The Materialism of Today Is Born of the Brutal Yesterday

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Down to Earth Series · 6 pages

A short extract from Before the Veil, the preface to Isis Unveiled, and effectively the statement of purpose for that book. Deeply sensible of the titanic struggle then in progress between materialism and the spiritual aspirations of mankind, she writes, her constant endeavour had been to gather into the chapters — like weapons into armouries — every fact and argument that could aid the latter in defeating the former.

The diagnosis that gives the file its title is genealogical rather than merely hostile: that the materialism of today, sickly and deformed child as it is, was born of the brutal yesterday, being the bastard progeny of the French Revolution and its reaction against ages of religious bigotry and repression — and that unless its growth is arrested it may become our master. The remedy proposed is not to defend theology against science but to distinguish between them and their objects: to show the false theologies in their naked deformity and separate divine religion from human dogma. The closing sentence sets the terms the whole Down to Earth series works in: that her voice is raised for spiritual freedom, and her plea made for enfranchisement from all tyranny, whether of science or of theology.

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