^ — — — o.^ ^ MOV 1 3 1339 ■4. ^^\\ A'^^ BP 520 .05 1885a Olcott, Henry Steel, 1832- 1907. Theosophy \ A/ t* (. */ LECTURES AND ADDRESSES ON THEOSOPHY THEOSOPHY RELIGION AND OCCULT SCIENCE BY HENRY S. OLCOTT PRESIDENT OF THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY WITH GLOSSARY OF EASTERN WORDS LONDON GEORGE REDWAY YORK STREET COVEN 1" GARDEN MDCCCLXXXV ^0 the ^Icmarji of Prof. WILLIAM GREGORY, M.D., F.R.S.E. IN GRATITUDE FOR THE CLUE TO PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE FURNISHED TO THE AUTHOR IN HIS WRITINGS THIS BOOK IS REVERENTLY DEDICATED CONTENTS Forewords ... .,, Theosophy or Materialism — which? England's Welcome ... The Theosophical Society and its Aims The Common Foundation of all Religions Theosophy : the Scientific Basis of Religion Theosophy : its Friends and Enemies The Occult Sciences Spiritualism and Theosophy India : Past, Present, and Future .. The Civilization that India needs The Spirit of the Zoroastrian Religion The Life of Buddha and its Lessons PAGE 9 49 8i ii6 1 66 198 216 257 284 301 349 FOREWORDS. In complying with the demand for a London Edition of my collected Asiatic Lectures and Addresses, upon Theosophlcal subjects, a few words of explanation will suffice. At the be- ginning of last year the original edition was issued at Madras, in a semi-private form for the instruction of members of the Theosophlcal Society, by an officer of the Madras Branch ; but every page of the present edition has passed through my hands, has been carefully edited, and a large amount of original matter has been added. A number of the lectures have been translated into the vernacular languages by native scholars, and circulated at their own expense ; among them, the discourse upon the Zoroastrlan religion, of which the ParsI community of Bombay circulated — If my memory serves me — twenty thousand copies in Encrlish and Guzeratl. I recall two In- cidents in connection with that lecture which X FOREWORDS, give it a special interest : it led to the organization of a Parsi Archceological Society at Bombay, and was one of the final causes of the rupture of friendly relations between the eminent Aryan reformer, the late Swami Dayanand Saraswati, and the Founders of the Theosophical Society. That lamented and illustrious man had been upon the most intim.ate terms with us, and his great Indian Society, the Arya Samaj, was regarded as the sister to our own ororanization. But the Swami was a very intolerant, not to say bigoted Aryan, and had no mercy for those who professed another religion than the Vedic. My lecture upon the faith of the Parsis was represented to him as a proof of my having embraced Zoroastrianism, and was made a pretext to break off our previously reciprocal connection. Like many other strict secta- rians, he could not understand the Theoso- phical spirit of conceding to the people of all creeds the right of enjoying their religious convictions unmolested, nor the duty resting upon us to help them to discover and live up to the highest ideal that their respective re- ligions contain. We are fully convinced that FOREWORDS. xi all religions are but branches of one sole Truth ; and the aim of our public teachings and private discourses has always been to force this fact upon the attention of our auditors. In short, we are not " all things to all men," as has ungenerously been said, but the same thing to all men — viz., Theoso- phlsts, who believe in the essential Identity of all men, race, caste, and creed, to the con- trary notwithstanding. In the several hundred discourses I have de- livered In India and Ceylon, during the last six years, nothing more than a popular pre- sentation of elementary facts has been aimed at. There are metaphysicians enough to en- lighten, and confuse, the higher reading public ; but to one who can follow them through their demonstrations there are fifty who lack time, ability, or both. This, primarily, is my public ; and I shall be delighted to be the means of awakening in some of these the desire for profounder study of problems so absorbing. I have ever been most deeply interested In the future of the young, who are just now be- ginning their responsible career. With reli- xn FOREWORDS, gious feeling stifled by our modern system of education, they are too often avowed agnos- tics, if not crass materialists. This is lament- able, the more so, since it is unnecessary. Materialism is unscientific — utterly, absurdly so : one need not go far in psychological re- search to discover so much. But the sciolists win not admit it, nor take the least pains to get at the truth. They arouse the righteous anger of every student of any branch of arch- aic psychology, by their unworthy behaviour towards this greatest of sciences. They vio- late their own canons, by limiting the range of inquiry to the field of the physical senses, against the protest of those who have dis- covered facts lying beyond it, and senses by which they may be observed. The existence of those senses is the necessary corollary of the theory of Evolution, and the Esoteric Phil- osophy at once proves its validity, and shows how they may be fully developed. From experimental Physics we pass to axiomatic Metaphysics, through the experimental chan- nel of transcendental Physics. Unless we admit the unthinkable proposition that there is a fixed limit to Evolution, it follows that FOREWORDS. xiii Western Science in its full development will ultimately reach the same conclusion at which Aryan Philosophy arrived ages ago. Hence Theosophy is the complement both of science and of philosophy, and as such is entitled to the respectful examination of the savant and the theologian. As it appears that many of the most com- mon of Oriental terms are unknown here in the West, except to " old Indians," I have by request added a copious Glossary, the words for interpretation having been selected out of the present volume by that excellent English scholar, Mr. Richard Heme Shepherd, who has also prepared, with care, the excellent index, which adds largely to the value of the book. To avoid delay, persons wishing to corres- pond with the author upon any of the sub- jects treated upon in these discourses should address him at the headquarters of the Theo- sophlcal Society, Adyar, Madras, India. H. S. O. Lonhon, October^ 1S84. THEOSOPHY OR MATERIALISM— WHICH ?-^- Sixty-six years ago Schopenhauer declared his opinion that the greatest advantage of the nine- teenth century over previous eras lay in its access to the Vedas through the Upanishads, and pre- dicted for the study of Sanskrit literature an influence upon intellectual development not in- ferior to that of the revival of Greek in the fifteenth century.t He spoke of " the sacred, primitive Indian wisdom " as the best preparation for his own philosophy. And it is worthy of remark that the reputation of this great thinker is culminating at a time when his anticipation, which at the date of publication must have seemed strange or ex- travagant to all but a few far-seeing scholars, is in course of scarcely doubtful fulfilment. A parallel similar to that suggested by Schopenhauer has been drawn by Max Miiller, who has also testified to the already pervading influence of the * The author thankfully acknowledges the valuable aid given him in the collation of materials for this chapter, by an English friend, whose modesty forbids the mention of his name. t Preface to "The World as Will and Representation'' (Ilal- dane and Kemp's translation). i6 THEOSOPHY OR MA TERIALISM— WHICH ? new studies. In his Address to the Conoress of Orientalists in 1874, he said: "We know what it was for the Northern nations, the old barbarians of Europe, to be brought into spiritual contact with Greece and Rome, and to learn that beyond the small, poor world in which they had moved, there was an older, richer, brighter world, the ancient world of Rome and Athens, with its arts and laws, its poetry and philosophy, all of which they might call their own, and make their own, by claiming the heritage of the past. We know how, from that time, the Classical and Teutonic spirits mingled together, and formed that stream of modern thought on whose shores we ourselves live and move. A new stream is now being brought into the same bed, the stream of Oriental thought, and already the colours of the old stream show very clearly the influence of that new tributary. Look at any of the important works published during the last twenty years, not only on language, but on literature, mythology, law, religion, and philosophy, and you will see on every page the working of a new spirit.'*' * Recognizing the fact of this influence, we can only estimate its probable development in any direction by looking at the intellectual conditions prepared for it. The first and most indispensable of these, in relation to religious ideas, is a relaxa- tion of dogmatic faith in the recipient community. So long as spiritual intelligence is restrained in the * Chips from a German Workshop, vol. iv. p. 342. THEOSOPHY OR MATERIALISM—WHICH? 17 hard capsule of any of its formal systems, there can be no assimilation, and, therefore, no true influence. It is only at that period of ideal de- velopment, when the rind of an historical or traditional religion has served its purpose of growth and preservation, and permits the libera- tion of its vital spirit, that the latter can find itself in the general atmosphere of thought. Nor is this natural process always recognized for what it is. Just as in sensuous apprehension the body stands for the man, so the same principle in religion clings to its external and familiar form, and sees in the disintegrating action of intellectual progress only a negative side and an infidel tendency. But we may leave out of account a conservatism which is being visibly submerged beneath the rising level of intelligence, and ask what essentially it is that this intelligence demands for the support of its religious life? Now, in the first place, it requires that this shall repose upon an order of ideas not exposed to destructive invasion. Beliefs are needed which shall not find their origin and home in ignorance, to be dislodged from their positions with every advance of knowledge. Nor must there be any dependence upon historical evidences, or risk from their critical examination. Further, the founda- tions of religion must be such as cannot be im- paired by the comparative methods of study which discovery and scholarship have brought into vogue. The dogmatic fabric of Christianity, so far as its i8 THEOSOPHY OR MATERIALISM— WHICH? basis must be conceived as historical, is already in a ruinous, or highly-precarious condition. Any one who questions this must, at least, admit it to be the opinion of many who represent the progressive thought and Intelligence of the com- munity, the classes upon which the influence of science and inquiry is most apparent. Nor is this disposition at all confined to those whose special studies or mode of life may be thought to promote indifference to religious problems. The wide cir- culation of such works as " Ecce Homo," ^' Natural Religion," and others of recent years, Is sufficient indication of public sympathy with the scepticism of thoroughly reverent minds. And without quoting from the Innumerable testimonies afforded by current literature, it will suffice to advert to the perfectly open and unrestrained manner in which these questions are now publicly discussed, in contrast to the cautious, veiled, and tentative treatment they received from the sceptical side less than a generation ago. Our intellectual leaders, indeed, have ceased to regard dogmatic Christianity as any longer an open question for modern thought. There is a general assumption among them that this, as much as any other special system of religion, exhibits merely an historical phase of mental development, and from that point of view alone retains an Interest for the philosophic mind. And turning from free-thinkers to the Church itself, we see much that Is significant of the same general tendency. Not to insist on a few notorious, and THEOSOPHY OR MATERIALISM—WHICH ' 19 many other less ostentatious retreats from positions felt to be untenable, the most influential of the clergy are seeking to spiritualize the Christian doc- trine, without openly offending the popular and orthodox apprehension of it. Few of them, pro- bably, are explicitly aware that every advance in this direction, while it extracts the essential and interior truth which Christianity possesses In com- mon with every religion worthy of the name, is a suppression of Its distinctive character. This can only be apparent to those who have made a profound and sympathetic study of other systems ; a study for which the exclusive pretensions of Christianity have allowed little encouragement to its official professors. The practical problem of all religion being to ascertain the conditions of spiritual development, in proportion as our conceptions are freed from the formal, historical, and accidental elements peculiar to each system, will the substan- tial identity of all the radical solutions be discover- able. Thus purified and understood, they will be beyond the reach of the disproof from positive knowledge which is sooner or later reserved for all their temporal and external investiture. Neverthe- less, they will still involve metaphysical and trans- cendental assumptions ; though not contrary to science, they will still be non-scientific ; and, in short, there will be little to distinguish them from the ethical forms of a hypothetical philosophy. That brings us to the further demand which modern intelligence makes upon its future religion, if it is to have one at al). 20 THE OS PHY OR MA TERIALISM— WHICH? If Mr. Herbert Spencer is right, true religion is not the solution of a problem, but the statement and elevation of the problem itself as inscrutable.* And herein he finds the reconciliation of science and religion. Science and philosophy proclaim the relativity of all positive knowledge ; but Iw that very statement they affirm the existence of the Absolute, and concede to religion divested of all particularity and definiteness an appropriate and inexpugnable sphere. Although we can say no- thing of the Reality transcending phenomenal exist- ence, save only that it is, yet "in this assertion of a reality utterly inscrutable in nature, Religion finds an assertion essentially coinciding with her own. And this consciousness of an Incomprehen- sible Power, called Omnipresent from inability to assign its limits, is just that consciousness on which religion dwells." f The result at which this distinguished philoso- pher has arrived, as regards the intellectual possi- bilities of religion, may thus be expressed in a single sentence. The foundation is sound, but any superstructure that can conceivably be reared upon it must be wholly without warrant. To none can be conceded even a provisional validity, for the ultimate good of religious thought is not a developed consciousness of the unseen, but the recognition of a perfectly abstract mystery." + For human in- * First Principles — Part I. : " The Unknowable." t Op. cil.^ p. 45. X " Through all its successive phases the disappearance of those positive dogmas by which the mystery was made unmysterious, THEOSOPHY OR MATERIALISM— WHICH? 21 telUgence, therefore, religion does not, and cannot, exist, since it is essentially the consciousness of the limits of that intelligence itself. The momentous questions in which Philosophy and Religion concur are here pronounced to be illegitimate — the hopeless, resultless beating of thought against its own barriers ; prompted, indeed, by a consciousness, but a consciousness which can never be defined ; testi- fying to a truth, but a truth which can never be known. Regarding Mr. Herbert Spencer as the plenipo- tentiary of Science in its negotiation with Religion, it is certain that peace can never be concluded on the terms he offers. If he has rightly defined the issue, the conflict must go on till the race is educated into Agnosticism, or relapses into super- stition. But is the issue rightly defined ? Can we accept Mr. Spencer's statement of the terms of the pro- blem? Or is it not rather in the inadequate limits he assigns to, or assumes for, Science itself in the first place ; and, secondly, in a similarly wrong limita- tion of the true objects of religious thought ; and, thirdly, in a consequently fallacious distinction where there is no essential difference, that we find the sources of insufficiency and error in his result ? Within the space of this essay, only a succinct has formed the essential change delineated in religious history. And so Religion has ever been approximating towards that coni' plete recognition of this mystery" (the Absolute) "which is ils goal " (p. 100). 22 THE OSOPH Y OR MA TERIALISM— WHICH? explanation can be given of these suggestions, which introduce us to the whole subject of Eastern religious philosophy in its most important, yet least understood relation to the question here raised. For that question is essentially this : whether there can be a science of those problems — a science resting, as all science must rest, upon experience for its verification — an experience under conditions possible to all, since they have been actually realized by some. The reader is here, at the outset, requested not to make any assumptions concerning the nature and evidence of the ex- perience referred to, not to confound it with a vague and eccentric mysticism, or wdth conditions of which psychological pathology can give account. Nor must it be supposed that an appeal is made to the phenomenal so-called " Spiritualism " of recent years, whatever claims this may have, in another relation of the subject, to more attentive consideration than it has hitherto received. The experience here spoken of is not the alleged seeing and conversing with " spirits," but satisfies the scientific conception of experience in general. In other words, the conditions of this experience are defined. To say that these conditions require much preparation and training for their attain- ment is only to admit what must be asserted in a less degree of every physical experiment which demands a scientific education. And, what is important to observe, these conditions are just such as religion has always striven to affirm, but re- THEOSOPHY OR MATERIALISM— WHICH? 23 cUiced to exact and Intelligible statement, and divested of the pietistic language of an immature and mysterious consciousness. This involves a conclusion the very re vers'", of Mr. Herbert Spencer's. The true goal of religion is not mys- tery, but science — a science dealing with a strictly verifiable order of facts, though an order trans- cending that with which physical science, whose professors wrongfully limit the generic term, is concerned. What are the suppositions of Religion with which it is assumed that " Science " can never deal ? That there is a world or objective state beyond the cognizance of our physical senses ; that man is a subject who, in addition to his physical organism, has faculties — it may be undeveloped at the present stage of human evolution, or it may be only dor- mant — fitted to relate him by immediate conscious- ness and perception with that other world ; * and that physical disintegration affects only the mode, and not the existence, of individual consciousness. Lastly and chiefly, though in connexion with the foregoing propositions. Religion carries her account of man yet higher, asserting his relation to a Principle which is the source and inspiration of his moral consciousness, and which manifests itself in him as the perpetual tendency to realise an Universal Will and Nature, and to subordinate the individual limitation. These are the fundamental '■ " There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body " (i Cor. XV. 44). 24 THE OSOPHY OR MA TERIALISM— WHICH ? postulates of Religion, upon which have been built all the doctrinal fabrics of particular and perish- able creeds. These are the propositions which religious intelligence never can dispense with, which physical science has not refuted, and which transcendental science affirms. That this transcendentalism does not pretend to a cognition of the Absolute, and is thus perfectly consistent with the doctrine of the phenomenality and relativity of knowledge, should be already apparent. What it is opposed to is not Science, not Philosophy, but Materialism ; and even to Materialism only in the crude and popular sense of that term. For that we Western tyros know nothing of " Matter " that entitles us to say it can have no other manifestation than in the mode we call physical — the object of our present senses — will be granted by every philosophical man of science. The most that can be said is that we have no evidence of its existence in any other mode. " After all," says Professor Huxley, " what do we know of this terrible ' matter,' except as a name for the unknown and hypothetical cause of states of our own consciousness ? "* The material- ism, if such it can be called, of our really instructed thinkers, thus amounts only to the proposition that the world of our present perception, the world as known to physical science, is the result of a particu- lar mode of action of an unknown cause. That mode of action is objectively manifested in the * " Lay Sermons," p. 142. THEOSOPHY GR MATERIALISM— WHICH? 25 organism, or, as it is called, the physical basis of consciousness. The possibility of a transcendental science is just the possibility of other modes of action of this unknown cause, resulting in other conditions, and therefore in another world, of con- sciousness. The constant misuse of the word '' supernatural," by which it is made to signify not only what is altogether beyond the range of pheno- menal existence, but also every possible mode of such existence which is not related to our present organic conditions, ought to receive no countenance from men of science. " Nature " is co-extensive with existence, and to meet every reference to modes of existence, other than under conditions known to us, with the term " supernaturalism," is simply to betray confusion and inaccuracy of mind. Yet, for this confusion, the absence of any definite ideas concerning the conditions of post- mortem existence is largely responsible. On the great question of individual immortality — of sur- viving consciousness — Christianity has long ceased to offer any conceptions by which it is thinkable to the modern intellect. Some hypothesis, at least, is required by which this truth may be intelligibly apprehended. It is probable that a single book by two eminent men of science has done more to arrest the growing discredit into which this belief was falling than all the works of past or contemporary thcolosrians.* * (( The Unseen Universe, or Physical Speculations on a Fuf.ure State," by Professors Balfour Stewart and P. G. Tait. The public 26 IHEOSOPHY OR MATERIALISM— WHICH? Doubtless, Religion proposes higher aims than the mere demonstration of conscious perpetuation. But this is an indispensable pre-supposition, and is an essential part of that transcendental science which is absolutely wanting in the West, and which the East can supply. The foregoing considerations are intended only to clear the ground of negative assumptions and misconceptions which are constantly put forward in the name of science. Until it has been conceded that physical science has nothing to object to the possibility of transcendental science, no way can be made in describing the methods of the latter, or in showing that it fulfils the conditions, and offers the results, demanded by human intelligence at the present age for a developed conception of religion. The whole purpose of Religion may be succinctly defined as the verification in individual human con- sciousness of metaphysical and transcendental truth. It presupposes that the faculties of verifica- tion are undeveloped. It is of necessity a doctrine of evolution. This truth, which should come home to the Western understanding at the present time, is at the foundation of religious philosophy in the East. But it is not there the abstract or ill-defined statement which it remains still in Christianity ; it is a theoretical and practical system for all who will study and pursue it. So far is it from being interest in the application of scientific thought to this subject is evi- denced by the fact that this book, first published in 1877, had already reached its tenth edition in iSSi. 7'HEOSOPHY OK MATERIALISM— WHICH? 27 true that the East is the land of metaphor and dream, and the West the seat of practical intelli- gence, that in all that concerns transcendental reality or religion, the very reverse is the case. The right statement, however, is, that the practical and scientific intelligence of the East has its home in the higher realities, that of the West in the lower ones. And if the religious spirit in the West finds itself in a doubtful or opposed relation to what is there alone recognized as science, that is due to the fact that its own sense of the higher realities has not attained to definite conceptions, but is still in the undeveloped state of abstract affirmation, or in the nebulous state of mysticism. Herein consists the supreme importance of the influence of Eastern ideas upon the West at the present time. It is a reaction and an exchange. We are giving to India the knowledge and advantage of many practical things relating to our lower needs and nature. In return she offers us the wisdom acquired by thought and experience on a higher plane. A few years ago, before our own dogmatic preconceptions had yielded to the action of intellectual solvents, the opportunity would have been premature. The belief that it is so no longer is the rationale and justification of the Theosophical Society, the character and aims of which will be partly apparent from the following Lectures. The secret which the East has to impart is the doctrine and conditions of evolution of the higher as yet undeveloped faculties in man. But are there 28 THEOSOPHY OR MATERIALISM— WHICH i such faculties, such possibihties ? The answer to this question appeals to that rudimentary consciousness of them from which religion arises. This witness of a consciousness not yet raised to knowledge is Faith, which is indeed " the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen." To those who may think they have it not, or that it can be explained away, no other conviction can be brought. Upon the recognition of it depends the claim to attention of any system professing to expound the principles of Nature in its entirety. Such a system is now in course of publication for the first time. The preparation for it is in the in- creasing interest of Western culture in Eastern ideas. Through the labours of Western Oriental- ists, the abstract doctrines of these religious philo- sophies are already more or less clearly appre- hended. But the developed doctrines are not accessible to the ordinary reader, who, moreover, finds in the sacred writings as translated for him much which can be interpreted by no conceptions provided by Western thought and education. The Upanishads, for instance, abound with allusions which require an undiscovered key for their eluci- dation. And so of the Buddhist writings. The existence of living schools which are the reposi- tories of a more intimate knowledge had not been suspected till recently, and is not yet admitted by our Orientalists. The Theosophical Society is in communication with these, and is actively employed in collecting the information they will impart. Its THE OS PHY OR 3fA TERIALISM— WHICH? 29 organ, The Theosophist, is chiefly devoted to these teachings. The well-known book by Mr. A. P. Sinnett, " Esoteric Buddhism," is perhaps the best general representation of them, so far as already understood, which could be given to the English public. Other books are preparing, and a literature of Theosophy, or the Esoteric Philosophy of the ages, is steadily growing. An attempt even to sum- marize the doctrines in question would be beyond the scope of this work. Nor must it be supposed that the Theosophical Society, to which the reader is introduced in these Lectures, requires subscription to any creed. Its Fellows are students, not co- religionists in any sectarian sense. They are, how- ever, associated by a principle, an idea — Fraternity — of which, since it may either be misconceived, or be regarded as quite impracticable, something should here be added. In the closing chapter of Lange's " History of Materialism," it is well said : *' One thing, however, is certain : if the New is to come into existence, and the Old is to disappear, two great things must combine — a world-kindling ethical idea and a social influence which is powerful enough to lift the depressed masses a great step forward The victory over disintegrating esfoism and the deadly chilliness of the heart will only be won by a great ideal, which appears amidst the wondering peoples as a ' stranger from another world/ and by demanding the impossible un- hinges the reality" (vol. iii., p. 355). 30 THEOSOPHY OR MA TERIALISM— WHICH ? And again : " Often already has an epoch of Materialism been but the stillness before the storm, which was to burst forth from unknown gulfs, and to give a new shape to the world. We lay aside the pen of criticism at a moment when the social question stirs all Europe — a question on whose wide domain all the revolutionary elements of science, of re- ligion, and of politics, seem to have found the battle-ground for a great and decisive contest. Whether this battle remains a bloodless conflict of minds, or whether, like an earthquake, it throws down the ruins of a past epoch with thunder into the dust, and buries millions beneath its wreck, certain it is that the new epoch will not conquer unless it be under the banner of a great idea which sweeps away egoism, and sets human per- fection in human fellowship as a new aim in the place of reckless toil, which looks only to the per- sonal gain " ( ibid.^ p. 361). It is to such an idea as this that the Theoso- phical Society seeks to give a formal, if not already a quite practical expression. It is no new dis- covery, certainly, this reassertion of the essential r.nlty of the race, of Brotherhood as a principle to be elevated above all accidental or historical dis- tinctions. It is, on the contrary, the one vital ethical result out of religious thought. Is it there- fore a truism too barren or abstract to form the basis of practical association ? Is it nothing to ex- tricate It from the diversities of dogma in which its rilEOSOPH V OR MA TERM LISM— WHICH ? 3 1 significance is buried, to renew it in the hearts of men and women of all sects and creeds as the vow and obligation of their lives? Is it an objection that the Society does not come before the world with a single, well-devised application of the prin- ciple? Those who. would offer this as an objection cannot have realized how much more than abstract assent is implied in the recognition and study of the principle itself The conquest of selfishness and prejudice in all their forms, national, social sectarian, political, private, is the aim which grows in every individual mind out of a living sense of human fraternity. Its applications on the wider scale of law and co-operation must be self- developed. They are not to be the fanatical im- pulses of half-educated " world-betterers." They will emerge spontaneously and surely from the unity of spirit and habit acting upon an intelli- gent and well-informed apprehension of the pro- blems, and from the subordination of self-interest. Many practical problems which seem insoluble to individual thinkers can only find their solvent in an altered disposition of mankind. All religions seek to effect this change of disposition in the in- dividual consciousness. But nearly all religious systems have preferred their specific and distinctive tenets to their true universal basis and inherent tendency, and have thus become the most dis- cordant of influences in the world they would re- o-enerate. Therefore it is that the Theosophical Society has no room for propagandists of any 32 THEOSOPHY OR MATERTALISM— WHICH? exclusive creed. Its principle indeed requires that none of its members should even mentally assert the exclusive sanctity of his own religious denomina- tion. In India, the Society has been opposed and denounced at every turn by Christian mission- aries ; and if on its side it has seemed to evince hostility to Christianity, that is because its represen- tatives identify it with those arrogant pretensions v/hich make peace, charity, and fraternity impossible. If we point out to the natives of India that the form of Christianity taught by these zealots is becoming more and more discredited among the best religious thinkers of the West itself, our doing so belongs rather to our duty as educated Europeans than to any polemical disposition. The fact that we number in our ranks, not only many avowed Christians, but also some conspicuous members of the Chris- tian clergy, may be referred to in relation to a mis- understanding from which even some of our own Fellows in England have not been free. We have spoken of the advocacy of the principle of Universal Brotherhood, or, to avoid the charge of Utopianism, of a kindly reciprocity and mutual tolerance between men and races, as a primary object of the Theosophical Society. We can" happily point to the rapid extension of that organization to various countries, and the actual gathering together into the same of many persons of the most incongruous sects, and hitherto anti- pathetic nationalities, as substantial proof of its practicability. But this is only one out of the three THEOSOFHY OR MA TERIALISM— WHICH ? 33 declared objects of the Society, as the following pages show. Its second object is the promotion of the study of Aryan and other Eastern literature, religions, and sciences. Schopenhauer wrote even more wisely than he knew when making his pro- phetic utterances in 18 18. For, not only are the Uplianishads inestimably rich repositories of philo- sophical and spiritual thought, but also in the great body of Sanskrit, Pali and Zend literature is an in- exhaustible mine of noble and inspiriting thought. We might despair of ever making any important contributions to this department of knowledge, were we dependent wholly upon our own labours ; for the proper work of the Founders of the Society is rather that of organization than research. Having, however, the active aid of many of the most learned native scholars of Asia, and through them access to the rest, we feel confident that the movement we are directing will result in substantial gain to the scholar, the moralist and the philosopher. The Society's third declared object relates to the investi- gation of the unfamiliar laws of Nature and the faculties latent in man. An inordinate prominence has been given to the psychic phenomena produced by Madame Blavatsky, which, however striking in themselves, are nevertheless but a small part of Theosophy as a great whole. To a very limited ex- tent these questions are considered in the following Lectures ; but for full details the reader must be re- ferred to the literature of the Occult sciences, now being constantly enriched by new publications. 34 THKOSOPHY OR MATERIALISM— WHICH? No amount of reading, however, will suffice for a knowledge of the subject; at best, it gives but a smattering of information as a basis of beHef. Nor can a teacher develop the psychic powers in a way to make them docile and trustworthy to the student's will. Psychic growth is the fruit of self- mastery ; the Initiate is, more than any one else, " a self-made man ! " The Theosophical Society docs not make adepts : it but hints at their exist- ence and points to the path. ENGLAND'S WELCOME. '=■ Mr. Chairman,— On behalf of the General Council of the Theosophical Society, on Madame Blavatsky's behalf, and on my own, I thank you and this assemblage of colleagues and well-wishers for your cordial welcome. That a company so brilliant and distinguished should have gathered here for this kindly purpose, is to us most gratifying and, I may add, surprising. We have not been accus- tomed to such treatment at the hands of the people of our race, but rather to its opposite. Before leaving India, with the recollection still vivid of the abuse and obloquy we had to endure in that country, we should not have dared to anticipate it. I take this to mark a new era and a turning-point in our Society's history. All we have ever asked is that we might be heard with patience by the cultured classes of Europe ; and here I see many representatives of British Science, Art, and Literature, of Diplomacy and of Society, assembled to hear what we have to say. There must be a substantial power in Theosophy, since it has * An Address delivered at Prince's Hall, Piccadilly, London, July 21, 1S84, in response to a greeting to the Founders of the Theosophical Society by the Pondon members, through the Pre- sident of the local Lodge. 36 ENGLAND'S WELCOME. become so widespread a social movement In various countries ; without the adventitious help of august patronage, of great capital, or of fanatical support. It has become a theme for discussion at hundreds of British hearths, and, spreading from the most thoughtful to the most frivolous circles, is now actually noticed by " Society " journals as the fashionable talk of the day at the tea-tables of Belgravia and in the Holy Land of the West End ! These " fashion-writers " speak of it as a whim of the moment, to be forgotten, like the sun-flower and crutch, for to-morrow's caprice. But it vrill not — mark me, it will not — be forgotten. The day's folly of the drawing-room Is ephemeral as Its pleasure ; but the ideas provoked by Theosophy eat Into the mind, and cannot be dislodged. For they pertain to the secret causes of joy and sorrow, of our future, of our very existence Itself, and these cannot be dismissed at will. Let the jesters jest on, with their squibs, lampoons, and comic poems : they are but turning the mill-stonns of Destiny, which grind the grist of the nation's thought. My gifted countryman, Mr. Moncure Conway, said the other day that every idea must finally come to this metropolis to be tested and receive its mint- mark. He was right ; and we are now bringing you the golden ore of Theosophy, dug from the long-closed Intellectual mines of our Asiatic pro- genitors. We ourselves put it into the melting-pots of Western criticism, and ask that it may be tested, amalgamated with the purest silver of Western ENGLAND'S WELCOME. 