C.C. Massey on Ancient Opinions upon Psychic Bodies

Charles Carleton Massey · Constitution of Man Series · 11 pages

An essay by Charles Carleton Massey from Five Years of Theosophy, the 1885 collection selected from The Theosophist, carrying two footnotes inserted by Blavatsky in her capacity as editor. Massey's complaint is that modern spiritualism falls very short of the sublime designation it has assumed: chiefly intent on the phenomenal proofs of a future existence, it concerns itself little with the distinction between matter and spirit, and rather prides itself on having demolished materialism without the aid of metaphysics.

The point he presses is that proving survival settles nothing about what survives. A Platonist, he suggests, might observe that recognising a future existence is perfectly consistent with a very practical and even dogmatic materialism — one that would not greatly disturb the repose of the modern phenomenalists. His image for their position is exact: given consciousness safely housed in a psychic body which demonstrably outlasts the physical carcase, we are like men saved from shipwreck, thankful and content for the moment, not asking whether they are landed on a hospitable shore, a barren rock, or an island of cannibals. He allows that this hand-to-mouth immortality does not satisfy the thoughtful minds who give the movement its life, only that it supplies the relief most people feel on discovering, in an age of doubt, that they are undoubtedly to live again. The ancient opinions of the title are then set out as the alternative.

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