W.Q. Judge on the Inner Constitution of Man

William Quan Judge · Constitution of Man Series · 11 pages

An account of a lecture delivered at Irving Hall, San Francisco, on 26 October 1891, printed in The New Californian that December and collected in Echoes of the Orient III. It is the most accessible statement of the sevenfold scheme in this section, being spoken to a general audience rather than written for students, and makes a good first approach to the material the Overview sets out as a table.

Judge opens from two quotations — Shakespeare's that we are such stuff as dreams are made of, and The Voice of the Silence on that which in thee shall live for ever, the man that was, that is and will be, for whom the hour shall never strike — and says he will speak of those dreams and of that man: in other words of the inner constitution of man, divided sevenfold. He is careful to add at once that the sevenfold constitution is not, in their view, confined to man. The claim the running head takes is the one the lecture builds to: that esoterically the thought is more responsible and more punishable than the act — the same doctrine given a physical basis in Common misconceptions, where thought is called a material force whose least cerebral motion reverberates through the ether of space.

Read the full text (PDF, 0.5 MB, 11 pages)