HPB-SB-14-40

H. P. Blavatsky Scrapbooks

from Adyar archives of the International Theosophical Society

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vol. 14, p. 40	volume 14, page 40 vol. title: vol. period: 1882 pages in vol.: 174
Legend HPB note HPB highlighted HPB underlined HPB crossed out <Editors note> <Archivist note> Lost or unclear SBT, DT Restored

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eng • рус

MR. RODEN NOEL “ON SOME THEOSOPHIC DOCTRINES.”

To the Editor of “Light.”

Sir,—I am waiting for the completion of Mr. Noel’s attack before attempting a reply which, unless the concluding part is more unanswerable than those already published, I believe I shall be able to offer to it. In the meanwhile, however, I will ask you to let me at once call attention to what I cannot but regard as a very strange and prejudicial misjudgment in a note to the second part of the criticism. Controversy on the main questions (which I shall endeavour accurately to define) would be much embarrassed by the necessity for verbal explanations. If, however, Mr. Noel really thinks that the doctrines in question affirm the limitation of consciousness to this brain-life, pray let him say so. I am sure that he intends to deal fairly with these expositions; but to base that contention expressly on such passages as the following, taken out of their context, and even then not quite completely, is not to do so. I give the first with Mr. Noel’s italics and notes of interjection. “The spirit, of course, for all its comparative ethereality and incorporeality, a space occupying and material entity, is borne about by magnetic currents, swayed here and there like dead leaves!!!” “Surely,” says Mr. Noel thereupon, “the writer is a very decided, one might say very gross materialist.” Now he has omitted the important words after “spirit”: “sunk in its post-mortem trance,” in the original; important, because it was the very object of the writer to shew that in the particular case under consideration (an apparition described by Mr. Terry) it was not a conscious, intentional visit by the true spirit, but that this being in the first stage after death had not yet emerged from its astral integument, with which it was therefore for the moment identified, and so spoken of. How any one can have read these “Fragments” with common care, and then stumbling on such a passage as the above, can have supposed the writer to mean that the true spiritual Ego is “borne about by magnetic currents, and swayed here and there like dead leaves,” is to me incomprehensible. On the other hand that sentence is strictly applicable to what, when quitted by the Ego, the writer calls the “shell,” and which, even before that, would be subject to just the same laws, the control of the Ego being in abeyance during the “post-mortem trance.” It is called “the spirit” in this place merely to distinguish it from the empty shell, as I submit should have been perfectly apparent from the context.

“Thought, memory, and will are the energies of the brain.” “Has Buchner or Moleschott ever said anything more crassly materialistic?” asks Mr. Noel. And I ask in reply, Has the writer in the Theosophist ever said, as Buchner and Moleschott have maintained, that these energies are of the brain alone? Has the conscious spiritual Ego after bodily death a brain? and is not the whole of this teaching designed to shew what are the conditions of the individual future life of consciousness and thought? But in this paragraph the writer is referring to adepts and mediums—people living this bodily life, and acting through and by its organs. My idealism is as sensitive as Mr. Noel’s, but really I can bear without flinching the enunciation of a physiological truism.

Now it is quite competent to Mr. Noel to shew, if he can, that the theosophical teachers are no philosophers, and do not understand the tendencies of their own doctrines. But it is quite another thing to impute intentional inculcation of materialism to writers who avow altogether different principles. In the two instances above referred to there can be no question at all of unconscious inconsistency. Either the author of the “Fragments,” when he says “of course,” what he (for the moment, and for a special purpose) calls “the spirit,” is material, deliberately means to say that there is nothing else in the universe than matter, or Mr. Noel has simply misunderstood him. And when he says that thought, &c., are energies of the brain, he either means this in the sense of Buchner and Moleschott, and denies any conscious disembodied life whatever, or again Mr. Noel has mistaken him. I leave it to Mr. Noel himself to say which of these alternatives he thinks most probable.

I must also protest against the questions at issue being prejudiced by random quotations from the columns of the Theosophist, in which many different writers are allowed to deliver themselves without any authorisation from the acknowledged leaders of the Theosophic Society.

C. C. M.

Editor's notes

Sources

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  Light, v. 2, No. 97, November 11, 1882, p. 502