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[page x]
... The results, however, of the intellectual activity of the different branches of the great Aryan family are strikingly similar. The outcome of all Idealistic speculation in India is Buddha, in Persia Bahaullah, and in the west Schopenhauer whose system, in Hegelian language, is the marriage of free oriental universality with occidental determinateness.
But the history of Persian thought presents a phenomenon peculiar to itself. In Persia, due perhaps to semitic influences, philosophical speculation has indissolubly associated itself with religion, and thinkers in new lines of thought have almost always been founders of new religious movements. ...
[page 143]
... But all the various lines of Persian thought once
more find a synthesis in that great religious movement
of Modern Persia — Babism or Bahaism, which began
as a Shi'ah sect, with Mirza 'All Muhammad Bab of
Shiraz (b. 1820), and became less and less Islamic
in character with the progress of orthodox persecutions. The origin of the philosophy of this wonderful
sect must be sought in the Shi'ah sect of the Shaikhs,
the founder of which, Shaikh Ahmad, was an
enthusiastic student of Mulla Sadrá's Philosophy, on
which he had written several commentaries. This
sect differed from the ordinary Shi'ahs in holding
that belief in an ever present Medium between the
absent Imam (the 12th Head of the Church, whose
manifestation is anxiously expected by the Shi'ahs),
and the Church is a fundamental principle of the
Shi'ah religion. Shaikh Ahmad claimed to be such a
Medium; and when, after the death of the second
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Shaikhi Medium — Haji Kazim — the Shaikhis were
anxiously expecting the manifestation of the new
Medium, Mirza 'All Muhammad Bab, who had
attended the lectures of Haji Kazim at Karbala,
proclaimed himself the expected Medium, and many
Shaikhs accepted him.
The young Persian seer looks upon Reality as an
essence which brooks no distinction of substance and
attribute. The first bounty or self-expansion of the
Ultimate Essence, he says, is Existence. "Existence"
is the "known", the "known" is the essence of
"knowledge"; "knowledge" is "will"; and "will" is
"love". Thus from Mulla Sadrá's identity of the
known and the knower, he passes to his conception
of the Real as Will and Love. This Primal Love,
which he regards as the essence of the Real, is the
cause of the manifestation of the Universe which is
nothing more than the self-expansion of Love. The
word creation, with him, does not mean creation out
of nothing; since, as the Shaikhs maintain, the word
creator is not peculiarly applicable to God alone.
The Quranic verse, that "God is the best of creators",1
implies that there are other self-manifesting beings
like God.
After the execution of 'All Muhammad Bab,
Bahaullah, one of his principal disciples who were
collectively called "The First Unity", took up the
mission, and proclaimed himself the originator of the
new dispensation, the absent Imam whose manifestation
- Sura 23: v. 14.
[page 145]
the Bab had foretold. He freed the doctrine
of his master from its literalistic mysticism, and
presented it in a more perfected and systematised
form. The Absolute Reality, according to him, is not
a person; it is an eternal living Essence, to which we
apply the epithets Truth and Love only because these
are the highest conceptions known to us. The Living
Essence manifests itself through the Universe with
the object of creating in itself atoms or centres of
consciousness, which as Dr. McTaggart would say,
constitute a further determination of the Hegelian
Absolute. In each of these undifferentiated, simple
centres of consciousness, there is hidden a ray of the
Absolute Light itself, and the perfection of the spirit
consists in gradually actualising, by contact with the
individualising principle — matter, its emotional and
intellectual possibilities, and thus discovering its own
deep being — the ray of eternal Love which is
concealed by its union with consciousness. The
essence of man, therefore, is not reason or consciousness; it is this ray of Love — the source of all impulse
to noble and unselfish action, which constitutes the
real man. The influence of Mulla Sadrá's doctrine
of the incorporeality of Imagination is here apparent.
Reason, which stands higher than Imagination in the
scale of evolution, is not a necessary condition,
according to Mulla Sadrá, of immortality. In all
forms of life there is an immortal spiritual part, the
ray of Eternal Love, which has no necessary connection
with self-consciousness or reason, and survives after
the death of the body. Salvation, then, which to
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Buddha consists in the starving out of the mind-atoms
by extinguishing desire, to Bahaullah lies in the
discovery of the essence of love which is hidden in
the atoms of consciousness themselves.1 Both,
however, agree that after death thoughts and
characters of men remain, subject to other forces of a
similar character, in the spiritual world, waiting for
another opportunity to find a suitable physical
accompaniment in order to continue the process of
discovery (Bahaullah) or destruction (Buddha). To
Bahaullah the conception of Love is higher than the
conception of Will. Schopenhauer conceived reality
as Will which was driven to objectification by a
sinful bent eternally existing in its nature. Love or
Will, according to both, is present in every atom of
life; but the cause of its being there is the joy of
self-expansion in the one case, and the inexplicable
evil inclination in the other. But Schopenhauer
postulates certain temporal ideas in order to account
for the objectification of the Primordial Will;
Bahaullah, as far as I can see, does not explain the
principle according to which the self-manifestation of
the Eternal Love is realised in the Universe.
- See Phelp's 'Abbas Effendi, chapter, "Philosophy and Psychology".
[
[page 149]
... The later Sufis as well as philosophers proper gradually transformed or
abandoned the Neo-Platonic theory of Emanation,
and! in later thinkers we see a movement through
Neo-Platonism towards real Platonism, which is
approached by Mulla Hadi's Philosophy. But pure
speculation and dreamy mysticism undergo a powerful
check in Babism which, unmindful of persecution,
synthesises all the inherited philosophical and religious
tendencies, and rouses the spirit to a consciousness
of the stern reality of things. Though extremely
cosmopolitan and hence quite unpatriotic in character,
it has yet had a great influence over the Persian mind.
The unmystic character and the practical tone of
Babism may have been a remote cause of the progress
of recent political reform in Persia. ...
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