Besant A. - Why I Became a Theosophist

The Chairman introducing Mrs. Besant to the audience said that this was a continuation of a lecture delivered by Mrs. Besant on the previous Sunday evening, and at its conclusion there would be a discussion, and those who wished to take part in it must come up on the platform. He then introduced Mrs. Besant, who was received with prolonged cheering.

Mrs. Besant: Friends. You will remember that last Sunday I confined what I had to say entirely to the various difficulties, the various problems to which, as I put them to you, answers were not found along the ordinary lines of science or in the philosophy of Materialism. To-night, leaving the question of those difficulties, which will be I trust in the minds of most of you (as otherwise to-night’s lecture will not be thoroughly intelligible), I am going to try to show what solution, or at least what promise of solution there is along the lines that roughly are known as Theosophy, lines which I am now trying to follow in the hope of obtaining the light which I have tried to find elsewhere (Hear, hear). And first a word on the Theosophical Society, for it was the mere joining of that society which gave rise to so much criticism as to my action, and, as I cannot but think, to so much misconception. The objects of the Theosophical Society are three, and there is only one out of the three that you are bound to accept when you join it. The first and the obligatory object is to be the nucleus of a universal brotherhood (Hear, hear); that is to say that in joining the Theosophical Society you refuse to make any distinction of rank, or class, or sex, or nation, or race (Cheers). Every man and every woman is to stand for you on the common and equal ground of humanity, a right to brotherhood because human, and with nothing smaller than humanity to bound the platform on which you stand. I say no more on that first and only necessary object. Upon that, I imagine, in a Hall like this, absolutely no discussion or controversy can arise (Cheers). The second object is one that would appeal chiefly 489to the student, and to very many of the students among Freethinkers. It is to promote the study of Aryan and other religions, but especially Aryan philosophy. On that I need say nothing, for on that clearly very little controversy need arise.

The third object is the one where discord might come in. To investigate the unexplained laws in nature and psychical powers latent in man. That is the third object, and it is one which of course raises the most controversy, and on which the discussion is likely to arise; but what I want to put to you as far as the Society is concerned is this, that it pledges you to no theory, that it forces upon you no view, that it doesn’t ask you to accept one view of the universe or another. So far as entrance within its limits is concerned all that it says to you is, “Here is a line of investigation that you may take up if you choose, the unexplained in nature and the psychical powers latent in man.” Now in order that you may not suppose that I am in any sense lessening, or in any sense trying to make these objects seem smaller than they are, I will read you a paper that I got from America during the past week. In St. Louis, where a Theosophical Society applied for a Charter of Incorporation, the Court thought it right to investigate the objects of the Society before giving the legal sanction which this Charter of Incorporation implies, dealing specially with the third object, dealing with this investigation into the unknown and the latent psychical powers in man. The Report on which the Court granted the Charter of Incorporation says that “the object of the Society, whether attainable or not, is undeniably laudable. Assuming that there are physical and psychical phenomena unexplained, theosophy seeks to explain them. Assuming that there are human powers yet latent in man theosophy seeks to discover them”; and then it goes on to quote two or three opinions of learned and eminent men of science on the very points with which the Theosophical Society specially endeavours to deal, quoting Sir William Hamilton, whom the Report speaks of as “probably the most acute and undeniably the most learned of English metaphysicians that ever lived”; they quote him as saying, “However astonishing, it is now proved beyond all rational doubt that in certain abnormal states of the nervous organism perceptions are possible through other than the ordinary channels of the senses.” Then again, quoting the late President Wayland of Brown University, he said dealing, with clairvoyance, “The subject seems to me well worthy of the most searching and candid examination. It is by no means deserving of ridicule, but demands the attention of the most philosophic enquiry.”

On this Report presented to the Court the Charter of Incorporation was granted, and I mention that to you now to show you that many wild and foolish assertions made about the Theosophical Society by people who have never taken the trouble to investigate its objects are wholly baseless, that they ought not to be made, and that mere empty ridicule of what you don’t understand is a weapon that is unworthy of the Freethinker and ought not to be employed (Loud cheers).

