Blavatsky on Spinoza and Western Philosophers

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 8 pages

An unfinished essay in her own handwriting, held in the Adyar archives and not published until The Theosophist printed it in April 1962, more than seventy years after her death. It opens not with Spinoza but with Epicurus, called one of the greatest materialists that ever lived and the one who argued his case most strongly — the great, the virtuous, the noble and chaste Epicurus, who called the higher ends and divine laws mere inventions of the human mind and rejected the immortality of the soul.

The passage she quotes against modern positivism is his: that the soul must be material because we trace it issuing from a material source, because it exists only in a material system, is nourished by material food, grows with the body, matures with it, declines with its decay, and must die with its death. Her point is that this same man was nevertheless a Deist and, on her reading, a Theosophist — he devoted his life to natural science and to the analysis of divine action in relation to nature, concluded that an infinite universe could not be the product of divine action because evil cannot otherwise be accounted for, and yet admitted a Supreme Being and gods of human shape but colossal proportions. The cohesive power of his school, she notes, was never equalled by any other in antiquity.

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