37 thought, and then thrown into circulation. We have come to the bar of British public opinion to plead the cause of humanity, which sorely suffers through ignorance of the laws of spirit, soul, and mind, as well as those of the body. We do not pretend to leadership ; but we demand a seat in the Council which is deliberating on the master pro- blems of Religion and Science. The Materialis':, Positivist, Agnostic, and Secularist, are already there, in conspicuous places, jostling the Ecclesi- astic ; crushing religious sentiment, undermining spiritual aspirations, blackening the sky of sunny Intuition, robbing this reading and inquiring age of the last vestige of belief in the existence of man after the death of the body, and uncovering the black and yawning abyss of oblivion and ex- tinction into which they would have us leap. The Church has anathematised in vain ; the sharpest blades of theological dogmatism have broken like weak reeds upon the steely helms of the Biologist and Evolutionist. The party of Religion have been forced from their stronghold in the human heart, and the party of Materialistic science have usurped the conquered ground. It has come at last to such a point that well-read men can hardly be induced to discuss whether the creed of Christendom is in extremis or not ; regarding it as a waste of time, since none but the illiterate doubt the fact. That Rubicon, they aver, was crossed long ago. The victorious cohorts of Freethought are gathering to the trumpet-call of Darw^in, Huxley, Haeckel. of 38 ENGLAND'S WELCOME. Mill, Clifford, Lewes and Greg. They are building temples to their new god, Protoplasm, out of the debris of the world's old faiths, as the early Chris- tians utilized the shrines of the Pagan deities to build churches. It is the old, old story of evolution, change and growth ; the story that can be read in every sociological evolution in the history of our race. Whether by voice, or book, or sword the change is brought about, come it always must. The seed-germ of the next race, or civiliza- tion or creed, can only germinate as the dry husk decays, within which its potentiality was secretly de- veloped. The friends of Materialism hope that it may be the outcome of the destruction of Spiritu- ality. Shall it ? That is the question put by the Theosophical Society to you, thinking men and women of Europe. For the choice is narrowed to this : either materialistic Atheism* and Nihilism — the conception of a short life between two blanks — or Theosophy. Say what }'ou may, laugh as you * The use of the expression " materialistic Atheism " in this con- nexion has been made the pretext by seme not very friendly critics to charge me with a belief in a personal God. It will be impossible for any one to point to a single sentence ever spoken or written by me which would give colour to such a charge. Upon a hundred public occasions I have defined the " God " of the Founders of our Society to be identical with the Universal Principle — formless, changeless, devoid of the attributes of personality and of limitation — which is postulated by the highest metaphysicians of Asia. This is made very plain even in the few Lectures that have been preserved out of several hundreds delivered in India and Ceylon to constitute the present volume. And it is equally clear that, whatever may be my personal views or those of INIadame Blavatsky, no one in our Society is responsible for them, save ourselves ENGLAND'S WELCOME. 39 will, mock as you choose — that is the issue of to- day. Religion has but one foundation — Theosophy; a Church built upon any other is as a house built in the air. Let not the Christian tell me that the Bible offers its " scheme of salvation and its blessed promises;" nor the Jew that the inspired scrolls of the Law bear the divine messages of Sinai and the Prophets ; nor the Hindu that the sacred Veda, if read with faith and understanding, reveals all trutli that man is fit to receive, and that the Upanishads are full of the glory of spiritual life. Let all this be granted to each ; yet these books have no meaning to the spiritually blind eye of our sceptical generation, nor the words of their most authoritative expositors any sound to the faith-dulled ear of the youth whose University has taught him to believe nothing he sees or hears until it is experimentally proven. It is absolutely a waste of time to appeal to a sentiment of loyal faith in ecclesias- tical authority long since practically extinct. The only chance of dislodging Materialism from its fortress is to prove it unscientific^ and Esoteric Philo- sophy scientific. It is with the hammer of science that its idols, if they are to be broken at all, must be demolished. We, Founders of the Theosophical Society, planted it upon that basic general proposi- tion, as upon a rock that can buffet the storms of criticism. And the experience of nine years since come and gone has convinced us that we were right. Our work has extended to America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australasia — in all which 40 ENGLAND'S WELCOME. continents we have now established branches of the parent Society ; we have met and discussed with many superior minds of different nationahties ; and our conclusion is that if we had the work of founding our Society to do over again, we could not choose a broader, surer, safer basis of activity than that which you will find sketched out in its three avowed or declared objects. Those three foundations - stones are : to promote a feeling of brotherhood among men, regardless of race, creed, or colour ; to promote the study of the Aryan and other religions, philosophies, and sciences ; and to promote experimental research into the hidden laws of Nature and the latent capabilities of man. The canons of modern Science are equally the canons of ancient Oriental philo- sophy. If the one rests upon fact so does the other. Our Western college professors teach us to take nothing upon faith ; our masters of the Eastern school do the like. The motto written on the title-page of your well-known journal, i\^(f?//^;'^, is: '* To the solid ground Of Nature trusts the mind Avhich builds for aye." Wordsworth. The legend that heads our Society's journal, the T/icosophist/\s'. "There is no religion higher than Truth." The Lord Buddha, revered as the greatest among adepts of the Occult science, when asked by the Kalama people how they might know which religion was the truest, answered that they should believe nothing written or spoken, by any EA' GLAND'S WELCOME. 41 teacher of any epoch, upon mere authority, but only when the teaching harmonized with reason, and would stand the test of examination. That is the attitude which we likewise adopt. If the Theosophical Society had come forward with a claim of infallibility for its ideas or its teachers, discouraging criticism and shirking inquiry, it would have been turned out of court on its first appearance. But since it has spread from city to city and from land to land, until it can now count over a hundred branches, it is clearly in accordance with the spirit of the age, and meets a real want of humanity. It has an unmistakeable vitality, and has attained a development that pre- sages a great future for the movement. Month after month fresh branches spring up, and new lines of usefulness open out. Four days ago I organized, in the very stronghold of Presbyterian intolerance, the " Scottish Theosophical Society," and after a Lecture at Edinburgh one of the leading clergymen of the city took my hand in brotherly kindness, declaring that the sentiments I had just expressed to my audience were identical with those he was wont to preach from his pulpit. So, too, the freethinking journalists of Paris have de- clared our Society's cardinal idea of fraternal concert between the best thinkers and truest men of all races for research after the funda- mental facts of human existence, to be in strict harmony^with the principles of French republican- ism ; while, at the same time, the reactionary 42 ENGLAND'S WELCOME. Ultramontanes of the Royalist party have, in their organ, Le Defcnseiir, bidden us a hearty welcome as to those who may save France from the moral decay brought about by crass materialism. Pass- ing on to the Orient, you have only to consult the files of the native press of India and of Ceylon, to discover how enthusiastically the masses of those ancient countries speak of our Society and its work. In these Western communities most people regard us as innovators, trying to " float " a new delusion; but throughout the East it is accounted the chief merit of Theosophy that its teachings are but the uncoloured recapitulation of the grand philo- sophy taught to Egypt and Greece by their holy sages, and embalmed in their ancestral literature. Seven years ago scarcely a Hindu college graduate dared to confess a feeling of respect for the national religious philosophy ; now the imported Western scepticism is going out of fashion, and Indian and Sinhalese youth are joining our Society, and beginning to emulate the piety, temperance, honesty and truthfulness of their noble forefathers. Within the past twelvemonth these cherished young colleagues have founded, under our auspices, twenty- seven schools and colleges for Sanskrit teaching, have published books, have founded Theosophical journals, and have organized religious classes or Sun- day schools in various parts of the Indian Peninsula and of Ceylon. The movement has spread to the United States, despite the absence of its Founders, since 1878, in the East. Within the ENGLAND'S WELCOME. 43 past year, new branches have been formed, a Theo- sophicaljournalhas been started, other charters have been appHed for, a central governing Committee or Board has been organized,and two delegates of note — one,an author and journalist attached to the editorial staff of an influential New York paper, the other, a man of scientific repute, and a college professor — have come across the Atlantic to meet the Founders and to arrange for future Theosophical work in America. Within the next two days, I go to Germany to hold a conference of certain of the ablest philoso- phical writers of the day, and to launch the bark of Theosophy upon the deep sea of German thought. The seed planted by Mme. Blavatsky and my- self at New York in 1875, when we organized the Society, is fast growing into a banyan tree, whose roots are striking dow^n into the subsoil of human nature, and whose shade will one day be broad anci dense enough to shelter a multitude of students of the Problem of Life. And let me here candidly and gratefully confess how much of our success in English-speaking countries is due to the world- wide circulation attained by The Occtdt World and Esoteric Bitddhisin, those tw^o profoundly interesting and valuable books of our eminent colleague, Mr. A. P. Sinnett. Here, in the land and city of his birth, I thank that loyal friend and true-hearted Englishman, whose courageous and unselfish advo- cacy of a discovered truth is — well, w4iat one always expects from an Englishman of that sort ! As mine is the task of giving you a historical re- 44 ENGLAND'S WELCOME. trospect, I must briefly note what the Theosophical Society has accomplished under each of the three heads of work it sets itself First, as to the question of forming the nucleus of a Brotherhood of Humanity. We have effected much in this direc- tion ; much of a visible and practical character. Upon our rolls are inscribed the names of some thousands of men and women who represent many races and most of the great creeds. Our Rules positively prohibit the discussion, at our meetings, of questions likely to stir up strife about religion, caste, race, and politics. All such discordant issues are left outside our threshold. We meet as friends, whose declared and only pur- pose is to exchange ideas and to help each other to get at the truth. The wisest are our Theosophical aristocracy. The rich man is not esteemed in our Society for his wealth, nor the poor man despised for his poverty. The tie of a common interior nature makes us see and know each other as brethren in Theosophy. The antagonism of sex is unknown among us : we are not concerned as to the relative supremacy of man or woman, the test of excellence is the capacity of their respective minds ; the brightest is the most respected, and the highest place in our esteem is occupied by the one most devoted to the cause of Theosophy, and who best illus- trates in daily conduct its lofty ideal. It was a sight to behold with joy when, at the celebration of the Society's eighth anniversary, at Madras in ENGLAND'S WELCOME, 45 December last, more than one hundred delegates — Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Mussulmans and Agnostics — were gathered together from the four quarters of the globe to report the progress of the movement in their several countries, and to bring the vows of fealty from their various branches. The possibility of a practical confraternity upon the basis of mutual reciprocity and kindly tolerance was then and there triumphantly proved. We then saw that, while it is impossible, save in Utopia, to hope for a real brotherly union between nations or communities upon the external side of human nature, yet this may be effected quite easily upon the plane of the inner and nobler self Secondly, as to the study of the ancient philoso- phies and religions. Here, too, great results have been achieved. It would be vain to search the mysti- cal writings of modern times for so great a body ot valuable practical teaching upon these questions as the still meagre and budding Theosophical literature already offers. I venture to say, for example, that there can be found in no Western author so many lucid expositions of occult philosophy and meta- physics as have been given recently in the Theo- sophical circles of London and Paris by our gifted and beloved young Brahman colleague, Mr. Mohini, who sits beside me on this platform. This lineal descendant of the Raja Rammohun Roy has shown himself worthy of that grandsire whose learning and elevated spirituality of character are remembered in England, as well as in India, to this 46 ENGLAND'S WELCOME. day, with deep affection. Besides the exegetical works of Mr. Sinnett, there is Madame Blavatsky's encyclopaedic Isis Unveiled, now in its seventh edition, which traverses a vast domain of science and rehgion, and there are various pamphlets by different authors, all relating to the Asiatic side of the subject. On the side of Esoteric Christianity and the Hermetic Doctrine, the eloquent work of Dr. Anna Kingsford and Mr. Edward Maitland, The Pcj'fect Waj', will be reckoned among the great books of the century. The TJieosopJiist, a monthly magazine, issued at the Society's headquarters at Madras,* and now in its fifth volume, has among its contributors some of the ablest educated Hindus living, who during the past five years have been expounding their national Sanskrit literature. Thirdly, and lastly, as to researches into the occult side of Nature and of Man. What the mystical writers of Greece and Rome, of Germany, France, Italy, and England, had hinted at in this direction ; what was figured in the pictographs of Egypt, in the sculptures of Nineveh and of Central and South America, in the cylinders, bricks, and stones of Babylonia and of other countries ; what was embalmed though masked in folk-lore, legend, saga, and national customs, has been verified and corroborated by the individual re- searches of certain of our members. While the Christians are sitting almost speechless, unable * Mr. George Redway, the publisher of the present vokime, is the London agent. ENGLAND'S WELCOME. 47 to confute the dogmatic assertion of the infidel biologist, that human consciousness isimpossibleout- side the physical organism, and that man is extinct when it is dissolved, we Theosophists have experi- mentally proved its utter falsity. We have proved it by projecting ourselves out of the body, with the retention of full consciousness and volition, acling and observing as readily as any of us can do in his fleshy encasement. We liave proved that there is an inner range of percipient faculties, more acute, and mAich more unerring, than " the five gateways " of the outer body. We have verified the exist- ence of two sublimer states of matter than the form we are told about by our fashionable scientific authorities. The " Unseen Universe," or subjective world, of Professors Balfour Stewart and Tait has ceased to have for us the aspect of a hypothesis, for this terra incognita, this Polar circle of official science, has been explored by us, with the adepts of the East as our guides and teachers. Some of my colleagues in the Theosophical Society so revere the characters of these living Masters as to think it almost a crime that I should profane their secret by naming them to a mixed audience. But I am imbued with the American, rather than with the Oriental feeling as to such matters. I know as a fact that these grand men are not to be moved as to their inner selves by anything, good or ill, that may be said of them : the reviler's abuse but recoils upon himself, as, in the Eastern proverb, the dust blows back into the eyes of the fool who throws 48 ENGLAND'S WELCOME. it against the wind. And, as an old student of Psychology, I feel the enormous vitality the subject derives from the fact that these Masters live as really for us as their predecessors did for Apollonius, Plato, and Pythagoras ; that they can be seen, and conversed with, as they have been seen and con- versed with by many among us ; and that they furnish in their own persons a tangible, actual ideal of a hitherto unsuspected human perfectibility. And so realising, I shall, until they command me to keep silence, continue to bear testimony to their existence, to their benevolent philanthropy, to their angelic qualities, mental and moral. To them, through their agent, Madame Blavatsky, I owe the first glimpse of the true light. By thenri I was taught to detect its Sflow under the exoteric masks of the world's various faiths, and to know it for their silvery psychic spark. They taught me to see that the colour of my brother man, his dress, his formal creed, his social prejudices, were but the results of his external environment, and but tinted, without obstructing the inner shining of the im- mortal Ego: as the cathedral panes give for the watcher outside their glowing hues to the light that burns in the chancel and along the aisles. To them my life-long fealty is pledged. My earnest hope -is that I may not fail in my duty ; my chief desire that, through the extension of the Theosophical Society, I may succeed in causing hundreds as hungry as myself after spiritual truth to know of their existence and partake of their teaching. THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY AND ITS AIMS.^ When a new Society asks a hearing of the world it is sure to be challenged. The public has that vested right, and none but fools will object to its exercise. Infallibility is out of fashion, notwith- standing the Roman conclave of July 13th, 1870, where, as the Syllabus of the Vatican Council tells us, the Holy Ghost sat with the Bishops and judged with them. Men now-a-days take nothing on faith ; the era of inquiry and proof has come. The Theosophical Society expects no exemption from the rule ; has asked none ; and my presence before this great audience, so soon after the arrival in India of our Committee, shows our readiness to give a reason for its existence. We believe it was a necessary outgrowth of the century. I hope to show you that the hour demanded its coming, and that it was not born before its appointed time. Our society points to four years of activity as one proof that there was room for it in the world. And this activity, please observe, was not in the * An Address delivered at the Framji Cowasji Hall, Bombay, 23id March, 1879. D So THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY midst of friendly environments, with no one to question or oppose, but in the enemy's country, with foes all about, public sentiment hostile, the press scornful and relentless, traitors working with honest opponents to break up our organization and neutra- lize our labours. Occupying, as most of us did, positions of some influence, we have had to suffer, in ways that will suggest themselves to each of you, for the privilege of free speech. While the press has lampooned us, in writing and pictorial carica- tures, by the clergy we have been denounced as the children of Satan, doomed to eternal damnation along with the wretched " Heathen." We throve on opposition. The more we were abused, the greater interest was created to know what the Theosophical Society really was, how strong, and what were its aims? These questions, which have been put to us in every possible varia- tion since our arrival here, we answered, without concealment or equivocation, face to face, eye to eye. We had nothing to be ashamed of, whether in doctrine, motive, or deed, and so we spoke — and now speak — with the boldness of one who loves the truth and hates a lie. All this discussion, carried on for months, even years, in journals of world-wide circulation, drew to us large nun^bers of sympathizers. Scattered throughout America and Europe were men and women of intelligence, influence, courage, who had long been interested in the topics to which we applied ourselves, and who needed only such a ral- AND ITS AIMS. 51 lying-point as our society offered, to combine their strength. So they joined us, cheering us by their activity of deed no less than by their friendliness of word. A branch society sprang up in England, under the presidency of a barrister of the highest capabilities, and the conjoint direction of a Univer- sity professor, and of medical and other professional men. Other branches were formed in Russia, France, Greece, and elsewhere. One is now form- ing in Ceylon. Our membership increased to thou- sands. We received as brothers, with equal cordiality, Hindus, Jains, Parsis, Buddhists, Jews, and free-thinking Christians. At different times the press has described us as specially represent- ing each of those sects ; a proof, certainly, of our strict impartiality and the general resemblance all these great religions have to each other at their roots. There was room for all upon our platform, and none need jostle his neighbour. What that platform is, will be made clear before I have done speaking. Believing it good generalship to force the fight- ing when one feels sure of his supports, we not only struck blow for blow at our antagonists, but con- trived more than once to put them on the defen- sive. Often without obtruding ourselves upon public notice, we aroused an interest in everything related to the East. Oriental science, literature, chronology, tradition, superstitions, magic and spiritualism, afforded themes for our allies to speak and write upon, throughout the two parts of 52 THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY Christendom. Those who have seen the Western journal and periodical literature during the past four or five years, must have been struck with the apparently sudden growth of a deep interest in such matters. They will also have noticed the in- creased number of books published on Oriental sub- jects. How much of that activityis traceable directly and indirectly to the Theosophical Society, we, only, know who have been in the thick of the fighting. We have been asked, scores of times, why our Society has established as yet no periodical, nor issued any volumes of Reports. Our answer is that a wider activity could be achieved by utilizing presses already established. We have thus reached mil- lions of readers, where, through any special organ of our own, we might only have caught the eye and provoked the thought of a few thousands. How many in India, think you, have read about the visit of our Committee and its objects ? and how many would have done so if we had depended upon a journal of our own ? Papers in English and the several vernacular tongues have been sent us, and letters from the extreme North and the extreme South have come to us, from those wdio have an interest in our work. It has been remarked at the West that no Society has, w^ithin so short a time, been talked about in so many different countries as ours. We gratefully accept the fact as proof that we are welcomed to a standing-room in the arena of the century. And now what is the Theosophical Society, and AND ITS AIMS. 53 what are its aims ? How much appears upon the surface, and how much is concealed ? What is the plan of work ? How is the public to be benefited by the Society, and is mutual co-operation practic- able ? What attitude do we assume towards re- ligious beliefs, and what ideas, if any, does the Society hold about God and his government ? Do we believe in the immortality of the human soul, and, if so, on what grounds ? What importance do we attach to the study of the occult sciences, so called? What use has been made, by many or few of our Fellows, of any knowledge of those sciences? To what highest good do we aspire, here or here- after ? What are our ideas of the next world ? These questions j^// have come here to ask, / to answer. I have copied them from written docu- ments, handed to me since this address was an- nounced by the native committee. And here are others propounded by one who wishes to join us: — On one's becoming a member, is any course pre- scribed for him to follow with a view to his con- tinual progression and the acquisition of mastery over his baser nature ? What constitutes the differ- ence between the degrees in the Society ? Will instruction be imparted to individual members or groups, on what subjects, and how often ? Webster defines Theosophy as " a direct as distinguished from a revealed knowledge of God, supposed to be attained by extraordinary illum- ination, especially a direct insight into the pro- cesses of the Divine mind and the interior rela- 54 THE THEOSOPHTCAL SOCIETY tions of the Divine nature." How far does this agree with the doctrines of the Theosophical Society ? Is a member of the Arya, Brahmo, or Prarthana Samaj debarred from joining it, or will his joining affect his position in relation to the social rules and duties of his caste ? How much time would be required to become proficient in a degree ? Will any library be established and ac- cessible to the Fellows ? Will there be social gatherings to discuss Oriental philosophy and kindred subjects ? We have here seventeen inquiries, covering ground enough for thirty-four lectures, but I will attempt to cursorily glance at all in the hour at my disposal. All, except those of a strictly personal character, have been treated at great length and with signal ability by Mme. H. P. Blavatsky, Corresponding Secretary of our Society, in her " Isis Unveiled," a work which a well-known London jour- nal. Public Opinion, styled " a stupendous monu- ment of human industry," and which the Neiv Yoi'k Herald considered, " one of the great achieve- ments of our century." Those who care to really sound this question of the relative supremacy of ancient and modern science and religion can easily do so, as the work is to be had of our booksellers. But, to begin with our answers, I affirm then that everything essential, as regards principles, recommendations and ideas, appears upon the sur- face of our 'Society, and nothing is concealed that sJionld be made known. We do not say one thing AND ITS AIMS, 55 and mean another. We have no mental reserva- tions — we resort to no equivocations. What we believe, we say — always and everywhere. If we have survived all the battles through which we have passed ; if, after a four years' struggle against obstacles, in the very heart and stronghold of Christendom, we are a strong, compact, successful Society, daily increasing in influence, having daily accessions of able coadjutors ; if, at this juncture, our outposts are entrenched in the most widely separated countries, and garrisoned by men of the most diverse speech, complexion, and ancestry ; if here, upon the threshold of Aryavarta, we find our hands clasped with fraternal warmth by the Hindu, the Parsi, the Jain, and the Buddhist ; it is because we have not feared to speak the truth at any cost. When our Society was organised — at New York in 1875 — the very first section of the bye-laws adopted, after fixing upon our corporate title, affirmed that the object of the Society was to obtain knowledge of all the laws of nature. This covers the whole range of natural phenomena, and everything that concerns mankind and his environ- ments. The inaugural address of the President was delivered, November 17th, 1875, and in it, after attempting a comparison of our Society with the neoplatonists and theurgists of ancient Alexandria, the fire -philosophers of the middle ages, and the ancient and modern spiritualists, and finding no exact parallel, I said : " We are neither of these, but simply investigators of earnest purpose and 56 THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY unbiassed mind, who study all things, prove all things, and hold fast to that which is good. We seek, inquire, reject nothing without cause, accept nothing without proof: we are students, not teachers." Does not this utterance of 1875 answer most of the questions of 1879 ? The Society has its secrets, nevertheless; but they harm no one. Composed, as we are, of people who live at the two extremities of the earth, and who speak different tongues, we have the same necessity as Freemasons for some means of mutual identi- fication, in special cases. These are afforded by certain signs and tokens which, of course, are withheld from strangers, and are changed as required. Again, operating, as we do, mainly in Christian countries, in some of which (as in France, Spain, and Russia, for instance) religious intolerance pre- vails, the corporate perpetuity of our branches would be imperilled by allowing our membership to be known, and our plans for religious and scientific agitation might be baffled by exposing them. Our existence threatens no Government, feeds no political cabal, attacks no pillar of social order. We do not concern ourselves in the least with affairs of State, nor lay impious hands upon the conjugal, filial, or parental relation. We would not admit man or woman who was in rebellion against the existing laws or government of his or her country, or engaged in plots and conspiracies against the public peace and safety. In New York we expelled one of our most active charter officers. AND ITS ATMS. 57 an Englishman — one of the founders of the Society, in fact — because he allowed himself to be mixed up with a gang of French Communist refugees in their wicked conspiracies. Judge for yourselves, there- fore, how malicious and unfounded are the libels that have been circulated in this country as to our being political spies, and, most ridiculous of all, Russian spies ! The only Russian in our party became a citizen of the United States of America last July, an act unprecedented among Russian women, and her book, " Isis Unveiled," already referred to, is not allowed to cross the frontiers. Nor would we admit into our fellowship any one who taught irreverence to parents or immorality to husbands or wives. Nor have we any room for the drunkard or the debauchee. If Theo- sophy did not make men better, purer, wiser, more useful to themselves and to society, then this organisation of ours had better never been born. That it lives, and Is respected even by those who cannot sympathise with its Ideas, is evidence of its beneficent character. This answers one of the above questions, and I have also shown you that our plan of work is to employ existing agencies to create an interest in Eastern philosophies and religions, and make the Press our helper, even when it fancies it is killing us off with its fine sarcasm or abuse. And now, we are asked, what attitude do we hold to religious beliefs, and what do we believe as 58 THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY to God and his government? The Society, I have already told you, is no Propaganda, formed to dis- seminate fixed dogmas ; therefore, as a society, it has no creed to offer for the world's acceptance. It recognises the great philosophical principle that while there is but one Absolute Truth, the differ- ences among men only mark their respective appre- hensions of that Truth. It is not for me to say to you what this Absolute Truth is. If I were cap- able of doing so, then (for the first time since the world began) there would have appeared an infal- lible, omniscient human mind upon earth. There is no educated sectarian so bigoted that when you calmly discuss with him the bases of his faith, he will not admit that its Founder was not equal to his one Supreme God in omniscience and other attributes. The Parsi will not claim it for Zoroas- ter, the Buddhist for Sakya-Muni, the Jain for Parasnatha, the Jew for Moses, the Mohammedan for the Prophet of Islam, nor the Hindu for any of the Rishis, who "Above all fleshly, worldly feelings soared." Revere his spiritual intermediator and teacher as either of these may, he will only claim that, in his opinion, more of this Absolute Truth flowed from Heaven to Earth through this particular channel, this minor god, if you will, than through any other. And to settle these disputes, all the spilt blood of religious wars has been shed. Then why should we accord to these Christian missionaries who have so maligned us to you, that which we refuse to AND ITS AIMS. 59 other people ? Why should we, as a society, accept Jesus rather than Vasishta, Gautama or Zoroaster? Far be it from me to scoff at the simple faith of those thousands of Christians who have pictured to themselves a Deity all love and beneficence, and who exemplify in their lives and conversation all that is beautiful in human nature. The recollection of my nearest and dearest ones, and of those others whom I have known from boyhood up, in different lands and various social conditions, would stop my mouth were I so unjust and cruel. I myself come from a line of ancestors who have left behind them historical records of their unselfish and courageous devotion to Christianity. Just as I have left my home and business and friends, to come to India to search after the Parabrahma of primitive religions, so, in 1635, one of my ancestors left his home in England, to seek in the savage wilderness of America that freedom to worship the Jewish Jehovah which he could not have in England under the Restoration. But, as the author of "Isis" remarks, these people would have been equally good in any other religious sect ; they are better than their creed : goodness, virtue, equity, are congenital with them. But when we have shown in what we do not be- lieve, we have to say what is our faith. We do be- lieve in the immortality of the human spirit * — the " we " meaning all the representative Theosophists whose minds have been opened to me. In truth, there is not much attraction in our Society for these * The seventh principle in man— the Atma of the Hindus, 6o THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY who persistently deny this assumption, for what advantage is there in studying all those primitive, sublime utterances of the Vedas, the Zend Avesta, the Tripitikas, about the " soul" and future life, if a man is incapable of realizing the idea of a spiritual self or an Universal Principle at all ? Let such an one take his balances and weigh and count over and christen the motes of Nature's dust-heap, and get ribbons for catching a new bug, and titles for impaling a new beetle. He will die happy in the thought that his name, though Latinized or Hellen- ized past recognition, will be transmitted to pos- terity in connexion with the solar refrangibility of the cucumber, or some other discovery of equally momentous importance. The study of occult science has a twofold value. First, that of teaching us that there is a teeming world of Force within this teeming visible world of Phenomena ; and, second, in stimulating the student to acquire, by self-discipline and education, a knowledge of his psychic powers and the ability to employ them. How appropriate is the term ' occult science," when applied to the careful ob- servation of the phenomena of force, is apparent when we read the confessions of scientific leaders as to the limitation of their positive knowledge. " We have not succeeded," says Professor Balfour Stewart, " in solving the problem as to the nature of life, but have only driven the difficulty into a borderland of thick darkness, into which the light of knowledge ( Western knowledge, he should say) AND ITS AIMS. 6i has not yet been able to penetrate."