I Am the I Am, the Hebrew God, is supposed by Christians to be the First Cause, but the assumption of a first cause is quite unnecessary, and further, if you postulate a creative god, some impertinent person might ask you who made God. It is just as well to start with matter, in which mind and energy are inherent, which is eternal, infinite, immortal, self-existent and sustaining, requiring no supreme power as a basis or background, as set forth in the Sankhya System of the Hindus. See Phil. & Relig. of India, 55.

The attraction or love of one mass of matter for another is the energy. It is that love that creates all forms. The atoms go a-chasing after other atoms, even as you and I. There can be no attraction without mind. Anaxagoras and Empedocles believed in a dualism of mind and matter. The latter says: “The periods of the formation of the world depend upon the alternate prevalence of love and hate. During certain periods all heterogeneous atoms are separated from each other by hate, during others they are everywhere united by love.”

Haeckel says: “These three fundamental attributes, matter, force and sensation, are found inseparably united throughout the whole universe in every atom and every molecule.”

Edgar Allan Poe says: “That which is not matter is not at all. The ultimate unparticled matter not only permeates all things but impels all things. This matter is God. What men attempt to embody in the word ‘thought’ is this matter in motion. The unparticled matter, or God, in quiescence is what men call mind. The motion of the unparticled matter is the universal thought of the universal mind. This thought creates. All things are but the thought of God. For new individualities gross matter is necessary. To create individual, thinking beings, it was necessary to incarnate portions of the Divine Mind. Thus man is individualized. Divested of corporate investiture, he were God.”

According to the Ionic philosophy matter is by nature endowed with life, and life is inseparably connected with matter.—Ueberweg’s Hist. of Philosophy, 1-32.

It is said that in the beginning a male electron or spirit, or purusha, or soul, from the spirit principle of the universe, becoming involved in the material ether, formed a vortex, about which the female or material electrons of the ether revolved, thus producing an atom, the basis of all visible forms. The electron attracts the particles of matter in the ether as a magnet attracts steel. The electrons are called units of electricity, and there are perhaps a thousand in an atom. The space between these ions is comparatively as great as the space between the planets of our solar system. Leucippus, of Abdera, says that souls are round atoms.

The religious claim that the Divine Thought or Word originated the vortex movement. As John did not care to proclaim that his god was Ling, which he had stolen from the Hindus, he called it the Word, another meaning of Ling, from Ling comes linguist. Word is the exoteric meaning designed for fools, and the other is the esoteric or hidden meaning known only to the initiates. I think that the Christians are in error in claiming John’s god as their own, but amid such a flock of gods the confusion is not surprising.

“New Light has arisen, coming from Heaven, it assumed a mortal form. Virgin receive God in thy bosom, and the Word flew into the womb. Becoming incarnate in time, and animated by her body, it was found in mortal image, and a boy was created.”—Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, 17. Christna or the Word, the Hindu savior, like Christ was a shepherd, and he became entangled with the shepherdesses. He was born in the cave of Venus, as all Simon-pure christs have to be, and King Kamsa, in seeking to kill him, ordered the destruction of all male infants. He also had two fathers, God and Vasu Deva, the Earth god or Joseb. He and the god Vishnu were one.—Phil. & Relig. of India, 278.

The Hindus claim that the akasa or astral light, or Brahma, (electricity) originated the vortex movement that formed the atoms. Akasa is the source of life, the reservoir of all energy, the all-directing and omnipotent god. It was the indispensable agent of every magical performance, and the Brahmans said that they had to stir up Brahma in order to perform a trick in magic to delude their devotees. Madam Blavatsky says: “As God creates so can man create. By the action of the will power on the atoms he can call objective forms into being. The atoms are like automatic workmen moved by the influx of the will directed upon them.” “Every motion we make, every word we utter gives an impulse to the ether and thus creates atoms.”—Edgar Allan Poe.

Aristotle says: “The world always was and always will be. The ether fills the celestial spaces, and of it the spheres and stars are formed.” The atoms combine to form molecules, and these, being attracted together, form the gases of which nebulae are composed. These nebulae follow the same circular movement that prevails in the atoms, and the result of this movement is a solar system, the nucleus of which becomes the sun. The rings that separate from the main body in this revolution eventually break up and form planets. When these planets cool, we find all the atomic souls either in the water or imprisoned in the rocks or in the central fire. The sea beats up against the rocks, and the rains descend upon and disintegrate them and thus release the souls that were imprisoned there in the process of involution. Now they commence to evolve toward what the egotistic have termed man’s high estate.

Yogi Ramacharaka says: “The Yogi teaching informs us that even in the molten mass there were elementary forms that were to become the ancestral forms of the later living beings. From these elementary forms there gradually evolved, as the earth cooled and solidified, other forms, and so on until at last the first living form manifested. The lowest forms of what we call life were evolved from forms of crystal life, which indeed they very much resemble.”

Haeckel, the world’s greatest scientist, says: “Man descends immediately from the ape, and secondarily from a long line of lower vertebrates back to the Silurian fishes. The lowest man appeared on the earth about three million years ago.”—Riddle of the Universe, 82. Anaximander, of Miletus, says: “Living beings arose by gradual development out of the elementary moisture under the influence of heat. We land animals had in the beginning the form of fishes.”—Ueberweg, 1:35.