There is one other point in connection with Hypnotism, of which I spoke of course last Sunday, to which I think it well to draw your attention. There is sitting in Paris now, or was during the last week, a Congress of scientific men investigating the subject of hypnotism. At that Congress of course Dr. Charcot and others were present; and so far has hypnotism gone, that a society is actually being formed in England in order to set up a school where the science may be carefully studied; and they are proposing that a law shall be passed forbidding the practice of hypnotism to anyone except medical men or those who are properly qualified for the study. I only mention that to show you how far this has been going on, and how remarkable are the things that have been done in Paris – those cases for instance in which Dr. Charcot has made his name specially eminent, where he has used hypnotism instead of chloroform in specially dangerous cases, where, by simply paralysing the brain centres, without the danger to the heart, which you have from chloroform, he has been able to operate in the most critical cases, while the persons under hypnotism could not feel although able to talk and to understand. Not only physically has it been used, but morally as well, so that in some 490cases dishonest people have been hypnotised: under those conditions the suggestion of honesty has been made to them and when they have come out of that condition there are cases in which the cure has been absolutely complete; in others it has lasted for years. It has been used thus for what are called moral cures, as well as in dealing with physical diseases. I put this to you to show you that some things that may seem startling are nevertheless making their way distinctly into the realm of science, and to warn you lest you be too hasty in denying before you understand, and lest with this very subject, which goes quite into the special realm which is examined by theosophy, lest you should simply jeer at it because you have not read what scientific men have done and the records of discoveries more marvellous almost than any others which have been made during the century.

I pass now from this, out of what we should call the Theosophical Society and the very slight bonds that are put upon its members, into Theosophy itself. Not everyone who is a member of the society is a Theosophist. You will see from the objects that I put to you that many persons might join it who in no sense accepted the Theosophical view of the Universe. Supposing you not only became a member of the society, but that you desired to become a student of Theosophy. Then, of course, you will come to those special teachings which it is my duty to lay before you to night. I can only do this in very broad outline. The subject is a very complex one, it is full of a mass of details, and all that I can do in an hour’s lecture is to trace the more important doctrines that specially differentiate Theosophy and present them to you in as intelligible a fashion as it is possible to do in dealing with a subject that probably is new to most of you. This one word of warning I would give to any who may take up Theosophical literature and begin to study it for themselves, and still more to those who may not study but who may take simply second-hand some information about it from opponents. You know the kind of caricature of Materialist teachings that you sometimes hear from Christian Evidence agents when they are attacking Freethought and Freethinkers. It is quite possible to make anything ridiculous by suppressing the broad outline and bringing forward some insignificant detail, or by separating details from their context so that you do not see how they fall into the general scheme. I daresay some of you may have heard the presentation of Darwin’s great theory, which you certainly would hardly recognise as the result of his patient labour and his long-continued experiments. You may have heard of a wonderful picture about the astonishment of the papa and the mamma monkey when they found themselves the possessors of a human child. (Laughter.) Just such caricatures are made of Theosophy. Just such foolish expressions of ridicule are cast upon it, and I say to you, if you want to understand, you must be willing to study, and not take your judgment on a vast philosophy simply by a few phrases or partly perhaps by methods that are not understood. (Hear, hear.) Suppose then you come forward as a student of Theosophy. The very first statement that will be made to you, the very first warning that you will receive will be, “There is no such thing as the supernatural; there is no such thing as miracle. (Hear, hear.) However wonderful anything that you may come across, it is explicable by natural law. However startling, however strange some phenomenon, it is your ignorance that makes it startling, and knowledge will explain to you how it is.” (Loud cheers.) That is the very first statement that you meet, that you must throw aside every notion of the supernatural and the miraculous, that the Universe and Nature are co-extensive, that there is nothing beyond, or above, or outside. (Hear, hear.) The next step is the denial of a personal God. The Theosophists cannot believe in a personal or anthropomorphic God of Christendom or of religions other than Christianity. The Theosophist is bound to say that you cannot have the limitations of personality when you are tracing the source of the Universe; that you cannot have an extra-cosmic power, but must search for an inter-cosmic life; and where the difference comes between the Atheist and the Theosophist is this: the Theosophist is a Pantheist. If I put to you the opposition as straightly as it can be put, it will be this. Looking back 491into the far beginning of things, at that time of which Crookes, the great English chemist, tells us that matter was homogeneous and universally diffused ere yet it had aggregated into atoms. Looking back to that far-off time, there are two possible solutions that are before you. The first is that the Universe as we know it, is the result of the gradual building together of atoms into molecules, of molecules into larger masses, of those masses into the suns and the worlds that we know. Is the Universe the outcome of the clashing of these myriad atoms, of the forces which work amongst them and in them, until at last that senseless matter and that blind force ultimate in the human consciousness, create the human mind? Is that the fashion in which the universe has been builded? Or instead of the clash of matter and of force are you to see in the universe the unfolding of a universal life? Are you to see intelligence guiding the atoms, and mind guiding the laws? Is it life or not-life that is at the very core of being, at the very heart of the universe? Those are the two answers to the great problem. Atheism takes the first, Pantheism takes the second, and the Theosophist embraces the Pantheistic hypothesis as alone giving sufficiency of cause for the effects we see around us. I do not propose to go further into that Pantheistic question. There is scarcely any need to justify the existence of Pantheism in the intellectual world. Bruno died for it in Rome, Spinoza argued for it in Holland. It has its place in the world of thought and none can deny to Pantheism a right to be a mighty philosophy, the foundation of some of the greatest systems in the world.

