Blavatsky Refutes the Modern Negators of Ancient Science

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 18 pages

One of the last things she published, from Lucifer of April 1891, and written as a direct answer to a charge. Theosophists in general and the writer in particular, she notes, had been severely taken to task for disrespect to science — asked what right they had to question the conclusions of the most eminent men of learning, to refuse them an infallibility that implies omniscience, and to contemptuously ignore universally accepted theories. The article is written to give the reasons.

The first move is to head off a misreading, and it inverts the terms of the accusation. The negators of science in her title are not the theosophists: by science she means ancient wisdom, and its negators are the modern materialist scientists. The dedication sets the target more precisely still — it is offered to those who, though enlightened on some special point of science, take upon themselves the right of pronouncing arbitrarily on all things, and reject whatever is new and shocking to their ideas, often for the sole reason that if it were true they could not have remained ignorant of it. Plutarch stands at the head of the piece, addressing someone better grounded in the doctrines of the ancestors than to believe that the soul freed from the body is unconscious.

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