* Says Le Conte, " Creation or destruction of matter, increase or diminution of matter, lies beyond the domain of science." f And even Huxley ,J the High Pontiff regnant of materialism, confesses " it is also, in strictness, true that we know nothing about the .composition of any body whatever, as it is." Did time permit, I might cite to you many similar utterances from the mouths of the most worshipped biologists and philosophers who happen at the moment to have the stage of notoriety to themselves. You cannot open a book on chemis- try, physiology, or hygiene, without stumbling upon admissions that there are fathomless abysses in all modern science. Pere Felix, the great Catholic orator of France, taunted the Academy by saying that they found an abyss even in a grain of sand. Who, then, can tell us of the nature of life, the cause of its phenomena, the qualities of the inner man? Who guards the keys of the secret chamber, and where do they hang ? What dragons lie in the path ? America cannot tell us, Europe cannot — for we have questioned both. But in the Western libraries we found old books which tell us that in olden times there was a class of men, who had dis- * '* The Conservation of Energy," by Balfour Stewart, LL.D., F.R. S., Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Owens' College, Manchester (p. 163). t "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces," revised for Dr. Stewart's book, stipra (see page 171). X ••On the Physical Basis of Life." By Thomas H. Huxley, LL.D., F.R.S. 62 THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY covered these secrets, had interrogated nature be- hind her veil. These men lived in the lands now called Tibet, India, Persia, Chaldea, Egypt, and Greece. We find traces of them even in the frae- mentary remains of the sacred literature of Mexico and Peru. And we have been told that this sacred science is not extinct, but still survives, and is practised by men who carefully guard their know- ledge from profane hands. Some of us have even had the inestimable good fortune to meet with such wonder-workers and tosee their experiments. So we have come in quest of the places and opportunity to learn for our own benefit and that of humanity, what occult law of nature can be brought out of Dr. Stewart's "borderland of darkness " into the lighted and odoriferous class-rooms of Western Science. To what highest good do we aspire ? What is the highest good, but to know something of man and his powers, to discover the best means to benefit humanity — physically, morally, spiritually ? To this we aspire : can our interrogator conceive of a nobler ambition ? In common with all thinkinsr people we have, of course, our individual specula- tions about that infinite and awful something which Anglo-Saxons call God ; but, as a Society, we say, with Pope — " Know, then, thyself; presume not God to scan ; The proper study of mankind is Man." As to our ideas of the next world, the aid of metaphysics would have to be invoked to answer the question. Suffice it that we do not fancy the AND ITS AIMS. 63 other world to be gross like this ; lighted by the same solar vibrations, filled with such houses, such Framji Cowasji Halls, as ours ! Most men are apt to brutalize the next world in trying to construct a tangible idea for the mind to rest upon. The Heaven of Milton, which, as Professor Huxley ob- serves, is the one believed in by Christians and not at all that of any Biblical authority — is a place of shining stairs, golden pavements, and bejewelled thrones, on which, without an inch of cushion to mitigate their metallic hardness, the redeemed saints sit for ever and ever singing hymns to the accom- paniment of the harp. So the Moslem Paradise teems with physical delights, and even the "Summer Land " of our Western Spiritualists has been sketched, mapped out and described by all the re- cent authorities, from Andrew Jackson Davis downward. Is it not enough to conceive of a future state of existence corresponding with the new necessities of the monad that has passed through and out of the cycle of objective matter and become a subjective entity? Can we not realise a life apart from the use of pots and ladles, easy chairs and mosquito curtains? Even the Jivan-Mukta, or soul emancipated, while living in this world, loses all sense of relationship to it and its grossness. How much more perfect the contrast, then, between our narrow physical life and the Mukiatma, or soul universalized — the soul having sympathies with the Universal Good, True, Ji:st, and being absorbed in Universal Love ! Let 64 7HE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY us not drown ourselves in oceans of vague meta- physical speculation, in trying to drag the next sphere down to this, but rather strive to elevate our present plane of matter, so that one end of it may climb to some sort of proximity to the higher realm of spirit. What an important question is this which heads the second series that I read to you ! How can one be helped to acquire mastery over his baser nature? Mighty problem I — how change the brute into the angel ? Why ask for the obvious answer to so simple a question ? Does my friend imagine there is more than one way in which it can be done ? Can any other but one's own self effect this purifi- cation, this splendid conquest, in comparison with whose glory all the greatest victories of war sink into contemptible insignificance? There must be, first, the belief that this conquest is possible ; then, knowledge of the method ; then, practice. Men only passively animal, become brutal from ignor- ance of the consequences of the first downward step. So, too, they fail to become god-like because of their ignorance of the potentiality of effort. Certainly one can never improve himself who is satisfied with his present circumstances. The re- former is of necessity a discontented man — discon- tented with w^hat pleases common souls ; striving after something better. Self-reform exacts the same temperament. A man who thinks w^ell of his vices, his prejudices, his superstitions, his habits, his physical, mental, moral state, is in no mood to AND ITS AIMS. 65 begin to climb the high ladder that reaches from the world of his littleness to a broader one. He had better roll over in his mire, and dismiss Theo- sophy with signs of impatience. Great results are achieved by achieving little ones in turn ; great armies may be beaten in detail by an inferior force ; constant dripping of little water-drops wears away the hardest rock. You and I are so many aggregations of good and bad qualities. If we wish to better our characters, in- crease our capabilities, strengthen our will-power, we must begin with small things and pass to greater ones. Friend, do you want to control the hidden forces of Nature and rule in her domain as a kin<7- consort ? Then begin with the first pettiness, the smallest flaw you can find in yourself, and remove that. It may be a mean vanity, a jealousy of some one's success, a strong predilection or a strong antipathy for some one thing, person, caste ; or a supercilious self-sufficiency that prevents your form- ing a fair judgment of other men's countries, food, dress, customs, or ideas ; or an inordinate fondness for something you eat, drink, or amuse yourself with. It matters not ; if it is a blemish, if it stands in the way of your perfect and absolute enfran- chisement from the rule of this sensuous world, " pluck it out and cast it from thee." This done, you may pass on. You understand now, do you not, the meaning of the various sections and degrees of our Theoso- phical curriculum ? We welcome most heartily £ 66 THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY across our threshold every man or woman, of ascer- tained respectable character and professed sincerity of purpose, who wishes to study the ancient philo- sophies. They are on probation. If true The- osophists at bottom, they will show it by deeds not words. If not, they will soon go back to their old friends and surroundings, apologizing for hav- ino-even thouMit of doing different from themselves. And as one who brings peace-offerings in his hand, they will try to do some meanness to us, who only took them at their word and thought them better than they proved to be. I know this is true, for we have had experience — even in India. I must here clear up one point which some pro- fess to be in doubt about after reading a certain circular issued by our Society. That circular states that for a Fellow to reach the highest degree of our highest section, he must have become " freed from all exacting obligations to country, society, and family," he must adopt a life of strict chastity. I have been asked whether no one could become a thorough Theosophist without relinquishing the marriage relation. Now our circular makes no such assertion. A man may be a most zealous, useful, and respected Fellow, and yet be a patriot, a public official, and a husband. Our highest section is composed of men who have retired from active life to spend their remaining days in seclu- sion, study, and spiritual perfection. You have your married priests, and your sanyasis and yogis. So we have our visible, active men, seen in the AND ITS ATAIS. 67 world, mixed np In its concerns, and a part of it ; and we have our unseen, but none the less active, adepts — proficients in science, physical and occult — masters of philosophy and metaphysics — who benefit mankind without their hand being ever so much as suspected. Though I am ostensibly Pre- sident of the whole Theosophical Society, yet I am less than the least of these Emancipated Ones, and not yet worthy to enter this highest section. It is evident from the foregoing that there is room in our Society for all earnest, unbigoted persons and groups of such persons now working disunitedly. Divided, they are comparatively powerless to do much ; united^ they would make a strength to be felt by the reactionists. Remember the Roman /^j'j'r^i', my friends, and put that emblem up over the door of every temple. My own country, the Great Republic of the West, has this motto : E Pliiribus Unuin — one out of many, one country out of many smaller States. Just so it might be one National Samaj of Aryavarta, out of a shoal of local societies. That is the plan of our Theosophi- cal Society; we have various branches, but one cen- tral guiding authority, and surely there are no greater differences between you here than there are between the red, brown, black, yellow and white men who call themselves Theosophists, the w^orld over. The relations of a man to his country and his caste are, it appears to me, quite distinct from his relations to the study of natural law, of philology, 68 THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY of philosophy, and of esoteric science. Your brown faces and Oriental costumes show me, even without the fact that this audience understands the language I speak, the authors I cite, and the thoughts I utter, that education has no caste, colour, creed, or nativity. Why, then, ask if one must adopt a certain dress or put himself in a certain chair, or before a certain dish of food, to study your fore- fathers' philosophy ? Here am I, with a white skin, an European dress, and a life-experience coloured and shaped after the notions of the section, society, and class in which my parents brought me up. When I began to ponder over this magnificent Eastern philosophy, I was not told that I must dress in this way or that, or refrain from doing this, that or the other thing, not vitally injurious, — such as the drinking of liquors and indulgence in sensuality. I w^as simply shown the path, my way was pointed out, and I was left to my own choice. Well, like all men of the world, I had certain' bad habits, bad ways of thinking, foolish ways of living. I put an inordinate value upon things really worthless, and undervalued things really important. I was looking at things through bad spectacles. After a while, I discovered this myself, and, as I was in dead earnest and determined to succeed or die in the attempt, I began to reform myself I had been a moderate drinker of wines after the Western fashion ; I gave them up. I had been a frequenter of clubs, theatres, social parties, race-courses, and other places, wherein men of the world vainly seek AND ITS AIMS. 69 contentment and pleasure. I gave them all up ; not grudgingly, not looking back at them with regret, but as one flings from him some worthless plaything when its worthlessness becomes known to him. You will, perhaps, pardon the employment of my personal experience as the illustration of the moment, in view of the fact that it is the only one which, without breach of confidence, I can use to answer the interrogatory that has been put to me. If India is to be regenerated, it must be by Hindus, who can rise above their castes and every other reactionary influence, and give good example as well as good advice. Useless to gather into Samajes, and talk prettily of reform, and print translations and commentaries, if the Samajists are to relapse into customs they abhor in their hearts, and observe ceremonies that to them are but super- stitions, and throw all their enlightenment to the dogs. Useless for native gentlemen to sit at the tables of Europeans, in apparent cordial equality, if they have not the moral courage to break bread with them in their own houses. Not of such stuff are the saviours of nations made. But we will pass on to the next question. No time can be specified for the progress of a Thco- sophist from one stage to another. Some would take years, where others would only require days, to reach a given result. We are asked if any library will be established by us ? I hope and trust so. A nucleus already exists; which of you will help to build it up? What rich native loves his countr)ancn more than 70 THE THEOSOPFIICAL SOCIETY money? Or is it 3'our notion that the Indians should do nothing, and the strangers all ? We are willing to give even our lives, if need be, to this cause ; what more will any of you give ? Yes, there will be social gatherings to discuss our congenial themes. In point of fact, there are such already, for every Wednesday and Sunday evening, since our arrival at Bombay, we have held a sort of dttrbar^ or reception, at our bungalow. There we shall be happy to see all — even spies — who care to see us, and those who live out of the city can always communicate with us by letter. Being people who try to take a practical view of things, and dis- posed to work rather than talk, we have set our minds to accomplish two things. We want to per- suade the most learned native scholars — such men, for instance, as the distinguished Sanskrit Professor of Elphinstone College, who occupies the chair of this meeting, and the equally distinguished Presi- dent of the Pali and Sanskrit College of Ceylon, and the eminent Parsi scholar, Mr. Cama, who also honours us with his presence — to translate into English the most valuable portions of their respec- tive religious and scientific literatures, so that we may help to circulate them in Western countries. At the same time we wish to aid, as best we can, in the extension of non-sectarian education for native girls and married women, which we regard as the corner-stone of national greatness, and in the introduction of cheap and simple machines that can be worked by hand labour and that will increase AND ITS AIMS. 71 the comfort and prosperity of our adopted country. We have chosen this land for our home, and feel a desire to help it and its people in any way practic- able, however humble, without meddling with its politics, into which, as American citizens, we have, as I have remarked, neither the right nor inclination to intrude. Let me, before leaving this part of our subject, make one point very clear. The Theosophical Society is no money-making body, nor has it any- thing to do, as such, with financial affairs. Its field is religion, philosophy, and science, — not politics or trade. No one connected with its management receives a penny for his services. And now, having answered, seriatim, the ques- tions embraced in the list, I will pass on to some obvious deductions that suggest themselves, and then conclude. The Indian press have remarked it as a \(tcY strange thing that Western people should have come here to learn instead of to' teach — as though there were nothing in India worth the learning. This conveys a sad impression to my mind. It makes me realize how completely modern India ignores the achievements of ancient Aryavarta. It shows how complete is the eclipse of Aryan vv^isdom when people from the other side of the globe could know more of the essence of Vedic philosophy than most of the direct descendants of the Rishis themselves. Since we landed on your shores we have met hundreds of educated Hindus, Parsis, 72 THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY and men of other sects. They have thronged our parlours, filled our compound, and gathered about us day after day. Out of all these we have found few — so few that we might almost reckon them upon the fingers — who really know what Aryan, Zend, Jain, and Buddhistic philosophies teach. There have been scores able to recite slokas, and whole puranas and chapters, with accurate accent and rhythm; but they merely repeated words without understanding : they had not the key to the mysteries. I have met those who had seen the marvellous phenomena performed by ascetics, and amply corroborated all the stories we had heard and circulated through the Western press. But scarcely one who, having known and seen such thinQs, had set himself to work with determination to learn the science and explore the adytum of nature. In this throng of visitors there was no end of students of Mill, of Darwin, of Spencer, of Huxley, Tyndall, Bain, Schlegel, Renan, Burnouf. Their minds were, 'in some instances, whole arsenals of propositions in logic, metaphysics, mathematics, and sophistry — all the weapons which reason uses against intuition. They could out-wrangle a Cam- bridge double-first, and *' make the worse appear the better reason." They had persuaded themselves into error against their own inner consciousness. We have noted, and I repeat it, that a larger cluster of acute in- tellects we never encountered than this of Bombay. Part had become thorough materialists. To them, AND ITS AIMS, 73 as to Balfour Stewart, the Universe seemed "a vast physical machine composed of atoms, with some sort of medium between them as the machine." The apprehension of any sort of a God had died out, the feeling of having in them a soul had been smothered. With polite incredulity they have listened to our tales of phenomena witnessed by us, similar to those described in the biography of Sankara Acharya and Sakya Muni, sometimes unable to repress a smile. They seemed to come to us more to observe the lengths and depths to which Western credulity can go, than to gather corroboration of the narratives contained in their own sacred literature. And, I am sorry to say, some few, when out of earshot, have made them- selves merry over our testimony to the truth of the primitive philosophies. Another class we have met, with minds full of misty speculations which prevented their having any clear and defined views of either of the great questions of universal human interest. Drawn hither by the reveries of Swedenborg and Davis, or thither by those of Boehmen and St. Martin, they had found no sure ground upon which to plant their feet. To us strangers, this has been a most instructive study, and we have tried to discover the best means to combine all this intellectual vis^our, this learning-, this mental agitation, upon one objective point. We see in this state of things the promise of future good results. Here is material for a new school of 74 THE THEOSOPHICAL ."SOCIETY Aryan philosophy which only waits the moulding hand of a master. We cannot yet hear his ap- proaching footsteps, but he will come ; as the man always does come when the hour of destiny strikes. He will come, not as a disturber of the peace, but as the expounder of principles, the instructor in philosophy. He will encourage study, not inflame passion. He will scatter blessings, not sorrow. So Zoroaster came, so Goutama, so Confucius. O for a Hindu great enough in soul, wise enough in mind, sublime enough in courage, to prepare the way for the coming of this needed Regenerator ! O for one Indian of so grand a mould that his appeals to his countrymen would fire every heart with a noble emulation to revive the glories of that by- gone time, when India poured out her people into the empty lap of the West, and gave the arts and sciences, and even language itself, to the outside world ! Are her sons all sunken in selfishness and the soft ooze of little things? Has their scramble for meagre patronage deadened the noble pride of race, and replaced it with an obsequious humility tinged with unreasonable hate ? Can they not for- give their fellow-countrymen for wearing a different style of turban and having a different line of an- cestors? Is the love of caste so passionate and deep as to make an object of righteous hatred every one not in their own social circle ? Ah, young men of promise, beloved brothers and com- panions, objects of our solicitude and hopes, to see and dwell among whom wc have crossed three AND ITS AIMS. 75 oceans and threaded two seas, be Indians /"/'j-^, and caste men afterwards if you will. Is there not one of you to send the electric spark through this inert mass and make it quiver with emotion ? Here lies a mighty nation, like a giant benumbed with sloth, and no one to arouse its potential energies. Here lavish Nature has provided exhaustless resources, that combined talent and applied knowledge would turn into fabulous national wealth. Here rich mines, a fat soil, navigable waters, forests of valu- able timber, a multiplicity of natural products that might be manufactured at home into portable and profitable articles of commerce. All that is lacking is a share of that energy and foresight which, in two centuries and a half, have transformed the United States from a howling wilderness into a scene of busy prosperity. In vain the efforts of statesmanship to spread the blessings of education and promote the industrial arts, if they are not seconded by the patriotic endeavours of enlightened Young India. Are these great Colleges and Universities founded for the sole purpose of turn- ing out placemen and dreamers? Have schools been opened only to help to hatch debating societies and metaphysical training-clubs, where minds that should be directing great economical enterprises are engaged in splitting hairs, and voting whether -love is an essence and man a molecule ? I have observed with deep regret that there is among the youth of Bombay an eager desire for the empty honours of University degrees, and no disposition 76 THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY to fit themselves for the management of practical affairs. There are far too many native barristers and doctors, and far too few qualified superinten- dents of mills and manufactories, geologists, metal- lurgists and engineers. There are LL.B.'s in plenty, but of educated carpenters, millers, sugar- makers, and paper-manufacturers, none, or next to none. The great and crying want of modern India to-day is a scientific school attached to every College, such as we have in America, and in each great centre of population a school of Technology, with appropriate machinery, where the most im- proved methods of the principal handicrafts could be taught to intelligent lads. Do not imagine that I have the idle notion that India can be reformed in a day. This once enlight- ened, monotheistic and active people have de- scended, step by step, in the course of many cen- turies, from the level of Aryan activity to that of idolatrous lethargy and fatalism. It will be the work not of years but of generations to re-ascend the steps of national greatness. But there must be a beginning. Those sons of Hindustan who are disposed to act rather than preach cannot commence a day too soon. This /loiir the country needs your help. Leave your molecules to themselves ; put away for a time your speculations upon the descent of species, cease vain endeavours to count the number of times an atom may be split in halves, and go to work in earnest to help yourselves and your Motherland. The atoms in space will evolve Ah'D ITS ALMS. 77 new worlds without you ; your cotuitry is growing weaker and poorer every day, and wants you. But you lack capital, you say. Then unite into clubs and committees to find out where capital can be profitably employed, and spread the facts before the Western nations. In London alone there is lying, in bank vaults, idle capital enough to set every possible Indian industry on its feet. Those acute and daring English merchants and capitalists ransack the world in search of oppor- tunities to earn interest on their surplus incomes. Turkish bonds, Peruvian railways, Egyptian consols, Bohemian glassworks, American schemes, are all tried in this hope of profit. What does Europe or America know — really know — of Indian resources, trade, customs, business opportunities ? A mere handful of bankers and traders have only such facts as lie upon the surface of this unworked national mine. A few military officers and civil servants may have published the records of their casual ob- servations. But, in comparison with what ought to be known, and might be made known under a proper system of general and sub-committees, this is as a mere drop in the bucket. As to my own country, which would gladly exchange commodities with India as with any other nation, I can speak by the book. For my people, this land is but a geogra- phical abstraction, whose capes, rivers, and chief cities are known by name to the schoolboy, and straight- way forgotten, for lack of subsequent reminders. And yet I hear my native brothers complain of 78 THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY poverty. I hear of thousands of stahvart labourers dying of hunger for want of employment at three pice per day. I see Indian gums, fibres, seeds and grains, going abroad in the raw state, and coming back manufactured, to be sold to natives at large profit. I see men, as well-educated, as strong-minded, as capable to succeed in independent business, as any young men in New York, or London, or Berlin, de- meaning themselves to throng the ante-rooms of public officials in search of employment, and ready to fall upon each other's faces for the sake of miser- able little clerkships. This is what we behold, at even a first glance, in the country of our adoption. I will make no apology for my plain speech, for I come from a practical country, where we have learnt that smooth speeches and culture and true friendship do not always go together. There is too much talk here and too little enterprise; too much suavity and not enough available perseverance. There is unmea- sured ability to suffer and endure, but not the master spirit which laughs at trouble, and rushes to meet adversity with the joy of the athlete who hails the coming of his adversary as the opportunity, long sought, to show his prowess. Cast your eye over the Western world and see what an intense activity pervades the whole scene. Let the picture unroll like a great panorama before you. Behold the struggles of all those nations not only to extend commerce, but also to settle the weightier problem of religious truth. See Christi- anity in America broken up into innumerable sects, AND ITS AIMS. 79 and Science leading the public far away from the Church into the dry pastures of Materialism and Nihilism. See the clergy being stripped of the last shreds of their influence and the free secular press attaining predominant sway. Look at Great Britain agitating the question of disestablishment, the Catholics emancipated from the incubus of the Irish National Church, and Bradlaugh preaching bold atheism in London, Sunday after Sunday. In France, behold the revolution in politics that has passed the reins of power Into Republican hands, and flung out the Jesuits from their cosy nest behind MacMahon's chair. In Germany, open rupture w^Ith the Pope, and the abolishment of Ecclesiastical privi- leges. In Russia, the red spectre of the Nihilist Party, menacing both Church and State. Every- where, as it were, the boiling and seething of a vast cauldron — the conflict between Theology and Science. This conflict, so eloquently described by Professor John William Draper, began with the discovery of the printer's art, and its progress has been marked by a thousand victories for science. Born out of the womb of the Reformation, she has proved the benefactress of humanity by facilitating interna- tional intercourse, developing national resources, surrounding mankind with a multitude of comforts and refinements, and bringing education within the reach of the humblest labourer. Like other great Oriental countries, India has not hitherto availed itself of these material advantages. The fault So THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY does not lie with the masses, for they know nothing of all that has been going on in the busy world. It lies at the door of the edu- cated class I have heretofore described. And yon are the very men ! Yon have run through the cur- ricula of science and literature, and made no practical application of your acquired knowledge. The sen- tries of this sleeping nation neglect their duty. But as the unrestful ocean has its flux and reflux, so all throughout Nature the law of periodicity as- serts itself Nations come and go, slumber and re- awaken. Inactivity is of necessity limited. The soul of Aryavarta keeps vigil within the dormant body. Again will her splendour shine. Her prosperity will be restored. Her primitive philo- sophy will once more be interpreted, and it will teach both religion and science to an eager world. Her ancient literature, though now hidden away from the quest of an unsympathetic West, is not buried be- yond revival. The hoof of Time, which has stamped into dust the vestiges of many a nation, has not obliterated those treasures of human thought and human inspiration. The youth of India will shake off their sloth, and be worthy of their sires. From every ruined temple, from every sculptured corri- dor cut in the heart of the mountains, from every secret viJiara where the custodians of the Sacred Science keep alive the torch of primitive wisdom, comes a whispering voice which says : "Children, your Mother is not dead, but only sleepeth ! " THE COMMON FOUNDATION OF ALL RELIGIONS.* Religion, according to Mr. Herbert Spencer, is " a great (I should say the greatest) reahty and a great truth— nothing less than an essential and indestructible element of human nature." He holds that the religious institutions of the world represent a genuine and universal feeling in the race, just as really as any other institutions. The accessory superstitions which have overgrown and perverted the religious sentiment must not be con- founded with the religious sentiment itself. That this should be done is a mischievous mistake, alike of religionists and anti-religionists. Science, in clear- ing away these excrescences, brings us always nearer the underlying truth, and is therefore the handmaid and friend of true religion. The sub- stratum of truth is the one broad plateau of rock upon which the world's theological superstructures are reared. It is — as the title of our lecture puts it — " the common foundation of all religions." And now what is it ? What is this rock ? It is * A Lecture delivered at the Patchiappah's Hall, Madras, 26th April, 1882. F 82 THE COMMON FOUNDATION- AL conglomerate, having more than one element In its composition. In the first place, of necessity, there is the idea of a part of man's nature which is non- physical; next, the idea of a post-mortem continua- tion of this non-physical part; third, that of the ex- istence of an Infinite Principle underlying all phe- nomena; fourth, a certain relationship between this Infinite Principle and the Individual man. The evolution of the grander from the lower Intellectual conception in this graded sequence is now conceded, alike by the scientist and the theo- logian. This evolution is accompanied by an elimination ; for in religion, as In all other depart- ments of thought, the light cannot be seen until the clouds are cleared away. Primitive truth is the light, theologies are the clouds; and they are clouds still, though they glitter with all the hues of the spectrum. Fetish worship, animal worship, hero worship, ancestor worship, nature worship, book worship ; polytheism, monotheism, theism, deism, atheism, materialism (which includes positivism), agnosticism ; the blind adoration of the Idol, the blind adoration of the crucible — these are the alpha and omega of human religious thought, the measure of relative spiritual blindness. All these conceptions have passed through a distorting prism — the human mind ; and that Is why they are so Imperfect, so incongruous, so human. A man can never see the whole light by looking from inside his body outward, any more than one can see the clear daylight through a dust-soiled window- OF ALL RELLGLONS. S3 glass, or the stars through a smeared reflecting lens. Why? Because the physical senses are adapted only to the things of a physical world, and religion is a transcendentalism. Religious truth is not a thing for physical observation, but one for psychical intuition. One who has not developed this psychical power can never kno7.v religion as a fact ; he can only accept it as a creed, or paint it to himself as an emotional sentimentality. Bigotry is the brand to put upon one; Dilettantism that for the other. Behind both, and equally challenging both, stands Scepticism. Man's religion, like himself, has its ages. First, proclamation, propagandism, martyrdom ; second, conquest, faith ; tJiird, neglect, stagnation ; fourth, decadence, tenacious formalism ; fifth, hypocrisy ; sixtJi, compromise ; seventh, decay and extinction. And, like the human race, no religion passes as a whole through these stages seriatim. At this very day, we see the Australian sunk in the depths of animalism, the American Red Indian just emerging from the Stone Age, the European in the full flush of high material civilization. And so, a glance at religious history shows us the cropping up of highly heretical schools and sects in every great religion, of which each represents some special departure from primitive orthodoxy, some separate advance along the road towards the final p:oal that we have sketched out. And I also note, as the physician observes the symptoms of his patient, that history constantly affords, in the bitter mutual hatreds of 84 THE COMMON FOUNDATION thcse-cliques and sects for each other, the clearest proof that our conckision is correct, when we say — as we said just now — that Rehgion can never be really known by the physical brain of the physical man. All these hatreds, bitternesses, and cruel reprisals of sect for sect, and world's faith for world's faith, show that men mistake non-essentials for essen- tials, illusions for realities. We can test this statement very easily. Look away from this war of theologians to the class of men who have developed their psychical powers, and what do you see ? In place of strife, peace, agree- ment, mutual tolerance, brotherly concord as to the fundamentals of religion. Whatever their exoteric creed, they are greater than and far above it, and their innate holiness and gentleness of nature give life and strength to the church they represent; they are the flowers of the human tree, the brothers of all mankind ; for they know what is the lid^t that shines behind the clouds ; under the foundations of all the churches they sec the same rock. I ask those of you who wish to be con- \ inced of this fact to read the Dabistan, or School of Manners, by Mohsan Fani, who records in it his ob- servations of the sadhus of twelve different religions, two centuries ago. "Granting all the premises," the modern sceptic will say, "can you prove to me that science has not swept away all your religious hypotheses along with the myths, legends, super- stitions, and other lumber ?" Well, I answer, " yes." It is exactly on that datum line that the Theoso- OF ALL RRLLGLONS. 85 phical Society Is building Itself up. Some people think us opponents of science, but, on the contrary, we are its warmest advocates — until it begins to dogmatize from incomplete known data upon new facts. When it reaches that point we challenge it and oppose it with all our strength, such as It may be, just as we fight the dogmatism of theology. For, to our mind, it matters not whether you blindly worship a fetish, a man, a book, or a crucible, — It is blind idolatry all the same ; and science can be, and has been, as cruel and remorseless in her way as the Church ever was in hers. The first step Is to have an agreement as to what the word " science " means. I take it to be the collection and arrangement of observed facts about Nature. If that is correct, then I protest against half measures ; I want those observations to be complete, to cover all Nature, not the half of it. What sort of an ontology would that be which, while pretending to Investigate the laws of our being, took note only of our anatomy, physiology, and whatever relates to the physical frame of man, leaving out all that concerns his mental function ? Absurd ! you would say ; but I ask you whether it is any more absurd to study man In his body with- out the mind, than to study him In body and mind while ignoring the trans-corporeal manifestations of his middle nature ? You want me to define what I mean by this " middle nature " and by its " trans- cor.poreal manifestations." I will do so. I start, then, with the proposition that there is more of a 86 TFIE COMMON FOUNDATION man than can be burnt with fire, eaten by tigers, drowned by water, chopped to pieces with knives, or rotted in the ground. The materiahst will deny this, but it matters not ; the proposition can be proved as easily as that he is a man. They have in Europe a science which they call psychology — a misnomer ; for it is another kind of ology ; — but we will not quarrel about words. Well, when you come to analyse the Western idea that underlies this term of psychology, you will discover that it relates only to the normal and abnormal intellectual manifestations of the brain. One class of scientists — especially among the alienists, or students of insanity — maintain that mind is a function of the grey vesicles of the lobes of the brain ; injure the brain by any one of a dozen accidents, and sensation is cut off, thought ceases, mind is destroyed, the thinking, hence responsible, entity is extinguished. All that is left is carrion, and out of this carrion, before the accident, sprang by magneto-electric energy that which distinguishes man from the lowest animal, as the lotos springs from slimy mud. The opposed party affirm that the brain is the organ of the mind, the machine of its manifestation, and that the thinking something in man thinks still, and still ex- ists, even though the brain be shattered, even though the man die. The one reflects the tone of material- ist science, the other the tone of the Christian Churches and of the two crores * of so-called modern spiritualists. The materialists regard man as an * An Indian numeral—ten millions. OF ALL RELIGIONS. 87 unity, a thinking machine ; the others regard him as a duahty, a compound of body and soul. There is no ground for a " middle nature " in either of these schools. True, here and there, you will find some casual allusion to a third and higher principle — the "spirit," — as, for instance, in the Christian New Testament (i Thessalonians, v. 23), where Paul says, " I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ," — an expression which, however sound as theology, is extremely loose and heterodox as science. But the whole drift of Christian teaching, and of teaching through or by mediums, favours the duality theory; the body dead, second principle enters on a new career of its own, until it attains to a postulated sjunmiun bonitin or sumnimn maluni state. Now, experienced observers of the phenomena of mediums have seen many animated figures, or more or less substantial apparitions of deceased persons, and these they regard as returning souls revisiting the land of the living. They have no idea of this middle nature. But the Hindu philosophers make a far deeper analysis of man. Instead of a single part, or a duality, they affirm that there are no fewer than seven well-defined principles or groups which go to make up a human being. These are : — (i.) The Material body — Sthulasarira ; (2.) The Life Principle — Jiva ; (3.) The Astral body — Lingasarira ; 8S THE COMMON FOUNDATION (4.) The Kaviantpa (will, desire), resulting as the " Double " — Alayavintpa ; (5.) The Physical Intelligence (or Animal Soul) — Manas ; (6.) The Spiritual Intelligence — Biiddhi ; (7.) The Divine Spirit — Atnia. And so minute is their analysis, each of these prin- ciples Is subdivided into seven sub-groups. Generall}^ speaking, the first, fourth, and seventh principles mark the boundaries of the tripartite or trinitarian man. And the fourth, which just comes mid-way be- tween the gross body {Sthuiasanra) and t\\(iAt7na,o\- divine and eternal principle, Is this middle nature of which we have been In search. Now the next ques- tion to be asked us is whetherthis fourth principle, re- sulting as JMayavirupa^ or the human " double," Is Intelligent or non-intelligent, matter orspirit; and the next, whether Its existence can be scientifically ac- counted for and proved. We will take them in order. In itself the living man's double is either a vapour, a mist, or a solid form, according to Its relative state of condensation. Given outside the body one set of atmospheric, electric, magnetic, telluric, and other conditions, this form may be invisible, yet capable of making sounds, or manifesting other signs of its presence ; given another set of conditions, It may be visible, but as a misty vapour ; given a third set, it may be condensed into per- fect visibility, and even tangibility. Volumes upon volumes might be filled with bare para- OF ALL RELIGIONS. ■ 89 graph extracts of recorded instances of these apparitional visits. Sometimes the form manifests inteUigence, it speaks ; sometimes it can only show itself. I am now speaking of the apparitions of dead persons. I have myself seen more than five hundred such apparitions in America, where hundreds more saw them, and have recorded my ex- periences in the form of a book, which was gener- ously praised by some of the scientists of Europe as a careful record of scientifically accurate observations.