hydrogen, etc., as any textbook on the
subject will tell you; and although, of course, every sort of substance
is the abode of ceaseless _atomic_ energy, we all recognize that merely
atomic energy is not that of the powers of thought, will, and
perception, which make us organized mentalities instead of a mere
aggregation of the various substances exposed to view in a biological
museum, as constituting the human body--you might take all these
substances in their proper proportions, and shake them up together, but
you would not make an intelligent man of them. We are therefore safe in
saying that the physiological body represents the principle of inertia
in us, while the something that thinks in us represents the principle of
Ertia.

The balance of power between the Life Principle in us and the Death
Principle, is then, necessarily, a question of the balance between these
two, the spirit and the flesh, or ertia and inertia.

Why then does the balance preponderate to the life-side for a certain
length of time, and then go over to the opposite side?

Now this brings us to the distinction which the old writers drew,
between the "Vital Soul" of any living thing and the Spirit. Their
conception of the "Vital Soul" was very much the same as I have set
forth in the chapter on "The Soul of the Subject." It is the
individual's particular share of the Cosmic Soul or Anima Mundi, whether
it be an individual tree, or an individual person; and the ordinary
maximum length of time, during which the Vital Soul will be able to
overcome the inertia of its physical vehicle, depends upon the
particular class to which the individual belongs. What the ordinary
maximum is in regard to any species is a matter of experience, and it is
in this way that we have fixed the usual limit of human life at
three-score years and ten.

Now it is here that we shall begin to profit by some knowledge about the
invisible part of ourselves. The actual molecules of our body, as I have
just said, are only so much dead matter. This inert material is pulled
about in various directions by strings which we call muscles, according
to the movements we wish our bodies to make, and these muscles are set
in motion by the vibrations of the nerves.[4] But what is it that
occasions these vibrations of the nerves? Here we begin to pass beyond
the limits of official Science, though not beyond the limits of
recognizable Law. We have to recognize the existence of an etheric body
acting as an intermediary between intention, desire, or (in the case of
human beings) thought of the soul and the physical vibrations of the
nerves. This is why, in an earlier chapter, I have drawn attention to
our power of sending out etheric vibrations beyond the limits of the
physical body, as in the case of De Rocha's experiments. Such
experiments show that there is in us something not composed of dense
matter, which is able to convey vibrations to dense matter; and it is
this something which we speak of as the etheric body.

But if we wish to trace the links by which our thought operates upon the
physical body, we find ourselves compelled to postulate yet another
intermediary, what I have spoken of as the "Vital Soul"--a vehicle which
does not _consciously think_, but in which what we may call
race-consciousness becomes centred in the individual. This
race-consciousness is none other than the ever-present "will-to-live"
which is the basis of physical evolution--that automatically acting
principle--which causes plants to turn towards the sun, animals to seek
their proper food, and both animals and men to try instantly to escape
from immediate danger. It is what we call instinct which does not
reason. I may give a laughable experience of my own to illustrate the
fact that conscious reason is not the method of this faculty. Once when
on leave from India I was walking along a street in London in the heat
of a summer's day and suddenly noticed just at my feet a long dark thing
apparently wriggling across the white glare of the pavement. "Snake!" I
exclaimed, and jumped aside for all I was worth, and the next moment was
laughing at myself for not recollecting that cobras were not common
objects in the London streets. But it looked just like one, and of
course turned out to be nothing but a piece of rag. Well, instinct did
its duty even if it did make a fool of me; but there is certainly no
conscious reasoning in the matter, only the automatic action of inherent
Law--"Self-preservation is the first law of Nature."

This Vital Soul, then, is the seat of all those instincts which go
towards the preservation of the individual's physical body, and towards
the propagation of the race; and it is on this account that our
theosophical friends call it the "Desire Body" or, to use the Indian
term "Kama rupa." It acts with conscious intention, but not with
conscious _reasoning_. It is thus distinguished on the one hand from the
etheric body, which is a mere vehicle for finer vibrations than can take
place in the denser matter of the physical body, but which has _no
intention_; and on the other from the _mind_ which acts by conscious
reasoning, and it thus forms an intermediary between the two.

