The Law and the Word summary

In this appreciation prefacing Troward's final work, Paul Derrick offers a portrait of the man behind the books. He opens by asking what truly constitutes friendship, then presents Judge Troward as one of those rare messengers whose radiance of fellowship was as evident in his writing as in person. Derrick praises Troward's logician's gift for stripping away superfluous verbiage to reveal truth in splendid simplicity, and his sincerity, charity, and quiet firmness in defence of his convictions. He draws a striking parallel between Troward's intuited principle of the Universal Sub-conscious Mind and Henri Bergson's scientifically demonstrated Universal Livingness, recounting how Troward, on being lent Bergson's Creative Evolution, returned it saying he could not tell what Bergson was talking about, a remark Derrick reads as a sign of Troward's modesty and his preference for intuition over elaborate research. Derrick closes by remembering Troward chiefly as a teacher and constructive builder who reverenced the fundamental truths of faith while destroying sham, and whose whole labour was the uplift of humanity toward a deeper understanding of God's purpose.

Troward opens his final book by observing that the age has begun to sense that Thought is itself a power, indeed the greatest of the forces of the Universe, yet this recognition remains vague and "in the air," unable to yield practical fruit until we grasp that Thought works by law as exact as mathematics while leaving the individual wholly free. Beginning, like Descartes, from the certainty of our own existence and that of the world, he distinguishes the thinking "I Myself" from the physical body, and sets before us two great principles that must be squared with one another: the Mathematical element of Law and the Personal element of Free Will, symbolized by the Masonic pillars Jachin and Boaz. To show the trustworthiness of Law he surveys established facts of physical science, the resolution of matter into etheric particles of positive and negative electricity, the long series of vibrations or waves in ether, the transmission of energy by wireless and sound, and the predictive triumphs of Mendeleef, Clerk-Maxwell, and Leverrier, all of which prove that Law, being one throughout, may be relied upon to lead from the known toward the unknown. He then turns to the psychic side of human nature, citing De Rochas' experiments on zones of sensation beyond the skin and explaining them by the interference of etheric waves projected by heart and lungs, thereby preparing the reader to conclude that our faculties extend well past the physical body.

Troward moves from etheric vibration considered generally to its bearing upon our own personality, gathering first-hand psychic experiences as evidence. He recounts the healing of an amputee through her invisible limb, his own unwitting appearance to Mr. S. in Edinburgh while he prayed in London, his waking vision of Lanercost Abbey and its Latin inscription later found to be real, the governess and her invalid mother seen before their arrival at Norwood, and the apparition of a suicide seen by his wife in a Punjab bungalow eighteen years after the man's death. Comparing these cases, he infers that psychic action can operate independently of and at great distance from the physical body, and that there appear to be two modes of such action, one attended by sensation and one not. He then argues that these phenomena require no denial of natural law but rather its continuation into finer modes of matter and wider ranges of etheric vibration. Thought or the Desire of the Ego is proposed as the initial impulse generating waves in the Universal Medium, taking form only where a corresponding syntony can receive them. He closes by answering the sceptic's objection about apparitions appearing in the dark, citing Marconi's and Solari's 1902 wireless experiments to show that etheric action is more readily produced at night, while the great magnetic waves and Light itself work most powerfully of all.

Troward begins from the settled scientific fact that life comes only from antecedent life, and reasons that both the life of organized matter and the energy of inorganic matter must trace to one All-Originating Spirit, eternal and undifferentiated, which is above time and conditions. He recovers the meaning of Spirit as Breath and traces the twin principles of Expansion and Contraction, Light and Darkness, showing that they are correlatives rather than enemies, and that darkness of substance is not moral evil. He then identifies the initial creative impulse with Sound guided by Intelligent Selection, which is the Word or Logos that localizes the Spirit's activity in particular centres of space and time. This same principle, working on the scale of the Macrocosm, operates identically on the scale of the individual as the Microcosm. The Word we seek is not a magic syllable but the intention and faith behind it, working in the region of noumena. Man, whose very name means the Measurer, holds a definite place in the creative order: he cannot be made incapable of wrong thinking without contradiction, because his freedom to specialize the impersonal Law by supplying new conditions is the very function that makes him a Person and not a thing. The Will is not the creative faculty; Conception is, and the Will's office is to hold conception in line with the Law. Used in harmony with the Wholeness of Creation, our word becomes the Word of Power; used in self-will, it becomes the root of Black Magic and retrogression.