* I only mention it to satisfy you that this is no question of hallucination or unsupported statements. Well, then, we have here the middle nature of man acting outside of and after the death of the plwsical body ; though for my part — being a believer in Asiatic psychology — I do not believe that these post~inortein apparitions are the very man himself — the thinking, responsible Ego. They are, I con- ceive, but the vapoury image of the deceased — matter energized by a residuum of the vital force which is still entangled in the lingering molecules. Some call them " elementaries ; " others, " shells." They are the undispersed phantasms of the dead, the apparitional forms of human beings in transit between the states of full objectivity and full sub- jectivity — 2>., between life in this world and life in " Devachan." But to prove our proposition we must first show that this middle principle, this Mayavintpa or double, can be separated from the living body at will, projected to a "* " People from the Olhev World." New York, 1S75. 90 THE COMMON FOUNDATION distance, and animated by the full consciousness of the man. We have two means of proving this — (i) in the concurrent testimony of eye-wit- nesses as recorded in the Hterature of different races ; and (2) in the evidence of Hving witnesses. In the Hindu rehgious and philosophical works there are many such testimonies. Not to men- tion others, we may cite the famous case of Sankaracharya, who entranced his body, left it in the custody of his disciples, entered the body of a Rajah just deceased, and lived in it for a number of weeks ; and that of Agastya, who appeared in the heat of the battle between Rama and Ravana, while his body was entranced in the Neilgherries. This story is given in the Raviayana. In Patan- jali's Yoga Sutras this phenomenon is affirmed to be within the power of every Siddha who perfects himself in Yoga. As to living witnesses, I am one myself, for I have seen the doubles of several men acting intelligently at great distances from their bodies, and in this pamphlet that I hold in my hand,"^ will be found the certificates of no less than nine reputable persons — five Hindus and four Euro- peans — that they have seen such appearances, on various occasions, within the past two years. And then we have scores of similar attestations from credible persons living in different parts of the world, which are to be read in many European books treating upon these subjects. I do not pre- tend to say that a sceptical public can be expecte * " Hints on Esoteric Theosophy." By a Member of the Theoso phical Society. d V OF ALL RELIGIONS. 91 to take this mass of evidence, conclusive as It ma}/ be, without reserve ; the alleged phenomenon so surpasses ordinary human experience that to believe its reality each one must see for himself I, how- ever, do affirm that we have here 2. prima facia case of probable verity made out ; for, under the strictest canons of scientific orthodoxy, we cannot suspect a conspiracy to exist among so many individual witnesses, who never saw or heard of each other, who, in fact, did not even live In the same generation, but whose testimonies are yet mutually corrobora- tive. But if we have a case of probable truth, the man of science will ask us what we next demand of him. Do we allege a natural and scientific, or a super- natural, hence unscientific, explanation for the pro- jection of the double of the living, and the appari- tion of that of the deceased man ? I answer, most assuredly, the former. I am devotee enough of science to deny, with all the emphasis I can give to words, the fact that a miraculous phenomenon ever took place, in this or any age. Whatever has occurred must have taken place within the operation of natural law. To suppose otherwise would be equivalent to saying that there is no permanency in the laws of the universe, that they can be set aside and played with at the caprice of an irresponsible and meddlesome Power. We should be in a universe going by jerks, started and stopped like a clock that a child is playing with This supernaturalism is the curse of all creeds, it 92 THE COMMON FOUNDATION hangs like an Incubus around the neck of the re- ligious, and hatches the satire of the sceptic : it is the dry-rot that eats out the heart of any faith that builds upon it. This it is which, carried in the body of a church, foredooms it to ultimate destruc- tion, as surely as the hidden cancer carried in the human system will one day kill it. And of all epochs this nineteenth century is the worst in which to come before the public as the champions of super- natural religions. They are going down in every land, melting before the laboratory fires like waxen images. No, when I stand forth as the defender of Hinduism, Buddhism or Zoroastrianism, I wish it to be understood that I do not claim any respect or tolerance for them outside the limits of natural law. I believe — nay I kiiozu — that their foundation is a scientific one, and on those conditions they inust stand or fall, so far as I am concerned. I do not say they are in equally close reconciliation with science, but I do say that whatever foundation they have, whether broad or narrow, long or short, is and must be a scientific one. And so, too, when I ask you to cease from making yourselves ridiculous by denying the existence of this middle nature in man, it is because I am persuaded, as the result of much reading and a good deal of personal experi- ence, that the double, or Mayavirupa, is a scientific fact. Well, then, to return — is it matter or something- else ? I say familiar matter plus something else. And here stop a moment to think what matter is. OF ALL RELLGIONS. 93 Loose thinkers — among whom we must class raw lads fresh from college, with whatever number of degrees — are too apt to associate the idea of matter with the properties of density, visibility, and tangi- bility. But this is very inexcusable. The air we breathe is invisible, yet matter, — its equivalents of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and carbonic acid are each atomic, ponderable, demonstrable, by analysis. Electricity cannot, except under prepared conditions, be seen ; yet it is matter. The universal ether of science no one ever saw ; yet it is matter in a state of extreme tenuity. Take the familiar example of forms of water, and see how they rapidly run up the scale of tenuity until they elude the clutch of science : stone-hard ice, melted ice, condensed steam, superheated and invisible steam, electricity, and — it is gone out of the world of effects into the ^vorld of causes ! Well, then, with this warning before you, my cerebrally superheated young friend of Madras University, pray do not contradict me when I say that the Hindu philosophy of man fits in with the lines of modern science much more snugly than that of either the supernaturalism of the Christian or the materialism of the man of science. As we have seen the successive forms of water running up into the in- visible world, so, here, esoteric Hindu philosophy gives us a graduated series of molecular arrange- ments in the human economy, at one end of which is the concrete mass of the Sthulasarira^ at the other that last sublimation called Atnid^ or spirit. 94 TFIE COMMON FOUNDATION " But how can all these exist together in one com- bination ? is a man like a nest of boxes or baskets fitted into each other, or do you mean to advance the scientific absurdity that two things can simulta- neously occupy the same space ? " This is a side question provoked by the main one, but we must dispose of it first I will say, then, that, as the thing has been explained to me, each of these several sets of atoms which compose the seven parts of man, occupy the interstitial spaces between the next coarser set of atoms. The more ethereal elements in man are focalized as to their several energies in what the Hindus call the Shadachak- rams, or the six centres of vital force, crowned by Sahasralam, in which is located the higher consciousness. This supreme point is in the crown of the head : the others are located at the spleen, the umbilicus, the heart, the root of the throat, and the centre of the frontal sinus. The atoms of the BiiddJii would then pervade the interstices of the lianas ; those of the Manas those of the Kaviarupa ; those of the latter those of ^\^ Jiva ; and those of the Jiva hose of the StJnilasarira And, as each coarser principle contains the particles of all the finer principles therefore the StJiulasarira may be called the gross casket within which the several parts of the composite man are contained. Pervading and energizing all is the Atma, or that incomprehensible final energy which cannot be comprehended by the physical senses, and which is described to himself by the Brahman, in the Man- OF ALL RELIGIONS. 95 diikyo Upanishad hy saying: ''Thou art not this, nor that, nor the third, nor anything- which the mind can grasp with the help of the physical per- ceptions." Your popular Telugu poet beautifully and allegorically depicts this idea, in his poem Sitardmd anjaniyani (Cosmic Matter), where Sita — who is herself the personification of Prakriti — is asked by the daughters and wives of the Rishis to point out her husband, but, through modesty, re- frains. The ladies then, pointing successively to a number of different men, ask each time, " Is this thy husband ? " She answers in the negative, but when they point to Rama she is silent, for she can- not even speak of her heart's lord before strangers. So, the poet would have us understand, while we may freely say what Atma is not, when we are re- quired to say what it is we must be silent, for words are powerless to express the sublime idea. We have now prepared the ground to answer both of the questions put by our imaginary critic. The Mayavirupa, when intelligently projected be- yond the physical body by the developed energy of an initiate of Occult Science, contains in it all his Manas and Buddhi (including the Chittam and Ahankaram—SQnsQ of individuality), i.e., his Physi- cal Intelligence and Spiritual Intelligence. The In- itiate quits his earthly casket (in which are left the Jiva and Lingasarira), and for the moment lives, thinks and acts in this Double of himself Its atomic condition being less dense than that of the corporeal body, it has enhanced powers of locomotion and per- 96 THE COMMON FOUND A 'HON ception. Barriers that would stop the body — for ex- ample, the walls of a room — cannot stop it, for its particles may pass through the interstices of the vibrating gross matter composing the wall. It is in the subjective world, and may traverse space like thought, which is itself a form of energy. Or, if he likes, the Initiate may simply project a non- intelligent image of himself and make it appear at the spot at which he may have focalized his thought''' It depends upon him whether the image shall be but an illusionary form, or his own self ; it may be mere matter, or matter plus himself As to our accounting for the middle nature of man scientifically, I have already shown that we may do this by the collection of testimonies, and by per- sonal observation. We may add that further proof is obtainable by the best and surest of all methods — that of going oneself through the necessary course of self-training, and projecting one's own double. For this is no exclusive science reserved for a favoured few: it is a true science based upon natural law, and within the reach of every one who has the requisite qualifications. The humblest labourer, if psychically competent, may lift the veil of mystery as well as the proudest sovereign or the haughtiest priest. But, it is constantly asked why are not these secrets thrown open to the world as freely as the * I have in my possession a small group in silver, given me by a Buddhist priest in Ceylon, and representing the debate between Lord Buddha and his projected " Double," upon his Dhamma (Law), in the presence of the devas, as described in Buddhistic Legend. OF ALL RELIGIONS. 97 details of chemistiy or any other branch of know- ledge ? It is a natural question for a superficial reasoner to put ; but it is not a sound one. The difference between Psychic and Physical sciences is that the former can only be learned by the self- evolution of psychical powers. No college pro- fessor can evolve them for you, nor any friend, fellow-student or relative : you must evolve them for yourself Can another man learn music, or Sanskrit, or the art of painting or sculpture for you ? Can another eat, sleep, feel warm or cold, digest or breathe, for you ? Then why should you expect him to learn Psychology for you? Anyhow he cannot do it, however much you expect it ; and that is the final answer to all such questioners. Nor is it absolutely certain that, even though you should try ever so much, you could evolve these powers in 3/ourself Has every man the capacity for Lan- guages, or Music, or Poetry, or Science, or Philo- sophy ? You know that each of these require certain clear aptitudes, and if you have them not you can never become musician, poet, scientist, or philosopher. The branches of physical science are difficult to master even when you have the natural capacity; but psychical science is more difficult than any of them — I might almost say than all com- bined. That is why the Mahatma has been de- scribed as " the rare efflorescence of a generation of inquirers" (Sinnett's Occult World, p. 10 1), and in all generations the true Sadhu has been reverenced as almost a superhuman being. The G 98 THE COMMON FOUNDATION' term applies to him only in the sense of his being above the weaknesses, the prejudice and the ignor- ance of his fellow-men. With the most absurd blindness to the experience of the race, we. Founders of the Theosophical Society, are constantly being- asked to turn its members into adepts. We must show them the short cut to the Himavat, the private passages to the Asramas in the Neilgherries ! They are not willing to work and suffer for the getting of knowledge, as all have done who have got it heretofore ; they must be put into a first-class carriage, and taken straight behind the Veil of Isis ! They fancy our Society an improved sort of Miracle Club, or School of Magic, wherein, for ten rupees, a man can become a Mahatma between the morning bath and the evening meal ! Such people entirely overlook the two chief avowed objects of the Society — the formation of a nucleus of an Universal Brotherhood for the research after truth and the promotion of kind feelings between man and man ; and the pursuit of the study of ancient religions, philosophies, and sciences. They do not appreciate this purely unselfish part of the Society's work, nor seem to think it a noble and most meritorious thing to labour for the enlightenment and happiness of mankind. They have an insatiable curiosity to behold wonders, seeing which they would not, in many instances, be stimulated to search after the hidden springs of wisdom, but only sit with open mouth and pendulous tongue, to wonder how the trick was done, and what would be the next one ! OF ALL RELIGLONS. 99 Such minds can get no profit by joining the Theo- sophical Society, and I advise them to stay outside. We want no such selfish triflers. Ours is a serious, hard-working, self-denying society, and we want only men worthy to be called men, and worthy of our respect. We want men whose first question will not be "what good can I get by joining ? " but "what good can I do by joining? " Our work re- quires the services of men who can be satisfied to labour for the next generation, and the succeeding ones ; men who, seeing the lamentable religious state of the world — seeing noble faiths debased, temples, chifrchcs, and holy shrines, thronged by hypocrites and mockers^burn with a desire to re- kindle the fires of spirituality and morality upon the polluted altars, and to bring the knowledge of the Rishis within the reach of a sin-burdened world. We want Hindus who can love India with so pure an affection that they will count it a joy and an honour beyond price to work, and to suffer even, for her sake. Men we want, who will be able to put aside for the moment their puerile hatreds of race, and creed, and caste, as they put away a soiled cloth or a worn-out garment ; and, with a loving heart and clean conscience, be ready to join with every other man — be he black or white, red or yellow, bond or freeman — whose heart beats with love for India and her wide-scattered children of many races throughout the world. We welcome most those who are ready to trample under foot their selfishness when it comes in conflict with the 100 THE COMMON FOUNDATION general good. We welcome the intelligent student of science, who has such broad conceptions of his subject that he considers it quite as important to solve the mystery of Force as to know the atomic combinations of Matter ; and feeling so, is not afraid or ashamed to take for his teacher any one who is competent, whatever be the colour of his skin. Now to take our scientific argument one step further. Granted that the existence of the Double has been proven, and also its projectibility, how is it projected ? By an expenditure of energy, of course. That energy is the vital force set in motion by the will. The power of concentrating the will for this purpose is one that may be natural or ac- quired. There are some persons who have it naturally so strong in them that they often send their doubles to distant places, and make them visible, though they may never have given a day's study to the science of Psychology : I have known both men and women of this sort. But it is an uncommon power, and can never be exercised at all times except by the true proficient in psycho- logical science. The operations of the brain in mechanically evolving the current of will-force have been more or less carefully expounded by Bain and Maudeseley, while Professors Tait and Balfour Stewart have, in their Unseen Universe, traced for us the dynamic effect of thought-evolution into the Ether, or, as Hindus have called it these thousands of }^ears, the Akasa. They go so far as to say that OF ALL RELLGIONS. loi it Is not an unthinkable proposition that the evolution of thought In a single human brain may dynamically affect a distant planet. In other words, when a thought Is evolved a vibration of etheric particles is set up, and this motion must continue on indefinitely. Now the Yogi evolves such a current, and turns It in upon himself as a concentrated force ; continuing the process until the power is sufficient to force his Double out of its corporeal encasement, and to project it to whatso- ever locality he desires. We have thus shown the fact of the Mayavlrupa, its capability to exist out- side the body, and the energy which causes Its pro- jection. I cannot go Into details to elaborate the argument, for I can only detain you an hour in this tropical heat. But I trust at least to have shown 3^ou that I rely only upon scientific principles, and claim no Indulgence like the advocates of super- naturalism. And now is this Double — which is nothing but what is commonly called the " Soul " — im- mortal ? No, it Is not. So much of it as is matter in aggregation must ultimately obey the law of dispersion which, in time, breaks up and forces out of the objective universe whatever is material. It is equally the law of planetary as of lesser forms. As all that is material In a star was primarily con- densed from the loose atoms in space, so all that is material in the human body, however coarse or however fine, was primarily condensed from the chaotic atoms In the Akasa. And to that dis- A ■« 102 THE COMMON FOUNDATION persed condition it must return whenever the centripetal force that attracted it into the human nucleus ceases to resist the centrifugal force, or attraction of the atoms of space. This brings us right upon the problem of a continuity of existence beyond the physical death. Here is the dividing line between the world's religions. The dualists affirm that this soul goes to heavenly or infernal places to be for ever blest or punished, according to the deeds done in the body. Though they do not use the very word, yet it is the doctrine of - Merit they teach. For even those extremely unscientific theologians who affirm that a punishing and reward- ing Deity has from all time pre-ordained some to be saved and some to be damned, tell us that the merit of faith In a certain system of morals and dis- cipline, and a share in the vicarious merit of another, are pre-requisites to future bliss. We may assume therefore, that merit, or KARMA, is the corner-stone of Religion. This is both a logical and scientific pro- position, for the thoughts, words and deeds of a man are so many causes which must work out cor- responding effects ; the good ones can only pro- duce good effects, the bad ones only bad, — unless opposed and neutralized by stronger ones that are good. I need not go into the metaphysical analysis of what is bad and what good. We may pass it over with the simple postulate that whatever has either a debasing tendency upon the individual, or promotes injustice, misery, suffering ignorance and animalism in society, is essentially OF ALL RELIGIONS. 103 bad, and that what tends to the contrary is good. I should call that a bad religion which taught that it is meritorious to do evil that good may come ; for good can never come out of evil ; the evil tree pro- duces not good fruit. A religion that can only be propagated at the point of the sword, or upon the martyr's pile, or under instruments of torture, or by devastating countries and enslaving their popu- lations, or by cunning stratagems seducing ignorant children or adults away from their families and castes and ancestral creeds — is a vile and devilish religion, the enemy of truth, the destroyer of social happiness. If a religion is not based upon a lie, the fact can be proved, and it can stand unshaken, as the rocky mountain, against all the assaults of sceptics. A true religion is not one that runs to holes and corners, like a naked leper to hide his sores, when a bold critic casts his searching eye upon it and asks for its credentials. If I stand here to defend what is good in Hinduism, it is because of my full conviction that that good exists, and that however fantastic, and even childish, some may think its tangled overgrowth of customs, legends and superstitions, there is the rock of truth, of scientific truth, below them all. On that rock it is destined to stand throuc^h countless comincf generations, as it has already stood through the count- less generations which have professed that hoary Faith, since the Rishis shot from their Himalayan heights the blazing light of spiritual truth over a dark and ignorant world. ro4 THE C MAW N FOUNDATION It is most reasonable that you should ask me what those of you are to do who are not gifted with the power to get outside the illusion-breeding screen of the body and to acquire an intimate actual perception of " Divine " truth through the developed psychical senses. As we have ourselves shown that all men cannot be adepts, what comfort do we hold out to the rest ? This involves a momentary glance at the theory of re-births. If this little span of human life we are now enjoying be the entire sum of human existence, if you and I never lived before and will never live' again, then there would be no ray of hope to offer to any mind that was not capable of the intellectual suicide of blind faith. The doctrine of a vicarious atonement for sin is not merely unthinkable, it is positively repulsive to one who can take a larger and more scientific view of man's origin and destiny than that of the dualists. One whose religious perceptions rest upon the in- tuition that cause and effect are equal : that there is a perfect and correspondential reign of Law throughout the universe : that under any reason- able conception of eternity, there must always have been at work the same forces as are now active — must scout the assertion that this brief instant of sentient life is our only one. Science has traced us back through an inconceivably long sequence of existences — in the human, the animal, the vege- table, and the mineral kingdoms — to the cradle of future sentient life, the Ether of space. Would a man of science, then, make bold to affirm that you OF ALL L^ELIGIONS. 105 and I, who represent a relatively high stage of evolution, came to be what we are without previous development In other births, whether on this earth or other planets ? And If he would not, he must, In conformity with his own canons of the conserva- tion and correlation of energy, deduce from the whole analogy of nature that there Is another life for us beyond this life. The force which evolved us cannot be expended, It must run on In Its vibra- tory line until Its limit Is reached. And that limit the Hindu and the Buddhist, the Jain and the Zoroastrian adept, all define as that abstract state which lies beyond the phenomenal one of Illusions and pain. Whatever they may call It — whether Muktl, or Nirvana, or Light, — It Is all the same Idea : It Is the outcome of the eternal Principle of energy after passing around a cycle of correlations with matter. That final limit the " Middle Nature," as a whole, never reaches, for It Is material as to Its form, size, colour and atomic relations : if we call It the " Soul," therefore, we may say that the " soul " is not Immortal ; for that which Is material tends always to resume Its primitive atomic condition. And the Hindu Philosopher, arguing from this premiss, teaches that what does escape out of the phenomenal world is Atmd, the SPIRIT. Thus, while from the Hindu standpoint it Is correct to say the " soul " Is not immortal, it must also be added that the " spirit," Is ; for, unlike the Soul, or Middle Nature, Atmd con- tains no mortal and perishable ingredients, io6 THE COMMON FOUNDATION but Is of its essence both unchangeable and eternal. The confusion of the words " Soul " and " Spirit," so common now, is perplexing and mischievous to the last degree. It Is no argument to bring against the Asiatic theory of Palingenesis, that we have no remem- brance of former existences. We have forgotten nineteen-twentieths of the incidents of our present life. Memory plays us the most prankish tricks. Every one of us can recollect some one trifling incident out of a whole day's, month's, year's, inci- dents of our earliest years, and one that was in no way important, nor apparently more calculated than the others to impress Itself indelibly upon the memory. Howls this? And If this utter forget- fulness of the majority of our life-Incidents Is no proof that we did not exist consciously at those times, then our oblivion of the entire experiences In previous births is no argument against the fact of such previous births. Nor, let me hasten to add, are the alleged remembrances of previous births, affirmed by the modern school of Relncarnationists, valid proofs of such births : they may be — I do not say they arc — mere tricks of the Imagination, cere- bral pictures suggested by chance external In- fluences. The only question with us Is whether In science and logic It Is necessary for us to postu- late for ourselves a series of births, somewhere, at various times. And this I think must be answered in the afflrmatlve."^ * I have explained in my Buddhist Catechism the Buddhist OF ALL P^ELIGIONS. 107 So, then, conceding the plurality of births emd coming back to our argument, we see that even though any one of us may not have the capacity for acquiring adeptship in this birth, it is still a possibility to acquire it in a succeeding one. If we make the beginning we create a cause which will, in due time, and in proportion to its original energy, sooner or later give us adeptship, and with it the knowledge of the hidden laws of being, and of the way to break the shackles of matter and obtain Mukti — Emancipation. And the first step in this beginning is to cleanse ourselves from vicious desires and habits, to do away with unreasoning prejudices, dogmatism and intolerance, to try to discover what is essentially fundamental, and what is non-essential, in the religion one professes, and to live up to the highest ideal of goodness, intelligence, and spiritual-mindedness that one can extract from that religion and from the intuitions of one's own nature. I regard that man as a mad iconoclast who would strike down any religion — especially one of the world's ancient religions — without examining it and giving it credit for its intrinsic truth. I call him a vain enthusiast who would patch up a new faith out of the ancient faiths, merely to have his name in the mouths of men. I call him a foolish zealot who would expect to make theory of the non-transfer of memory from birth to birtli. Briefly, a memory of each birth is evolved within that birth, and when a person can attain to the " fourth stage of Dhyana," or in- terior evolution, he can psychically recall all the series of memories belonging to his consecutive births. io8 THE COMMON FOUNDATION all men see truth as he sees it, shice no two men can even see alike a simple tree or shrub, far less grasp metaphysical propositions with the same clearness. As for those who go about the world to propagate their peculiar religious belief, without the ability to show its superiority to other beliefs which they would supplant, or to answer without equivocation the fair questions of critics — they are either well-meaning visionaries or presumptuous fools. But mad, or vain, or stupid, as either of these may be, if sincere they are personally entitled to the respect that sincerity always com- mands. Unless the whole world is ready to accept one infallible chief, and blindly adopt one creed as the wisest, the only rule must ever be to tolerate in our fellow-men that infirmity of judgment to which we are ourselves always liable, and from which we are never wholly free. And that is the declared policy and platform of the Theosophical Society — as you may see by reading the pamphlet containing its Rules and Bye-Laws. It is the broad platform of mutual tolerance and universal brotherhood. There must be elementary stages leading up to- wards adeptship, you will say. There are, and mod- ern science has laid out some of them. I told you that Psychology is the most difficult of sciences to get to the bottom of, but still Western research has cleared many obstacles from the path. Mesmerism is by far the most necessary branch of study to take up first. It gives you (i) proof of the separability of mind from conscious physical existence ; a mes- OF ALL RELIGIONS. IC9 mcrized subject may show an active intellectual con- sciousness and discrimination while his body is not only asleep but buried in so profound a trance as to more resemble a livid corpse than a living man ; (2) it gives you proof of the actual transmissibility of thought from one mind to another : the mesmeric operator can, without uttering a word or giving a perceptible signal, transmit to his subject the thought in his own mind ; (3) it easily proves the reality of a power to hear sounds and see things occurring at great distances, to communicate with the thought of distant persons, to look through walls, down into the bowels of the earth, into the depths of the ocean, and through all other obstructions to corporeal vision ; (4) as also of a power to look into the human body, detect the seat and causes of disease and prescribe suitable remedies, and to impart health and restore physical and mental vigour by the laying on of the mesmerist's hands, or by his imparting his robust vital force to a glass of water for the patient to drink, or to his wearing apparel ; (5) of a power to see the past and even to prognosticate the future. These and many more things Mesmeric Science enables a person, not an adept of the higher Asiatic Psychology, to prove com- pletely to himself and to others. I say this on the authority of a Committee of the Academy of France. And then, besides Mesmerism, there are the highly important branches of Psychometry and Me- diumism,and others that to barely mention would be beyond the scope of my present lecture. Each and no THE COMMON FOUNDATION all help the inquirer towards the acquisition of * Divine' wisdom, towards an intelligent and scien- tific conception of the laws of that " Eternal Some- thing," as Mr. Herbert Spencer calls it, which you may call God, or by any other name you like. Whatever name you may choose for it, the knowledge of it is the highest goal for human thought, and to be in a state of harmony with it the noblest, first and most necessary aspiration of an intelligent man. The pursuit of this knowledge is, in one word, Theo- SOPHY, and the proper methods of research consti- tute Theosophical Science. And thus in a single sentence I have answered a thousand questions as to what Theosophy is, and what the object of theosophical research. Most of you, like the great mass of Hindus, have, until this moment, been imagining to yourselves that we were come to preach some new religion, to propagate some new conceit, to set up some new " New Dis- pensation." You see now how far you have been from the mark, and what popular injustice has been done to us. Instead of preaching a new religion, we are preaching the superior claims of the oldest religions in the world to the confidence of the pre- sent generation. It is not our poor Ignorant selves that we offer to you as guides and gurus, but the venerable Rishis of the archaic ages. It is not an American or a Russian, but a hoary Hindu philoso- phy that we claim your allegiance for. We come not to pull down and destroy, but to rebuild, the OF ALL RELIGIONS. 1 1 1 strong fabric of Asiatic religion. We ask you to help us to set it up again, not on the shifting and treacherous sands of blind faith, but upon the rocky base of truth, and to cement its separate stones together with the strong cement of Modern Science. Hinduism proper has nothing zvhatever to fear from the researches of Science. Whatever of falsehood may have come down to you from previous genera- tions we may well dispense with, and when the time comes for us to see through our present viaya (illusions), we will cheerfully do so. " The world was not made in a day ; " and we are not such ignorant enthusiasts as to dream that in a day, or a year, or a generation, long established errors can be detected and done away with. Let us but always desire to know the truth, and hold ourselves ready to speak for it, act for it, die for it, if necessary, when we may discover it. People ask us what is our religion, and how it is possible for us to be on equal terms of friendliness with people of such an- tagonistic faiths. I answer that what may be our personal preference among the world's religions has nothing to do with the general question of Theosophy. We are advocating Theosophy, as the only method by which one may discover that Eternal Something, not asking people of another creed than ours to take our creed and throw aside their own. We two Founders profess a religion of tolerance, charity, kindness, altruism, or love of one's fellows ; a religion that does not try to discover all that is bad in our neighbour's creed, but all that is 112 THE COMMON FO UN DA TION good, and to make him live up to the best code of morals and piety he can find in it. We profess, in a word, the religion that is embodied in the golden rule of Confucius, of Gautama, and of the founders of nearly all the great religions, and that is preserved for the admiration and reverence of posterity, in the edicts of the good King Asoka, on the monoliths and rocks of Hindustan. Following this simple creed, we find no difficulty whatever in living upon terms of perfect peace with the adherent of any creed who will meet us in a reciprocal spirit. If we have been at war with the pretended Christians, it is because they have belied the teachings of him whom they call their Master, and by every vile and unworthy subterfuge have tried to oppose the growth of our influence. It is they who war upon us, for defending Hinduism and the other Asiatic religions, not we who war upon them. If they would practise their own precepts we would never use voice or pen against them ; for then they would respect the religious feelings of the Hindu, the Parsi, the Jain, the Jew, the Buddhist and the Mussulman, and de- serve our respect in return. But they began with calumny instead of argument, and calumny, I fear, will be their favourite weapon to the very end. In com- parison with the unmanly conduct of my countryman (Rev. Mr. Cook) who lectured here the other day, de- nouncing the Vedas as filthy abomination and the Theosophlsts as disreputable adventurers, how sweet and noble was the behaviour of that Mohammedan lawyer who defended Raymond Lully, when a OF ALL kEUGiONS. 113 Mussulman tribunal was disposed to punish him for trying to propagate his religion in their city. "If you think it a meritorious act, O Moslems ! for a Mussulman to try to preach Islam among the heretics, why should we be uncharitable to this Christian, whose motive is identical ? " I cannot re- member the exact words, but that is the sense. The tender voice of Charity spoke by that lawyer's lips, and his words were the echo of the spirit of Truth. Come then, old men and young men of Madras, if you call yourselves lovers of India, and would make yourselves worthy of the blessings of the Rishis, join hands and hearts with us to carry on this great work. We ask you for no honours, no worldly benefits or rewards, for ourselves. We do not seek you for followers ; choose your proper leaders from among your wisest and purest men, and we will follow them. We do not offer ourselves as your teachers, for all we can teach is what we have learnt from this Asia ; the Gospel we circulate is derived from the recluses of the Indian mountains, not from the professors of the West. It is for India we plead, for the restoration of her ancient religion, for the vindication of her ancient glory, for the maintenance of her greatness in science, in the arts, in philosophy. If any selfish consideration of sect or caste, or local prejudice, bar the way, put it aside, at least until you have done something for the land of your birth, for the renown of your noble race. In this great crowd I see painted upon your foreheads the vertical sect- H 114 THE COMMON 2^0 UND ATI ON. marks of the Dwaitis and the Visishtadvaitis, and the horizontal stripes of the Sivaites. These are the surface indications of reh'gious differences that have often burst out in bitter words and bitter deeds. But, with another sense than the eye of the body, I see another set of sect-marks, indicative of far greater peril to Indian nationality and Indian spirituality than those. These marks are branded deep upon the brains and hearts of some — though, happily, not all — of your most promising young men, the choicest children of the sorrowino: Mother India, and they are eating away the sense of pride that they belong to this race and have inherited this noble religion. These are the B.A., B.L., and M.A. brands that the University over yonder has marked you with. After three years of intercourse with the Hindu nation and of identification with its thought, I almost feel a shudder when some noble- browcd youth is presented to me as a titled gradu- ate. Not that I undervalue the importance of college culture, nor the honourable distinction one earns by acquiring University degrees ; but I say that, if sucJi distinctions can only be had at the cost of ones national honour and of ones spiritual intuitions^ they are a curse to the graduate and a calamity to his country. I would rather see a dirty Bairagee, who has his ancestors' intuitive belief in man's spiritual capabilities, than the most brilliant gradu- ate ever turned out of the University, who has lost that belief. Let me keep company with the naked hermit of the jungle rather than with a graduate OF ALL RELLGIONS. 