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

"In the face of such experience as that of Crookes and the Dialectical Society, of Wallace and the late Professor Hare, what can we expect from our luminaries of erudition?  Their attitude toward the undeniable phenomena is in itself another phenomenon.   It is simply incomprehensible, unless we admit the possibility of another psychological disease, [...]

""A kick from thee, O Jupiter! is sweet", says the poet Tretiakowsky, in an old Russian tragedy. Rude as those Jupiters of science may be occasionally toward us credulous mortals, their vast learning - in less abstruse questions, we mean - if not their manners, entitles them to public respect. But unfortunately it is not [...]

"After expending their energy on such puerile theories as "unconscious cerebration", "involuntary muscular contraction", and the sublimely ridiculous one of the "cracking knee-joints" (le muscle craqueur); after meeting ignominious failures by the obstinate survival of the new force, and finally, after every desperate effort to compass its obliteration, these filii diffidentiae - as St. Paul [...]

"A tornado of indignation followed the confession. Mr. Crookes depicts it in his pamphlet on Psychic Force. He heads it very pointedly with the quotation from Galvani: "I am attacked by two very opposite sects - the scientists and the know-nothings, yet I know that I have discovered one of the greatest forces in nature...." [...]

"Thus, they were compelled to acknowledge:  1st. That the phenomena which they, at least, had witnessed, were genuine, and impossible to simulate; thus showing that manifestations produced by some unknown force, could and did happen.   2nd. That, whether the phenomena were produced by disembodied spirits or other analogous entities, they could not tell; but [...]

"These representatives of modern science in both hemispheres seem never to have exhibited more scorn, or to have felt more bitterly toward the unsolvable mystery, than since Mr. Crookes began the investigation of the phenomena, in London. This courageous gentleman was the first to introduce to the public one of those alleged "materialized" sentries that [...]

"If, therefore, we should ever receive from some contemporaneous Faraday the same fling that that gentleman made years since, when, with more sincerity than good breeding, he said that "many dogs have the power of coming to much more logical conclusions than some spiritualists", we fear we must still persist.   Abuse is not argument, [...]

"Many years of wandering among "heathen" and "Christian" magicians, occultists, mesmerizers; and the tutti quantity of white and black art, ought to be sufficient, we think, to give us a certain right to feel competent to take a practical view of this doubted and very complicated question.   We have associated with the fakirs, the [...]

"In a recent philosophical work, The Unseen World, while showing that from the very definition of the terms, matter and spirit, the existence of spirit cannot be demonstrated to the senses, and that thus no theory is amenable to scientific tests, he deals a severe blow at his colleagues in the following lines:   The [...]

"Even the just and severe rebukes of some of their leading men are of no avail and the fear on the part of men of science to investigate such an unpopular subject, seems to have now become a general panic.   "The phenomena chase the scientists, and the scientists run away from the phenomena", very [...]