Exact Science versus Archaic Philosophy

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 31 pages

Thirty-one pages setting the claims of nineteenth-century science against those of the archaic tradition, and unusually candid about what it does not expect to achieve. Truth, the abstract begins, is established by thorough investigation and delay; falsehood prospers by precipitancy. It is useless, Blavatsky adds, to demand or expect from the learned men of the age what they are absolutely incapable of giving — not until the next cycle changes and transforms their inner nature by improving the texture of their spiritual minds.

The specific claims are testable in principle, which is what makes the study interesting rather than merely dismissive. Sound and light, hearing and sight, are always associated — but sound, she asserts, is seen before it is heard, a statement about the order of perception that would have been as startling to her readers as to ours. The second part turns to the pivotal attributes of the first four Root-Races and to the correspondences between them and the senses. Whatever one concludes, the essay is a good specimen of her method: an unfalsifiable framework, and inside it a series of assertions specific enough to argue with.

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