Part 2

II.

THE FOUR PILLARS OF MEDICINE.

Requisites for the practice of medicine.—Philosophy. Natural sciences. The phenomenal world. The inner temple. Truth. The four kingdoms and the four elements.—Astronomy. Mind. States of consciousness. “Stars” and constellations. The Tatwas. Sun and Moon. Thinking and the thinker.—Alchemy. What alchemy is. Quacks and pretenders. The Three Substances. The creative power. Terrestrial Alchemy. Celestial Alchemy. The Alchemy of the Astral plane.—The Virtue of the Physician. The true physician. Medical science and medical wisdom. 25

III.

THE FIVE CAUSES OF DISEASE.

Salt, Sulphur and Mercury.—The Ens astrale. The “ether”. Invisible influences. Microbes. The astral plane. Mental diseases.—Ens veneni. Poisons and impurities. Disharmonies, sympathies and antipathies in chemistry. A chemical romance. Sexual impurity. Promiscuous intercourse. Nutriment. Correspondencies between spiritual powers and physical forces.—Ens naturæ. The macrocosm and microcosm. Two beings in one man. Terrestrial and the celestial nature. Generation and incarnation. Heredity. Relationship between internal organs.—Ens spirituale. Consciousness. Spirit and soul. The thought-body. Re-incarnation. Will. Imagination. Arcana. Memory. The astral light.—Ens Dei. God Karma. Science and art. 50

IV.

THE FIVE CLASSES OF PHYSICIANS.

Five classes.—Naturales. Therapeutics. Earth. Water. Air. Fire. Ether; the one element.—Specifici. Empiricism. The chemistry of life. Principles of light and colour. The astral man.—Characterales. Emotions. Hypnotism. Suggestion. Spiritual powers.—Spirituales. Magic.—Fideles. The power of faith. 74

THE MEDICINE OF THE FUTURE.

Ancient and modern quackery. Science and wisdom. Spirituality and substantiality. Development. Self-control. Realism and idealism. The realization of the ideal. The physician of the future. Self-knowledge. The true life. The awakening of the soul. Phenomena and noumena. The higher science. Material and spiritual evolution. Intellectuality and spirituality. Periodicity. Circular motion and spiral progress. The self-recognition of truth. 86

INTRODUCTION.

“There are two kinds of knowledge. There is a medical science and there is a medical wisdom. To the animal man belongs the animal comprehension; but the understanding of divine mysteries belongs to the spirit of God in him.” (Theophrastus Paracelsus, “De Fundamento Sapientiæ.”)

A great deal has been written in modern books on pathology about the difficulty of defining the word “disease.” The dictionary calls it “lack or absence of ease, pain, uneasiness, distress, trial, trouble,” &c., but against either of these definitions objections may be raised. James Paget says: “Ease and disease, well and ill, and all their synonyms are relative terms, of which none can be fixed unconditionally. If there could be fixed a standard of health, all deviations from it might be called diseases; but a chief characteristic of living bodies is not fixity, but variation by self-adjustment to a wide range of varying circumstances, and among such self-adjustments it is not practicable to make a line separating those which may reasonably be called healthy from those which may as reasonably be called disease.”

To this occult science answers that such a standard of health exists for us as soon as we recognise the unity and supremacy of the law; that the results of obedience to the law are harmony and health, and the results of disobedience are called discords or disease.

Shakespeare says:—

“The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre Observe degree, priority and place, Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, Office, and custom, in all line of order.” —(Troilus and Cressida, i. 3.)

If we regard the order, which “is Heaven’s first law,” as the creation of the self-adjustment of accidentally arising circumstances, leaving out of consideration the fundamental Unity of the All and its one purpose, we would then probably find various laws of order in the universe, being essentially different from each other; and it would be difficult to know which of these laws it would be best to follow; but if we recognise in the order that rules all things a manifestation of one eternal law of order and harmony, the function of Supreme Wisdom acting in nature but not being the product of nature, it will remain for us only to know that supreme Law and obey it. The universe is only one, and is ruled by only one source of all laws; but there are many unities within the constitution of this great Unity; they constitute as many selves within Self, whose separate interests are not identical with that of the whole, and therefore the order obeyed by these temporary selves is not the same as that of the eternal whole. Thus the battle for existence, far from being the cause of the order observable in the world, is in fact the cause of the disorder existing therein.