The importance of recognizing the place of this higher intermediary in
the ascending scale of living principle is, that for all practical
purposes the animal world does not rise higher than this in the scale.
It is true that in particular instances we find the first dawning of the
mental faculty in an animal, but it is only very faint; so this does not
affect the broad general principle. The point to be noted is that up to
this stage human beings are built on the same lines as animals, and what
distinguishes us, is the addition in ourselves of a higher factor,--that
of the reasoning mind exercising the power of conscious thought.

Now it is the direction of this thought that influences the three lower
factors. The sequence, going upwards, is as follows:--movement is
communicated to the physical body by the etheric body; and movement is
communicated to the etheric body by the Vital Soul; then, in proportion
as the purely instinctive action of the Vital Soul is controlled by the
conscious thought, so its action upon the two lowest principles is
modified.

Here, then, is the crucial point. In what direction is the conscious
thought going to modify the action of the three principles that are
below it? If it takes the soul of mere racial desire and the physical
body as its standard of thought, then it naturally follows that it
cannot raise it any higher. It has descended to _their_ level and so
cannot pour any stream of life into it, on the simple principle that no
current can ever flow from a lower to a higher level, whether the
difference in level be that of actual elevation, as in the case of
water, or different in potential, as in the case of electricity. On the
other hand if the conscious mind recognizes that itself proceeds from
some higher source, it looks to receive life from that source, and its
thought is modified accordingly, and in turn re-acts correspondingly
upon the lower principles.

If this is clear to the student, he will now see how it is that by
limiting our conception of life to the current ideas entertained by the
race, we impress these ideas on our three lower principles. It is true
that these three principles are not capable of reasoning themselves, but
the highest of them, the Vital Soul, has its action modified by the
reasoning principle above it, and so communicates to the two lowest
principles corresponding waves of vibration. And in this connection we
must remember the distinction between the two systems of nerves; the
voluntary system connected with the brain and forming the medium of all
voluntary action, and the involuntary, or sympathetic system connected
with the solar plexus and controlling all the automatic actions of the
body, and thus being the agent of that continual renewal of the physical
organism which is always going on, and keeps in existence for a life
time a body which begins to disintegrate immediately the soul has left
it.[5] Now it is through this inner Builder of the Body that our Thought
re-acts upon our physical organism. The response is purely automatic,
for the simple reason that there is no original thinking power in the
three lower principles; the action is that of the Law as directed by
Thought or Word.

In this way then, it appears to me, the Personal in us acts upon the
Impersonal in us; and if we assume, as I think we may, that this action
takes place by means of etheric waves, we have, on general scientific
principles, a clue to what we read in the Bible about the transmutation
of the body. The theory of the constitution of the atom shows us that
its nature is determined by the number of its particles and their rate
of revolution, and that a change in the rate of revolution results in
the throwing off of some of the particles. Then the number of particles
being altered, there results a change in the distribution of the
positive and negative charges within the sphere of the atom, since they
must always exactly balance one another; and this change in the
distribution of the positive and negative charges must instantly result
in a corresponding change in the geometrical configuration of particles
constituting the atom.

That the particles automatically arrange themselves into groups of
different geometrical form within the sphere of the atom, has been
demonstrated both mathematically and experimentally by Professor J.J.
Thompson,[6] these geometrical forms resulting of course from the
balance of attraction and repulsion between the positive and negative
charges of the particles.

That the transmutation of one substance into another is not a mere dream
of the mediaeval alchemists is now already shown by Modern Science. Under
suitable conditions an atom of Radium breaks down into atoms of another
sort known as Radium Emanations, and these again break down into yet
another sort of atoms to which the name of Radium Emanations X has been
given, while Radium Emanation also gives rise to the atom of Helium
(N.K. 124). Thorium also behaves in the same manner, transmuting into
atoms called Thorium X, which again change into atoms of another sort to
which the name of Thorium Emanations has been given and these in turn
transmute into atoms of yet another kind, known as Thorium Emanations X.
The same is the case also with Uranium which, however, so far as is yet
known, undergoes only one transmutation into what is known as Uranium X.

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