115 who, though loaded with degrees, has, by a course of false history and false science, been made to lose all faith in anything greater in the universe than a Haeckel or a Comte, or In any powers in himself higher than those of procreation, thought or diges- tion. Call me a Conservative, if you will ; I am conservative to this extent that, until our modern professors can show me a philosophy that is un- assailable ; a science that Is self-demonstrative, that Is, axiomatic ; a psychology that takes in all psychic phenomena; a new religion that is all truth and with- out a flaw, I shall proclaim that which I feel, which I know to be the fact, — viz., that the Rishis knew the secrets of Nature and of Man, that there Is but one common platform of all religions, and that upon it ever stood and now stand, in fraternal concord and amity, the hierophants and esoteric initiates of the world's great faiths. That platform is Theosophy. May the blessing of its ancient Masters be upon our poor stricken India ! THEOSOPHY, THE SCIENTIFIC BASIS OF RELIGION.* Notwithstanding the very complimentary terms kindly employed by my honoured friend, the Chairman, in bespeaking your attention to the remarks I shall make, I feel most keenly my incapacity to deal with our subject as it deserves. When I face this vast audience, and recollect that it represents the highest culture of Bengal ; when I think that we are met under the very shadow ol Calcutta University ; when I reflect that these walls have resounded to the voices of native orators, whose eloquence can hardly be surpassed by the most eminent senators in Western Parlia- ments and Congresses, and that, from the very spot where I stand, you have been addressed upon the most burning questions in religion and politics by Kally Churn Banner] i, Lalmohun Ghose, Keshub Chunder Sen, Surendra Nath Bannerji, Kristo Das Pal, Sivanath Sastri, and Protap Chunder Mozum- dar, — a sense of personal inferiority to those great masters of rhetoric and logic oppresses and warns me. But I have a message to deliver — a message of reproach in part, but also one of encouragement. I may not soothe your ears with the melody of * A LecLiue Delivered at the Town Hall, Cakutta, llh Aprils 1S82. BASIS OF RELIGION. 1 1 7 your own gifted speakers; but I must deliver it, though all of them were here ; ay, though all the great dead of the past generations, who gave renown to the name of Bengal, were to cluster about this platform. I would they might do so ; indeed, I should feel more sure of ^he moral regeneration of India, if those glorious ancestors of yours could but confront you for one short hour. If you could but hear what they would say of the ways in which you are maintaining their honour and sustaining their dignity, I think I should not then need to utter a single word : one look at the ex- pression of their faces, as their glance, of mingled reproach and displeasure shot through to the very marrow of your being, would be quite enough. If you want to estimate modern Bengal, with its foreign clothes and foreign vices, at its proper valuation, put it beside ancient Bengal. Call out your pertest Babu, who has fed on Spencer and Mill until he fancies himself able to build a new religion, or even a new planet ; clothe him with all his academic honours ; stuff his hands full of his diplomas; gather around him all the paraphernalia of Western culture, including the spirituous aids to re- flection. If we were toask this B.A. — this Bad Aryan —to give to the present audience his candid opinion of himself, he would probably tell you that he was the type and the bemc ideal of Hindu development — a fair representative of what young India might become under the fertilising sprinkles of the college watering-pot. But if we had the power to evoke Ii8 THEOSOFHY, THE SCIENTIFIC the shades of the great Menu, of Kapila, Gautama, Patanjali, Kanada, and Veda Vyasa ; of Jaimini, Narada, Marichi, Vasishta, and other really great Hindus, and could place them before you on this platform, how would our trousered B.A. appear then ? That is the gist of the whole question. A nation which has had representatives such as those I have named, need not go to any foreign teachers for an imprimatur o\ culture. When they can match •the Aryan Rishis, then it will be time enough to look up to them as the gods of the academic BraJimaloka. And that is part of my message to young Bengal. I know that the first question which arises in the minds of my audience is, what motive I have in talking thus. You listen in surprise to hear a white man speak, as, hitherto, you have only heard your orthodox Hindus speak. And as you have always observed that a motive underlies all human action, you must be asking yourselves what is my motive ? I must therefore preface my discourse with some personal explanations. Elsewhere in India it is pretty well known how we Theosophists came here, and why. For three years — that is, since February, 1879, — we have been living under the public eye at Bombay, and every- body knows what sort of people we are, how we live, and what we do. We have lived down serious suspicions and calumnies. I could not give you a better proof of this than by referring you to the action of the Hindu and Parsi educated public the 71. i SIS OF RELIGION. 119 other day when a ranting missionary from my own country Indulged In false and insulting remarks about us, In one of his public lectures. The re- sponse the natives made showed most unmistakeably that his slanders had Increased rather than dimin- ished their friendliness for their theosophist friends. It will be so here. Though this Is my first visit to Calcutta, It will not, I trust, be the last. I expect henceforth to spend at least two or three months of each year in Bengal, and you will thus have ample opportunity to become acquainted with me. We are not birds of passage ; we have not come to India, as Sinbad did to the Valley of Diamonds, to pick up what we can, and after a time flit away. We have not the least intention of returning to our own countries to reside. India is our chosen home, the land of our adoption; and the Hindus are our dearest friends, If not our brothers. We were not driven out of our Western homes. If we had chosen to stop there, we should now be enjoying all comforts and pleasures. In my native land, where the highest offices of State are open to all aspirants, I might even now, if I should return, hold, as I havefor many years before held, posts of honour and importance. One of our most influential New York journals, a journal which circulates a lac and a quarter of copies every week-day, and of its Sunday edition 167,000 copies, asked, the other day, why I should expatriate myself, and why I did not return to my own people to teach them about Asiatic philosophy? Nor did I leave America to better my fortunes. A 120 THEOSOniY, THE SCIENTIFIC sorry way it v\'ould be of improving one's prospects to give up an income of thousands of rupees, and devote every moment of one's time to the interests of a philanthropic society, for whose support I must pay thousands annually out of my private means. There are the Treasurer's accounts, audited and certificated by the Council of the Society, which show that I am stating the bare fact. They show that since we began at New York our preparations to depart for India, Madame Blavatsky and I have given towards the expenses of our Society more than Rs. 25,000. And since we came we have not asked a Hindu, a Parsi, a Buddhist, or any one else, to give us one solitary rupee for our private benefit. Well, admitting all this to be true, the question will all the more press home upon you — what is our motive, why should we take up this life of public drudgery, move over Asia like uneasy ghosts, expose ourselves to the darts of slander and the stings of suspicion ? I shall tell you ; the answer is simple enough. We follow an idea ; and for it we face obstacles, dis- comfort, and danger, incur expense and trouble, resign as worthless what men usually prize, and relinquishing family and home, country and friends, make a new home in Asia, and seek friends and brethren among her ancient races. We are covetous ; yes, but it is for knowledge. We are ambitious ; yes, but only for a place among those who have loved humanit}-, irrespective of caste, race and creed. We are conspirators \ )'es, but BA SIS OF J^ RL TGI ON. 1 2 1 only with the good and true souls who have deep religious aspirations, and who, deploring the darkened spiritual state of mankind, would point back to the beacons of hope that the Ris/iis of old lit on the mountain peaks of Aryan philosophy. When you come to know us, you will recall my present words, and be ready to testify that I told you only the truth. But how comes about this w^onder that we foreigners should feel so deep a reverence for Hindu philosophy, and why even then should we have left our country to come here ? In the year 1874, Madame Blavatsky and I met. I had been a student of practical psychology for nearly a quarter of a century. From boyhood no problem had interested me so much as the mystery of man, and I had been seeking for light upon it wherever it could be found. To understand the physical man, I had read something of anatom}-, physiology and chemistry. To get an insight into the nature of mind and thought, I had read the various authorities of orthodox science, and practi- cally investigated the heterodox branches of phrenology, physiognomy, mesmerism and psycho- metry. To understand mesmerism one must have read Von Reichenbach's " Researches on Magnet- ism, Electricity, &c., &c., in their relations to the Vital Force," and I venture to say that no one can possibly comprehend the rationale of the astound- ing phenomena of modern spiritualism, who has not prepared himself by a glance at all the subjects 122 THE OS PHY, THE SCIENTIFIC above enumerated. So, then, this had been my bent of mind since boyhood, and although I ahvays took an active part in all that concerned my country and fellow-countrymen, and an especially active one during our late Civil War, yet my heart was not set on worldly affairs. In the year above mentioned (1874), I was investigating a most start- ling case of mediumship, that of William Eddy, an uneducated farmer, in whose house were nightly appearing, and often talking, the alleged spirits of dead persons. I will not go into particulars just now, for I have other things to speak about ; perhaps I may make it the subject of some future discourse. Suffice it that with my own eyes I saw, within the space of about three months, some five hundred of these apparitions, under circumstances which, to my mind, excluded the possibility of trickery or fraud. My observations were com- municated to a New York daily journal during the whole period, and the facts excited the greatest wonder. Madame Blavatsky and I met at this farm-house, and the similarity of our tastes for mystical research led to an intimate acquaintance. She soon proved to me that, in comparison with even the chela of an Indian Ma/mtnia, the authori- ties I had been accustomed to look up to knew absolutely nothing. Little by little she opened out to me as much of the truth as my experiences had fitted me to grasp. Step by step- 1 was forced to relinquish illusory beliefs, cherished for twenty years. And as the light gradually BASIS OF RELIGION. 123 dawned on my mind, my reverence for the unseen teachers who had instructed her grew apace. At the same time, a deep and insatiable yearning- possessed me to seek their society, or, at least, to take up my residence in a land which their presence glorified, and incorporate myself with a people whom their greatness en- nobled. The time came when I was blessed with a visit from one of these MaJiatinas in my own room at New York — a visit from him, not in the physical body, but in the " double," or Mayavi- rupa. When I asked him to leave me some tangible evidence that I had not been the dupe of a vision, but that he had indeed been there, he removed from his head the puggri he wore, and giving it to me, vanished from my sight. That cloth I have still, and in one corner is marked in thread the cipher or signature he always attaches to the notes he writes to myself and others. This visit and his conversation sent my heart at one leap around the globe, across oceans and continents, over sea and land, to India, and from that moment I had a motive to live for, an end to strive after. That motive was to gain the Aryan wisdom ; that end to work for its dissemination. Thenceforth I began to count the years, the months, the days, as they passed, for they were bringing me ever nearer the time when I should drag my body after the eager thought that had so long preceded it. In Novem- ber, 1875, we founded the Theosophical Society as a nucleus around which might gather all those of 124 THEOSOPIIY, THE SCIENTIFIC every race and land, who were in sympathy with our mode of research ; and as no such body could have any permanence unless we should eliminate the ever obvious causes of disagreement among men — religious bigotry and social intolerance — we organised it on the basis of universal brotherhood. The idea must have been a good one, since it has suc- ceeded. I doubt if any society of a cognate character has ever so rapidly increased as ours. We already have branches in most parts of the world, and are fast overspreading India with our organizations. The branch I shall tomorrow form at Calcutta will be the twenty-fifth in this country established since February, 1879, and by the time I reach Bombay there will be twenty-eight. But I am getting ahead of my subject: let me turn. During the three years w^ien I Avas waiting to come to India, I had other visits from the LlaJiatnias^ and they were not all Hindus or Cashmeris. I know some fifteen in all, and among them Copts, Tibetans, Chinese, Japanese, Siamese, a Hun- garian, and a Cypriote. But, whatever they are, however much they may differ externally as to race, religion and caste, they are in perfect agree- ment as to the fundamentals of .occult science and the scientific basis of religion. The long-wished-for time came at last ; our private affairs were settled, the New York Society was placed in competent hands ; and my colleague and I embarked. Many friends accompanied us to the vessel to say good-bye, and their waving hand- BASIS OF RELIGION, 125 kerchiefs, which we watched as long as we could see them, were a testimony to the exiles that they were leaving loving hearts behind. How thoroughly, not- withstanding, I had transferred my love to the coun- try of my adoption, you may imagine when I tell you tliat as our steamer passed out of the harbour to the ocean, I cast no " longing, lingering look behind." Though I was leaving the native land I had loved so dearly, and had even risked my life for, and never expected to behold it again, I did not even give it the tribute of a sigh ; but, descending to my cabin, opened the map of India, and sent my thought to my Land of Promise. But when, after buffeting the storms of various waters, we neared Bombay, then far into the night, alone I paced the forecastle to catch the first glimpse of the beacon-light that waited to welcome me home. The passengers were fast asleep, and only the watch on deck and myself were there to see the stars of the Indian sky, and the fire-seething waves of the Indian sea. The midnight bells were struck, but still the lighthouse could not be made out. At last, at one in the morning, the officer on duty, who knew my anxiety, relieved it by pointing to a faintly luminous speck at the water's edge, and telling me that that was Bombay light. My heart gave a throb, as perhaps throbs the heart of an old Hindu who has been long away in foreign countries ; and a feeling of joy and pleasure came across me to think that my journey was ended, and my real life about to begin. I had pictured to myself a Hindu nation homogeneous, 126 THEOSOPHY, THE SCIENTIFIC at least, as regards spirituality and love of their ancestors — one great family, rejoicing in the Aryan name, and with a religious faith built upon the assurance, if not the knowledge, of theosophical truth. Though I knew there w^ere religious sects and cliques, I thought that these barriers were not high enough to keep Hindus apart. I had written to Keshub Babu to ask him to join in our work, and I was ready to serve in any subordinate capacity, under and with anybody, no matter whom, in the interest of India and Indians. I only asked some little corner, however small, w^here I might incorporate myself with their national life and thought ; and as I asked nothing but the privilege to learn and work, I hoped tobe taken at my word and tobe viewed as a friend. But I was not: the back of the hand, not the palm, was offered me. Dogged by the Government Police as suspects, my colleague and I were not happy enough to find a sure refuge in Indian hearts. Our char- acters were traduced by the enemies of Indian religion without a protest from its followers ; it seemed, in fact, as though we were doomed to see every hope crushed — every one we had an affection for turn his back upon us. Thus under a black sky of trouble, we went on for weary months together, keeping up our courage by re- membering what goal we had in view, and by degrees learning to pluck success from the very thorn bush of disaster. We founded our Bombay Branch, then another and another ; we established BASIS OF RELIGION. 127 our magazine, the TJicosopJdst^ and made it a suc- cess ; we went to Ceylon, and were greeted with enthusiasm ; and though some who mistook us for sectarians have broken with us, the third year of our Indian work now opens up, bright and full of promise. The worst, we think, is over ; and every month, as I remarked in a recent lecture, we are being drawn nearer and nearer to the Indian heart. I venture to take thevastnessof the present audience as a proof of this fact, for I cannot believe it is only idle curiosity that has brought all of you to- gether. Our appeals to you to remember the glories of Aryavarta and strive to revive them, have not fallen upon deaf ears ; the dry bones are stirring with the flutter of a higher and nobler spiritual life ; the echoes of sympathy are coming towards us from North and South, from East and West. Bombay has spoken, the North- West has spoken. Madras has spoken, and there have even been whispers from Bengal, though we have never, until now, spoken to Bengali audiences. Away with despondency and dejection ! The morn is breaking, and if we wait but a little longer, we may see the perfect day. No one feels more sensibly than I do the anomaly that a white man should be appealing to you to study your religion. This is work for your learned Pundits. But they are silent ; and what is to be done ? I met the greatest Pundits of India at Benares, and, after showing to them the effects of Western culture upon the religious thought of 128 THE OS PHY, THE SCIENTIFIC Young India, implored them to rise to the occasion, and to do their duty. As though the voice of the Rishis were speaking by my Hps, I arraigned them at the bar of their country, and said that history would not hold them guiltless, if the entire body of our youth should fall into materialist scepticism. I begged that they would at least compile tracts and catechisms, which should embody the great principles of morality and religion, the broad out- lines of philosophy and spiritual science laid down in the Sastras, so that it might be seen that a Hindu need look nowhere outside his own literature for inspiration to noble deeds and noble living. The Pundits listened, applauded, signed articles of union between their Sabha and our Society, and then — did nothing more. I am wait- ing on and hoping almost against hope that from among the greatest of your living scholars will step forth a moral regenerator to lead you back from your desultory wanderings to the solid ground of Hindu philosophy. Must India call in vain ? Must the empty voice give back the hollow echoes of her appeal ? Is there not, even in Bengal, one Aryan heart that can be touched with the fire from the sacred altars of religion ? Where is the Brahmin who is able, like his pure and holy forefather, to perform the AgniJiotra in the true way, and draw from the ambient sky the fire of Agni upon his kusa grass ? Where is the Brahmin who has the same fire in the hollow of his hand ? Alas ! no answer comes. There are thousands BASIS OF RELIGION. 129 of Brahmins, but no adept AgniJiotris. Among these swarming millions, and amid this teeming life, the aspirant lor spiritual instruction finds scarcely a single Guru who can practically teach the Yoga science. Hundreds of bright young men are suffering from spiritual starvation. Can we help them ? Is there no hope to offer the youths who have learnt to regard modern science as the sole authority in questions of a religious and scientific nature ? For that is the ordeal that the advocates of Aryan philosophy must pass. It is useless to try and cover it up, or evade the alterna- tive : either we must prove Hinduism to stand upon the ground of science, or leave it to its fate. I think we can hold out this hope, and can give this assurance. I believe that modern research has arrived at certain facts which help us to under- stand our subject if we collate and adjust them to each other. And this brings us to consider the second part of our discourse — an explanation of the word Theosophy, and its application to the Yoga Vidya. Properly speaking, Theosophy may be defined as the knowledge of " Divine " wisdom. If there were a Western science of Psychology, worthy of the name, this would be its crowning glory ; the seeker after knowledge of the " soul " would end by becoming a Theosophist. For one can gain what is called Divine wisdom only in one way — through the development of the psychic powers. Religion is most strictly a personal affair : every man makes 130 THEOSOPHY, THE SCIENTIFIC his own religion and his own God : that is to say, if he has any idea at all about religion or God, they must be his own, not somebody's else ideas. Another man can no more think for you in these matters, so as to do you any good, than he can eat or sleep for you. You may think some man very great, and be ready to wash and garland and swing him like an idol, and eat the dust of his feet, and all that sort of thing ; and you may fancy that his commonest utterances are divinely inspired. You may call j'ourself a Tantrika, a Sivaite, a Vaish- nava, a Buddhist, or whatever you please. But, after all, when it comes to your actual religious experi- ence, it will be your experience, measured and limited hy your own personal, psychical and theoso- phical capacity. It is simply tyranny to try and force a particular religion upon any man. So, as I said before, religion is something personal ■; and it is also something sacred, something not to be rudely interfered with and pried into. The true moralist will exert his influence to make his fellow- men live up to the best features of their respective faiths ; it is the most audacious of experiments to try and glue together bits of a number of good re- ligions into a new mosaic. I shall not enter here into any discussion as to what is meant by the word " Soul." I have my ideas, and they may conflict with yours. Call it what you please, the only radical point to reach is the fact that in the nature of man there is this depart- ment which is called psychical, and which is not to BASIS OF A' ELI GI ON. 131 be included in the most objective, or physical and mechanical part of the self. The orthodox psycho- logist will not concede you this point. He will meet you at the very threshold of the inquiry, and affirm that there is no more of man than is embraced in the ingenious mechanism of his body. The English poet, Pope, coined an expression to signify his scorn of a man who was devoid of great qualities — one who was ** Fix'd, like a plant, to its peculiar spot, To draw nutrition, propagate and rot." But if you add to this the intellectual capacity as the result of cerebral function, have we not here the type of the " man " of modern Psychology ? What does that science make of the human being but a digestive, locomotive, procreating, and thinking mechanism ? Can you find anything better than this in the philosophy of Herbert Spencer and the entire a posteriori school ? I will ^\mq you a year to pore over Mr. Spencer's Principles of PsycJiology^ or over The Emotions and the Will, and The Senses and the Intellect, of Professor Bain (whom some of the greatest critics of our day consider as the master psychologist of the age), and then defy you to find the secret of true psychology ; or, if you choose, you may con the works of James Mill, Cousin, Locke, Kant, Hobbes, Hegel, Fichte, Huxley, Haeckel, John Stuart Mill, Comte, and all the learned writers of the kind. You will see a good deal of protoplasm, and pro- togen, and monads ; but you will not discover the 132 THEOSOPHY, THE SCIENTIFIC nature of " soul " in any of them. After wading through their heavy volumes, you will arrive at the conclusion that they are little better than obscura- tionists — intellectual clouds between you and the sun of spiritual truth. You will find some of them light, fleecy clouds, some so thin and vapoury as to let through a good deal of light ; others black and murky clouds, bursting with suppressed lightnings. If you go on far enough, you will see that these heavier intellectual masses, like the prototypes in Nature with which we are comparing them, will discharge their thunders at each other as they come into opposition, and then there is a great noise and heavy discharge of critical artillery. But the net result, after all is over, and you digest your notes and collect your confused thoughts, will be what I said — you will have puzzled your brain with a multitude of words and got no clear idea of Psychology. For they confuse the intellectual experiences of the human brain with the other and totally different experiences of the real Psyche ! And though they wrote ten times as many books, since they would all be written upon this false hypothesis, they would be no nearer the mark. These Western psychologists have, we may say, chopped man into minute shreds. There is not an atom of him (and by him I mean their " him," not the complete man), not a bone, muscle, nerve, cell, or ganglion, that they have not dissected, and fumbled over, and analysed. He has not a feeling, an emotion, a cognition — not a single or BASIS OF RELIGION. 133 complex intellectual process — that they have not pulled about, weighed in the scales of logic, tested with the resolvents of reason, ticketed, and laid away in the psychological herbaria. But I defy the whole of them, from Locke to Bastian, and their whole army of followers, to show you one single discovery that explains the psychic pheno- mena whose occurrence has been observed in India from the remotest ages, and the laws of whose causation are explained in the Aryan Sastras. The earnest seeker after Divine wisdom — the true Theosophist — will turn away from western " authorities " with a sense of weariness and de- spair. To express it truthfully in one word, I must call the soul-science of the Aristotelians of the now dominant European school, subcuticular — skin-deep — Psychology, the psychology of what lies inside the human skin ! Their battles are all foiigJit tinder the epidermis ; they understand the psychological effect of external objects and phenomena upon the human mind ; but a transcuticular man is to them a scientific absurdity. Their man is acted upon centripetally by Nature, but does not react centri- fugally upon it. Asiatic philosophers recognize man as comprising three groups or divisions of self- hoodf Thtrc \s, first, Sthul Sharira — the physical — the grosser, more material, objective and per- ceptible ; second, Mayavi Rupa — the psychical, or less perceptible, though still material ; tJiird, the Atnia — the spiritual, or imperceptible and trans- cendental. With a minuteness of analysis that 134 TIIEOSOPHY, THE SCIENTIFIC matches that of the European ps}xhologists, they have again sub-divided these three groups into sub-sections. But there is this inestimable advan- tage on their side, that they prove their proposi- tions experimentally. When they talk of a " double," or Mayavi Riipa, or Stiks/una S/iarira, they produce the thing itself: they sliozu tJiemsclvcs to yoH ill their doubles. They will leave their physical bodies {StJinl Sharira) in saiiiadJu, a state of lethargy, at some distant place, force the " double " out through its pores, and to that trans- ferring their consciousness, with all its train of in- tellectual and intuitional cognitions and feelings, visit and make themselves visible to you. Fancy Professor Bain, or Mr. Mill, or I\Ir. Spencer, under- taking to argue on Psychology with a man in the Jllayavi Riipa ! \Miere would be then all their " quips and quilibets," their hard Greek and Latin terms, their speculative h}-potheses ? Until that moment, they would have thought themselves authorities, but now the spectres of their books would rise before them only in reproach. Their antecedent mental state, as contrasted with their present one, might be likened to that of a philo- sopher who had speculated upon the possibility of aerolites, but of a sudden had been hit hard by a fragment of one tumbling on him from the sky. Or we may take an example even more extreme. Let us suppose that great man and thinker, Mr. Spencer, sitting in his arm-chair at dusk in his library. He has been writing the seventeenth chapter of BASIS OF religion: 135 the second volume of his Principles of Psychology, and has worked out the problem of the " Completed Differentiation of Subject and Object" to his per- fect satisfaction. He has satisfied himself that the phase of emotion is stimulated by memories of past experiences ; his hand has just traced these words : — " Such components of consciousness, pleasurable and painful, divisible into classes and sub-classes, differ greatly from the components thus far described ; being extremely vague, being unlocalizable in space, and being but indefinitely localizable in time " (op. cit. p. 467). He has de- scribed to us the effect produced upon his state of quiescence by hearing at his back a voice which he recognizes as the voice of a friend: and, as he tells us, " a wave of pleasurable feeling" upsets certain antecedent sets of " vivid states," known to him as the parts of his body, a feeling of muscular tension is excited, " the emotion felt goes on presently to initiate other muscular tensions, and after them special sounds " — he speaks. And now, his chapter finished and his pen thrown aside, he muses. A wonderful phenomenon occurs — one that has hap- pened to and been recorded by other great scholars. Out of the reasoning, analysing, digestive machine that the world, by visual, auditive, and tactual observations, recognize, as I\Ir. Spencer, oozes a whitish vapour which at first a cloud, con- denses into a man. It is not only a man but that very man, I\Ir. Spencer, his actual counterpart or " double," his Mayavi-nipa. At last it is fully 136 THEOSOPIiy, THE SCIENTIFIC formed, and in the same degree as the Hght of in- telligence comes into its eyes, the same light diminishes in the eyes of the musing philosopher. The synthetic man, who but just now was building air-castles with walls and foundations of words, has divided into two parts, and the supreme intellectual activity, as well as the supreme consciousness of selfhood, is transferred to that part which is now outside the skin that was the philosopher's tiltima tJmle but just now. Can we not imagine what this new-born self would say to the heavier body before it ? Let it speak — " Here I am, and there you are, O man ! I am ego — self ; you a machine. You were my prison and jailer ; but see, I have escaped. Henceforth I leave you, I enter you, at will. You cannot detain me, you cannot ignore me, you sJiall not silence me. I am the conscious entity, you a vegetating mechanism of bones, and flesh and nerves. How now about your emotions and will, your grey-matter vesicles and your white-fibre telegraph lines? Come, philosopher, rouse your- self and debate with me. I would have you teach me psychology. You write learnedly about sub- ject and object. You have cleverly told your readers that you cannot frame any psychological conception without looking at internal co-existences and sequences in their adjustments to external co- existences and sequences {pp. cit., i. p. 133) : now here we are — you there with your thinking machi- nery inside, and I here, with my intellectual powers outside, the physical ]\Ir. Spencer. Come, since BASIS OF RELIGION. 137 you are fond of sequences, follow me^ if you can, to the high plateau of the Himavat. There we shall find men who hiozv Psychology instead of dreaming about it ; men who are the successors of a thousand generations of Aryan and Hindu sages, who, all this time, have known what man is, and what his powers are. Your school of metaphysics, not yet a century old, is a thing of yesterday as compared with the hoary science of the Rishis, the Arahats, and the Medean Magi. In the pride of your re- cently enfranchised intellects, you Western biolo- gists and psychologists are trying to climb the sky of occult science, wherein alone can be found the truth about man and nature. Dull clod of earth, component of ashes and gases and water, it was I who illumined and inspired you ; I who gave you such intuitions of Divine wisdom as you had, de- spite the incubus of your vaunted reason ! I am iJie Spencer, you but my covering. You are of the ground ; I of the infinite and eternal essence of Nature ! " What can you answer — M.A. of the University of Calcutta — though you glitter with medals, and are clothed in honours as with a gar- ment ? Theory is one ' thing, fact another. Do you cling to the theory of Germany or of Edinburgh, when you can learn the fact at the asrainanis of the Neilgherries and the Himalayas ? Mr. John Stuart Mill {Dissertations and Discus- sions^ iii. 97) makes a bold assertion. He says: — " The sceptre of Psychology has decidedly returned 138 THEOSOPIIY, THE SCIENTIFIC to this island " (Great Britain). Sceptre, indeed ! He talks as though it were some royal bauble, like the Koh-i-noor, that could be looted and sent home by a P. and O. Steamer ! The sceptre of Psycho- logy is wielded on the Himavat, and no modern empiric can clutch that rod of power, that staff of authority. The mesmerist knows something about Psychology, the modern spiritualist knows some- thing, and so does the student of Psychometry. Their knowledge is based upon experimental re- searcli. They may not be learned anatomists, morphologists, or biologists ; but, perhaps, they have a better idea of the whole nature of man than any of these. They have seen one from whom the. conscious Ego had stepped out, and left the bod}^ not a dead thing, but living, W\^ Jiv-Atma, or life- principle, being in it. The dull eye of the body, in which no intelligence shines ; the listless apathy and muscular relaxation ; the reduced temperature of flesh ; the stopped or fluttering heart — all these have convinced them that it is not the bodily me- chanism that is the real man ; and this conviction becomes a certainty when one has seen a body thus inert, and, at the same time, seen the double of the man moving about, with full consciousness, doing intelligently the acts of a responsible being, and in every way showing that the physical body is but a habitable mechanism, of itself unspiritual, if not altogether irresponsible. In the ordinary experi- ments of Mesmerism, when the patient is thrown into the state of ecstasis, one usually observes that BASIS OF RELIGION. I39 the body has passed into a state whose physical appearances closly resemble death. I have stood by a person in this death-like lethargy, and found there was neither pulse, animal heat, nor breathy while, at the same time, the inner self of the ecstatic was apparently soaring in the supernal spheres, keenly alive to its rapturous experiences. In a book of mine {People from the Other World), which records my researches on the Eddy mediumistic phenomena, I have described the case of a Mrs. Compton, whom I saw in such a dead- alive condition, after one of the most marvellous seances on record. Well, this something that comes out of the human body is, in the judgment of occultists, the soul-principle — the responsible en- tity, the part of a man which, whether inside or outside the body, is that which acquires the certainty of Divine wisdom. It is this that be- comes the true Theosophist. And, as this is not restricted by the hard limits of creed, race, pre- judice, caste, and other external relations, which hedge about the material or physical man, you will observe that when this self is thoroughly freed from the restrictive environments of society, it must be free from our prejudices, hatreds and antipathies, of one sort or another. This is the part of a man that becomes an adept, and the very name of MaJiatnia (great soul), that you have called it by for countless generations, shows how well this has been under- stood in India. When the Yogi practises dharana, dhyan, and samadhi';^ it is for the purpose of getting *■ Three stages of self-induced ecstasy and trance. I40 TIIEOSOPHY, THE SCIENTIFIC himself — that is his real self — disentans^led from the illusions of the bodily senses, which continually cheat us as to what is real and what unreal. He strives to evolve this astral self, and to purify that to the nearest possible approximation of absolute spirit. There are four stages of Yoga. In the first, the Yogi begins to learn the first forms of Yoga^ and to fight his battle with the animal nature. In the next, having learnt the forms, he advances towards perfect knowledge. In the third, the advance continues, and he overcomes all the primary and subtle forces — that is to say, he van- quishes the nature spirits, or elementals, resident in the four kingdoms of nature ; and neither fire can burn, water drown, earth crush, nor poisonous air suffocate, his bodily frame. He is no longer dependent upon the limited powers of the five senses for knowledge of surrounding Nature ; he has developed a spiritual hearing that makes the most distant and most hidden sounds audible, a sight that sweeps the area of the whole solar system, and penetrates the most solid bodies along with the hypothetical ether of modern science; he can make himself as buoyant as a thistle-down, or as heavy as the giant rock ; he can subsist with- out food for inconceivably long periods, and, if he chooses, can arrest the ordinary course of nature, and escape bodily death to an inconceivably protracted age. Having learnt the laws of natural forces, the causes of phenomena, and the sovereign capabilities of the human will, he may make " miracles " his BASIS OF RELIGION. 