Narcissism and Animal Sensualism Personified

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Down to Earth Series · 7 pages

From Blavatsky Collected Writings XIII, pages 345–47, under the heading “On Dr Carpenter and Scientific Prejudice” — a fragment in H.P. Blavatsky's handwriting found in the Adyar Archives, as Boris de Zirkoff notes. The title-page illustration is credited to Obscurum per Obscurius, and the running head reads “Brainwaves of an Invertebrate Zoologist.”

The piece is built on a contrast stated at the head: that from Aristotle down to Herbert Spencer no philosopher has pretended to have fathomed even the least important forces of Nature, whereas an invertebrate zoologist acts as if Mother Nature had placed the aggregate of her forces in his vest pocket and appointed him sole guardian of her secrets. The named subject is Dr W.B. Carpenter — William Benjamin Carpenter, 1813–1885, English physician, invertebrate zoologist and physiologist — whom Blavatsky calls the greatest and fiercest opponent the modern Spiritualists had to encounter. Her complaint is not that he was hostile but that he was hostile in a particular way. Many men of science, she writes, were as uncompromisingly hostile to the new “epidemic” as he was, but chose the prudent course: unable to demonstrate what the phenomena are, they either shut their eyes to the facts or declined to have anything to do with them, which she calls the wisest course while science has nothing more definite to offer than generalizations. Carpenter took the other course, and the fragment announces that it proposes to prove the charge. The opening paragraph adds a further count — that some who forged a synonym of refined voluptuousness out of a man's name also got hold of his ideas and paraded them as their own without giving him credit.

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