“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The theory of evolution represents a magnetic organizing suggestive hypothesis. It can, even in scientific terms, never be proven. Under its banner of suggestion, however, the great parade of men and other living creatures are observed so that the hypothesis brings about its own hypnotic focus—so that creatures, man, and indeed the universe itself, seem to behave in certain highly ritualized fashions.

The theory, then, is a way of organizing experience, a suggestive hypothesis. It is indeed no more than a point of view. It has colored man’s societies and cultures since its inception. It has dominated economical systems. In that regard, for example, James was quite correct: certain religious societies interpreted the theme so that it read “evolution of the soul”; but there is no soul in Darwinian theory and hereditary, and certainly none in the environment.

Suggestion not only impels toward action, but causes you to interpret action in a given manner. In strict Darwinian terms, man and animal alike had to be turned aggressively outward in the most competitive of physical ways. A new achievement on the part of a species, or any mutation occurred, occurred as the direct result of personal experience—and of course no information was available otherwise.

Why then did such a theory originate? Darwin was initially a religious man. Like many others, his religious background held out nonsensical propositions. It saw a good God, a just savior, who nevertheless never thought twice about sending down death and destruction as punishment for sin.

Darwin was faced with the proposition of a kind god who was more cruel than any human being, and with supernatural power behind him to boot—so Darwin tried to justify God’s ways to man.

To some extent the Freudian self, as per James, more or less followed the same pattern. A man could scarcely trust his neighbor if he agreed with Darwin or Freudian concepts. Behind any altruistic impulse there had to be a selfish gain. Before all of this, however, nature was seen as primarily passive—put here by God for man’s purpose, but without possessing the uniqueness or even approaching the status of man.

Darwin managed to bring out nature’s complexity, though this had been mentioned by other men—I believe by a man called Mendel in particular. But Mendel did not catch man’s imagination. Darwin then brought nature to man’s focus in a new way, for before neither science or religion had dealt with it in a meaningful manner. The full sweep and extent of the natural world , with all of its seeming ambiguities, cruelties and splendors, had to be accepted as more than a passive package delivered into man’s hand.