Category: Isis Unveiled: H. P. Blavatsky (1877)

"Aristotle, in his philosophical deduction On Dreams, shows this doctrine of the twofold soul, or soul and spirit, very plainly. "It is necessary for us to ascertain in what portion of the soul dreams appear", he says. All the ancient Greeks believed not only a double, but even a triple soul to exist in man. [...]

"This mystery of first creation, which was ever the despair of science, is unfathomable, unless we accept the doctrine of the Hermetists. Though matter is coeternal with spirit, that matter is certainly not our visible, tangible, and divisible matter, but its extreme sublimation. Pure spirit is but one remove higher. Unless we allow man to [...]

"Esoteric philosophers held that everything in nature is but a materialization of spirit. The Eternal First Cause is latent spirit, they said, and matter from the beginning. "In the beginning was the word...and the word was God." While conceding the idea of such a God to be an unthinkable abstraction to human reason, they claimed [...]

"Space fails us to present the speculative views of certain ancient and mediaeval occultists upon this subject. Suffice it that they antedated Darwin, embraced more or less all his theories on natural selection and the evolution of species, and largely extended the chain at both ends. Moreover, these philosophers were explorers as daring in psychology [...]

"To return to our subject. The child lacks reason, it being as yet latent in him; and meanwhile he is inferior to the animal as to instinct proper. He will burn or drown himself before he learns that fire and water destroy and are dangerous for him; while the kitten will avoid both instinctively. The [...]

"Now that the Aristotelean authority is shaken to its foundations with that of Plato; and our men of science reject every - nay hate it, except each his own; and the general estimate of human collective wisdom is at the lowest discount, mankind, headed by science itself, is still irrepressibly drawing back to the starting-point [...]

"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 [...]

"This point is too important to be passed by without a few words of comment. The attitude of physical science toward the spiritual half of the cosmos is perfectly exemplified in her gross conception of fire. In this, as in every other branch of science, their philosophy does not contain one second plank; every one [...]

"Fire, in the ancient philosophy of all times and countries, including our own, has been regarded as a triple principle. As water comprises a visible fluid with invisible gases lurking within, and, behind all the spiritual principle of nature, which gives them their dynamic energy, so, in fire, they recognized: 1st. Visible flame; 2nd. Invisible, [...]

"Professor Balfour Stewart pays a very high tribute to the philosophical intuition of Herakleitus, the Ephesian, who lived five centuries before our era; the "crying" philosopher who declared that "fire was the great cause, and that all things were in a perpetual flux." "It seems clear", says the professor, "that Herakleitus must have had a [...]