Madame Blavatsky on the Introversion of Mental Vision

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 8 pages

A response to experiments by F.W.H. Myers and his colleagues at the Society for Psychical Research in London, and one of the most concrete pieces of reasoning in the section. The result that interested her was odd enough that the newspapers had picked it up: in a large majority of trials — too many to be chance — a blindfolded thought-reader shown a drawing of an arrow reported it pointing the wrong way. Turn the paper so the head pointed right, and it was read off as pointing left.

Some journalists concluded there was a mirage on the inner plane of sensation as well as the outer. Her explanation goes deeper, and starts from something uncontroversial: an object as we see it and its image on the retina are not merely different in position but exactly reversed, and how that inverted image comes to be experienced the right way up is a mystery physical science admits it cannot solve. Western metaphysics, she argues, has fared no better — Reid and Hamilton and their school flounder in a bog of speculation, and the only philosopher who caught a glimpse of the truth was Berkeley, who to the regret of all students of the true philosophy could not get past theological Christianity in spite of his intuitions.

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