The Receptacle 3

“How should we represent creation or creations? as a process of
transformism taking place in “matter”?
Creation – or “creations” – should then be represented not as a process of
transformism taking place in “matter” in the naively empirical sense of
the word, but rather as an elaboration by the life-principle, that is to
say, something rather like the more or less discontinuous productions of
the imagination: images arise in the soul from a non-formal substance with
no apparent link between them; it is not the images which transform
themselves, it is the animic substance which causes their arising and
creates them. That man should appear to be the logical issue, not indeed
of an evolution, but of a series of “sketches” more and more centered on
the human form – sketches of which the apes seem to represent disparate
vestiges – this fact, or this hypothesis, in no way signifies that there
is any common measure, thus a kind of psychological continuity, between
man and the anthropomorphic and in some sense “embryonic” bodies which may
have preceded him. The coming of man is a sudden “descent” of the Spirit
into a receptacle that is perfect and definitive because it conforms to
the manifestation of the Absolute; the absoluteness of man is like that of
the geometrical point, which, strictly speaking, is quantitatively
unattainable starting from the circumference.”

Frithjof Schuon – Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress

A suite of lead pencil drawings shown in close-up. This is the third drawing.