The genius of analogical sense made each of the four elements in the outer world the counterpart of a corresponding psychic mode of consciousness. Earth represented sensation; water matched emotion; air symbolized thought; and fire was the universal ancient emblem of the spirit-soul. At the mere listing of the chart the mind senses a fitness, if not some phases of actual suggestions of identity, of these correspondences. Earth is appropriate to the fact of sensation, because this psychic state is generated in a body composed of earthly elements, the physical. Paul reminds us that the natural man is of the earth, earthy. And how kindred seem emotion and water! Both are lightly mobile, fluid, unstable and readily changeable, shimmering at every turn of sun or wind. Likewise how close in affinity are air and thought! Both are invisible, yet alike they reveal their character by what they affect outwardly. It is a testimony to the reality of this correspondence between air and mind that virtually every people in the world, in casting about for words suitable to convey the idea of mind-soul-spirit, has simply appropriated for this concept the words for air, wind or breath. Mind and air are definite poetical counterparts of each other. Then fire; universally this chemical phenomenon, subsisting on air and some more subtly potent elements above it, gave man his most realistic conception of the fiery nature of the creative energy. "Spirit" is itself from the Latin
spiro, I breathe. The breath keeps the fires of life burning. The Greek has it as
pneuma, which again means "breath." To deeper reflection, the energy of life creative assumes the concept of a fiery potency, both able to build up and to dissolve. The light of the sun, naturally conceived to be the fiery energy of the creative power, was antiquity’s universal symbol for the life-giving power of the Logos. It was the great god Re in Egypt, whose hieroglyph is the sun. Expressing a recondite item of ancient esoteric knowledge, and one which modern science seems to be on the point of confirming, stands the statement of the Greek Neoplatonist Proclus:
The light of the sun is the pure energy of intellect. Not man’s intellect, to be sure, but God’s, of which man’s is a miniature and potential copy.
This is verily a concept to stop one’s breath with its astounding significance: the suns in infinite space would then be the glowing fiery brain cells of God’s mind. When God said "Let there be light!," he carried out the command by the exertion of his mind. The light of the universe has been generated by the thinking process of the cosmic mind! Even at the human level, it is a fact that the act of steady thinking generates in the brain a quantum of heat and light, measurable by delicate electrical apparatus. Thought is known to be a product of the flash of electricity from one brain cell to another oppositely charged quite analogous to the lightning in a thunder-storm.
It is not surprising, then, that we find the so-called "Fire Philosophers" of the Medieval period expounding the theory that "every man has a little sun
THE ULTIMATE CANON OF KNOWLEDGE
