Madame Blavatsky on the Boogeymen of Science

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 16 pages

Three connected articles from The Theosophist of 1883, and the opening sentence is the one worth carrying away: that the fanaticism of blank negation is often more tenacious, more dangerous, and always far harder to combat than that of mere assumption. What she sees following from it is the steady crumbling of time-honoured ideals, the growing supremacy of extreme physico-materialist thought, and a stubborn refusal by most of Western society to look at psychological facts that a minority had demonstrated as conclusively as a mathematical equation.

The bugbears of the title are mesmerism and homeopathy, treated as the two subjects official science of the day would not examine because examining them would cost too much. A long opening footnote is more interesting than most of the article, and shows how carefully she wanted her terms taken: she coins physico-materialism and metaphysico-materialism, concedes that in one sense every Buddhist and every occultist is strictly speaking a materialist, and puts the whole question as one about the nature of Force. Shall we say that Force is Spirit, or that Spirit is a force? Anything capable of producing an effect on any portion of the Kosmos, objective or subjective, must on her account be material — otherwise it is a pure abstraction, a no-thing.

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