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

"As God creates, so man can create. Given a certain intensity of will, and the shapes created by the mind become subjective. Hallucination, they are called, although to their creator they are real as any visible object is to any one else. Given a more intense and intelligent concentration of this will, and the form [...]

"Therefore the theory is as old as the world; for Democritus was not the first philosopher who taught it; and intuition existed in man before the ultimate development of his reason.   But it is in the denial of the boundless and endless Entity, professor of that invisible Will which we for lack of a [...]

"We know that every exertion of will results in force, and that, according to the above-named German school, the manifestations of atomic forces are individual actions of will, resulting in the unconscious rushing of atoms into the concrete image already subjectively created by the will.   Democritus taught, after his instructor Leucippus, that the first [...]

"Here it is verbatim: "As to the movements and oscillations alleged to happen with certain tables, they can have no cause other than the invisible and involuntary vibrations of the experimenter's muscular system; the extended contraction of the muscles manifesting itself at such time by a series of vibrations, and becoming thus a visible tremor [...]

"To pass from the philosophical speculations of a man like Schopenhauer to the superficial generalizations of some of the french Academicians, would be profitless but for the fact that it enables us to estimate the intellectual grasp of the two schools of learning.   What the German makes of profound psychological questions, we have seen. [...]

""Besides that", continues Schopenhauer, "these manifestations present to us a substantial and perfectly logical contradiction to materialism, and even to naturalism, because in the light of such manifestations, that order of things in nature which both these philosophies seek to present as absolute and the only genuine, appears before us on the contrary purely phenomenal [...]

"No one can better treat his subject than does Schopenhauer in his Parerga. In this work he discusses at length animal magnetism, clairvoyance, sympathetic cures, seership, magic, omens, ghost-seeing, and other spiritual matters.   "All these manifestation," he says, "are branches of one and the same tree, and furnish us with irrefutable proofs of the [...]

"The ideas of some of our schoolmen about matter are, from the kabalistic standing-point, in many a way erroneous. Hartmann calls their views "an instinctual prejudice." Furthermore, he demonstrates that no experimenter can have anything to do with matter properly termed, but only with the forces into which he divides it. The visible effects of [...]

"Where is then that matter which you all pretend to know so well; and from which - being so familiar with it - you draw all your conclusions and explanations, and attribute to it all things? ...That, which can be fully realized by our reason and senses, is but the superficial: they can never reach [...]

"There is a reflection of every one of these views in Schopenhauer's philosophy. Our "investigating" scientists might consult his works with profit. They will find therein many a strange hypothesis founded on old ideas, speculations on the "new" phenomena, which may prove as reasonable as any, and be saved the useless trouble of inventing new [...]