Materialism, Spiritualism, Monism

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Confusing Words Series · 5 pages

An unusually tidy piece of argument. One postulate is set down — that every mental change is signalled by a molecular change in the brain substance — and the three positions of the title are given as the three possible readings of it. Materialism says the mental changes are caused by the molecular ones. Spiritualism, meaning those who believe in a soul, says the molecular changes are caused by the mental ones, thought acting on brain matter through the medium of Fohat. Monism says there is no causal relation at all, the mental and the physical being two sides of the same thing — which the file marks in a bracket as a verbal evasion.

Occultism's reply puts the first view out of court entirely and interrogates the second: what is it that presides so judicially over the mental changes, what is the noumenon of the mental phenomena making up the external consciousness of physical man, and what is it we recognise as the terrestrial self which does control and regulate the flow of its own mental states? No occultist, she allows, would deny that the materialist theory expresses a truth in its way — the superficial brain-consciousness is bound up for all practical purposes with the integrity of the cerebral matter. But that brain-consciousness or personality is mortal, being a distorted reflection. A long footnote separates the monism of Lewes and Bain, which compresses all phenomena into one substance and so entails annihilation, from the transcendental monism of esoteric philosophy.

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