Psychometry Is the Natural but Latent Faculty in Us

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 12 pages

From The Theosophist of July 1883, reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings IV as The Soul of Things, and written as a review of the three-volume work of that name issued ten years earlier by Professor William Denton, an Anglo-American geologist, in collaboration with his wife. What she admires about it is the method: it is a record of extensive research into the origin of visible things with no laboratory instruments at all — no furnace, crucible, flask, chemical or lens — and yet containing facts about the hidden half of nature that equal or outvie any discovery made with them.

The faculty being described is defined as natural but latent in everyone: that by which the inner self cognises the dynamic world of causes. The passage quoted at the head is the most memorable statement of the doctrine in this section — that not only the images of the past are held in the picture galleries of Akasha but also the sounds of past voices, the perfumes of archaic flowers withered ages ago, and the aromas of fruits that hung on trees when man was a mumbling savage and polar ice a mile thick covered what are now the fairest countries under the sun. And the consequence she draws is domestic rather than cosmic: that even on the walls of our most private apartments, where we think the eye of intrusion shut out and our retirement beyond profaning, there exist the vestiges of all our acts — silhouettes of whatever we have done.

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