Leaves from my Chinese scrapbook / by Frederic Henry Balfour.

  • Balfour, Frederic Henry.
Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Leaves from my Chinese scrapbook / by Frederic Henry Balfour. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    99/290 (page 87)
    Tower is self-produced, self-transformed, self-shaped, self- manifested, self-intelligent, self-powerful, self-exhausting, self-reposing;—though, he adds, to speak of these pheno- mena as actualities, in the common acceptation of the term, is inaccurate. Then he proceeds to describe the evolution of the visible universe:— The Four Stages. Now, seeing that that which has form was produced from formlessness, from what can the Universe have sprung 1 Thus it is that it is said there was first the period of the Great Calm, then of the Great Inception, then of the Great Beginning, and lastly of the Great Concretion. At the time of the Great Calm the primordial aura was yet invisible. The Great Incep- tion was when the primordial aura first began to exist; the Great Beginning was when form first came into being; the Great Concretion was when simple matter first appeared. Then aura, form, and matter were in readiness, but had not yet been separated from one another; and for that reason the condition of things was called Chaos. Chaos means the indiscriminate mingling of everything together before their distribution. “Invisible, though looked for; inaudible, though listened for; intangible, though clutched at”—therefore was the primor- dium called the period of Calm, or Stillness; and there is no form to which that Calm was like. Then the condition of Calm changed, and it became One— sc., the primordial ether came into being. This One changed again, and became Seven; Seven changed, and became Nine; and the changes of the Nine were final. Then a reflex change took place back to the One; and the One was the commence- ment of that change which resulted in the production of forms. The pure and light ascended, and became Heaven; the turbid and heavy descended, and became Earth; and the harmonious aurse, in combination, produced Man. Heaven and Earth containing in themselves the germinal essence of all things, the visible creation was evolved and came into existence.