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

"And the heaven was visible in seven circles, and the planets appeared with all their signs, in star-form, and the stars were divided and numbered with the rulers that were in them, and their revolving course was bounded with the air, and borne with a circular course, through the agency of the divine SPIRIT." "We [...]

""In the beginning of time the great invisible one had only his holy hands full of celestial matter which he scattered throughout the infinity; and lo, behold! it became balls of fire and balls of clay; and they scattered like the moving metal into many smaller balls, and began their ceaseless turning; and some of [...]

"The testimony of Plutarch, Professor Draper, and Jowett, are sufficiently explicit. But we would ask Mr. Proctor how it happens, if the ancient astronomers were so ignorant of the law of the birth and death of worlds that, in the fragmentary bits which the hand of time has spared us of ancient lore there should [...]

"Think not my magic wonders wrought by aid, of Stygian angels summoned up from hell; scorned and accursed by those who have essay'd, her gloomy Divs and Afrites to compel. But by perception of the secret powers of mineral springs, in nature's inmost cell, of herbs in curtain of her greenest bowers, and of the [...]

"Like Cardon and Pompanatius, "who were no friends to the soul's immortality", as says Henry More, "Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence", and that "it does preexist before it comes into the body." Years have rolled away since [...]

"Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul's immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists - to use an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth - are afraid that if they admit spirits and apparitions they must admit a God [...]

"Verily, no modern atheist, Mr. Huxley included, can outvie Epicurus in materialism; he can but mimic him. And what is his "protoplasm", but a rechauffe of the speculations of the Hindu Swabhavikas or Pantheists, who assert that all things, the gods as well as men and animals, are born from Swabhava or their own nature? [...]

"Further, the same reviewer shows us many of the identical ideas and all the material requisite to demonstrate the great discoveries of Tyndall and Huxley, in the works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, and even in Herder's Philosophy of History. "Priestley", adds the author, "was not molested by government, [...]

"Huxley, Tyndall, and even Spencer have become lately the great oracles, the "infallible popes" on the dogmas of protoplasm, molecules, primordial forms, and atoms. They have reaped more palms and laurels for their great discoveries than Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch, and Seneca had hairs on their heads. Nevertheless, the works of the latter teem with ideas [...]

"We have misgivings sometimes; we have questioned the impartiality of our own judgment, our ability to offer a respectful criticism upon the labors of such giants as some of our modern philosophers - Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, Carpenter, and a few others. In our immoderate love for "men of old - the primitive sages - we [...]