< The Occult World (continued from page 11-218) >
the believers proposed to account for them was thought unnecessary. Mr. Sinnett, however, seems to think that the lady was not fairly treated, for a great part of his book is intended to show that she must have been acting in good faith. The name, by the way, is hardly so “manifestly Russian” as Mr. Sinnett thinks; in fact there is a decidedly Polish ring about it. However, Russian or Pole, Madame Blavatsky is doubtless a clever woman. But when she was about creating a cup and saucer, why did she not produce them directly on the table-cloth instead of giving ingenuous gentlemen the trouble of grubbing for them under the roots of a tree? It is curious, by the way, that so little has been done of any importance by the extraordinary powers which the “Brotherhood” seem to possess. True, the reader is informed that during the Indian mutiny they contrived to use “their own methods” of distributing information, “when this would operate to quiet popular excitement and discourage new risings,” and so far we are their debtors. But when it is stated that Madame Blavatsky was enabled, in the composition of her great work, Isis Unveiled—a work with which we have not the advantage of being acquainted—to make “references to books of all sorts, including many of a very unusual character,” to which she had physically no access, we can only wonder that she and her allies have done so little for literature. Nor let any one suppose that this is because the Brothers, who appear to be chiefly natives of India and to live somewhere in Thibet, are unacquainted with European languages. There are given in this book many letters from a personage rejoicing in the name of Koot Hoomi Lal Sing, which are expressed in, we cannot say excellent, but perfectly intelligible English, or rather, if it must be said, American. The writer, while pleading his want of acquaintance “with Western, especially English, modes of thought and action” (which in itself is curious, seeing that we are told he had been sent to Europe to be educated—where?), refers to Bacon, Robert Boyle, and the Royal Society; knows all about Socrates, Copernicus, Galileo, and Robert Records; says “‘Roma ante Romulum fuit’ is an axiom taught us in your English schools;” and uses “a Paris Daumont drawn by a team of yaks or camels” as an image of incongruity. Even Mr. Sinnett seems to have once had his suspicions, for he is careful to tell his readers that “Madame Blavatsky had been saying that Koot Hoomi’s spelling of skepticism with a k was not an Americanism in his case, but due to a philological whim of his.” Probably it is due to a grammatical whim that he begins another letter, “Availing of the first moments of leisure,” and says, “We will be at cross purposes until” so-and-so. What sort of a whim it is that makes him talk of “deific powers in man” Mr. Sinnett does not say. Seriously, however, it is melancholy to see this kind of rubbish gravely adduced as “a study of the most sublime importance to every man who cares to live a life worthy of his human rank in creation; who can realize the bearing on ethics of certain knowledge concerning his own survival after death.” In the first place it is not easy to see what possible connexion there can be between man’s survival after death and Madame Blavatsky’s hanky-panky with teacups and cigarettes, or “Koot Hoomi’s longwinded discourses about “the lower group of etheric agents,” “sublimated forms of spiritual energy,” and the like; and secondly, if there were, our readers will remember a certain trenchant, if not truculent, remark of Prof. Huxley’s which is too well known to need quotation.
After all, the old test of telling the number of a concealed bank-note is still open; and if the occultists plead, as “Koot Hoomi” does in regard to another test, almost equally good, that “precisely because it would close the mouths of the sceptics it is inadmissible,” in that case it is hardly fair to rail at the sceptics as he does. Nor can it be believed that people who decline to take the simplest means to convince mankind of the genuineness of their pretensions can have the ardent desire which they profess of securing the moral and spiritual improvement of the human race.
Mr.Sinnett's Book on "The Occult world"
We exceedingly regret that, owing to an error made by our printer, the head-lines of a review of The Occult World quoted last week from The Athenæum, were set in this journal as if Mr. Sinnett were the author of the review, and were condemning his own book.
Among the later arrivals at the British Association at York was Mr. Alfred R. Wallace.
<Untitled> (The “KNEPH.”...)
...
<Untitled> (The Bombay Guardian...)
...
The Human Battery
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<... continues on page 11-219 >
Editor's notes
- ↑ Mr.Sinnett's Book on "The Occult world" by unknown author, London Spiritualist, No. 472, September 9, 1881, p. 121
- ↑ The “KNEPH.”... by unknown author
- ↑ The Bombay Guardian... by unknown author, Sunday Mirror, The, September 11, 1881
- ↑ The Human Battery by Tailor, C.E., Saint Thomas Times, Wednesday 21, 1881
Sources
-
London Spiritualist, No. 472, September 9, 1881, p. 121