I pass from that. Take then now what one may fairly call the Great Unknown X in the equation of the universe, unknowable to us, inconceivable by us, and therefore there is not much to be gained by spending too much time on that part of the subject. As Buddha said long ago, Those questions take us nowhere; we had better deal more with the things which are comprehensible by the human intelligence. Now the Theosophist says, positing that unknown X, its primal manifestation is triple in its nature. You have substance or matter; you have life or motion; you have intelligence or consciousness; that is to say that going back as far as thought will carry us we never expect to come to a time when there will not be this substance, this motion, this intelligence. That triune manifestation of the unknown X is the furthest point backward to which our thought can reach.

Passing again for the moment from that, I come to what will probably be a difficulty in the minds of many of you, which I want to deal with at this stage, because it is here that if you were studying Theosophy the difficulty would meet you. Every theory of the universe that comes to you, comes to you on the authority of some thinker or another. The religious theory comes to you by the authority of a church or a priest. The scientific theory comes to you on the authority of some great scientific thinker, who has proved his right to be listened to in the world of thought.

But there is this great difference between the theory put forward by the priest and the theory put forward by the scientific teacher. The one says, “You must believe. You cannot prove it; you cannot investigate it; you cannot analyse it; you must take it on authority and on faith.” The other says, “Much of this theory will be difficult for you to grasp; some of it will be incomprehensible to you without scientific knowledge; but I have proved it step by step; it is based on experiment, not on faith; it is based on knowledge, not on guess, and you can verify it for yourselves if you will take the same pains that I have taken and travel along the same road along which I have gone. While you have not studied you can’t prove it. While you know nothing about the subject much of it will appear to you contradictory and possibly absurd; but it is all based on fact and therefore it is verifiable. I do not ask you to accept it; I do not tell you that you will be damned if you don’t believe it (Laughter), but I tell you it is truth, and I have proved it to be truth, and you can prove it to be truth for yourselves as you go along.” There again you have authority, but it is authority that is based on a foundation that you can test for yourself, and that I venture to say is the great difference between the authority of the priest and the authority of the scientific 492teacher. The one you can verify as you go along the road; the other you must believe, and no evidence is vouchsafed.

Now Theosophy comes under the second of these categories: that is to say its teachers do not take the tone of the priest; they take the tone of the scientific teacher. They do not say you must believe; they simply say to you, “This is the truth as we have found it. You can study it, you can verify it; you can go over for yourself the experiments through which we have gone. If you take our theories they will guide you. If you take our hypotheses they will help you. But if you choose to reject them do it if you will, and only believe as far as you can verify, only accept as far as you are able to understand.” But you may say to me, “You use the word teachers. Who are they?” Those whom we call teachers of Theosophy have been known by a great many names, and as some of the names are Sanskrit they seem to have given a good deal of offence; but these teachers or masters as they are called, are nothing more than human beings who have studied a special subject very carefully, who have obtained a knowledge of nature which is larger than the ordinary knowledge; and who because they know are able to do things that ignorant people cannot do; and who because they have studied have knowledge greater than that to which others can pretend. But you blunder very much as to the Theosophical position if you suppose these people are put forward as in any sense supernatural beings. They are nothing of the kind. They are ordinary human beings, or extraordinary only in this sense, in the sense that the specialist, the scientific man, is extraordinary when you take him amongst a group of average laymen. They have more knowledge, but only because they have studied. It has not come to them supernaturally, but by patience and long-continued investigation into the secrets of the great Mother Nature. These then are the people that we mean when we speak of the teachers of Theosophy, and the theories of the universe that the Theosophist studies come to him from these. And mind, in Hindostan where some of them live, they are known by the people who live there as you know those amongst whom you live. It is quite fair to say, do they exist? but if you want to know whether they exist or not you must take the same means of investigation here that you would take if you wanted to find out if the Emperor of Germany were a real person. Some people know them personally by speech, by sight, by correspondence, as you may know those amongst whom you have lived. Others only know them at second-hand by the testimony of these. That naturally is my own position. I have talked with and cross-examined people who have been in daily contact with these men, and I have found nothing supernatural, no claim on miraculous power, but the simplest and most straightforward statement as to how they lived and what work they performed. The testimony, so far as I was able to judge, was testimony based on truth and on knowledge, and backed up, let me add, by personal possession of some of the knowledge and some of the powers used in a perfectly natural and simple way in the ordinary habits of daily life, and not as a show, or in order to surprise and astonish.

