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

"The recent "miracles" at Lourdes having been unfavorably discussed in the London papers, Monsignor Capel communicates to the Times the views of the Roman Church in the following terms:   "As to the miraculous cures which are effected, I would refer your readers to the calm, judicious work, La Grotte de Lourdes, written by Dr. [...]

"Both the infidel spiritualists and the orthodox Roman Catholics seem to have leagued themselves this year against the iconoclastic pretensions of materialism. Increase skepticism has developed of late a like increase of credulity.   The champions of the Bible "divine" miracles rival the panegyrist's mediumistic phenomena, and the middle ages revive in the nineteenth century. [...]

"True, to the evidence of one scientist and his friend - Messrs. Lankester and Donkin - the accused opposed the testimony of Wallace, Crookes, and a host of others, which totally nullifies an accusation based merely on circumstantial evidence and prejudice.   As the London Spectator very pertinently observes:   "It is really a pure [...]

"After such a public exhibition of ignorance and prejudice, Mr. Butlerof, Professor of Chemistry at the St. Petersburg University, and Mr. Aksakof, Counsellor of State in the same city, who had been invited to assist on the committee for mediums, became so disgusted that they withdrew.   Having published their protests in the Russian papers, [...]

"At one time, there was reason to hope that Russian scientists would have undertaken the task of giving the phenomena a careful and impartial study. A commission was appointed by the Imperial University of St. Petersburg, with Professor Mendeleyeff, the great physicist, at its head.   The advertised programme provided for a series of forty [...]

"Considering all this, it remains to us but to wonder at the preposterous presumption of these men, who claim to be regarded by right of learning as the high priest of science, to classify a phenomenon they know nothing about.   Surely, several millions of their countrymen and women, if deluded, deserve at least as [...]

"In his resume de Mirville describes the argumentation of these adversaries of spiritualism as consisting of five paradoxes, which he terms distractions.   First distraction: that of Faraday, who explains the table phenomenon, by the table which pushes you "in consequence of the resistance which pushes it back."   Second distraction: that of Babinet, explaining [...]

"Hundreds of travelers claimed to have seen fakirs produce the same phenomena, and they were all thought either liars or hallucinated. But it was but yesterday that the same phenomenon was witnessed and endorsed by a well-known scientist; it was produced under test conditions; declared by Mr. Crookes to be genuine, and to be beyond [...]

"Sincere skepticism as to the immortality of man's soul is a malady; a malformation of the physical brain, and has existed in every age.   As there are infants born with a caul upon their heads, so there are men who are incapable to their last hour of ridding themselves of that kind of caul [...]

"The more we think and the more we learn, the more difficult it becomes for us to account for the atheism of the scientists. We may readily understand that a man ignorant of the laws of nature, unlearned in either chemistry or physics, may be fatally drawn into materialism through his very ignorance; his incapacity [...]