isis unveiled: xii (forbidden ground)

“There are revelations of the spiritual senses of man which may be trusted far more than all the sophistries of materialism. What was a demonstration and a success in the eyes of Plato and his disciples is now considered the overflow of a spurious philosophy and a failure. The scientific methods are reversed.

The testimony of the men of old, who were nearer to truth, for they were nearer to the spirit of nature – the only aspect under which the Deity will allow itself to be viewed and understood – and their demonstrations, are rejected. Their speculations – if we must believe the modern thinkers – are but the expression of a redundance of the unsystematic opinions of men unacquainted with the scientific method of the present century. They foolishly based the little they knew of physiology on well-demonstrated psychology, while the scholar of our day bases psychology – of which he confesses himself utterly ignorant – on physiology, which to him is as yet a closed book, and has not even a method of its own, as Fournie tells us.

As to the last objection in Macaulay’s argument, it was answered by Hippocrates centuries ago: “All knowledge, all arts are to be found in nature.”

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The artist will display his waves of harmony better on a royal Erard than he could have done on a spinet of the sixteenth century. Therefore whether this instinctive impulse was directly impressed upon the nervous system of the first insect, or each species has gradually had it developed in itself by instinctively mimicking the acts of its like, as the more perfected doctrine of Herbert Spencer has it, is immaterial to the present subject.

The question concerns spiritual evolution only. And if we reject this hypothesis as unscientific and undemonstrated, then will the physical aspect of evolution have to follow it to the ground in its turn, because the one is as undemonstrated as the other, and the spiritual intuition of man is not allowed to dovetail the two, under the pretext that it is “unphilosophical.”

Whether we wish it or not, we will have to fall back on the old query of Plutarch’s Symposiacs, whether it was the bird or the egg which first made its appearance.”

H. P. Blavatsky