Now whether you believe in the existence of those men or not is not to them of the smallest concern. They have never been anxious to press themselves upon the world, nor do they threaten you, as the Christian God is supposed to do, with various pains and penalties if you deny their existence. All they say is, “It is your own loss; it is your own business. We are ready to help if you want it, and if you don’t we will wait until you do”; that is to say, there is no great parade or ostentation, or attempt to force the knowledge, but the willingness to help the student which you find in every man of science, who may not always think it worth while to leave his own line of investigation to throw knowledge amongst those who are indifferent; but they are always ready to help when the desire for help is sincere, and to open the stores of knowledge to all who come desiring to know, and who are willing to learn in order that they may understand. These teachers, then, speaking of the nature of man, make certain definite statements about it which by the student of Theosophy 493are accepted as true as a basis for further investigation. If he does not choose he need not, but most of us do. Those are the famous seven principles so much talked of; that is to say, that the Theosophist learns that man is not a simple organism, and that for the purposes of understanding the organism you may divide him into seven parts. Some philosophies divide him into five, some into six, and some into seven, but the Theosophist takes the seven-fold division, as the most intelligible and throwing most light, especially on the mental functions of man. Those seven principles have been so often named that I need not trouble you with their names to-night. For the purposes of my lecture it will be sufficient to group them, not to take them as seven, but grouped together, that is, dividing the seven into three groups, because that simpler division will be sufficient for all that I can do tonight. Dividing them, then, into the three groups, you get what is called the individuality of man, that which makes the personal I, that which you mean when you say “I.” That includes the intellectual life of man. It includes also, the Theosophist would say, the spiritual life, that is, the spark of the universal spirit which he believes to be in each human frame, that part of the mighty life of nature, which acting through and in every natural object, is in man as in all the rest. That first group, then, the Ego, is what the Theosophist looks on as a group in man separable from the body. I will show you, in a moment, the line of proof on which that statement goes, but this individuality consists of the intellectual and the spiritual life, not separated from matter, as some people would imagine, for we know no separation of intelligence from material basis; we say that so far as investigation has gone, there is no such thing as pure intelligence, that is as intelligence divided from all material substratum. You may remember I put to you as the primal existence, substance, or matter; life, or motion; intelligence, or consciousness; and those we believe never to be separated, so that the disembodied soul, as it is sometimes spoken of, is a thing unknown in the Theosophical philosophy. The other group (I will not take it as three, as I said, for I prefer to take it as two, for the moment) – the other group will include the physical body, with the whole of man’s appetites and passions, that, in fact, which you would call his lower nature; and we assert that the higher nature, or the individuality, forms one group, and the lower nature, that is the body, with its physical life, or vitality, with its passions and desires, that that forms another group which is separable from the higher intelligence, from the higher nature. Now there, of course, is a point where great discord and controversy will arise. We allege it, not as a supernatural thing, but as a natural fact. Many of you will have heard, casually, probably, of what are called “Astral appearances.” That phrase is often used to designate the Ego separated from the body, and appearing separated from it. The mere fact that it appears, shows you it is partly material, because it is only where you are dealing with the material that visibility can possibly come in.