14T playthings, and do wonders that would take the con- ceit out of even a modern philosopher. He can walk upon water, without even wetting the soles of his feet ; or, sitting in dhyan, can, by inward concentra- tion, so change the magnetic polarity of his body that it will rise from the ground and be self-sus- pended in the air. Or, if he throws himself into the fourth and deepest state of abstraction, he will then have so withdrawn the life-principle from the outer to the inner surfaces of the body, that you may tie him in a sack and bury him under- ground for weeks together, and when dug up and rubbed and handled in a certain way, he will revive to perfect consciousness. Your distin- guished and honoured countryman. Dr. Rajend- ralala Mittra, tells me that when a boy, he saw the Sadhu (ascetic), whom some wood-choppers found in the Sunderbunds jungle, and brought up to Calcutta. He was found sitting, like a stiffened corpse, with his legs twisted through the roots of a tree. At Calcutta he unhappily fell into the hands of two fools, whose tipsy folly — as I am told, though I speak under correction^made them practically his murderers. Not able to arouse him by shout- ing, pushing, and beating, they put fire into his hand, and plunged him into deep water in the Ganges with a rope about his neck, as though he were a ship's anchor, and twice kept him there all night. They pried his tetanous jaws apart, put beef into his mouth, and poured brandy down his throat. Finally to prove their own 142 THEOSOPHY, THE SCIENTIFIC shamelessness, and to make their memory hateful for ever, this Hindu Rajah and this Enghshman set upon the poor saint whose emaciated body had been left by him, as he thought, in the safe solitude of the jungle, where tigers and serpents would not harm him, while his soul went out in search of Divine truth, these cruel, impious beasts set upon him an abandoned creature of the other sex to pollute him with her unholy touch ! Oh I shame upon such specimens of humanity ! By their cruel violence they finally awoke the Sadhu from his lethargy, and his first utterance was, not a curse upon his tormentors, not a burst of indignant invective, but a plaintive and reproach- ful cry, " O why, sirs, did you disturb me ; I had done you no harm ? " Shortly after he died from the effects of the food-poison they had forced into him. This happened some forty years ago. But do you suppose Calcutta is any better now, or a safer place for a real Sadhu to trust himself in ? I think not ; and, in my opinion, if any one of }'ou should want to find any better type of Yogi than the painted impostors who perambulate your streets, you will have to go far away from the city gates in search of him. At Lahore I met the son of a native gentleman, still residing in a neighbouring place, who was an eye-witness to the burial of a Sad/m, in the presence of Maharajah Runjit Singh — a case that has be- come historical. The particulars are given by Sir BASIS OF RELIGION, 143 Claude Wade, the Political Resident, in his Camp and Court of Riinjit Singh, and by Dr. MacGregor, then Residency Surgeon, in his History of the Sikh War. This Sadhn was buried alive for forty days, a perpetual guard being kept, night and day, over the spot. The English officials saw him buried and also exhumed, and Dr. MacGregor gives a profes- sional diagnosis of the case. When uncovered, the man's body was shrunken and dried like a stick of wood ; the tongue, which at the burial had been turned back into the throat, had become like a piece of horn ; and eyes, ears, and every other orifice of the body, had been stopped with plugs of ghee (clarified butter). Upon returning to his external consciousness, the Sadhn told them that he had been enjoying the blissful society of Yogis and saints, and that if the Maharajah wished it, he was quite ready to be buried over again. There is — to say nothing of the Aryan and post- Aryan Sastras, which, as you know, are full of such things — a whole literature of Mysticism among the European nations, and the annals of the Christian Church teem with testimonies of ecstatics and visionaries who, escaping from the body while alive, have penetrated the inner world and seen divine things. No one can read the mystical literature of the Christian and other churches without beinor struck with the idea that the visions of an uninitiated seer are invariably mixed up with his own indivi- duality. His subjective prejudices and preconcep- tions give objective colour and shape to the objects 144 THEOSOPHY, 7 HE SCIENTIFIC he encounters in his supra-physical life. The Christian sees the Heaven of his Apocalypse, or his Milton ; the Parsi, the Chinvat Bridge of Souls guarded by the dread Maiden and her dogs ; the Mussulman, the Gardens of the Blessed, with their houris and never-ending delights. Swedenborg, the Swedish seer, who developed his clairvoyance when past the middle age, and after he had devoted many years to scientific pursuits and religious thought, saw a system of correspondences which explained and illuminated, as he imagined, the dead-letter of the Bible, of whose divine authority he was already convinced. The visions of my almost life-long friend, Andrew Jackson Davis, have a similarly subjective character. In all these cases, the seer has not passed out of the circle of illusion, he has not yet come into the fourth stage of Yoga, as defined by Patanjali. In this fourth stage " the Yogi, loses all personality and all consciousness of separate existence ; all the operations of intellect become extinct, and spirit alone remains." The Moksha of the Hindu is this pure transcendental state indefinitely prolonged — an existence in which all the causes of sorrow beine absent, there can be no sorrow ; and the causes of illusions being left behind, there can be no illusion but the absolute truth is known in its unveiled splendour. The Theosophist is a man who, what- ever be his race, creed, or condition, aspires to reach this height of wisdom and beatitude by self- development ; and, therefore, you will see that in a 8AS/S OF RELIGION. 145 Theosophlcal Society like that we have founded — and which we hope many of you will join — to have one creed for our members to subscribe to, or one form of prayer for them to adopt, or an}^ rules that would interfere with their individual relations to caste, or any other social and external environment not actually antipathetic to Theosophical research, would be impossible. You will also infer that, de- spite the false statements or ignorant misconceptions of many of our critics, we are not preaching a new religion, or founding a new sect, or a new school of philosophy or occult science. The Hindu Sastras, the Buddhist Gathas, and the Zoroastrian Desatir, contain every essential idea that we have ever propounded, and our constant theme, these past seven years, has been that of my present dis- course, to wit, that Theosophy is the scientific and the only firm basis of religion. We deny that there is the slisj-htest conflict between true reliG^ion and true science. We deny that any religion can be true that does not rest upon scientific lines, and we affirm that the outcome of scientific research will be to set religion upon such an eternal founda- tion, by breaking down the thick mystery of matter and tracing force up into that everlasting and im- mutable principle, called Motion by some. Spirit by some, and Farabrahnta by the Vedantists. Theosophical research, therefore, is the prop and stay both of religion and science ; and by ignoring all those causes which keep men apart, and arm brother against brother, it is a promoter of 146 THEOSOPHY, THE SCIENTIFIC peace and harmony among men — in short, of Uni- versal Brotherhood. A great noise has ahvays been made about certain striking phenomena which have occurred, not only in the presence of the mystics and saints of different religious sects above mentioned, but also in connexion with the Thcosophical Society. Minds, empty of healthy philosophical thought, hanker after the marvellous. Many such have joined our Society in the hope of seeing wonders, and even of obtaining siddhis (powers), without the usual training. Such are always, of neces- sity, foredoomed to disappointment. There is no royal road to Geometry. The Occult Science may be learnt by different methods, and by any one who can find a teacher, provided he has the necessary psycho-physiological qualifications in him- self. For this department of research does exact very peculiar aptitudes. Can you learn law, medicine, theology, chemistry, astronomy, or any other science embraced in the college curriciiliLni, without the special mental capacities that each demands ? You know that to be impossible ; and that even where the mental capacity is not wanting, it takes time, patience and close thought and application, to master your sub- ject. There is not a professor, however emi- nent, who does not continue a student of his specialty to the very day of his death. Come, then, foolish man, do you imagine that Theo- sophy, this science of sciences, which unlocks for BASIS OF RELIGION. 147 you the corridors of nature and ushers you Into the blazing splendour of absolute Truth, is less difficult than any of these pettier branches of knowledge? Do you think that in a few weeks, or months or years, you can pierce the veils of the mysteries, while you are keeping on in your round of worldly occupations, indulging your animal plea- sures,cow^eringbeforeyoursocIal prejudices, and wrap- ping your nobler self in the tainted body of Ignoble desires ? The mere seeing of phenomena does no good except to a mind which has already obtained a thorough understanding of philosophy. This the Yogi knows so well that he does not allow himself to be diverted by them, even when produced by himself, from his ultimate object of reaching the fourth stage of Yoga. Patanjali says that even in the third stage the Yogi Is liable to be overcome ; and even in the last, which is sub-divided into seven stages, he is not wholly safe from the " local gods," nor will be so till he has advanced beyond the fifth of these seven. In the course of training, adopted among certain mystics of Tibet, there are seven stages of an ascending series, and each of these is sub-divided into nine sub-stages. But whatever the training, there Is the same object — emancipation from Illusion and attainment of Theosophical know- ledge. The untrained seers and religious ecstatics we have noticed above, as having visions of a partially subjective character, are all beneath the fourth stage of Yoga. Their delusions result from their lack of training. They see a spiritual light 148 THE OS PHY, THE SCIENTIFIC but through a smoky glass: Patanjali's methods having been unknown to them, they have not de- veloped their psychic powers by dharana and d/iyan, that is, by " restraint of the mind," and " spiritual meditation." Hence, their actual psychic percep- tions are mixed up with their intellectual pre-con- ceptions ; as the Scripure has it — they " see through a glass darkly." So we arrive at this point at last. If Psychology is a science, — and Psychology includes the learning of divine wisdom — then this search after religious truth is the scientific basis of religion. Theosophy, therefore, is the scientific basis of religion, for this research is Theosophy. I think this is plain enough, and I cannot see how any reasonable man, of what- ever creed or sect, could put himself in antagonism to us. If his sect or his bigotry is more precious to him than the learning of the truth, of course we need not areue with him. He could not understand us, or, if he could, he would not admit it. Perhaps, in his petulant dissatisfaction, he might even accuse us of falsehood. One of these sect-leaders said, the other day, in a Calcutta paper, that the study of occultism and spiritualism only pandered to " vain curiosity ; " that " men will not believe in God and immortality, but they will believe in any amount of spirit-rapping and occultism." I could not offer you a better example of the spirit just described — a spirit which would have us put aside science and investigation of natural law, and blindly take on faith what any would-be leader BASJS OF RELIGION. 149 chooses to tell us. '' The more " — says this gentle- man, himself an avowed religious teacher, — " a man is found to disbelieve in the natural and legitimate objects of faith, the more inclined he is to put his trust in all manner of magic, witchcraft, and spiritualism." What is the use of arguing with a mind like that ? The little world of illusion in which it lives is quite enough to satisfy its every desire ; if it thinks it can find emancipation in it, let it try. Of one thing such people are most certainly ignorant, and that is of the spirit of the nineteentJi century. The day of blind faith has gone by, never, I hope, to return. If we are to have any re- ligion — and every man of moral feeling longs for some religious convictions — it must be one that is in reconciliation with science and natural law. We are no longer inclined to catch up our religions, as though they were made of glass, and run for shelter behind the rampart of " faith," every time a Darwin or a Spencer throws a stone at them. The men who desire to prohibit our look- ing into the mysterious operations of Nature, are the lineal descendants of the theological doctors of Galileo's time. Some of these professors of Pisa and Padua behaved so absurdly about this theory of the heliocentric system that he has held them up to an immortality of ridicule in a letter to Kepler. " Oh ! my dear Kepler," he writes, " how I wish we could have a hearty laugh together. Here at Padua, is the principal professor of philosophy, whom I have repeatedly and urgently ISO THEOSOPHY, THE SCIENTIFIC invited to look at the moon and planets through my glass, which he pertinaciously refuses to do. Why are you not here ? What shouts of laughter we should have at this glorious folly, and to hear the philosopher at Pisa labouring before the Grand Duke with logical arguments as if, with magic in- cantations, to draw the new planets out of the sky ! " Dr. James Esdaile, from the Preface to whose work on Natural and Mesmeric Clairvoyance , I copy this quotation, is the Residency Surgeon, who (under the patronage of Lord Dalhousie, then Governor-General of India), established a Mesmeric Hospital here at Calcutta, in 1846, at which were performed painlessly some hundreds of sur- gical operations upon mesmerised patients. His noble devotion to truth and purely philanthropic labours provoked the enmity and spite of his profes- sional colleagues. They behaved towards him with the same vindictive malice as some editors, preachers, and laymen have shown to the Theoso- phical Society. But he kept on with his work, despite all obstacles, until the use of mesmeric anesthesia was superseded by the application of chloroform to surgery. Dr. Esdaile lived down opposition, and was enabled to say in 1852, as the result of per- sonal experience, that " like the camomile plant. Mesmerism only flourishes the more for being trodden upon." Theosophy seems to enjoy the same vital elasticity, for we have just seen that the unceasing ardent opposition of the missionaries from my own'countr\%instead of crushing it (as their BASIS OF religion: 151 party hoped), has done it a world of good. A Christian himself, and without a trace of infidelity in his opinions, Dr. Esdaile scouts the idea of the study of Mesmerism promoting atJicisni; and, though he gives no sign of knowing the connexion of his idea with Vedantism or Yoga, he says that by this research the life of man '' will pro- bably be found to be only a modification of the vital agent which pervades the Universe." Thence, he says, we may "come to understand the astound- ing sympathies and affinities sometimes developed between the organic and inorganic world, and be led to suspect the possibility of the finite mind of man passing for a time into relation with the in- finite, and thereby receiving impressions otherwise than by the senses which regulate and circumscribe our knowledge of surrounding nature in our normal state of existence." These arc the wise words of a true philosopher, and I may add, a true Christian, in the better sense of the word. Mes- merism — a modern European discovery of an old Asiatic science — is the key to the mystical phenomena, of the Hindu Sastras. Young gentleman of the University, remember this, and withhold }'our flip- pant scepticism about your ancestral faith until at least you have mastered this subject. Yes, in Mesmerism is balm for the heart of the searcher after the hidden truth of Aryan philosophy. Look, if you please, at this engraving. It is from a little work published two years ago at Lahore bv Sabhapathy Swami. It represents the system of 152 THEOSOPHY, THE SCIENTIFIC psychic development, by Raj Yoga. Here is traced a series of lines and circles upon the naked body of a man sitting in the posture of Padmdsan^ and practising Yoga. The triple line passes down the front of the head and body, making the circles at certain points — viz.^ over the vomer, or nasal cavity, the mouth, the root of the throat, the heart, the umbilicus and the spleen. The artist, to bring the whole system into one view, traces for us the parts of the line and circles that would be out of sight, such as that over the lower end of the spinal column, the line up the spine, and over the cere- bellum and cerebrum, until it unites with the front line. This is the line travelled by the will of the Yogi in his process of psychic development. He, as it were, visits each of the centres of vital force in turn, and subjugates them to dependence upon the will. The circles are the ckakras, or cen- tres of forces, and when he has traversed the en- tire circuit of his corporeal kingdom, he will have perfectly evolved his inner self — disengaged it from its natural state of commixture with the outer shell, or physical self His next step is to project this "double" outside the body, trans- ferring to it his complete consciousness, and then, having passed the threshold of his carnal prison- house, into the world of psychic freedom, his powers of sight, hearing, and other senses are indefinitely increased, and his movements no longer trammelled by the obstacles which impede those of the external man. Do not understand BASIS OF religion; 153 me as saying that this is the only method of psychic evokition ; there are others than PatanjaH's, and some better ones. The highest form of Yoga — to employ that as a generic term — is one by which there is rather a moral than a physical or semiphysical training and evolution, and, as I con- ceive, by this process the ascetic sooner and more perfectly breaks through the wall of Maya, or illu- sion, than he can by Patanjali's methods. Perhaps, some physiologists in this audience may feel inclined to deny that consciousness can be thus transferred from the sensorium in the brain to other parts of the body. Should such be here, I will ask them to refer to the Zoist, to Professor Weinholt's Lecture on Somnambidism, to the Breslau Medical Collections, to Dr. Bertrand's Treatise on Soninanibnlism, to Dr. Petetin's Electricity Animale, to the Proceedings of the Philosophical Society of Lausanne, to the Re- port of Signori Corini, Visconti and Mazzacorati, of a case in the Hospital della Vita at Bologna, to Dr. Esdaile's and Professor William Gregory's works. In these, and in scores of others I might mention, it will be seen that in certain morbid states • of the nervous system, especially catalepsy and hysteria, the senses of hearing, sight, taste and touch are localized at the pit of the stomach, the finger-tips, the soles of the feet and the back of the head. I do not claim any- special weight for my own tes- timony, but still, as one always likes to have parole evidence when possible, I may tell you that I have 154 THEOSOPin, THE SClENflFIC seen examples of some of those psycho-physiologi- cal phenomena. Not to dwell upon othrrs,* I will mention but a single case— that of an American girl of ten years old, the daughter of a friend of mine. This charming little child would, in her waking state, read any book,print or writing,! heldagainst theback of her head. The faculty, which she accidentally discovered, left her after a couple of years, without apparent cause. Now, if Nature thus spontaneously offers us examples of the higher mesmeric and other psychic phenomena, their possibility is by Nature herself proven. The only remaining question is whether the Yogi or other mystic can, by intense concentration of his will upon a certain centre of" vital activity, voluntarily excite an identical condi- tion. And that he can, I know to a certainty. I have spoken of Baron von Reichenbach's mas- terly work : here it is. I affirm that this record of five years' experiments of an Austrian chemist of the first eminence contains in itself a master-key to Aryan psychological phenomena. That Reich- enbach probably never read a single Sastra, or o-ave himself one moment's concern about Patan- jali, does not in the least detract from the value of his researches. You see the silvery nimbus or . £loud about the head of the Yogi in Sabhapathy Swami's book, and here I show you pictures of the * A year later, upon revisiting Calcutta, I had the good fortune to witness a striking case of the kind. A young Hindu married lady, suffering from hysteria, was able to read books and distinguish colours when held to her finger-tips, the little toe and the elbow, and to hear at the umbilicus. BASIS OF RELIGION, 155 Hindu Gods, Siva and Krishna, with their Parvatis, Radhas, and Gopis. Around the head of each is the same aureole. These are not sketched after the conceptions of some modern artist ; they represent the popular idea of hundreds and thousands of years ago. And now I show you a similar picture, by a Christian artist, of a Christian saint — where the same glory, and of a transcendent brightness, is de- picted. In Buddhist temples the image of the recum- bent Buddha lying in the divine ecstasisjias a flam- ing aureole of this kind about the head and body ; the lines of colour not standing out like spikes, but wavy, like the coruscating splendours of the auroras of the North and South Poles. In the Bactrian rock-cut image of Zoroaster, which is assumed to give, perhaps, the nearest idea of a personal like- ness of that splendid seer, the same idea of a glory about the head is carried out.^" Now whence did the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Parsi, and the Christian, get this impression that the head of a spiritual leader must radiate lights ? Shall I surprise you vvhen I say that we may find tlie answer in this book of Reichcnbach ? Look at this illustration. This figure B represents the actual luminous appearance of the human head, as seen by one of a class of persons of acute nervous sensitiveness with whose help the author made his * Later a Buddhist monk presented me with a vejy curious small silver figure of Lord Buddha in the erect position, with the aureole re- presented as surrounding him from head to foot. And with it is, moreover, an identical duplicate, which represents the projected Double or Phantasm of that trreat teacher. 156 THEOSOPIIY, THE SCIENTIFIC researches. Repeated experiments with over fifty such subjects demonstrated that the human system, in common with every animate and inanimate natural object, and with the whole starry heavens, is pervaded with a subtle aura, or, if you please, imponderable fluid, wdiich resembles magnetism and electricity in certain respects, and yet is analo- cfous wath neither. He called it Od, or Odyle. This aura, while radiating in a faint mist from all parts of the body, is peculiarly bright about the head. These two spots of light are the eyes, and this third one is the mouth. Now this picture represents the aura of a young married lady ; and we have only to imagine to ourselves — as we may from all the analogies of nature — how this aura would be intensified by enormous concentration of the wall, to comprehend readily the intuition which first suggested the artistic conception of the aureole. In fact, we find that Reichenbach was anticipated by the Aryans in the knowledge of the Odic aura."^ But all the same, it should be remembered that we mieht never have understood what the nimbus about Krishna means, but for this Vienna chemist. I must not pass on towai'ds my conclusion before showing you that we can get some instruc- tion from Reichenbach upon certain Brahminical customs prescribed by the Sastras, but which I have not yet found even one Brahmin to explain. * In the Atharva Veda, a work of enormous antiquity, mention is made of the existence of a sensitive aura, of a span's widtli, about the human body. BASIS OF RELIGION-. 157 • You have had two kinds of Brahminlcal customs handed down, one primitive and essential, the other secondary and non-essential ; customs and practices no doubt invented by cunning priests to save pro- fitable vested rights, when the" caste had begun to lose its original spirituality. When Brahmins sit to eat, every man is isolated from his neighbours at the feast. He sits in the centre of a square traced upon the floor, grandsire, father and son, brother and uncle, avoiding contact with each other quite as scrupulously as though they were of different castes. If I should handle a Brahmin's brass platter, his lotah or other vessel for food or drink, neither he nor any of his caste would touch it, miuch less eat or drink from it, until it had been passed through fire : if the utensil were of clay, it must be broken. Why is this ? That no affront is meant by avoidance of contact is shown in the careful isolation of members of the same family from each other. The explanation, I submit, is that every Brahmin was supposed to be an indi- vidual evolution of psychic force, apart from all consideration of fam.ily relationship ; if one touched the other at this particular time, when the vital force was actively centred upon the process of digestion, the psychic force was liable to be drawn off, as a Leyden jar charged with electricity is dis- charged by touching it with your hand. The Brahmin of old was an initiate, and his evolved psychic power was employed in the agnihotra and other ceremonies. The case of the touching of the 1-58 THEOSOPHY, THE SCIENTIFIC eating or drinking vessel, or the mat or clothing of a Brahmin by one of another caste, of inferior psychic development, or the stepping of such a person upon the ground, within a certain prescribed distance from the sacrificial spot, bear upon this question. In this same plate of Reichen- bach's, the figure F represents the aura, streaming from the points of the human hand. Every human being has such an aura, and the aura is peculiar to himself or herself, as to quality and volume. Now the aura of a Brahmin of the ancient times was purified and intensified by a peculiar course of religious training — let us say psychic training ; and if it should be mixed with the aura of a less pure, less spiritualized person, its strength would of necessity be lessened, its quality adulterated. Reichenbach tells us that the Odic emanation is conductible by metals, more slowly than electricity, but more rapidly than heat, and that pottery and other clay vessels absorb and retain it for a long while. Heat he found to enormously increase quantitatively the flow of Odyle through a metal conductor. The Brahmin, then, in submit- ting his odylically-tainted metallic vessel to the fire, is but experimentally carrying out the theory of Reichenbach. I will not, however, enlarge upon a branch of my subject which might well be made the theme of a series of lectures. The gathering obscurity of the twilight warns me to be as brief as thebreadthof our theme and its novelty to you permit, as also does the fear that I may have BASIS OF RELIGION. i59 already overtaxed your patience. I iiiiist avail myself of the few remaining minutes at my dis- posal to say something more specific about the Theosophical Society. The Society has no endowment, its current expenses being met, as far as practicable, out of an Initiation Fee often rupees. The deficiency is made good by Madame Blavatsky and myself, out of our private resources. Our printed rules define the objects of our organization to be : — I. — To form the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity, without distinction of race, creed, or colour. 2. — To promote the study of Aryan and other Eastern literature, religions, and sciences, and vindicate its importance. 3. — To investigate the hidden mysteries of nature and the psychical powers in man. I have touched upon these sufficiently, I hope, to made it clear that our Society has not one feature of sectarianism in it ; that it regards religion as a personal matter ; that its founders do not believe that any actual knowledge can be obtained of Divine things except through psychical develop- ment ; that it has not a shadow of political char- acter ; that it is neither a propaganda nor a special antagonist of any particular faith ; that its influence must be in the direction of piety, personal purifica- tion, unselfishness, and patriotism, in the noblest sense of that much abused word. Finally, you must infer that instead of undervaluing Western i6o THEOSOPHY, THE SCIENTIFIC culture and scientific research, we have a thorough appreciation of the importance of both. The question between you and myself at this present moment is whether you will take an active practical interest in our work, and help us to make Bengal what it ought to be, in virtue of its tradi- tions and its world-wide reputation for intellectual, metaphysical, and scientific capacity, the centre of a Theosophic revival that shall thrill all India with the promise of a new spiritual era. I am not asking you to draw the rusty sword of Luxman Sen from its scabbard and deluge your land in blood. It is not war that India wants, but peace, — ■ peace todevelop her prostrate industries; peace to im- prove her agriculture, and to re-adjust her population to her territory, drawing away the surplus where it is overcrowding the land, and settling it in districts where labour can find vacant land and employment ; peace to remove all obstructive barriers, and knit the races of the Peninsula into a brotherly and reciprocally profitable union ; peace to foster the love of art, which was once so high that the land is filled with monuments which excite the world's wonder ; peace to found Sanskrit schools wherever they flourished in the olden time, so that once more the treasures of Indian literature may be known, and this present foul reproach of ignorance of our Sastras may be removed ; and peace, that there may be born a generation of unselfish patriots, in place of the present one, which I need not describe : a generation which will esteem it the highest BASIS OF RELIGION. i6i happiness, as well as the highest honour, to forget self, and to work for the public good. Ay, " peace hath its victories as well as war." I have not come here to ask you to give us money, or to erect great temples of Theosophy, to stand as laughing-stocks of human vanity for the warning of future genera- tions. I am not asking you to overturn the altars of your faith to make room for the hybrid erections of ignorant iconoclasts. I do not ask you to trample under the feet of pert criticism the sacred literature of your forefathers, and to substitute for the majestic rhythm and profound thought of its slokas, the crude rhapsodies of modern ideologists. I am not asking the educated among you to put aside the science your masters of the College have taught you, nor to tear up the diplomas which are the certi- ficates of your industry and culture. I am not come to tear down the purdahs behind which the lustful violence of your conquerors obliged you to hide your beloved mothers and sisters, wives and daughters. I am quite content to leave time to work its own changes, and to the increasing good sense of the Hindus the cure of all evils and the extirpa- tion of all abuses. But I stand here as the unworthy mouthpiece of ancient India, to speak a word of appeal on her behalf into the ears of the present generation. Since science has proved that your race and mine boast a common parentage, and that the streams of Aryan and European civilization flowed from a single fount, I speak by right of heritage for the l62 THEOSOPHY, THE SCIENTIFIC claims of Aryan philosophy. If you will it, we may together work in fraternal concord, and to- gether snatch from the oblivion of neglect the science of Divine Truth, the Wisdom-Religion of archaic times. We care not what may be the name of your Samaj ; if you are working for India, we will work with you. The Mahimnastava, a hymn to Siva, daily chanted by the Brahmins (for an English transla- tion of which I am indebted to my venerable friend, Babu Rajnarain Bose), expresses a sentiment which I should like every modern Hindu to take to heart. It mirrors the spirit of our Society, and is as follows : — " As the Ocean is the goal of all rivers, so Thou art the ultimate goal of different paths, straight or devious, which men follow, according to their different tastes and inclinations." I am asked how we shall set about this task, how to learn Occultism without teachers, and without text-books that we can read. For just such emergencies as these men always arise : we must create the teachers and compile the books. Meanwhile we must turn to a quarter where we need never seek in vain. There is a teacher within us who waits for us to unlock his prison-doors and set him free. That teacher is our veritable Ego, our Inner Self We can reach him by holy lives, abstract meditations, and the evolution of the powers of will. More than one road will lead us to the Adytum wherein he dwells ; for adeptship is of no one creed, and is the life of all faiths. Look at BASIS OF RELIGION, 163 the prescribed methods of training under different systems, and you will find that while they differ as to formulas, they resemble each other in essentials. First, the man must be pure — in body, mind and aspiration. Second, the place chosen must be pure— in atmosphere and surroundings. It must also be quiet and safe. Third, the diet must be simple, digestible, and taken in as moderate quantities as the preservation of bodily health permits. The would-be adept must have physical stamina, for concentration makes a great drain upon vital force And the experience of mediums shows that mediumship, except in the highest form of mental impressibility, is usually concomitant with a scrofu- lous or phthisical taint in the blood. Fourth, the motive must be a noble and unselfish desire for Divine wisdom ; and, lastly, the practice must be gradual and cumulative. Given these, and one may be sure of attaining his end — that of develop- ing into an adept Theosophist. My task is finished, my word spoken. It remains with you to crown our effort with practical success, or to suffer my voice to pass profitlessly, in widen- ing ripples of sound, out into the ocean of air. Remember only that what can be done to-day may be impossible tomorrow. Neglect has brought Hinduism to its present pass. Neglect has reduced the Brahmin Pundits already to a con- dition little better than that of half-starvation or genteel beggary. If they would not expose them- selves to the rude rebuffs of the bazaar, and jostle i64 THEOSOFHY, THE SCIENTIFIC with a crowd of painted impostors, who masquerade as Sadhtis to cheat the charitable, and secretly give loose rein to their bestial natures — they must seek Government employment, and convert themselves into clerical automata. Their once famous schools are now only a memory, and their once grand debates on philosophy at the courts of kings survive only in legendary story. A wave of practicalism is sweeping away the last vestiges of Hindu origin- ality, engulfing the fairest relics of Aryan greatness, as the muddy overflow from the crater Kilauea swallows up the trees and villages upon its slopes. Nesflect and sottish laziness have done all this. A few years — or perhaps a few generations more — and the foreign boot will be on every Hindu foot, the foreign brandy-bottle in every Hindu hand, and what is a thousand times worse, the foreign heart will be beating in every Hindu body, for love of country and religion will have all died out. Are you pre- pared to face this doom ? Does there yet burn in any corner of your breast a spark of that noble pride and self-respect that made the Aryan man ennoble by his personal virtues the Aryan name? If you would arrest the tide of national demoralization that is rushing through the brandy-shop and the opium-den, you must set up again the old moral standards, and teach your children to live up to them. You can save your nationality and regain your spiritual-mindedness, or you can impiously see them swept, by the torrent of pretended " Progress," into the Kala Pani of commercial expediency. Some BASIS OF RELIGION. 165 of your best men thought India had already reached that stage, for they wrote me, two years ago, from Bengal, that we Theosophists had come too late. India was dead, and hope extinguished. But I said No, and I say so now ; a nation is never dead while one single patriot son survives. For he alone, by an extraordinary moral grandeur and spiritual insight, may re-infuse the vanished life into the decrepit frame, and laying his holy hand upon his mother's heart, cause it to beat again. No, Aryavarta, queen-mother of nations, is not dead. Her altar-fires burn feebler every year, and the recollection of her spiritual triumphs has become a tradition of a by-gone time. Yet it is not too late for her children to labour for her, and sacrifice themselves for her dear sake. The sacrifice will not be profitless, the labour not in vain. Remember and take heart from what an English poet has written : — *' Dejected India, lift thy downcast eyes, And mark the hour whose steadfast steps for thee From Time's press'd ranks brings on the Jubilee." THEOSOPHY: ITS FRIENDS AND ENEMIES.* Complying with the good custom of all societies that are really working for the general good, though the latter merit is denied us by some, we now, a third time, come before the Bombay public to give an official account of ourselves. Our anniversary meeting should have been held last November, and would, but that we were then far away in the Punjab, and did not return to Bombay until the last day of the old year. Having thus unavoidably missed the usual time, we thought it best to wait until we could celebrate the anniver- sary of the arrival of our party in India. That event, so important to us — I wish I could add, possibly to the country, as regards its future results — occurred on Sunday, February i6th, 1879, and I am here to tell you how it has fared with us during the two years that have since passed. I will do my best to ... . " nothing extenuate, nor aught set down in malice." We only ask that those who love and those who hate us, will alike be governed by the same feeling of moderation. For, to tell you the plain truth, we * A Lecture delivered at the Framji Cowasji Institute, Bombay, 27th February, iS8i. ITS FRIENDS AND ENEMIES. 