Quartum
Organum

01 / 06

I. A perfect source and an unfinished world

Every cosmology must sooner or later account for the world it describes, and the world Graham describes is not a comfortable one. Nature produces with astonishing fertility and destroys with no apparent regard for what it has produced; yet we are accustomed to attribute to its source the very justice, compassion and foresight whose absence from so much of its operation occasions our perplexity. Graham, who published as Krypton, declines to soften the contradiction. He removes it at the root, by asking whether moral perfection belongs at the beginning of things at all.

His answer is set down in the opening Premise with a terseness that rewards a second reading. The beginning is “principle not personality, potential not perfection”: a source rich in creative power, but without the moral qualities which beings within its world may afterwards develop. “Genetic intelligence is creative but not discriminatory,” he writes; it builds according to an inherent plan, and is not to be petitioned for its reasons. Divinity, on this view, is not the starting point of the process but its possible culmination, and the culmination is not secured in advance.

It would be easy to call such a conception materialistic and have done with it. That would be to miss its whole purport. Graham’s universe contains possibilities of consciousness far exceeding any now ordinarily exercised; what he contests is the place assigned to their fulfilment. If the qualities we most revere have yet to be made, the question of who is to make them becomes urgent, and the answer he gives is unambiguous. The book is, in this sense, less a theory of origins than an argument about responsibility, approached through the longest route he could find.

02 / 06

II. Gonos, not theos

The subtitle, A Genetic Cosmo-Conception, names the governing analogy. “Creation is not an act but a process,” Graham writes, “and in every creative process known to us the causation factor is intra-form and impersonal.” The seed is his model. It does not contain a miniature tree; it carries the formative possibilities of a long sequence of growth, which an environment calls forth. So with worlds. Suns and planets, he argues, arise from world-seeds drawing their substance from the latent energy of space, and proceed according to an inherent genetic ideation, much as an organism proceeds from its germ. “This is the master key,” he says of the conception: “gonos, not theos.”

The phrase is a deliberate provocation, and it should be taken as one. In place of a maker standing outside his work and imposing form upon inert material, Graham sets a cause working from within the developing thing. Whatever one finally concludes about planets and their germination, the habit of mind he attacks is real: the habit of picturing causation as a command issued from without. He asks his reader to look for the cause of a form in the form’s own principle of growth. The challenge survives a good deal of disagreement with the cosmology built upon it.

He knows, too, where his authority for the method lies. The Premise appeals to the Zohar, “If you would know the unknown, observe carefully the known,” and the first chapter takes as its epigraph a sentence Graham ascribes to Aristotle: “If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and development.” The two sayings frame the book. Its knowledge of remote things is to be won by analogy from near ones, and its knowledge of any thing is to be won by following that thing through its genesis.

03 / 06

III. Quantity made, quality to be made

From this starting point Graham builds a history in two great movements. Involution is the formation of worlds through seven stages, descending to dense matter; Evolution is the release of the Life Principle from that confinement and its gradual building of living forms, sensation, reason and, at length, moral and spiritual consciousness. The words are old in esoteric literature, and Graham works in continual relation with Theosophical and Rosicrucian teaching; his subtitle recalls Max Heindel’s The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception. His distinctive emphasis is temporal. The orders of being are not simply an inventory present from the first; they arise in sequence, and the later stages possess what the earlier did not.

He states the decisive distinction in a single sentence: “In Involution all quantity is made but no quality (moral); in Evolution quality is made but no quantity.” The genetic consciousness at work in the formation of a world is, in his terms, supplemented in living things by an epigenetic consciousness acquired through experience, and it is this second consciousness that adds “qualitation.” The term is a useful one. It names the work by which existence acquires moral and spiritual quality, which no amount of mere production can supply.

Graham was insistent that his argument be met in its own order. At the close of the Premise he asks the reader to follow the textual sequence, since “one cannot accept our ‘Evolution’ unless he has read our ‘Involution,’” and much in the later reading of scripture will be meaningless without both. The request is more than a printer’s convenience. In a book whose subject is development, the reader is asked to develop the understanding by stages as well.

1. InvolutionThe formation of worlds: quantity made, no moral quality.
2. EvolutionLife, reason and consciousness: quality made through experience.
3. The Ancient WisdomMyth, zodiac, Pyramid and scripture read by the same key.

After the close of Graham’s Premise: “one cannot accept our ‘Evolution’ unless he has read our ‘Involution.’” Volume I contains the first two divisions; Volume II, the third.