Now I ask you to throw back your minds to some difficulties I put last Sunday. I spoke about clairvoyance; I spoke about clair-audience; I spoke of the intensifying of the senses in disease; I spoke of thought-transference and of hypnotism. The whole of the phenomena which come under those great groups are explained by the Theosophist by this separability of the Ego from the bodily frame, the possibility of its existing apart from it and manifesting itself away from it; all this, with the reading at a distance that you get in the clairvoyant, is explained by the Theosophist as being the projection of this intelligence, this Ego, out of the material frame for awhile. The phenomena that you get in disease, where there is a strange intensity of perception and where a sick person can hear at a distance at which ordinary hearing is quite impossible, is explained by the Theosophist that where you have the higher and the lower nature balancing each other very often the lower is more vigorous than the higher; there this special acuteness will be impossible; but when physical disease of the bodily frame comes, when the lower nature for the time is weakened by the stress of the disease, then you find for the time the rising above it of the higher nature, and those cases that are so common in 494medical records are rendered intelligible by the fact of the Ego having, as it were, got through the material covering and exercising its intellectual faculties through the separating veil which the ordinary body makes. But the Theosophist says if it is done by disease it is done badly. If it is the result of disease it is necessarily mischievous; it is likely to be untrustworthy; but you can, if you choose to go through the necessary training, give to the higher self the mastery over the lower without mischievously lowering the vitality of the body or making it unfit for the duties of daily life; and very much of the training which is gone through by the practical student, as apart from the theoretical student of Theosophy, has for its object the training and development of the higher nature, making it master over the lower, so that what you get unconsciously in the mesmeric state you may get consciously in the more highly evolved state, so that higher and lower may work together with powers that are impossible until that evolution has been gone through.

Now that I put to you as a Theosophical explanation. I don’t ask you to accept it. I don’t ask you to take it for granted at first going off, but I do say, as it gives at least an intelligible hypothesis which includes under it a large number of phenomena which are utterly wanting of comprehensibleness under any other supposition, it is at least worth your investigation, unless of course you say that you know everything, unless you are sure no wider knowledge will ever dawn on the human race than this happy nineteenth century at the present time possesses. Of course if you are satisfied, there is no reason to enquire. If you have all, there is no object in going further; but if you find a hypothesis offered you which does give some sort of explanation for puzzling psychical phenomena, we say at least it is worth investigation, and it is only foolish to ridicule it until you have experimented and tried to understand it. This higher nature of man, this Ego, separable as we see from the body, does not perish when the body dies. There again you come to the point of differentiation between the Atheistic and Pantheistic philosophies. There you have the point of divergence between large numbers of you who are present, and I who believed like you, but have been driven out of it by study and by further investigation. (Loud applause.)

And this leads to the doctrine that will most certainly in European countries be met with the most opposition, although it is accepted as you know by vast numbers in the Oriental world, and has been so accepted for these many hundred years – I mean the doctrine of re-incarnation.

Now I saw the other day a statement “Mrs. Besant goes in for the transmigration of souls.” I did not think it possible for a statement showing so much ignorance to have been seriously made. Transmigration of souls, the old doctrine which is still believed in in Hindostan and was very widely taught at one period of the world’s history, is the doctrine that the living principle of man can go into lower forms of animal life and so on. There is no such doctrine as that found in Theosophical teachings. What is said is this: That the individuality of man does not perish with the one body that it animates at any special time; and I point out to you some facts in human life which, although they do not prove the proposition, suggest there may be something in it. The statement is that this Ego can incarnate itself in different personalities at long intervals in the world’s history: that is to say that when you are born you do not live for the first time on earth; neither when you die will you have passed through your last experience.

Frankly this doctrine will I know raise an immense amount of opposition in your minds (Hear, hear) chiefly because it is new (Loud cheers, and a voice, “It’s as old as the hills”). That is so, but I mean new to modern scientific thought. Now I will put to you one or two difficulties I hinted at last week.

Take the case of a boy like Hoffman. He is able to compose, that is to say he can make an arrangement of notes and a succession of notes which implies the knowledge of certain laws of harmony. It does not imply merely a good ear; it does not imply merely a lively musical imagination, it implies a knowledge of musical science and of 495principles it takes years to acquire in the ordinary way. Now the only tutor he had was his father, and his father has less knowledge of harmony than this boy has shewn in his compositions. You say “Genius.” What is genius? You answer nothing by using a word. We are trying to get at facts, not merely to use words as counters, and we ask what is the genius that enables this child to show a knowledge, a scientific knowledge, which he has not been years enough in the world to acquire in the ordinary way. Now the explanation of that from the Theosophical standpoint would be that that knowledge was partly at least acquired in a previous stage of existence, so that thus Wordsworth’s fancy is not only a dream – his notion that you brought knowledge with you is not only a mere stretch of poetical fancy, but is a real truth in nature, manifesting itself in this special way. Now you may say, that comes by hereditary transmission. Have you ever thought of the tremendous difficulties involved and covered by that easy phrase? Think of the evolution of the child from the junction of two cells. Think of the slow growth of body and of brain, and remember it is all fashioned out of the mother after the co-operation of the father. Then when you get to your transmission of genius, through generation after generation, when you try to get it to your physical basis, you must, if you are honest, face the tremendous difficulties which are implied in these marvellous abilities which the child shows being transmitted through generation after generation, and all bound up together in one single cell, invisible except under a high power of the microscope, till you come in your physical science to difficulties quite as tremendous as any which can possibly be put to you in the psychical explanation of these things. If everything were plain sailing, if we could see from the beginning to the end how that brain is made which has this enormous amount of knowledge, then you might refuse to look at any other explanation. The gravest men of science will tell you that they do not understand, and if you take the hypothesis of a man like Darwin (certainly not a man to be laughed at or to be made fun of, but a man who in his theory of pangenesis makes the greatest strain on human belief it is possible to make) when you see how far a scientific man is driven by the difficulties of the argument, you may then think it worth while at least to be thoughtful in reference to the problem, and not throw aside with a laugh an explanation which you do not understand (Loud cheers).

