Says Henry More, the revered English Platonist, in his answer to an attack on the believers of spiritual and magic phenomena by a skeptic of that age, named Webster: “As for that other opinion, that the
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greater part of the reformed divines hold, that it was the Devil that appeared in Samuel’s shape, it is beneath contempt; for though I do not doubt but that in many of these necromantic apparitions, they are ludicrous spirits, not the souls of the deceased that appear, yet I am clear for the appearing of the soul of Samuel, and as clear that in other necromancies, it may be such kinds of spirits, as Porphyrius above describes, ‘that change themselves into omnifarious forms and shapes, and one while act the parts of daemons, another while of angels or gods, and another while of the souls of the departed.
‘ And I confess such a spirit as this might personate Samuel here, for anything Webster alleged to the contrary, for his arguments indeed are wonderfully weak and wooden.”
When such a metaphysician and philosopher as Henry More gives such testimony as this, we may well assume our point to have been well taken. Learned investigators, all very skeptical as to spirits in general and “departed human spirits” in particular, during the last twenty years have taxed their brains to invent new names for an old thing. Thus, with Mr. Crookes and Sergeant Cox, it is the “psychic force.” Professor Thury of Geneva calls it the “psychode” or ectenic force; Professor Balfour Stewart, the “electro-biological power”; Faraday, the “great master of experimental philosophy in physics,” but apparently a novice in psychology, superciliously termed it an “unconscious muscular action,” an “unconscious cerebration,” and what not? Sir William Hamilton, a “latent thought”; Dr. Carpenter, “the ideo-motor principle,” etc., etc. So many scientists — so many names.
Years ago the old German philosopher, Schopenhauer, disposed of this force and matter at the same time; and since the conversion of Mr. Wallace, the great anthropologist has evidently adopted his ideas. Schopenhauer’s doctrine is that the universe is but the manifestation of the will. Every force in nature is also an effect of will, representing a higher or lower degree of its objectiveness. It is the teaching of Plato, who stated distinctly that everything visible was created or evolved out of the invisible and eternal WILL, and after its fashion. Our Heaven — he says — was produced according to the eternal pattern of the “Ideal World,” contained, as everything else, in the dodecahedron, the geometrical model used by the Deity. With Plato, the Primal Being is an emanation of the Demiurgic Mind (Nous), which contains from the eternity the “idea” of the “to be created world” within itself, and which idea he produces out of himself.The laws of nature are the established relations of this idea to the forms of its manifestations; “these
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forms,” says Schopenhauer, “are time, space, and causality. Through time and space the idea varies in its numberless manifestations.”
These ideas are far from being new, and even with Plato they were not original. This is what we read in the Chaldean Oracles:”The works of nature co-exist with the intellectual [[noerio]], spiritual Light of the Father. For it is the soul [[psuche]] which adorned the great heaven, and which adorns it after the Father.”
“The incorporeal world then was already completed, having its seat in the Divine Reason,” says Philo who is erroneously accused of deriving his philosophy from Plato’s.
In the Theogony of Mochus, we find AEther first, and then the air; the two principles from which Ulom, the intelligible [[noetos]] God (the visible universe of matter) is born.
In the Orphic hymns, the Eros-Phanes evolves from the Spiritual Egg, which the AEthereal winds impregnate, Wind being “the spirit of God,” who is said to move in AEther, “brooding over the Chaos” — the Divine “Idea.” In the Hindu Katakopanisad, Purusha, the Divine Spirit, already stands before the original matter, from whose union springs the great Soul of the World, “Maha =Atma, Brahm, the Spirit of Life”;these latter appellations are identical with the Universal Soul, or Anima Mundi, and the Astral Light of the theurgists and kabalists.
Moe is the founder of GnosticWarrior.com. He is a father, husband, author, martial arts black belt, and an expert in Gnosticism, the occult, and esotericism.