167 have suffered quite as much, if not more, from the extravagant expectations and ideas of our friends, as from the maUce and falsehood of our enemies. The former have rushed to as great extremes in one direction, as the latter have in another. We have been kept quite as busy in recovering ground we ought never to have lost, and should never have lost if our sympathisers had been reasonable, as in defend- ing ourselves and our cause from the plots and assaults of those who wished for our defeat. I have tried, in many public addresses, to define our exact responsibility to the Indian nation. I have done my best to show exactly what it had, and what it had not, a right to demand of us. I have ex- plained over and over again, what the Hindus had themselves to do, if they really cared to snatch their nationality from the gulf of perdition into which it has been plunging headlong, these many centuries. I have tried to make Young India see that there can be no real moral reform that does not come from their own united effort ; and that no foreigner, though he love the conntry ever so much and be ready to sacrifice ever so much for it, can relieve her own sons of the smallest portion of that duty. Many whom I see around me in this audience heard my first address to the country, from this same platform, on 23rd March, 1879. I ask these to remember how earnestly I tried on that occasion to impress this solemn conviction upon the native mind. Among other things I said : — " If India is to be regenerated, it must be by Hindus, who can i6S THEOSOPHY, rise above their castes and every other reactionary influence, and give good example as well as good advice. Useless to gather into Samajes, and talk prettily of reform. Not of such stuff are the saviours of nations made." Did you hear me putting ourselves up as the would-be leaders of Hindu re- generation, as exemplars of virtue or patterns of v/isdom ? No, a thousand times no : I said our chief and sole desire was to help India and her people, " in any way practicable, however humble,* without meddling with politics, into which, as foreigners, we "had neither the right nor inclina- tion to intrude." With the cry of one who sees danger hovering over those he sympathises with, and would have them make an effort to save themselves, I said : — " Here is material for a new school of Aryan philosophy which only waits the moulding hand of a master. We cannot yet hear his approaching footsteps, but he will come ; as the man always does come when the hour of destiny strikes. He will come, not as a disturber of the peace, but as the expounder of principles, the in- structor in philosophy. He will encourage study, not inflame passion. He will scatter blessings, not sorrow. So Zoroaster came, so Gautama, so Con- fucius. O for a Hindu, great enough in soul, wise enough in mind, sublime enough in courage, to pre- pare the way for the coming of this needed Re- generator ! O for one Indian of so grand a mould that his appeals to his countrymen would fire every heart with a noble emulation to revive the glories ITS FRIENDS AND ENEMIES. 169 of that by-gone time when India poured out her people into the empty lap of the West, and gave the arts and sciences, and even language itself, to the outside world ! " And that I foresaw that the work, even if begun at once, must take long to yield the desired results, is shown in these further re- marks : — " Do not imagine that I have the idle notion that India can be reformed in a day. This once enlightened, monotheistic and active people have descended step by step, in the course of many centuries, from the level of Aryan activity to that of idolatrous lethargy and fatalism. It will be the work not of years but of generations to re-ascend the steps of national greatness. But there must be a beginning. Those sons of Hindustan who are disposed to act rather than preach, cannot com- mence a day too soon. This hour the country needs your help." So, too, I may refer you to the address I de- livered, on November 29th, at the celebration of our fourth anniversary, when I again recurred to the subject. "We do not ask you to be our followers," I said, "but our allies. Our ambition is not to be considered leaders, or teachers ; not to make money, or power or fame. Choose any man here, of either of the old races represented, and show us that he is the right man to lead in either branch of this reformatory movement, and I will most gladly en- list as a common soldier under him." But this idea of the necessity for personal effort does not seem to have as yet impressed itself upon the public mind. 170 THEOSOPH\, Some would force us to accept without remonstrance the imputation that we want to push ourselves into the attitude of leaders, to ape the state of Alex- ander, who — Dryden tells us, in St. Cecilia s Day — "Assumes to nod, Affects the god, And seems to shake the spheres." — and that if we do not at least attempt to lead, or to exhibit all the qualities, intellectual and moral, of the ideal leader, we must confess that we have not made good our claims. But again, for the twentieth time, I protest, and, in the presence of this multitude, declare that the moral Regenerator of Aryavarta will be no European, but must be a son of the soil, and no one else ! It is only too evident I say, too sadly so, that a vague notion has gained wide currency that we, Theosophists, must straightway bind up all the gaping wounds in the body of this hapless India, while the Hindus look passively on, or consent to be taken as derelict in duty. " What efforts," asks a correspondent of the editor of a Bombay native paper, " have until now been made by this Society to alleviate the sufferings of the Aryans, and how have they succeeded ? " Does our questioner know the meaning of words ? Did he, before penning those lines, ponder well what relief of the sufferings of the Aryans involves, and what our poor efforts could reasonably be ex- pected to accomplish in that direction ? No, but like every other man who has sat down to hale us before the public, he dashed off the first smart ITS FJ^IENDS AND ENEMIES. 171 phrase that came Into his mind, as one shuts his eyes and fires his musket point-blank into a crowd. I can say one thing in reply to this gentleman which can be proved even upon European testi- mony, let alone the abundant evidence natives can furnish, and that is that we have made every effort in the power of mortal men to interest the paramount race in behalf of the Hindus, and to make them respect Aryan philosophy and science. To effect this result we have spared neither time, trouble, nor the inconveniences and costs of travel. We have also excited respect for Indian achieve- ments and sympathy with Indian thought, in the most distant countries. In ample proof of this, I point you to the articles which have appeared in those countries, many of which are preserved by us in our scrap-books at Head Quarters. But all this is nothing in the eyes of these drowsy patriots ! " Here we are," substantially say they who, perhaps, never sacrificed one pan-sitpari for India, *' and here are the Aryans, twenty-four crores strong. Here is Aryavarta, stripped to the last rag, and in the last extremes of starvation. Here are one-fifth of the people lying down hungry every night, and rising hungry every morning. Here are fifty millions of wretched human beings fighting famine on a half acre of land each. Here is ignorance holding a nation in chains, and super- stition gnawing out the last remnants of hope in their hearts. Here are hungry fathers breeding children by lakhs only to starve ; farmers eating 172 THE OS PHY, the best of their seed grain and saving the worst ; giving their land no fallow time for recuperation ; burning their manure, because the wood is all cut away; here are taxes multiplying, poverty increasing, and an educated class thinking of Government alone as their employer ; here are five hundred struggling applicants for ten vacant places, at from Rs. 40 to 60 per month, advertised by the Bombay Telegraph Department ; and here are liquor-shops, springing up like mushrooms in every large town. Come, Theosophists, banish our sufferings and we will not call you impostors or adventurers any more." This is no exaggeration, but the exact tone of nine-tenths of the criticisms upon us with which the native press has teemed, and of the public expectation. Do we not know it ? Who should know it better than w^e who get almost every day letters to this very effect from the four corners of India? And yet how can we utter one angry word in protest, when we know that the cause of all this is in the wretchedness of a people, enwrapped in such a blackness of despair that they clutch at even the faintest promise of relief In their awful dejection they have tried to cheat their hearts into the belief that, perhaps, the hoped-for Re- generator had come or was just coming from across the ocean. Ay, and just after my first address was made, a native paper said as much. But it is not so, it is not so, I tell you. We can only sorrow at our helplessness to give the succour so much needed, and try to spur to a sense of their duty those who alone could do something, if they only ITS FIUEA'DS AND ENEMIES. 173 would. And in parenthesis let me remark that it would be a good beginning if those who have said the sharpest things about what the Theosophists have not done, would, when next writing to the papers, prove that they had themselves set us that pattern of unselfish patriotism they would have us imitate ! Talk is cheap, gentlemen, and the com- modity is not scarce in India. If words could be coined into rupees, our young reformers would long ago have restored the splendour of the Aryan epoch, and lodged every ryot in a marble bungalow. Yet words are useful too, and very necessary to India at this particular juncture. Words of warning, of appeal, of encouragement ; glowing words that shall burn through the thick crust of selfishness and reach the very core of every patriot's heart. Have you read the history of the world and not learnt the mighty power of the right word spoken at the right moment? Speak then, every man of you, but also act ; speak and tell your countrymen that the time for dreaming is past, the hour for action has come. Let a great shout go up, like the voice of thunder, until the Himalayas echo to the cry from Cape Comorin, that if the nation is to be saved, every one who can give the slightest help must nozu give it. Even the British themselves, with all their might and power, will be unable to save the Indian people from starvation, per- haps annihilation, unless India herself awaken to activity and reform, and help them to save her. You have gained knowledge, scatter it every- 174 THEOSOPHY, where ; for it Is Ignorance that has cursed Arya- varta, and this is the demon that has buried his fangs in her fair throat. You remove your shoes and reverently worship when you enter your temples and, I tell you, you ought to do the same at every school-house door. For, if India may be rescued, it is only by the spread of education in the Temples of Knowledge. When one shall see in your coun- try what you can see in America and England — a school open wherever there are children to be taught — then, ay, then indeed, will the sufferings of the Aryans be " alleviated," and India be prosperous and happy once more. Do not trouble yourselves about the Theosophists ; don't waste your time in complaining that they have not accomplished the miracles you expected of them : they will do what little they can — you may count upon that ; and they will never do any thing dishonourable, or that has to be covered up. Set your own houses in order ; live in private up to your public professions, — that is all we, or any one else, could ask : be what you pretend to be. If you are idol-haters in public meetings, be so when your own family and caste fellows are by too ; if you are orthodox at heart, be manly enough to say so to the face of the whole world. If you think Christianity the best religion, and your reason is convinced, boldly proclaim it, and take the consequences ; and if you think it the worst, say so like men. If you expect your neighbour to give in charity, or work for the country's good, set him the example. We have ITS FRIENDS AND ENEMIES. 175 had enough of masks and hypocrisies, and a moral coward every honest soul loathes. Cannot every man in this assemblage put his hand upon one of these two-faced talkers ? Are they not in the orthodox sects, in the Arya Samaj, the Prarthana Samaj, and the Theosophical Society — yes, even in that, and not only hypocrites but traitors ? Do you not, even while I speak, recall to mind how the man with two faces pretends to be a reformer, but is not ; to favour child widows' remarriage, and yet casts the first stone at the one who puts into practice his very sentiments, nay, will himself, if a widower, marry a wife young enough to be his grand-daughter's daughter ? Have you not heard him abhor child-marriage, and yet know that he had had no sound sleep until his own baby daughter was pledged and bound to a boy husband ; or worse yet, to a man older than himself ; seen him frown upon the costly ceremonials of investiture with the thread, marriage, first pregnancy, &c., and yet beggar himself and his relatives in trying to vie with his acquaintance in empty display? These are the men of mere words, whose counsel no one respects or wants, because they are hypo- crites and poltroons. But he who preaches self- denial and practises it; he who proves by his acts that he means all he says, ah ! he is a man to listen to, let his advice be ever so fanciful and impracticable. For we feel that he at least is a conscientious man and is acting up to his best light, even though strength often fail him and he occasionally may 176 THEOSOPFIY, fall out of the straight path. These are the kind of men we try to draw into our Theosophical Society. We never ask them what their creed is, we do not care : they may worship the god they see in fire or the sun ; or the divinity that for them infuses the substance of a Sivaic Lingam and ani- mates its ultimate atoms ; they may search for his glory at Mecca or Jerusalem ; in the kabah or fire- temple ; at Benares or L'hassa ; or in the ocean depths or the morning dawn. Though they wash their sins away in the Ganges or the Jordan : though they pray standing or kneeling, with forms of words or the soundless aspirations of the inmost heart — we care not. They are sincere, and we hail them as our brothers. They are searchers after truth, and, in the degree of their spiritual mindedness, Theosophists. What then is Theoso- phy? you will ask. I reply that TJicosophia — " God- like wisdom " — for us means "search after divine knowledge," the term divine applying, as we see it, to the divine nature of the abstract principle, not to the quality of a Personal God. Many may even be rejecting God as a being, be piicca atheists in fact, and yet if they accept the existence of divine or absolute wisdom and truth, and are honestly and sincerely trying to find it out and live up to that standard, they are philo-theosophs, lovers of God- like or divine Wisdom and Truth ; the two words being synonymous, for there can be no absolute Truth without Wisdom, and absolute Wisdom is absolute Truth. Our Society might have added to ITS FRIENDS AND ENEMIt^S. m the name " Thcosophical " that of " Philadelphian " (from the two words pJiilos, loving, and adelphos, brother), as it was always meant to be a society of universal brotherhood and for promoting brotherly love among all races — but there were several re- ligious societies of that name already, as the Christ- adelphians and the Philadelphians. Knowing but of one really divine manifestation on earth — Humanity as taken collectively, Humanity with its god-like intellect, its latent promises and spiritual hopes, hidden away under a thick crust of material- ism and selfishness — we know of no better form of worship, no higher cultus to the divine principle, than that whose oblations are laid on the altar of Humanity. With our hands upon that altar we must all strive to call out these divine, deep, hidden intuitions of mutual Help, Tolerance and Love. By "divine " then I mean that which the common intuition of mankind conceives to be the opposite of all that is animal, material, brutish. The know- ledge one gains by the help of the physical senses is physical science. It is the orderly classification of the objective phenomena of the visible world. Theosophy, on the contrary, is the discovery of the law and order of the inner world of force or spirit, by the aid of another set of faculties that lie within the human being. What creed the spiritual searcher m.ay outwardly held to, matters as little as the colour or shape of his turban or scarf; provided only that he does not let the acid of his creed eat out the precious substance of his nobler nature. 178 TIIEOSOPHY, There have been true theosophists in every creed ; true seers who have Hfted the secret veils of Nature and penetrated her mysteries. It may astonish you to hear me say that the most materiahst scientists are theosophists— ay, Professors Huxley and Tyndall, for instance, who have devoted their whole lives to the search of truth in hidden principles, in physical nature, and served humanity faithfully and sincerely. This alone would make good my proposition, even did we not know that mankind are substantially the same the world over. Have you ever read the Dabistan — that most instructive report by Mohsan Fani, the learned Persian of the seventeenth century, of his observations of the various holy men who were his contemporaries ? If not, do so, and you will find quoted the exultant language of Jellal-Eddin Rumi, in which he de- scribes the extinction of all human prejudices and passions that occurs when the mystic has attained emancipation. " O IMoslems ! what is to be done ? I do not know myself; I am neither Jew, nor Christian, nor Gheber, nor Moslem ; I am not from the East nor from the West; nor from land nor sea ; neither from the region of nature nor from that of heaven ; not from Hind nor China ; not from Bulgaria nor Irak ; nor from the towns of Khorassan I know but him, Yahu! What is the intent of this speech ? Say it, O Shams Tabrizi ! The intended meaning is ; / am the soul of the world!' The Mobed Peshkar of Patna, we are told, " attained the knowledge of God and him- ITS FRIENDS AND ENEMIES. 179 self, and he became eminently divested of prejudice and exempted from human Infirmities: being totally unfettered by the bonds or chains of any sect what- ever, and studiously shunning the polemic domains of prejudice; in short, the eulogium of one creed and the abhorrence of another, entered not into his system." The Shaikh Bahu-ud-din Muhammed Amall, enchanted by the noble sentiments of Kaiviin, a Zoroastrlan sage, became his follower, and nobly exclaims : " As the splendour of the Almighty is in every place, knock thou either at the door of the kabah or the portals of the fire- temple." The editors of the Dabistan say : " There Is scarcely a tenet to be found In any other creed which does not, at least in its germ, exist in the Hindu religion." And yet while thus showing an appreciation of a profound truth, they also say that the common state of a Yogi " is that of complete impasslveness or torpor ;" thereby indicating that the Hindu search, through Yoga, after the very spiritual light and powers exemplified in the joyous cry of the Sufi Jellal-Eddin, was a thing they did not appreciate. And yet they affirm this great truth that "in all times and places, the religion of the ' En- lightened' was distinguished from that of the 'Vul- gar ; ' the first as Interior, being the product of uni- versal reason, was everywhere nearly uniform ; the second, as exterior, being composed of particular and arbitrary rites and ceremonies, varied accord- ing to the influence of the climate, and the char- I So THEOSOPHY, acter, history, and civilization of a people. But, in the course of time, no religion remained entirely the same, either in principle or form." The core and heart of all was a like aspiration after spiritual truth. This spiritual aspiration for absolute know- ledge is true Theosophy, and the word that our Society brought to the Western world was that the acquirement of this knowledge was possible by self-discipline and purification and development. We first proclaim then the universal brotherhood of man and the duty of all to join in what will pro- mote the welfare of the human race, especially those who are weakest and most need help. We do not claim this as any new doctrine ; it has been often enunciated by other societies. But we are trying to make those who accept it in theory, show it in practice. Our plan has been to interest groups of men of different races and religions to co-operate with each other in this direction. We have suc- ceeded to a certain extent — to an extent which might surprise some who have imagined that we were do- ing nothing. I hear we are accused of greatly ex- aeeeratinsf our numbers. We have members in the two Americas, in Australia and the West Indies, in Siam and Burmah, in Java, Holland, Austria, Russia, France, England, Scotland, Ireland, Ger- many, Hungary, Belgium, Italy, Cyprus, Ceylon, Spain, Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Greece, Mexico, Japan, and, here, in India. Thus, in ever widening circles, like the wavelets caused by a stone that drops in water, runs on the ITS FRIENDS AND ENEMIES. i8i impulse given to contemporaneous thought by the Theosophical Society. That impulse is now so marked, and has gone so far beyond any blunders in judgment we may make — so far beyond the reach of anything we, Founders of the Society, could do to check it, did we even wish to do so — that the established and inexorable law of the diffusion of human thought would carry it down the century were we to die tomorrow. I have here the photograph of a group of some three hundred boys who are regularly attending the school recently opened by our branch Society at Galle, Cey- lon — one of the five schools that have sprung up in that island as the result of our recent visit.* Every boy is the son of Buddhist parents, and nearly all were until now being educated in missionary schools, where their minds were being turned away from the religion of their forefathers. The teachers you see here are Buddhist members of our Society, and our noble colleagues pay the school's entire expenses out of their private means. That no such schools have been founded by Theosophists in India may be accounted for, partly because Government is doing so much for non-sectarian education, but mainly because we have not yet received into our * The attendance increased to five hundred, and this so alarmed the missionaries that they opened their principal school as a free school, offering to give a first-class education gratis. The Buddhists are so poor that they availed themselves of the chance, and our numbers largely declined. When some generous friend shall help them to funds, ours will be made a free school, and then we shall have all out- boys back again with a rush. 1 82 TBEOSOPHY, Society men with the liberality of Jamsetji Jeejibhoy, Jaggernath Sunkerseth, Gokuldas Tejpal, or Cowasji Jehangir, though we have one member worth fifteen lakhs. And so long as the schools are but founded, it matters little that we should have the mere credit of their establishment. Our highest hope is to arouse others to noble deeds, and to cause the seeds of a great and permanent reform to be scattered. From the first we have been fortunate in attracting into our membership many authors, journalists and others who address the public or have a hand in the work of education. This will explain to you why our theosophical ideas should have so rapidly gained a world-wide circula- tion. Theosophy, properly understood, has not one feature calculated to excite the hostility of reason- able men of any school of science or religion. I will lay down two cardinal propositions — (i.) That, psychically, all men are brothers, all equally entitled to know divine truth, and, without distinction of na- tionality or faith, should join for the general good of humanity ; bound by a common tie and common sympathies. For united effort not only mitigates the hardness of the task, but produces tenfold p-reater results in the same time. One ant can carry but a grain of dust at once, but a colony of ants labouring together can remove the largest house in time. So one man, unless endowed with extraordinary advantages, can accomplish compara- tively little ; but with co-operation every thing is possible. This help we ask, this we have the right ns FRIEA'DS AND ENEMIES. 183 to expect ; and, as I have shown you, we have had it from thousands of well-wishers whose faces we have never seen and never may see. (2.) My second proposition is that every human being has within his own nature, in a greater or less degree, certain sublime faculties which, when fully developed, will give him divine knowledge. The theory upon which almost all formalized religions rest is that only a certain favoured class of men have these spiritual capacities, and alone can be permitted to exercise them. But, as I said before, there have been " emancipated " or "illuminated " ones under all the various religions, and the testi- mony they have brought back to us from their soul-flights into the inner world has essentially agreed. We have seen that when a certain point of this interior development is reached, the seer loses all sense of his nationality, his theology, even of his personality. His pettiness becomes infinitely expanded, and, from the consciousness of being a microscopic point as compared to the whole, he feels that he is in all, bounds all, is all. The body he so cherished and lavished so much care and thought upon is now felt to be a clog and impedi- ment — if, indeed, he can cramp himself down to a realisation that it exists. How beautiful, how suggestive, the verse of the poet Hafiz, where, in a charming allegory, he describes the ease with which the absolute truth may be attained when the barriers of flesh arc once surmounted : — 1 84 THEOSOPHY, " The perfect beauty of my beloved is not concealed by an inter- posing veil ; O Hafiz, iJioii ai't the curtain of the road ; remove away." There are no secrets of nature impenetrable, he would say ; the only obstacle to our gaining full knowledge is SELF. This is the coward, the traitor, the despot, the bigot, the swinish sensualist, the lump of egotism. This Self is the serpent coiled beneath the flowers of life. This is that which stifles all good and noble aspirations, and which makes the Rights of Man as a whole ruth- lessly sacrificed to the base greed of the individual man. Ah ! the dream of Universal Brotherhood of Man, when nations will cease to enslave nations, and the only strife will be who can best live up to the ideal of human perfectibility ! The bright vision mocks us even as we gaze upon its splendour, yet happy he who has even been so blessed as to see it in his dreams. Theosophy is the enchantress that alone can conjure it up ; and though hard be the task and disheartening the delay in gaining the divine wisdom, when once gained, the sacrifices of a life seem no adequate price to pay for its acquisi- tion. Who are the friends of this Theosophy — v.'ho its enemies ? I utter no paradox in saying that in the cause of Theosophy, as of every other cause, those esteemed its friends are sometimes its worst enemies, and its would-be enemies often its best friends. For the zeal of the former is often inordinate, and the poisoned darts of the latter ITS FRIEjVDS and ENEMIES. 185 often recoil from the polished shield of truth and wound the one who hurled them. If I frankly include myself in the former category, I should be acquitted of egotism, and so I do. My Cause is far greater than my ability to serve it effectively, and none knows so well as I how much and often this sacred cause may have been injured by the errors I have myself committed. It is not a ques- tion to be considered whether my motives have been good ; for results are the current coin in the exchequer of moral justice. The Christian hell, the proverb says, is paved with good intentions ; a Christian sect has adopted the motto Finis coronat opus — the end justifies the means — and made it the pretext for nameless and numberless crimes against humanity. As regards the moral accountability of the individual, the question is whether he has done all he could with the means at his disposal to realize a worthy ideal. If Theosophy has suffered from my blunders, who profess to be among its most earnest advocates, its mouth-piece, so has the progress of our Society suffered through the inex- cusable heedlessness of our associated fellows and members in holding such extravagant views of the Founders, and expecting them to be above the weaknesses of mortality. This I have touched upon already, but I revert to it from a desire to press home the thought that a would-be friend may con- vert himself into a dangerous enemy by setting up the illusions of his own fancy, and then growing indifferent, if not hostile, when the glamour passes 1 86 THEOSOPHY, awa}^ " Are these Theosophlsts," asks a certain Mr. Ganpatrao of the editor of the Indu Prakash, "in conduct like ordinary people of the world, or like Tukaram, and other SadJuis of ancient times ? " Now, if the false report had not spread that we were like Sadhns, our friend would never have thought of asking such a question. If the gentle- man is within the sound of my voice, let me answer that we are nothing but ordinary people, and never pretended to be anything else. We never asked people to look upon us as gurus, or follow our per- sonal example ; though we have tried, as far as our natural infirmities permitted, to make that example a good one. What we have said to the Hindus is, " Follow the example of your Tukarams and your Harischandras, of your Rishis and your Yogis ; follow them as models, and not any foreigner, even though he may think your ancestors fools, and not know he is one himself in saying, or even thinking, so. And we have tried to make the dignity, the virtue, and the learning of those ancestors of yours appreciated by you, and respected by the whole v/orld." " Have they conquered the six passions of Lust, Anger, Greediness, Vanity, Avarice, and Envy ? " he asks. Now it is for those who are best acquainted with our daily lives and conversation to answer this question. I leave it to them to answer ; not alto- gether now, but after we are dead and gone, when the truth shall shine out through the clouds of partiality, on the one side, and of prejudice, on the ITS FRIENDS AND ENEMIES. 187 Other. Some of these vices we may, I think, justly claim to be exonerated from having even now. For no one in India, even our worst enemy, would dare accuse us of either lust, greediness, avarice, or envy. If I were to tell you we are perfectly free of vanity it would perhaps be taken as the best proof that we are not, or remain for ever an open question , as nothing is so difficult as to prove whether it is personal Vanity in man or a justifiable Pride which is his secret motor. From anger we certainly are not exempt; we have not yet reached the stage where one can suffer in silence and with smiles the cruel stripes of slander, the base return of treachery and ingratitude, the wilful perversion of our motives, the cowardly assaults on character by masked assassins. No, not perfect yet — alas 1 not yet. But even sup- posing that we are not to be ranked among the " emancipated ones," though striving hard, does our questioner therefore give us to understand that he is not bound to listen to our advice to put aside his own vices and take examplefromthe virtues of Tukaram? That is the gist of the whole question ; and this interrogatory reflects the now universally prevalent tone of public thought — viz., that to find some holy or supposed holy person, and nominally enroll one- self as his admirer, follower, ©r pupil, will confer merit and secure vioksha without self-sacrifice or the conquest over evil passions. Not only by word of mouth in private conversations, but from many public platforms, and through our journal, the Theosophist, we have tried to compel the public 1 88 THEOSOPHY, to think of the great problem of Theosophy, and pointed all who would learn to the ancient Aryan sources of information. Mr. Gunpatrao's next question is, " How far do the Theosophists keep up to the standard of Brother- hood ? " I will tell him that he may search ■ the whole history of our Society, and he will find that we have always been on the side of the weak against the strong. We have, as you have seen in what has been shown you respecting the spread of our fellowship to all the quarters of the world, linked many, of many nations and creeds, together with the tie of mutual reciprocity and tolerance. " This new Gospel," says a writer in a London journal, " appears to be now in the ascendancy among spiritualists. Its immense value in behalf of the well-being of mankind cannot be over-estimated. We rejoice to see the Theosophists in Hindustan . . really labouring towards this goal." " That greatproject of human fraternity," writesM. Fauvety, President of the Paris Psychological Society, "which you propose to realise by means peculiar to your- selves. . . constitutes the grandest and noblest tentative that has been essayed on the road to universal conciliation." " Such a society as yours," says the venerable French metaphysician Cahagnet, in accepting our diploma of Fellow, " has been the dream of my wdiole life." Says the Pioneer of Allahabad — a paper which before we came to India and promulgated our views, was certainly never charged with any specially weak tolerance of Hin- ITS FRIENDS AND ENEMIES. 189 duism — "We have no hesitation in recognising the Theosophical Society as a beneficent agency in promoting good feeling between the two races in this country, not merely on account of the ardent response it awakens from the Native community, but also because of the way in which it certainly does tend to give Europeans in India a better kind of interest in the country than they had before." "No man," remarks the Colombo (Ceylon) Ex- iwiiner, " who has a firm faith in what he believes is the truth, and the excellence of his own system of faith, can quarrel with the Theosophists. . . . They tell us they have a conscientious mission to perform, and we see them labouring earnestly in the discharge of their self-imposed duties. . . . the spirit of research they are striving to infuse into the torpid minds of our countrymen cannot fail to lead to good results." " Let us," says the noble President of the Ionian Theosophical Society, of Corfu (Greece), in his Inaugural Address, " let us place the brotherhood of nations as the first of our wishes, and let us hasten the coming of that blessed moment when the whole of mankind will be gathered in one fold and will have but one shepherd." The Amriia Bazar Patrika, that fearless champion of Indian interests, speaking of our journal, says "Since the Theosophist carefully abstains from politics, and its plan is one of Universal Brother- hood, it should be welcomed by every sect and people throughout the world. And as it recognises the Aryans as the fathers of all religions and 190 THEOSOPHY, sciences, Hindus owe it their enthusiastic sup- port." Omitting personal matters, what remains is to dispose of the question of occult phenomena. The IndiL PrakasJCs correspondent wishes to know whether Madame Blavatsky has produced real phenomena; whether she will do so again ; and whether the correspondent himself may have a special chance to see them ? Now, as far as human evidence will go, the proof is apparently overwhelm- ing that at Simla, Benares, and elsewhere, strange things of this nature did occur, and that they were real and not mere deceptions. Tricks, gentlemen, are played only by tricksters — persons who have no character to lose, and who have an interested motive in making their dupes believe their lies. You will get no Court in any civilized country in the world to withhold from an accused person of pre- vious good character the benefit of the doubt. And now tell me, if you please, what was Madame Bla- vatsky 's interested motive in this case? She is not here, and I may speak freely what I have to say about her. What was the motive? Money? She never asked or received one anna's value for any phenomenon she ever produced either in India or elsewhere. And, mind you, these phenomena have attended her for many years, all over the world, as she has journeyed to study occult science. If it were at all worth the trouble I could occupy hours in read- ing to you reports of the strange feats of this kind she did in America alone, in the presence of all ITS FRIENDS AND ENEMIES. 191 manner of people. I might give you the names and addresses of enough credible witnesses — sceptics — to prove her possession of these powers to the satis- faction of any fair-minded man. And her vindi- cation might be made with the greatest ease by collecting the testimony of eye-witnesses in India, who would certify to facts more reraarkable than any that have been reported in the papers. Well, then, if money was not her object, was it fame ? A sorry reward, indeed, this sort of fame, which makes her the subject of the scurvy jests and pus- illanimous jeers of the ignorant and prejudiced ! Her fame is already secured in the authorship of his Unveiled, one of the most masterly reviews of ancient and modern Science and Theology ever written : a book which one of the best of our con- temporaneous critics pronounces " one of the re- markable productions of the century." Only here in India has the book had the honour of being abused by certain petty editors. I say "honour," for it is an honour to be abused, as it is a disgrace to be praised, by such weathercocks. Well, if neither money nor fame forced her to invite such criticisms, what then ? Come, you who rake the gutters of human nature for bits of garbage to fling in decent people's faces, what is left for you to insinuate ? She is a woman ; strike her in the good woman's most sensitive moral part — her motive. Ah, shame on slanderers ! See this great, generous-hearted soul, filled with love for humanity; longing to throw lif^ht into the darkened minds of those who still 192 THEOSOFHY, believe in miracles, and still clank the chains of superstition; devoting her life, sacrificing the sweets of home, and family and ease, and a high social position, to go about the world in search of truth, and spreading it so that all may partake. Those who know her best appreciate her abnegation and perfect disinterestedness ; and though some who do- not understand her motives may think — nay even take upon themselves to proclaim her accord- ing to their worldly understanding a hallucinated lunatic — no one had better venture to call her an impostor, unless, indeed, he is prepared to be him- self called by some of the most renowned men living a vile slanderer ! Here stand I, her witness and friend, I whom she took out of the ditch of worldly selfishness and put on the path to divine truth and happiness. I am here to tell you that I should deserve to have my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth were I to keep silence when her motives are thus called in question. She has shown her phenomena from what I con- ceive to be the mistaken idea that when there was no reasonable ground for suspicion of their genuineness they would be acknowledged, and the public would try to learn as she had learned, and then, whether materialists or religious bigots, become wiser and happier. Noticing the impending visit to India of Professor Solavief, the " Herbert Spencer of Russia," the Pioneer editorially remarks : — " He (Prof. Solavief) has been impressed with a sense of the im- portance of Hindu thought in connexion with pure speculation, by ITS FRIENDS AND ENEMIES. 