Of course in dealing with this the position of the convinced Theosophist is that this doctrine has come to him on the authority of the teachers of whom I spoke, who know it as Huxley knows any animal into which he examines in life; that is to say of those who have gained that stage of human development in which you look back on your past and are able to trace the steps whereby you have grown into real human maturity. But there again they tell us, “You need not believe it until you can prove it for yourself; you can take it if you choose or accept if you will, but if you think you are wiser than we who have studied, throw it aside by all means until the time comes for your own knowledge, and then you will see the truth as we see it to-day.”

On this again hinges the law of Karma, that is the law in the world of ethics, “The law of ethical causation” as Colonel Olcott calls it, a law which ought not to be difficult of conception by the ordinary secularist, because if there is one thing which we have insisted upon more than another it is that in the moral world, as in the mental and in the physical, it is impossible to escape from the realm of law. This doctrine of Karma shows the connection of the present and the past. The whole moral, mental, and physical condition of the world is the outcome of causes set going in the past, and that which you see is the inevitable result of the working of those forces.

Now dealing with that point Mr. Foote said somewhat hastily, “If you accept the law of Karma what about your Socialism? for every Social reformer fights against Karma.” That shows the utter misconception of the meaning of law. Law is not the declared will of some superior being; it is the ascertained sequence of events. We cannot help the law whether we like it or not, and all that this law tells us, like any physical law, is there are certain conditions of action, and the better you under496stand them the more you will be able to control the results that flow from them. Every one who thinks must admit that all that exists to-day is the inevitable result of what has existed in the past; but that does not make you sit down and refuse to act. On the contrary, the moment you understand everything goes by law, you have a motive for action; for if the present has been made by the past, the present makes the future as the past has made it. Just as the effects around you are noticeable because the causes have been set going in the past, so the causes you set going to-day will bear their fruits in the future, and so by working now you can mould the future and make it better and happier than the past.

The only difference that comes in between the Atheist and the Theosophist in connection with the law of Karma would be this: The Theosophist says to a man “You will have to reap your own harvest.” The Atheist would say “The reaping of that harvest will be cancelled by your death.” That is, of course, a very serious and grave difference. We say the man cannot escape. Sooner or later he will reap the fruits of his own action; sooner or later this law, under the sway of which he is, will bring about the effects of which his own actions have been the cause. There is no cancelment at death; there is no getting rid of the debt; you will have to pay it to the uttermost farthing, and it is there that the law of Karma turns on re-incarnation, making it part of a coherent scheme, tracing man’s destiny from the far past into the far future of his life. It is to be said for it from the moral point of view, those two things are believed in by the Buddhists; they believe in re-incarnation and they believe in the law of Karma, and the result of that belief has been that there is less crime amongst them than amongst any other religionists. I have here a passage from last year’s Secular Almanack in which there is a comparison between the amount of crime amongst the Buddhists of India and amongst other religionists. It is taken from the government report, so it is the nearest approach to accuracy we are able to get at. Out of every 274 Europeans one person is condemned for crime. Out of every 799 native Christians one person is condemned for crime; and only one person is condemned for crime out of every 3,787 Buddhists. It seems to be a good working theory of life whether you believe it or not, and it is very easy to understand how that force would work amongst people who for generations have been trained in this belief, upon whom it works as a moralising power whose strength no one can deny.