Troward opens with the artist's principle of unity, in which a single motif governs every subordinate detail, and applies it to Life itself, whose motif is to express its own Livingness. The Law of Unity, known in science as the Law of Continuity and in the Hermetic axiom as above, so below, is the basic law of Life, and its infraction is the root of all trouble. Every part, however infinitesimal, must be a complete whole on its own scale in order to build the greater whole, so that the expansion of our individuality serves rather than submerges the Great Whole. Unity does not mean uniformity, since diversity is the necessity for any expression. Troward distinguishes Generic Creation, which advances the class under a Law of Averages but takes no notice of the individual, from the individual creation possible to man, the one type able to perceive the relation between the Word and the Law. By bringing the Personal Factor to bear on the Impersonal, we specialize the action of the Law without altering it. Limitation belongs not to the Law but to our comprehension of it, and fancy must be trained into scientific imagination, which becomes the Word of Power. We thus pass from bondage to Law into liberty through knowledge of the Law of our own Being, the logical outcome that is the New Creation.

Troward develops the idea that beyond the specific characteristics of any individual thing lies a generic basis of being, a manifestation of Cosmic Law common to its whole class, which he names the Soul of the Subject. Because this element is impersonal, it has no purpose of its own to resist the impressions laid upon it, yet it always expresses those impressions in terms of its own class-nature, so that every impress receives expression in terms of the medium through which it is expressed. In man this generic ground is our Cosmic or Impersonal Personality, ordinarily fused with our conscious faculties but revealed in abnormal states as the subliminal consciousness, whose powers of clairvoyance, distant perception, and even prediction attest to faculties genuinely resident in us. Through this same impersonal channel Thought-Power both reaches us and is sent out by us, for healing, for good suggestion, and even upon plants and metals. Drawing on the study of etheric waves, Troward frames a working hypothesis: the Word starts etheric vibration, which stirs the soul of the subject, which in turn communicates vibration to its body. The principle extends to abstractions as well, so that one may place oneself en rapport with the soul of any subject, though always subject to the discipline of ordinary knowledge and honest work. He closes with a solemn warning that this power, being creative in either direction, sets the Law itself against us when used destructively, and responds as a willing Soul of the Subject when we intend to co-operate with the Great Law.

Troward asks what combination of the Law and the Word could yield a life free from anxiety and full of continual interest, and answers that it lies in identifying our own Word with the Creative Word that brings all things into being. He argues that the Promises of the Bible distinguish it from all other systems because they are Promises according to Law: not capricious favouritism, but degrees of realization of the one Principle, so that the more a man works with the Principle the more the Law works for him. Surveying scriptural promises of health, wealth, peace, safety, creative power, and eternal life, he insists they be read literally rather than explained away, warning against both worthless tradition and superstitious veneration of the mere letter. He then supplies a working hypothesis for their fulfilment: the interaction of Animus Dei, the Active and Personal principle, with Anima Mundi, the Passive and Impersonal Soul of the Universe, into which the Word is planted as seed. Finally he translates the mechanism into Ohm's Law, showing that the current of Spirit is limited only by the resistance of our own doubt, so that Faith is itself a mathematical law and the perception of the Law's widest generalization.

Troward opens with the greatest of the promises, the overcoming of death, and argues that death is not inherent in the nature of things but the consequence of an inverted mode of thinking, first shown in the story of Eden. Reasoning judicially from observed fact, he shows that no force can be stopped by its own current; only the inertia of the medium resists it. The human body represents inertia, and the something that thinks in us represents Ertia, so the balance between life and death is the balance between spirit and flesh. He distinguishes the physical body, the etheric body, the Vital Soul or race-consciousness, and the reasoning mind, and shows that conscious thought modifies the three lower principles for good or ill depending on whether it looks downward to racial ideas or upward to a higher source. Drawing on the electronic theory of the atom and the demonstrated transmutation of Radium, Thorium, and Uranium, he argues that thought, acting through etheric waves, may transmute the body itself, so that St. Paul's teaching on the transmutation of the physical body falls within the Laws of the Universe when specialized by the Word. He then traces what survives death: the thinking mind is the permanently surviving self and our centre of consciousness. Following the Descending and Ascending Arcs of the Circle of Being, involution and evolution, he presents the Resurrection Body as a new body free of the old disabilities, and closes with the figure of the square and the circle to show that the true Resurrection of the Individual comes only when the personality speaks not its own word but the Word of Life of Him who sent us.

Troward closes the book by teaching that the burden of anxiety is transferred by reaching past secondary causes to First Cause, which works through universal Law that may be specialized by the Word. Because the Law flows from the Word and not the reverse, we are counselled to state not what we wish to have but what we wish to be, trusting the having to follow as the natural fruit of being. Each person is shown, through a chain of scriptural citation, to be a "Word of God," and the New Name is received by realizing our inclusion in the Truth. The Perfect Word must be at once Human and Divine, and Troward reasons from the facts of Nature and mind toward the Word made Flesh as the Standard of Measurement for our own thought. He reinterprets the doctrine of the Atonement not as an arbitrary decree but as the psychological foundation of reunion with the Eternal Life, removing the sense of separation called Sin. The Bible Promises are thus Promises according to Law, containing the principle of their own fulfilment, and the whole reaches its conclusion in the recognition that the Perfect Law is the Law of Liberty.