Musings of an Unpopular Philosopher

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Down to Earth Series · 25 pages

A twenty-five page gathering of Blavatsky's editorial writing for Lucifer, the London periodical she launched in 1887, opened by a contents and train of thoughts running to several pages with references throughout.

The first movement concerns the magazine itself and the reception it met — a radiant beam destroying the darkness of night, the section headed “Ever Onward,” the observation that in an age of iconoclasm and prosaic realism no one who dabbles in things unseen is counted a philosopher, even an unpopular one, and a passage on the verdict of posterity arguing that historians are the descendants of the patristic biographers who made an apostate of the Emperor Julian and a saint of Constantine. Sections follow on “Our Morning Star,” on a wicked charge laid against the magazine, and on what Lucifer undertakes to review and preach — modern rather than ancient ethics, metaphysical against materialistic philosophy. A second movement compares then and now: the age of Ovid or of Hosea, the modern conviction that the muddy water of the rivers of modern life deserves more attention than the rivers of ancient life, and a passage on duels between nations being judged by a different code of honour from duels between individuals. A third turns to monuments and what became of them — the pyramid of Cheops seen by Herodotus with its outer coating of immaculate marble against the skeleton that remains, and the fate of the Colossus of Rhodes, whose remains were plundered and sold in 683 AD after the Rhodians had taken money from donors to raise it again. The closing movement is on public opinion as the most dangerous of foes and constructive criticism as the benefactor of thought, with the Unpopular Philosopher of the title characterised as one who has nothing to lose, and truth described as the result of conflicting opinions, like the spark struck from two flints.

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