04 / 06

IV. The fourth organon

Organon means an instrument, and the title places the book in a succession. Aristotle’s logical treatises were gathered as the Organon; Bacon offered his Novum Organum as a new instrument for the interpretation of nature; P. D. Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum proposed a third, opening upon higher dimensions of space and consciousness. Graham’s title continues the enumeration, claiming a place for a fourth instrument of thought. His text itself names Aristotle, invoking the first organon’s physics of development rather than its logic; Bacon and Ouspensky it leaves unnamed.

What, then, is the instrument? Graham answers plainly in his Preface: “It is not the proof that is lacking but the mind to see it. That proof is in nature, and the logistic key is analogy and correspondence.” The sentence places the difficulty where few cosmologists care to place it: in the knower rather than in the evidence. Analogy, for Graham, is not an ornament of exposition but a discipline of perception. The Hermetic maxim “As above, so below” had been applied to many things, he observes, but never to worlds themselves; the seed and the star are to be read as one process at different scales.

The same Premise joins this method to a change in consciousness. “From this should follow three future imperatives: (1) a new dimension of consciousness, born of (2) an enlightening concept of Causation, and (3) right orientation of the mind with Reality.” The phrase “a new dimension of consciousness” recurs throughout both volumes, from the account of higher planes of life to the interpretation of scripture. J. Wayne’s introduction reads this recurrence as an homage to Tertium Organum and an indication of the sequel which Graham’s title promises; it is a reading worth testing on the pages themselves. What is certain is that, for Graham, knowledge of causation is not an end in itself. It is the means by which the mind is to be reoriented.

The instrument has its hazards, and Graham’s confidence sometimes outruns them; an analogy that opens a question does not thereby settle it. But the demand he makes of the reader is exact. He does not ask for belief. He expects his reader to have “a mental background from which to judge these things,” and the long first volume is designed to furnish one.

05 / 06

V. Divinity made functional

The human chapters bring the cosmology home. Reason, in Graham’s account, is acquired rather than bestowed; consciousness is “intelligence born of experience,” and wisdom is “a state of being”: one must be, “not just think or believe.” He proposes a severe criterion of knowledge: “The criterion of Truth is the amount of truth you have in yourself, and the amount you have in yourself depends on the degree your consciousness … has learned from and conformed to Reality.” Knowledge, on this measure, is gauged by what the knower has become.

Imagination receives an unexpectedly generous place. “Imagination is like a hook we throw forward to draw ourselves up or onward, and by it we can make Evolution somewhat as we will.” The faculty that is misleading when projected backward upon origins becomes, turned toward the future, an instrument of development in its own right.

From all this follows the sentence in which the book’s purpose is most clearly concentrated: “For divinity to become factual on earth, it must first become functional in man.” Graham names humanity’s “nobler purpose” in the closing pages of the first volume: “to qualify the quantitative, to pacify life’s savage forces, to rationalize, moralize and finally spiritualize the planetary entity.” If the source of the world has not secured these qualities, they will exist only as conscious beings learn to produce them. The burden is heavy; it is also, rightly understood, a dignity.

J. Wayne’s introduction carries the demand one step further, from the world to the act of reading:

“We may receive an idea long before we can make much use of it; some later experience may disclose a meaning which our first acquaintance with the words did not supply.
”

J. Wayne · Introduction to This Edition · Volume I

06 / 06

VI. The two volumes

Lloyd Mahon Graham was born in Nova Scotia in 1889 and spent many years in New York; records describe him at different times as a metaphysician and a freelance artist. Quartum Organum appeared through Krypton Associates in 1949 and in a second edition from Pageant Press in 1959. A presentation copy of the first edition, inscribed to friends with whom its authors had shared years of discussion upon psychic and occult subjects, gives a glimpse of the conversations behind the finished exposition.

The restored edition follows the 1959 text in two volumes with continuous pagination. Volume I, Involution or Cosmogenesis, contains J. Wayne’s Introduction to This Edition, Graham’s Preface and Premise, and the First Section: the account of causation, matter, life and the constitution of the human being, through Chapter XIV. Volume II, The Ancient Wisdom, brings these principles to bear upon myth, the zodiac, the Great Pyramid, and the Old and New Testaments, which Graham reads as repositories of a knowledge whose meaning has been obscured; its concluding chapters subject institutional Christianity to an unsparing examination. That knowledge, recovered, is what he calls the “analeptic,” the restorative. Selected diagrams have been redrawn or cleaned from the originals for clarity, and each volume carries its own index.

Graham wrote with the confidence and, at times, the asperity of a controversialist. His chronology of the ages and certain of his judgments upon peoples and institutions belong to his own day and his own polemic; they are reprinted as he wrote them, and are not offered as findings of the present edition. What is offered is the argument itself, in its own sequence: a cosmology which refuses to place perfection at the beginning, and which therefore asks of its reader the work of making it.