If man, like his divine prototype, were a perfect unity, a manifestation of will and thought identified and one, there would be only one law to obey: the law of his divine nature; he would be forever in harmony with himself; there would be no disharmonious elements in his nature, seeking to create an order of their own, and thereby causing discords and disease; but man is a compound being, there are many elements in his nature, each representing to a certain extent an independent form of will, and the more one of these modifications of will succeeds in departing from the order that constitutes the whole, and to enact, be it intelligently or instinctively, a will of its own, the greater will be the disharmony which it causes within the whole organism and the greater will be the disease. “A house divided against itself will fall.” Disease is the disharmony which follows the disobedience to the law; the restoration consists in restoring the harmony by a return to obedience to the law of order which governs the whole.

The key to the cure of diseases is therefore in the understanding of the fundamental law which governs the nature of man, and for this purpose it is necessary that a rational system of medicine should know the constitution of man; not only that of his physical body, which is merely the lower part of the house wherein he dwells; but the whole physical, astral and mental constitution of that being called “Man,” which is still the greatest mystery to science, and of which little more than the anatomy, the physiological functions and the chemical composition of the material organs and substances composing his corporeal form is either known to or taught by our modern academies.

Great progress has been made by modern science in investigating all the minor details of the shell which man occupies during his life upon this planet; but as regards the inhabitant of that house, the inner man, who is neither wholly material nor wholly spiritual, the ancient sages knew more about his true nature than is ever dreamed of in our medical schools, and it will be undoubtedly worth while to examine their views. Moreover, if the outward body of man is, as they teach, only the outward expression of the qualities and functions of a more interior and invisible human organism; then it appears that many bodily diseases, such as are not caused by direct physical injuries, are the results of disorders existing within that inner organism, and as every true physician should seek to know the causes of diseases, and not merely destroy their external effects, such a knowledge of the “causal body” of man, whose visible image is his “phenomenal form,” may open a new field for pathology and therapeutics, from which a rich harvest may be gathered for the benefit of mankind.

THE CONSTITUTION OF MAN.

From times immemorial the sages have taught that we shall never know immortal truth, if we do not discover it within our own selves. Experience has long ago corroborated this theory, for in spite of all progress in scientific researches concerning the nature of Man, and which were carried on by means of researches in the external kingdom of nature, the real constitution of Man and that which constitutes his essential being has not yet been discovered. We know that from the ovum the fœtus, from the fœtus the child, from the child the body of man becomes developed; we know the order in which these processes take place; but we seem to know nothing about the powers that produce them. Such an alchemical trick of nature as to make a man grow out of a cell in which no man is contained would seem absurd, incredible and miraculous, and would be believed by nobody, if it were not a well-known fact, and being of daily occurrence it has ceased to appear surprising, so that it appears now strange if anyone wonders how such a thing is possible.

Horne says: “By a silent, unseen, mysterious process, the fairest flower of the garden springs from a small insignificant seed.” A similar mysterious process takes place in the evolution of the human body. All these processes are evidently the effects of the action of a cause adequate to produce them; to deny this would be identical with affirming the self-evident absurdity, that something could grow out of nothing, and the law of logic furthermore makes it clear that although a physical cause can produce a physical effect, a living body can only be produced by a living power, an intellectual organism by an intelligent being. Whether or not the animal body of man has evoluted from the lower animal kingdom, or whether certain animals are the products of a perversion and degradation of the nature of man, does not concern us at present. What we know is, that no life and intelligence can become manifest in a form unless these powers are contained therein, and we also know that life cannot be created by death nor can intelligence be created by that which has no intelligence.

But if popular science confessedly knows nothing about the origin of the manifestation of life, nothing about what is vaguely termed “soul,” nothing about the nature and origin of the mind (whose functions are required for the purpose of enabling the brain to investigate such things) nothing about the spirit and nothing about the higher constitution of man, whose external expression and symbol is his physical body; it will not be inappropriate to apply to other sources for information and hear what the ancient sages taught concerning the principles that go to make up the constitution of man. The first requisite of a rational and perfect system of a medicine is a thorough knowledge of the whole constitution of man; of the whole, and not merely of a part of his nature.

The ancient Indian sages compared man to a lotus flower, whose home is the water (the world), whose roots draw their nutriment from the earth (material nature), while it raises its head to the light (the spiritual kingdom), from which it receives the power to unfold the powers latent in its constitution.

A great deal has already been said in Theosophical literature about the sevenfold constitution of man: but for the sake of completeness we will delineate it again.

1. Rupa. The physical body, the vehicle of all the other “principles” during life.