193 the light thrown on this subject by the Theosophical Society and its stupidly maligned, and so far ill-appreciated founder, Madame Blavatsky. The fact is, that while we (Englishmen) in India have been in contact with the remains of old native culture for a hundred years without having detected its significance, it has been reserved for the indomitable old lady just mentioned to put an entirely new face on Oriental philosophy. ... It will probably surprise some heedless jokers in the press to hear that already some of the foremost European metaphysicians in India have acknowledged this. . . ." Bitter experience has taught her the truth that human nature is too base to be honest. Were I in her place I would never again — at least not in India — thus fling myself as a victim to be mangled by the hounds. There are many who would regard the Theosophical Society as a miracle club, by joining which, whether deserving or not, they ought to get their fill of wonders. Some, devoid of patriotism and the instinct of race pride, caring nothing for the vindication in modern eyes of their ancestral fame and glories, but only eager for their senses to be astonished by phenomena, have felt themselves aggrieved because they have seen none. Madame Blavatsky has been reviled by them and through them, because of their disappointment. The pub- lished testimony of those who have witnessed the most wonderful things, has caused her to be pounced upon by a host of newspaper critics, as though she were not a private individual who never showed any- thing but to a limited circle of friends, but a sort of professional juggler who had cheated them out of their money. But even though they sawten thousand phenomena, yet neither studied nor put forth indi- N 194 THEOSOPHY, vidual efforts, they would never reap the slightest benefit. They would never learn the great truth, that while occult phenomena are possible, a miracle is an impossibility in nature. Spiritualism has for the past thirty-two years been surfeiting the public with phenomena of the most startling description : the known laws of force have been upset, matter has displayed qualities never suspected before, and even the figures, or rather portrait-statues of the dead have stalked in our presence, and revealed the secrets of the shadow world. Has religion or philosophy been the gainer by all this ? No. Have the mass of investigators been stimulated to nobler lives ? No. Those that were moral before are for the most part moral still, and the bad con- tinue bad. We are gorged with phenomena, we need philosophy and a sure path to release us from our pain and suffering. Where is this knowledge to be sought for? Here, in India ; and if you will question either one of the hundreds of European visitors with whom Madame Blavatsky has talked in different countries, you will find that her con- stant vehement assertion has ever been that what she knows she learned in India and Tibet, and that for what they taught her she gives her love and her life, If necessary, to promote the happiness of their people. " But is not your Society established for the sole purpose of giving these experimental proofs of psychic power ? " some will ask. I answer, no ; more phenomena have been shown to outsiders than ITS FJ^IENDS AND ENEMIES. 795 to members, because every man who joins us to study occultism, tacitly pledges himself to try to develop his own latent psychic powers. If he does this he is helped, if not he is left to wait until he can decide to rouse himself to exertion. Adeptship implies the highest success in self-evolution, and the lavish display of phenomena to beginners is as demoralising as overdoses of opium or brandy. It either kills effort, or excites a frenzy of supersti- tious adulation. Do you know what we might have done in India by this time as easily as I can lift this paper ? We might have formed a new sect that would now count its tens of thousands of devotees. If we had been vain and unprincipled enough to have given ourselves out as two Sadhus bearing a divine commission and preaching under inspiration ; and if Madame Blavatsky had publicly done one-fourth of the phenomena I have seen her do in America, or even in India, in private, and the occurrence of which is perfectly attested, you would have seen thousands prostrating themselves before the flag of the Theosophical Society, and trampling one another to come and embrace our feet. Do you doubt it ? You would not if you stopped to read our correspondence, and note the extravagant lengths to which the imagination of our friends has carried them. I can show any of you, if you choose, a bundle of requests for the miraculous cure of physical and mental ailments, the recovery of lost property, and other favours. And, lest my English auditors might be disposed 196 IHEOSOPHY, to laugh in their sleeves at Hindu credulity, let me warn them tha't some of the most preposterous of these requests have come from their own com- munity ; some from persons so highly placed that they have asked that their names may be withheld at all hazards. All this is a saddening proof of the unspirituality and rankling superstition of the present age. Adepts do not show them- selves or their phenomena because there is no public to appreciate them. It is known that we have affirmed that some of these maJiatnias are in relations with our Society, and take an interest in its welfare. I reaffirm the statement, and at the same time protest against the daring supposition that for that reason they are responsible for all or any of the mistakes in its management. Those faults are all my own and count against me. I have realised, too late, that the public who could so basely treat a woman who was but their disciple* could not understand anything that might be said about them. So, henceforth, I shall try to abstain from even speaking of them, except to such as are prepared and anxious for the truth. An age that is satisfied with church miracles, mediumist phe- nomena, or the most rank materialism, without seeking further for the hidden causes, may as well be left to play with its toys. The thoughtful man need ask for no more wondrous phenomenon than his own existence, no greater miracle than the display of his own splendid powers. He is surrounded by a world of phenomena scarcely one of which has ITS FRIENDS AiVD ENEMIES. 197 he traced to its ultimate source. The steps of science are near the threshold of the sanctuary ; her hand held out to feel the lintels of the door which with her bandaged eyes she cannot see. Mystery on mystery of the outer world has been unearthed, until it almost seems as though there were but little left to learn. This blinded goddess of Materialist Science has but just begun to dream that a universe of vast extent may lie behind the curtain at the door. She stands without, uncertain, groping ; and across the threshold waits Theosophy — sweetest of all the devis into which poetic fancy ever made a thought personified — and holding out her own strong hand says, " Sister Science, come ! The field is boundless, let us search together." THE OCCULT SCIENCES.* In the tenth chapter of his famous work, entitled All Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, Hume attempts to define the limits of philoso- phical inquiry. So pleased was the author with his work that he has placed it on record that with the " wise and learned " — a most necessary separa- tion, since a man may be wise without being at all learned, while modern science has introduced to us many of her most famous men who, through burst- ing, like Jack Bunsby, with learning, were far, very far from wise — this postulate of his must be " an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious de- lusions." For many years this oracular utterance was unquestioned, and Hume's apothegm was laid, like a handkerchief steeped in chloroform, over the mouth of every man who attempted to discuss the phenomena of the invisible world. But a brave Englishman and man of science, to-wit, Mr. Alfred Russell Wallace, F.R.S., has of late called Hume's infallibility in question. He finds two grave de- fects in that writer's proposition that " a miracle is a violation of the laws of Nature ; " since it assumes, firstly, that we know all the laws of Nature ; and secondly, that an unusual phenomenon is a miracle. * A Lecture deliveretl at Colombo, Ceylon, 15th June, 1880. THE OCCULT SCIENCES. 199 Speaking deferentially, is it not after all a piece of preposterous egotism for any living man to say what is, or rather what is not^ a law of Nature ? I have enjoyed the acquaintance of scientists who could actually repeat the names of the several parts of a cockroach, and even of a flea. Upon this rare accomplishment they plumed themselves not a little, and took on the airs of men of science. I talked with them about the laws of Nature, and found they thought they knew enough of them to dogmatize to me about the Knowable and Unknowable. I know doctors of medicine, even professors, adepts in physiology and able to dose their patients without exceeding the conventional average of casualities good-naturedly permitted to the profession. They have dogmatized to me about science and the laws of Nature, although not one of them could tell me anything positive about the life of man, whether in the state of ovum, of embryo, of infant, of adult, or of corpse. The most candid medical authorities have always frankly confessed that the human being is a puzzle as yet unsolved and medicine "scientific guess- work." Has ever yet a surgeon, as he stood beside a subject on the dissecting table of the amphi- theatre, dared to tell his class that he knew what life is, or that his scalpel could cut away any in- tegumental veil so as to lay bare the myster}' ? Did any modern botanist ever venture to explain that tremendous secret law which makes every seed produce the plant or tree of its own kind ? 2CO THE OCCULT SCIENCES, Mr. Huxley and his fellow-biologists have shown us protoplasm — the gelatinous substance which forms the physical basis of life — and told us that it is substantially identical in composition in plant and animal. But they can go no farther than the microscope and spectroscope will carry them. Do you doubt me ? Then hear the mortifying con- fession of Professor Huxley himself. " In perfect strictness," he says, " it is true that we know nothing about the composition of any body what- ever, as it is ! " And yet what scientist is there who has dogmatized more about the limitations of scientific inquiry ? Do you think that, because the chemists can dissolve for you the human body into its elementary gases and ashes, until what was once a tall man can be put into an empty cigar-box and a large bottle, they can help you any better to understand what that living man really was ? Ask them — I am willing to let the case rest upon their own unchallenged evidence. Science ? Pshaw ! What is there worthy to bear that imperial name so long as its most noisy representatives cannot tell us the least part of the mystery of man or of the nature which environs him ? Let science explain to us how the smallest blade of grass grows, or bridge over the " abyss " which Father Felix, the great French Catholic orator, tauntingly told the Academy, existed for it in a grain of sand, and then dogmatize as much as it likes about the laivs of Nature ! In common with all heretics, I hate this presumptuous pre- THE OCCULT SCIENCES, 201 tcnce ; and as one who, having studied psychology nearly thirty years, has some right to be heard, I protest against, and utterly repudiate, the least claim of our modern science to know all the laws of Nature, and to say what Is, or what Is not, possible. As for the opinions of non-scientific critics, who never Informed themselves practically about even one law of Nature, they are not worth even listen- ing to. And yet what a clamour they make, to be sure ; how the public ear has been assailed by the din of these ignorant and conceited criticasters! It is like being among a crowd of stock-brokers on the Exchange. Every one of the authorities is dogma- tizing in his most vociferous and impressive manner. One would think to read and hear what all these priests, editors, authors, deacons, elders, civil and military servants, lawyers, merchants, vestrymen, and old women, and their followers, admirers, and echoing toadies have to say — that the laws of i^ature were as familiar to them as the alphabet, and that every one carried in his pocket the com- bination key to the Chubb lock of the Universe ! If these people only realized how foolish they really are In rushing in "... where angels fear to tread," they might somewhat abate their pretences. And if common sense were as plentiful as conceit, a lecture upon the Occult Sciences would be listened to with a more humble spirit than, I am afraid, can be counted upon In our days. 202 THE OCCULT SCIENCES. I have tried, by simply calling your attention to the confessed ignorance of our modern scientists of the nature of life, to show you that in fact all visible phenomena are occult or hidden from the average inquirer. The term ocailt has been given to the sciences relating to the mystical side of nature — the department of force or spirit. Open any book on scieflce, or listen to any lecture or address by a modern authority, and you will see that modern science limits its inquiry to the visible material or physical universe. The combinations and correla- tions of matter, under the impulse of hidden forces, are what it studies. To facilitate this line of inquiry, mechanical ingenuity has lent the most marvellous assistance. The microscope has now been perfected so as to reveal the tiniest object in the tiny world of a drop of dew ; the telescope brings into its field and focus glittering constella- tions that, as Moore poetically says — " stand Like winking sentinels upon the void Beyond which Chaos dwells ; " the chemist's balances will weigh matter to the ten- thousandth part of a grain ; by the spectroscope the composition of all things on earth and suns and stars is claimed to be demonstrable in the lines they make across the spectrum ; substances hitherto supposed to be elements are now proved to be com- pounds, and what we had imagined to be compounds are found to be elements. Inch by inch, step by step, physical science has marched, from its old THE OCCULT SCIENCES. 203 prison In the dungeon of the Church towards Its desired goal — the verge of physical nature. It would not be too much to admit that the verge has been almost reached, but that Edison's recent dis- coveries of the telephone, the phonograph, and the electric light, and Crookes's of the existence and properties of radiant matter, seem to have pushed far- ther away the chasm that separates the confessedly knowable from the fancied unknowable. The recent advances of physical science tend to mitigate somiC- what the pride of our scientists. It is as though whole domains, previously undreamt of, were suddenly exposed to view as each new eminence of knowledge is gained; just as the traveller sees lone reaches of country to be traversed upon climb- inp- to the crest of the mountain that had been shuttlne him in within a narrow horizon. The fact is that whether regarded from her physical or dynamical side, Nature is a book with an endless variety of subjects to be studied and mysteries to be unravelled. And, as regards science, there is a thousand times more that is occult than familiar and easy to understand. The realization of this fact, both as the result of personal inquiry and of conversation with the learned, was one chief cause of the foundation of the Theosophlcal Society. Now, it must be agreed that while the first necessity for the candid student Is to discover the depth and immensity of his own ignorance, the next is to find out where and how that ignorance 204 THE OCCULT SCIENCES. may be dispelled. We must first fit ourselves to become pupils and then look about for a teacher. Where, in what part of the world, can there be found men capable of teaching us a part of the mystery hidden behind the mask of the world of matter? Who holds the secret of life? Who knows what force is, and what causes it to bring around its countless, eternal correlations with the molecules of matter? What adept can unriddle for us the problem how worlds are built and why ? Can any one tell us whence man came, whither he goes, what he is ? What is the secret of birth, of sleep, of thought, of memory, of death ? What is that eternal, self-existent principle by common consent believed to be the source of everything visible and invisible, and with which man claims kinship ? We little modern people have been going about in search after this teacher, with our toy lanterns in our hands, as though it were night instead of bright day. The light of truth shines all the while, but we, being blind, cannot see it. Does a new authority proclaim himself, we run from all sides, but only see a common man with ban- daged eyes, holding a pretty banner and blowing his own trumpet. " Come," he cries, " come, good people, and listen to one who knows the laws of Nature. Follow my lead, join my school, enter my church, buy my nostrum, and you will be wise in this world, and happy hereafter ! " How many of these pretenders there have been, how they have imposed for a while upon the world, what mean- THE OCCULT SCIEMCES. 205 nesses and cruelties their devotees have done in their behalf, and how their shams and humbugs have ultimately been exposed, the pages of history show. There is but one truth, and that is to be sought for in the mystical world of man's interior nature ; theosophically, and by the help of the " Occult Sciences." If history has preserved for us the record of multitudinous failures of materialists to read the secret laws of Nature, it has also kept for our instruction the stories of many successes gained by Theosophists in this direction. There is no im- penetrable mystery in Nature to the student who knows how to interrogate her. If physical facts can be observed by the eye of the body, so can spiritual laws be discovered by that interior perception of ours which we call the eye of the spirit. This per- ceptive power inheres in the nature of man ; it is the godlike quality which makes him superior to brutes. What we call seers and prophets, what the Buddhists know as arahats and the Aryans as true sanyasis, are only men who have emancipated their interior selves from physical bondage by meditation in secluded spots where the foulness of average humanity could not taint them, and where they were nearest to the threshold of Nature's temple ; and by the gradual and persistent conquest of brutal desire after desire, taste after taste, weakness after weakness, sense after sense, have moved forward to the ultimate victory of spirit. Jesus is said to have gone thus apart to be tempted ; so did 2o6 THE OCCULT SCIENCES. Mahomet, who spent one day in every month alone in a mountain cave ; so did Zoroaster, who emerged from the sechision of his mountain retreat only at the age of forty ; so did Buddha, whose knowledge of the cause of pain, and discovery of the path to Nirvana^ was obtained by solitary self-struggles in desert places. Turn over the leaves of the book of records, and you will find that every man who really did penetrate the mysteries of life and death got the truth in solitude and in a mighty travail of body and spirit. These were all Theosophists — that is, original searchers after spiritual know- ledge. What they did, what they achieved, any other man of equal qualities may attain to. And this is the lesson taught by the Theosophical Society. As they wrested her secrets from the bosom of Nature, so would we. Buddha said we should believe nothing upon authority, not even his own ; but because our reason told us the assertion was true. He began by striding over even the sacred Vedas because they were used to prevent original theosophical research ; castes he brushed aside as selfish monopolies. His desire was to fling wide open every door to the sanctuary of Truth. We organized our Society — as the very first section of our original bye-laws expresses it — " for the discovery of all the laws of Nature and the dis- semination of the knowledge of the same." The known laws of Nature why should we busy our- selves with ? The unknown or occult ones were to be our special province of research. No one in THE OCCULT SCIENCES. 207 America, none in Europe, now living, could help us, except in special branches, such as magnetism, crystal-reading, psychometry, and those most striking phenomena of so - called mediumship, grouped together under the generic name of modern spiritualism. Though the Vedas, the Puranas, the Zend Avesta, the Koran, and the Bible, teemed with allusions to the sayings and doings of wonder-working Theosophists, we were told by every one that the power had long since died out, and the adepts vanished from the sight of men. At the mere mention of occult science, the modern biologist curled his lip In fine scorn, and the lay fool gave way to senseless witticisms. It was a discouraging prospect, certainly ; but in this, as in every other instance, the difficulties were more imaginary than real. We had a clue given us to the right road by one who had spent a long lifetime in travel, who had found the science to be still extant, with its proficients and masters still practising it as in ancient days. The tidings were most encouraging, as are those of help or succour to a party of castaways on an unfriendly shore. We learnt to recognize the supreme value of the dis- coveries of Paracelsus, of Mesmer, and of Baron von Reichenbach, as the stepping-stones to the higher branches of occultism. We turned again to study them, and the more we studied the clearer insight did we get into the meaning of Asiatic myth and fable, and the real object and methods of the ascetic Theosophists of all ages. The words "body," 2o8 THE OCCULT SCIENCES. " soul/' " spirit," Moksha and Nirvana, acquired each a definite and comprehensible meaning. We could understand what the Yogi wished to express by his uniting himself with Brahma, and becoming Brahma ; why the biographer of Jesus made him say, " I and the Father are one ; " how Sankara- charya and others could display such phenomenal learning without having studied It In books ; whence Zaratusht acquired his profound spiritual illumina- tion ; and how the Lord Sakya Muni, though but a man "born in the purple," might nevertheless become all-wise and all-powerful. Would any hearer learn this secret? Let him study mes- merism, and master its methods until he can plunge his subject Into so deep a sleep that the body is made to seem dead, and the freed soul can be sent whithersoever he wills, about the earth or among the stars. Then he will see the separate reality of the body and its dweller. Or, let him read Professor Denton's " Soul of Things," and test the boundless resources of psychometry ; a strange yet simple science which enables us to trace back through ages the history of any substance held in the sensitive psychometer's hand. Thus a fragment of stone from Cicero's house, or from the Egyptian pyramids; a bit of cloth from a mummy's shroud ; or a faded parchment, letter, or painting ; or some garment or other article worn by a historic personage ; or a fragment of an aerolite — give to the psychometer Im- pressions, sometimes amounting to visions sur- passingly vivid, of the building, monument, mummy, THE OCCULT SCIENCES, 209 writer or painter, of the long-dead personage, or of the meteoric orbit from which the last-named object fell. This splendid science, for whose discovery, in 1840, the world is indebted to Professor Joseph R. Buchanan, now a Fellow of our Society, has but just begun to show its capabilities. But already it has shown us that in the Ahtsa, or Ether of science, are preserved the records of every human experience, deed and word. No matter how long forgotten and gone by, they are still a record, and, according to Buchanan's estimate, about four out of every ten persons have in greater or less degree the psychometrical power which can read those im- perishable pages of the Book of Life. Taken by itself, either mesmerism, or psychometry, or Baron Reichenbach's theory of Odyle, or Odic force, is sufficiently wonderful. In mesmerism a sensitive subject is put by magnetism into the magnetic sleep, during which the body is insensible to pain, noise, or any other disturbing influence. The psychometer, on the contrary, does not sleep, but only sits or lies passively, holds the letter, frag- ment of stone or other object, in the hand or against the centre of the forehead, and, without knowing at all what it is or whence it came, describes what he or she feels or sees. Of the two methods of looking into the invisible world, psycho- metry is preferable, for it is not attended with those risks of the magnetic slumber, which may arise from inexperience in the operator, or from low physical vitality in the somnambule. Baron Dupotet, M, 2IO THE OCCULT SCIENCES. Cahagnet, Professor William Gregory, and other authorities, tell us of instances of the latter sort, in which the sleeper was with difficulty brought back to earthly consciousness, so transcendently beautiful were the scenes that broke upon his spiritual vision. Reichenbach's discovery— the result of several years' experimental research, with the most expen- sive apparatus and a great variety of subjects, by one of the most eminent chemists and physicists of modern times— was this. A hitherto unsuspected force exists in Nature, having, like electricity and magnetism, its positive and negative poles. It per- vades everything in the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms. Our earth is charged with it ; it is in the stars ; and there is a close interchange of polar influences between us and all the heavenly bodies. Here I hold in my hand a specimen of quartz crystal, sent me from the Gastein Moun- tains, by the Baroness von Vay. Before Reich- enbach's discovery of the Odic force — as he terms it this would have had no special interest to the geologist, except as a curious example of imperfect crystallization. But now it has a definite value be- yond this. If I pass the apex, or positive pole, over the wrist and palm of a sensitive person — thus — he will feel a sensation of warmth or cold, or the blowing of a thin, very thin pencil of air over the skin. Some feel one thing, some another, accord- ing to the Odic condition of their own bodies. Speaking of this latter phenomenon— viz., that the Odic polaric condition of our bodies is peculiar THE OCCUL T SCIENCES. 2 1 1 to ourselves, different from the bodies of each other, different in the right and left sides, and different at night and morning in the same body — let me ask you whether a phenomenon long noticed, supposed by the ignorant to be miraculous, and yet constantly denied by those who never saw it, may not be classed as a purely Odic one. I refer to the levitation of ascetics and saints, the risincr into the air of their bodies, at moments when they were deeply entranced. Baron Reichenbach found that the Odic sensibility of his best patients greatly varied in health and disease. Professor Perty of Geneva, and Dr. Justinus Korner tell us that the bodies of certain hysterical patients rose into the air without visible cause, and floated as light as a feather. During the Salem witchcraft horrors, one of the subjects, Margaret Rule, was similarly levi- tated. Mr. William Crookes recently published a list of no less than forty Catholic ecstatics whose levitation is regarded as proof of their peculiar sanctity. Now, I myself, in common with many other modern observers of psychological pheno- mena, have seen a person in the full enjoyment of consciousness raised into the air by a mere exercise of the will. This person was an Asiatic by birth, had studied occult sciences in Asia, and explains the remarkable phenomena as a simple example of change of corporeal polarity. You all know the electrical law that oppositely electrified bodies attract, and similarly electrified ones repel each other. We say that we stand upon 212 THE OCCULT SCIENCES. the earth because of the force of gravitation, with- out stopping to think how much of the explanation is a mere patter of words conveying no accurate idea to the mind. Suppose we say that we cHng to the earth's surface, because the polarity of our body is opposed to the polarity of the spot of earth upon which we stand. That would be scientifically correct. But how, if our polarity is reversed, whether by disease, or the mesmeric passes of a powerful magnetiser, or the constant effort of a trained self-will ? To classify, let one imagine one- self either a hysteric patient, an ecstatic, a somnam- bule, or an adept in Asiatic occult science. In either case, if the polarity of the body should be changed to its opposite polarity, and so our electrical, magnetic, or Odic state be made identical with that of the ground beneath us, the long-known electro- polaric law would assert itself, and our body would rise into the air. It would float as long as these mutual polaric differences continued, and rise to a height exactly proportionate to their intensity. So much of light is let into the old domain of Church " miracles " by mesmerism and the Od discovery. But our mountain crystal has another and far more striking peculiarity than mere Odic polarity. It is nothing apparently but a poor lump of glass, and yet in its heart can be seen strange mysteries. There are doubtless a score of persons in this great audience who, if they would sit in an easy posture and a quiet place, and gaze into my crystal for a few minutes, would see and describe to me pictures THE OCCULT SCIENCES, 213 of people, scenes and places in different countries, as well as their own beautiful Ceylon. I gave the crystal into the hand of a lady who is a natural clairvoyant, just after I had received it from Hungary. " I see," she said, " a large, handsome room in what appears to be a castle. Through an open window can be seen a small park, with smooth, broad walks, trimmed lawns, and trees. A noble-looking lady stands at a marble-topped table doing up something into a parcel. A man-servant in rich livery stands as though waiting for his mistress's orders. It is this crystal that she is doing up, and she puts it into a brown box, something like a small musical-box." The clairvoyant knew nothing about the crystal, but she had given an accurate description of the sender, of her residence, and of the box in which the crystal came to me. Reichenbach's careful investigations prove that minerals have each their own peculiar Odic polarity, and this lets us into an understanding of much that the Asiatic people have said about the magical properties of gems. You have all heard of the regard in which the sapphire has ever been held for its supposed magical property to assist somnam- bulic vision. " The sapphire," according to a Buddhist writer, "will open barred doors and dwellings (for the spirit of man) ; it produces a desire for prayer, and brings with it more peace than any other gem ; but he who would wear it must lead a pure and holy life." Now, a series of investigations by Amoretti into 214 THE OCCULT SCIENCES. the electrical polarity of precious stones (which we find reported in Kieser's Archia, vol. iv., p. 62) resulted in proving that the diamond, the garnet, the amethyst, are — E., while the sapphire is + E. Orpheus tells how by means of a load-stone a whole audience may be affected. Pythagoras, whose knowledge was derived from India, pays a par- ticular attention to the colour and nature of precious stones ; and Apollonius of Tyana, one of the purest and grandest men who ever lived, accurately taught his disciples the various occult properties of gems. Thus does scientific inquiry, agreeing with the researches of the greatest philosophers, the experi- ences of religious ecstatics, continually — though, as a rule, unintentionally — give us a solid basis for studying occultism. The more of physical pheno- mena we observe and classify, the more is the student of occult sciences and of the ancient Asiatic sciences, philosophies and religions helped. We modern Europeans have been so blinded by the fumes of our own conceit that we have not been able to look beyond our noses. We have been boasting of our glorious enlightenment, of our scientific discoveries, of our civilization, of our superiority to everybody wdth a dark skin, and to every nation east of the Volga and the Red Sea, or south of the Mediterranean, until we have come almost to believe that the world was built for the Anglo-Saxon race, and the stars hung in the firmament to make our bit of sky THE OCCULT SCIENCES. 215 pretty. We have even manufactured, out of Asiatic materials, a religion to suit ourselves, and think it better than any religion ever heard of before. It is time this childish vanity were done away with. It is time that we should try to discover the sources of modern ideas, and compare what we think we know of the laws of Nature with what the Asiatic people really did know thousands of years before Europe was in- habited by our barbarian ancestors, or an European foot was set upon the American continent. The crucibles of science are heated red-hot, and we are melting in them everything out of which we think we can get a fact. Suppose that, for a change, we approach the Eastern people in a less presumptuous spirit, and honestly confessing that v/e know nothing at all of the beginning or end of natural law, ask them to help us to find out what their fore- fathers knew. This has been the policy of the Theosophical Society, and it has yielded valuable results already. Depend upon it there are still " wise men in the East," and the occult sciences are better worth studying than has hitherto been popularly supposed. SPIRITUALISM AND THEOSOPHY.^^" TilIRTEEN years ago, one of the most eminent of modern American jurists — Cliief Justice Edmonds, of the Supreme Court of New York — declared in a London magazine that there were then at least ten millions of Spiritualists in the United States. No man was so well qualified at that time to express an opinion upon this subject, for not only was he in correspondence with persons in all parts of the country, but the noble virtue of the man, as well as his learning, his judicial impartiality and conservatism, made him a most competent and convincing witness. And another authority, a publicist of equally unblemished private and public reputation — the Hon. Robert Dale Owen — while endorsing Judge Edmonds's estimate, adds "f that there are at least an equal number in the rest of Christendom. To avoid chance of exaggeration, he, however, deducts one-fourth from both calculations, and (in 1874) writes the sum-total of so-called Spirit- ualists at fifteen millions. But whatever the aggre- * A Lecture delivered at the Rooms of the United Service Institu- tion of India, Simla, 7th October, 18S0. t The Debatable Land belivecn this World and the Next, London, 1874, p. 174. / SPIRITUALISM AND THE OS PHY. 217 gate of believers in the alleged present open inter- course between the worlds of substance and shadow, it is a known fact that the number embraces some of the most acute intellects of our day. It is no question now of the self-deceptions of boors and of hysterical chambermaids that we have to deal with. Those who would deny the reality of these contemporary phenomena must confront a multitude of our most capable men of science, who have exhausted the resources of their profession to determine the nature of the force at work, and been baffled at seeking any other ex- planation than the one of trans-sepulchral agency of some kind or other. Beginning with Robert Hare, the inventor of the oxy-hydrogen blow-pipe and the Nestor of American Chemistry, and ending wdth Herr Zollner, Professor of Physical Astronomy in Leipzig University, the list of these converted experimentalists includes a succession of adepts of physical science of the highest professional rank. Each of them — except, perhaps, Zollner, who wished to verify his theory of a fourth dimension of space — began the task of investigation with the avowed purpose of exposing the alleged fraud, in the interests of public morals ; and each was trans- formed by the irresistible logic of facts into an avowed believer in the reality of mediumist phenomena. The apparatuses devised by these men of science to test the mediumist power have been in the highest degree ingenious. They have been of four 2i8 SPIRITUALISM AND THEOSOPHY. different kinds — [a) machines to determine whether electrical or magnetic currents were operating ; {p) whether the movement of heavy articles, such as tables touched by the medium, was caused by either conscious or unconscious muscular contrac- tion ; ic) whether intelligent communications may be received by a sitter under circumstances pre- cluding any possible trickery by the medium ; and id) what are the conditions for the manifestation of this new form of energy and the extreme limita- tions of its action? Of course, in an hour's lecture, I could not describe a tenth part of these machines, but I may take two as illustrating two of the above-named branches of research. The first will be found described in Professor Hare's work. The medium and inquirer sit facing each other, the medium's hands resting upon a bit of board so hung and adjusted that whether he presses on the board or not, he merely moves that and nothing else. In front of the visitor is a dial, like a clock- face, around which are arranged the letters of the alphabet, the ten numerals, the words " Yes," " No," " Doubtful," and perhaps others. A pointer or hand connected with a lever, the other end of which is so placed as to receive any current flowing through the medium's system, but not to be affected by any mechanical pressure he may exert upon the hand-rest, travels around the dial and indicates the letters or words the communicating intelligence wishes to be noted down. The back of the dial being towards the medium, the latter, of SPIRITUALISM AND THE OS PHY, 219 course, cannot see what the pointer is doing, and if the inquirer conceals the paper on which he is noting down the communication, cannot have even a suspicion of what is being said. The other contrivance is described and illustrated in the mono9;raph entitled, Researches in tJie PJicno- vicna oj Spiritualising by Mr. William Crookes, RR.S., editor of the Quarterly Jottrnal of Science, and one of the most successful experimental chemists of our day. A mahogany board, 36 inches long by 9