Principles and aims of the New Atlantis Foundation

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patible with the central significance of Christianity and with modern scientific thinking.

The second revelation is the Christian revelation. It is the revelation of God in Man; of the central planetary event of the Universal having become Single in the Person of Jesus Christ, and of the possibility for all individuals in their own relativity to attain to Christ-consciousness. It is revealed in the doctrines of the Holy Trinity and the Divinity of Christ. Vladimir Solovyov considered these doctrines to be truths attainable not only by faith but also by contemplation. He developed the notion of Sophia as the future incarnation of the Holy Spirit into Universal Humanity.

The third revelation can be said to have originated with the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, which cut away the ground from philosophical speculation and religious superstition and founded man’s thinking on the basis of his actual experience. It includes much of philosophy and science since then and the researches of psychology, insofar as it is concerned with man’s consciousness and not only his behaviour. But the outstanding prophet of this revelation was Erich Gutkind, who pointed the way to the future development of mankind in his book Sidereal Birth. In this he maintains that there will be no more great geniuses to guide mankind, but that the responsibility for the human future will rest upon those individuals who attain a new level of human consciousness transcending the limits of the individual self. The works of three philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche, Otto Weininger and Max Stirner, who declared the sovereignty of individual persons and the power of mankind to determine autonomously their own future, can be considered as commentaries on this revelation.

The basis for these three revelations is three systems of philosophy, the Vedanta, Plato and Hegel. In the Vedanta Man first reached knowledge of the absolute reality of awareness itself. Plato first attained to the principle of reason, by inventing the concept, on which all reason is based. He can properly be considered as the philosopher of Christianity insofar as Jesus Christ represents the archetype or the Idea of Man, and all individuality is founded on the principle of identity, which is the basis of the concept. Hegel discovered the dialectics of reason in his logic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.

Each of these three, Vedanta, Christianity and Hegel, has an integral triune. That of the Vedanta is Sat-Chit-Ananda (Being-Consciousness-Bliss). This can be related to the three states of consciousness, sleeping, waking and dreaming. But it is not a dialectic in time. It is not concerned with history. Hegel’s is a