I pass from this to another point. I have scarcely time to speak of physical powers, but this has drawn so much attention in the outside world that it would seem as if I wanted to avoid it if I left it untouched. I mean what is called phenomena. It is a stupid word, because it only means appearances, but it is used in the sense of unusual occurrences. Now these phenomena may be divided roughly into four classes First you have a very large number, the greatest number, that simply are magnetic phenomena. You know how extraordinary are the results you can obtain by using the ordinary apparatus for electrical or magnetic experiments. You know also how many things are alleged by the Spiritualists to occur by means of spirits.

Now one thing that Madame Blavatsky set herself to do in America was to show that what the Spiritualist could do by alleged spirits in the dark, she could do in the daylight naturally and without the aid of spirits at all, and she alleged and proved by action that you could bring about the phenomena which are generally met in the spiritualistic séance rooms without any help from spirits at all, but by the mere utilising of little known natural laws. The larger number of the phenomena come under that head. They are really magnetic phenomena done without the ordinary apparatus. I will take one as an instance. You know that with an electro-magnet if you cut the circuit which joins it to the electric battery, anyone who likes can raise the iron.

Without saying anything to anybody you can just screw your wire on the battery and the strongest man will not be able to lift the magnet. I am taking it for granted you have a battery of fair strength. That is done with the ordinary apparatus. An object can be similarly fixed – that is the allegation I am putting to you – without the 497apparatus, but by the same force, the force of magnetism, only directed without the assistance of a wire. You need not believe, but I want that you should understand the Theosophical position in the matter, that there is no pretence or trick at all, no pretence of anything but natural forces used by persons who understand them, to produce their natural results. Then again you get another set of phenomena which are not thus explicable. They are in the nature of psychical conjuring. You know how a conjurer will deceive you and how he will make you think all sorts of things which are not true. You may play the same tricks with people’s brains that you can play with their eyes, and a certain number of these phenomena are merely, to use Madame Blavatsky’s own phrase, “psychological conjuring.” One day, with some half a dozen other people, there was some talk about getting frightened by things you don’t understand. There was a gentleman there, a very well-known man, who said he would not be frightened by anything; he had no nerves and he didn’t mind what happened. “Very well,” was the answer, “pick up my handkerchief.” The handkerchief was going to be picked up, when suddenly a snake of the cobra kind appeared beside it and the gentleman started back. That was simply a psychological delusion. There was no snake at all; and I asked what would have happened if he had put forward his hand. He would have found it was not there. If you are a person of strong will you can impose your own thought on the person who is with you and make them see what you want them to see. It is merely a case of momentary hypnotism. You know what fools people make of themselves when mesmerised, though there is nothing in the way at all. This she called conjuring, because these are merely illusions, merely tricks which are played by persons who know how to play them. Many others are simply explicable by thought transference, the power of making a person think and telling them what they are thinking; not dealing with anything which is wonderful, except that all nature’s powers are wonderful, only we lose the sense of wonder when we deal with what we are accustomed to, while the sense of wonder is awake when we come to sudden cases which we are not accustomed to meet. Those three will cover most phenomena. There is one other kind, the transference of objects, that does not come under any of the three. Those are certainly the most difficult to understand and the most difficult to believe, but here again you are not bound to believe them. You may be a Theosophist without believing in them. It is only a question of evidence. If you can get the evidence that convinces you there is no strain made upon your faith.

The last point I will put to you is another which I know will raise antagonism, and I am sure you will pardon me if I purposely raise those which I know you will disagree with, because it is only right that I should put frankly those things which you think are the most unreasonable and the most unlikely to be true. I think it better to do that than to deal with what is common to us all. This last point is that life, or rather living beings, exist outside our globe and atmosphere, right through the whole of this mighty universe.