The atoms combining by their own desire and will formed a molecule, and the molecules by their own volition combined to form a life cell, our earliest ancestor, a minute, animate mass of protoplasm, the lowest form of animal life, born in the slum of the ocean bed millions of years ago. Myriads of these life cells form the human body. Each cell is a distinct individual, having brain, mind and soul. Haeckel says that the primordial living substance is plasm. We can live only by eating other living beings or plasm, that is, by cannibalism. Plants create living plasm out of alleged non-living matter, they form carbo-hydrates, and from these form plasm by a combination with water, carbolic acid, ammonia and nitric acid. We claim to have souls, but deny them to the plants, the divine creators whose chemical laboratories, the cells, are beyond human comprehension.

The cells arrange themselves in the embryo in the form of a human being by their own will. “They use the materials which are at hand, fabricating organs for themselves by instinct, and in the appointed hour are born in the shape which they have formed for themselves.”—Enoch, ch. 14. The human embryo in its development passes through all the forms through which the race has struggled in its evolution from stone, through the primordial cell, the worm, the fish, the saurian and gorilla. In the last stage, that of the gorilla, the embryo is entirely covered with hair like our beloved ancestors, and sometimes development is arrested at this point and a hairy child is born occasionally with a tail.

The scientists have discovered in the cell body a god more potent than any known deity and have named it centrosome. It is a being of stellar form, located just above the nucleus or nerve centre of the cell. It is a creator whose magic far excels the feats of gods or men. It divides one living being into two, splitting the brain and the body of the cell in halves in such a manner that the two individuals produced are the exact duplicates of the parent cell in form and character. The cell brain matter, called cromatin, is composed of strings of very minute granules, termed cromosome, which are supposed to contain all the hereditary traits. The division of each one of these cromosomes into equal halves gives to the individuals produced a similar character. The centrosome is one in the beginning, but before dividing the cell it divides itself into two persons, so that one of the centrosomes may accompany each of the two cells. Each centrosome seizes one half of the brain of the parent cell thus divided and draws it to one side of the cell to form the nucleus of one of the new cells. Then the whole body of the cell is divided in the centre.—Story of the Living Machine, 100. When the centrosome divides the cell, two cells are produced capable of reproducing themselves in like manner. Prof. A. Dastre says that “under suitable circumstances the lowest animated forms are immortal.”

Our soul is formed by the combination of the souls of the two germ cells from which the embryo originated. We existed in our parents prior to our advent here and in all of our ancestors for 500,000,000 years back, more or less. The conscious matter that constitutes me, the cromatin, existed in every one of my ancestors since we were washed out of the igneous rocks or spawned in the ocean depths. Jack London says: “I did not begin when I was born. I have been growing, developing through incalculable myriads of milleniums. All these experiences of all these lives and of countless other lives have gone to the making of the soul-stuff that is I.”

Elephas Levi says: “The millions of germ cells that fail to become human beings are transformed into phantoms or larvae. These larvae possess aerial bodies formed from the steam of blood. For this reason they seek out spilt blood, and were formerly nourished by the smoke of sacrifices. The cohesion of the parts of these phantastic organisms is so feeble that they fear a strong wind, large fires, and above all the points of swords. They are vampires.” This accounts for the craving of the gods for blood sacrifices. The spirits and phantoms were mistaken for gods by the drunken prophets.

“The cells are spheroids and they are men in embryo,” says Plato. “God caused the universe to move with a circular motion and created original man as a perfect circle. The sexes were originally three in number, man, woman and hermaphrodite, and they had two faces and four arms and four legs, but Zeus cut them in two. After the division the two parts of man, each desiring the other half, came together and threw their arms about one another eager to grow into one. Each of us when separate is but the indenture of a man, having one side only like a flat-fish, and he is always looking for his other half.”—Plato, 1-483.

The intelligence of the cells has been clearly established by overwhelming proofs. An egg or ovum is at first a small fertilized cell, and in its development or transformation into an embryo, it is at first divided into several cells, to wit, the head cell, the body cell, the tail cell and the food cells. Prof. Oppel, in his experiments in embryology, separated these cells, removing them from their proper positions, but the cells so removed, traveled about trying first one place and then another until they usually found their proper positions and there joined the body and grew thereon, producing a perfect animal. If they made a mistake and joined the body in the wrong place, a monster was produced.

Furthermore, a scientist produced a mushroom-shaped being by subjecting metallic salts to the action of a galvanic current. The particles of the metal gathered around the pole of the magnet in the shape of a mushroom. This thing was a living being, with alimentary canal in its stem, through which it drew its nourishment and added to its growth. It was only necessary that a current of life or electricity be introduced among the particles to cause them to assume the form of a living organism. The metallic tree is produced by the same means. A copper wire and a piece of zinc are suspended in a bottle of a solution of acetate of lead, and the particles of lead gather about the copper wire and put forth branches, limbs and foliage.—Yogi Ramacharaka.

Each atom of matter, each molecule and every life cell, of which man is composed, has a soul of its own. And it is claimed that beside the individual cell souls, man not only has a communal soul in his brain, but a soul in his Solar Plexus. After a frog is beheaded, if a drop of acid is placed on his body, he will wipe it off with his foot.

The development of animals out of frogs and men out of animals was held by Anaximenes 600 B. C., and the evolution of species was an accepted doctrine before the flood. In the Hindu books it is written: “When the world had issued out of the darkness, the subtle, elementary principles produced the vegetal seed, which animated first the plants, from the plants life passed into fantastical bodies which were born in the waters, then through a series of forms and various animals it reached man.”—Bhagavata.

Kapella, an Aryan sage, denied the existence of a first cause, claiming that everything in nature found itself developed only in consequence of material fatal forces. The ancient Kabalists said: “A stone becomes a plant, a plant a beast, a beast a man, a man a spirit, and the spirit a god.”