Principles and aims of the New Atlantis Foundation

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organic development in a way in which the formal logic of ‘either — or’ is not. That formal logic applies to words, so long as the same word always means the same, and also applies to mathematics, space and the inorganic material world, but it is unable to deal with a world of change, since change involves contradiction. It involves something becoming what it was not. It is therefore unable to deal with the world of organic life.

It is clear from all this that the attitude of mind which asserts that there is one fixed truth which has to be discovered, that a proposition must be either true and right or untrue and wrong, and that two opposite ideas cannot both be true at the same time, is not only destructive in the sense of causing conflict in the world. It is also not true to life in a world of continual change. The persistence of the tradition of triunity both in religious and philosophical thought has marked the awareness that the logic of duality, though it is both valid and necessary in word-thinking and in mathematics, and also in dealing with the material world in space, cannot help in our thinking about organic life; nor in our thinking about our life experience insofar as it concerns relationships between people. But since it has appeared only mythologically in religions or abstractly in philosophies, it has not been taken seriously as applying to the real world.

Mitrinovié saw that there was need of a scientific, modern and critical statement of both the simultaneity and the sequence of the Trinity. This he proposed in the form of Three Revelations to mankind which happened in succession and are historically verifiable as facts of human evolution, but which remain simultaneously valid. The word revelation should not be taken as having any supernatural connotation. Every scientific discovery is in a sense a revelation to the person who makes it. There have been many revelations in the course of man’s development, but these can be summarised into three world revelations.

The first revelation is the pre-Christian revelation of ancient tradition. It is found in Vedanta, Buddhism, Astrology, Kabbala and altogether in the wisdom and scriptures of the ancient world. It is the revelation of God in the world; the revelation to Man of how the world and he himself originated, and of the development and operation of organic life both in macrocosm and in microcosm. It was revealed through the clairvoyant consciousness of teachers and leaders of mankind, and was expressed in symbolic and mythological language. Rudolf Steiner is the outstanding exponent of this ancient tradition for modern times, bringing together the whole of pre-Christian wisdom so as to be com-