Now I will ask you quietly for a moment to think whether you are prepared to deny the possibility of that hypothesis. Do you really think that in the whole of this universe you are the only beings who live? Do you think all the mighty forces of nature at work for milleniums on milleniums have ultimated in life on this one little globe only? If you do not, you can have no quarrel with the Theosophists. If you admit you may have such living beings, they will be different from us because the conditions are different; if you take that great scientific law, that wherever there is life, it will be life conditioned by its environment, then you must be prepared to admit that there will be forms of life very different from yours, and in this universe, in which we are as but a grain of sand, there may be the most marvellous forms of living things, of which we know absolutely nothing. The moment you grant that, you grant all we ask, because you have opened up then the universe for investigation, and it is only a question of power to investigate and power to give out what you have found by your investigation. I am not 498now putting whether you accept or not the views which have been put forward by some as to the nature of these living beings, or forms, or anything else. I am only pointing out to you that, unless you are going to be full of the most stupendous self-conceit, you cannot deny the possibility of living things other than those you know. Then they say “superstition.” What is there superstitious in believing there may be living things different from ourselves under different conditions of life and manifesting themselves within their condition? The answer is, that will bring us all back to priestcraft. If you shut your eyes, yes; for wherever there is darkness there is superstition, and out of superstition and ignorance comes the chance of the priest to tyrannize, and if you are wise you will say, “No, we will understand, we will investigate, we won’t believe until we do understand, and we won’t accept until we know. But we won’t be fools enough to tie a bandage round our eyes and then say we can’t see.” Now it is alleged here again that information may be obtained either second-hand from others or first-hand by yourself, for the whole of this comes down to personal investigation. If you really want to know the truth, you can never know until you know of personal knowledge, and everything else is second-hand, and, to a large extent, not valuable. If you want to know, you must go along the lines of learning which have been traced by those who are further on in the subject than you are. Study for yourself. In this Hall there are many whom I have taught, and it is very likely some of them will remember the difficulties they at first had over the microscope, and the large amount of faith they were good enough to repose in me as a teacher when I said there were things there which they could not see. Why not? Because they had no practice; because in every natural science you have to go through some drudgery and apprenticeship before you are able to understand, or even to see. The person who first looks sees a lot of blobs he cannot understand; generally he is misled, and thinks he has found some animal, or that a bit of dirt on the lens is some fresh organism that no one has ever found out. (Laughter.) Similar blunders will lie in the road of the practical student of forms of life other than our own, but just as patience in the one case gets over it, so does patience in the other, and until you have tried and studied, you have no right to pass an opinion upon the subject at all. In fact, what I am pleading for here is knowledge and the right to investigate; and I am not easily frightened by bogey cries about superstition, because I have seen too many ghosts made up of turnip tops and sheets to run away from the road I want to travel, for fear of meeting one of the bogeys there. I am prepared to take the risk, and I never found superstition flourish on the soil of knowledge, or found those who were trying to learn were those who were most likely to give way to the claims of credulity or yield a blind faith to any man who lived.

In closing this lecture, I can only say to you that I am far more conscious than you can be how very, very little credit I have really done to my subject, but it is a hard one to deal with amongst those who know nothing of it, a difficult one with its fresh conceptions and, as some people will think, somewhat uncanny clothing to make it seem like a respectable nineteenth-century gentleman in the eyes of an audience such as this. They do not like, some of them, its Oriental garb, forgetting that words are only sounds to convey what we mean, and in every science we get a terminology which is very tiresome to the student when he is beginning; and I have only, in leaving this for to-night and in leaving it to any of you who may be inclined to search for yourselves, I have only to say one personal word before I sit down. I am told that if I am a Theosophist I am unfair to Secularism and that I have gone too far to stand on the Secular platform. The moment my brethren of the N.S.S. tell me that, that moment I will leave it; but I will never give your enemies and mine the right of saying I left the ranks of organized Freethought of my own free will. (Loud applause.) If you want me to go, say so, and I will go. (“No.”) If you desire I should not stand on this platform, to-night shall be the last time I shall ever stand here, but not of my my own free will, for I hold that Freethought is 499wide enough to cover every form of honest investigation. (Cheers.) I love too well the party I have worked with for 15 years to give one handle to the enemy if I can help it by word or act of mine; but there is one thing I will not do for any party, and that is to be traitor to the truth as I see it, or to hold my lips when I have anything to say that I believe will be useful to the men and women around me.

Many years have passed since, in a quiet country vicarage, I took a vow to be true to truth all through my life, and to follow her wherever she might lead me. On that first moment, when she called me, I left home, social position, friends, and went out alone into the world with my child in my arms. Later, her cry came to me once more, demanding that last wealth of mine, and I laid then my child at her feet as I had laid all else, so that I might keep unstained the loyalty I had sworn to her. And for the rest of my life, as in its past, this one fealty I will keep unstained. If friendships fail me they must fail; if human love leave me it must go; so that I be true to that one truth I follow, and strive to do her service in the world in which I live. She may lead me into the desert, I will go after her; she may strip me of all love, I will still cling to her; and I ask for no loftier epitaph on my tombstone than this:

“She tried to follow Truth.”

(Loud and continued cheering.)

Footnotes