Madame Blavatsky on the Secret Doctrine, Her Magnum Opus

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 7 pages

Seven pages answering complaints from her own readers, and the natural companion to her demolition of Isis Unveiled elsewhere in this section. Students of Theosophy outside the inner ring had been saying the teachings did not satisfy them: one took her to task for leaving the door open to hostile criticism by taking too little account of modern science and modern thought; another complained that the explanations were incomplete.

The second complaint is printed at length, and it is a fair one. A close reader of ten years' standing describes reading and re-reading the book, collating passages, and finding the best explanations on occult points marred just as they begin to grow lucid by a reference to some exoteric philosophy or religion, which breaks the train of reasoning and leaves the explanation unfinished — so that parts can be understood but no succinct idea emerges, particularly on Parabrahman, the first and second Logos, Spirit, Matter and Fohat. Her reply is that this follows from a mistaken notion of what the book was for: it had never been intended to dovetail with modern science or to explain occult points. She was and remained, she writes, more concerned with facts than with scientific hypotheses.

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