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

"Since the advent of spiritualism, physicians and pathologists are more ready than ever to treat great philosophers like Paracelsus and Van Helmont as superstitious quacks and charlatans, and to ridicule their notions about the archaeus, or anima mundi, as well as the importance they gave to a knowledge of the machinery of the stars. And [...]

"There are not a few well-meaning men in the present century who, desiring to avenge the memory of such martyrs of science as Agrippa, Palissy, and Cardan, nevertheless fail, through lack of means, to understand their ideas rightly. They erroneously believe that the Neo-Platonists gave more attention to transcendental philosophy than to exact science. "The [...]

"In a lecture delivered by Hiram Corson, Professor of Anglo-Saxon Literature at the Cornell University, Ithaca, N. Y., before the alumni of St. John's College, Annapolis, in July, 1875, the lecturer thus deservedly rebukes science: "There are things, he says, "which Science can never do, and which it is arrogant in attempting to do. There [...]

"There is still another possible hypothesis, that of its being the result of some unknown natural cause; and this possibility cannot be so completely shut out as to leave no alternative but that of admitting the existence and intervention of a being superior to nature." This is the very point which we have sought to [...]

"Demokritus of Abdera shows us space crammed with atoms, and our contemporary astronomers allow us to see how these atoms form into worlds, and afterward into the races, our own included, which people them. Since we have indicated the existence of a power in the human will, which, by concentrating currents of those atoms upon [...]

"According to Demokritus, the soul results from the aggregation of atoms, and Plutarch describes his philosophy as follows: "That there are substances infinite in number, indivisible, undisturbed, which are without differences, without qualities, and which move in space, where they are disseminated; that when they approach each other, they unite, interlock, and form by their [...]

"Before leaving the subject, we wish to say a few words more respecting the cases where the head, arm, and hand were instantly dissolved, though it was evident that in each instance the entire body of the child had been perfectly formed. Of what is a child's body composed at its birth? The chemists will [...]

"But we will not weary the reader with further selections from the multitude of teratological cases to be found recorded in the works of standard authors; the above suffice to show that there is reason to attribute these aberrations of physiological type to the mutual reaction of the maternal mind and the universal ether upon [...]

"Deleuze has collected, in his Bibliotheque du Magnetism Animal, a number of remarkable facts taken from Van Helmont, among which we will content ourselves with quoting the following as pendants to the case of the bird-hunter, Jaques Pelissier. He says that "men by looking steadfastly at animals oculis intentis for a quarter of an hour [...]

"Catherine Crowe discusses at considerable length the question of the power of the mind over matter, and relates, in illustration, many well-authenticated instances of the same. Among others, the most curious phenomenon called the stigmata have a decided bearing upon this point. These marks come upon the bodies of persons of all ages, and always [...]