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

"The opposing power alone of unbelief and skepticism, if projected in a current of equal force, can check the other, and sometimes completely neutralize it. Why should spiritualist wonder that the presence of some strong skeptics, or of those who, feeling bitterly opposed to the phenomenon, unconsciously exercise their will-power in opposition, hinders and often [...]

"Pythagoras brought his doctrines from the eastern sanctuaries, and Plato compiled them into a form more intelligible than the mysterious numerals of the sage - whose doctrines he had fully embraced - to the uninitiated mind. Thus, the Cosmos is "the Son" with Plato, having for his father and mother the Divine Thought and Matter. [...]

""The incorporeal world then was already completed, having its seat in the Divine Reason", says Philo who is erroneously accused of deriving his philosophy from Plato's.   In the Theogony of Mochus, we find Aether first, and then the air; the two principles from which Ulom, the intelligible νοετος God (the visible universe of matter) [...]

"Years ago the old Germain philosopher, Schopenhaur, disposed of this force and matter at the same time; and since the conversation of Mr. Wallace, the great anthropologist has evidently adopted his ideas.   Schopenhauer's doctrine is that the universe is but the manifestation of the will. Every force in nature is also an effect of [...]

"When such a metaphysician and philosopher as Henry More gives such testimony as this, we may well assume our point to have been well taken.   Learned investigators, all very skeptical as to spirits in general and "departed human spirits" in particular, during the last twenty years have taxed their brains to invent new names [...]

"Says Henry More, the reverend English Platonist, in his answer to an attack on the believers of spiritual and magic phenomena by a skeptic of that age, named Webster:   "As for that other opinion, that the greater part of the reformed divines hold, that it was the Devil that appeared in Samuel's shape, it is [...]

"While men of genuine science, such as Wallace, Crookes, Wagner, Butlerof, Varley, Buchanan, Hare, Reichenbach, Thury, Perty, de Morgan, Hoffman, Goldschmidt, W. Gregory, Flammarion, Sergeant Cox, and many others, firmly believe in the current phenomena, many of the above named reject the theory of departed spirits.   Therefore, it seems but logical to think that [...]

"We must confess that the situation appears to be very grave. The control of mediums by such unprincipled and lying "spirits" is constantly becoming more and more general; and the pernicious effects in seeming diabolism constantly multiply. Some of the best mediums are abandoning the public rostrum and retiring from this influence; and the movement [...]

"But, in this daily increasing torrent of occult phenomena that rushes from one end of the globe to the other, though two-thirds of the manifestations are proved spurious, what of those which are proved genuine beyond doubt or cavil? Among these may be found communications coming through non-professional mediums, which are sublime and divinely grand. [...]

"We are quite ready to concede to skeptics that one-half, and even more, of seeming phenomena, are but more or less clever fraud. Recent exposures, especially of "materializing" mediums, but too well prove the fact. Unquestionably numerous others are still in store, and this will continue until tests have become so perfect and spiritualists so [...]