Speculative Lucubrations of an Aristotelean Philosopher

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Down to Earth Series · 34 pages

A thirty-four page reply to a philosophical critic of Spiritualism and Occultism, opened by a full abstract and train of thoughts with page references throughout.

The reply works by turning the critic's own standards back on him. He is described first as the mouthpiece of a majority that has worked out an elaborate policy of sophistry and paradox behind which each member hides his personal views, with his “respectable deference to public opinion” read as shorthand for hypocrisy; and as a patriot who postulates that the intellect of the average Briton stands well above the average intellect of humanity at large. The substantive charge against his reasoning is that he confuses phenomena for which the agency of disembodied spirits is claimed with natural phenomena for which every trace of the supernatural is rejected. From there Blavatsky presses the consistency argument that the piece is built on: that whoever does not believe in Spiritualism cannot consistently believe in Christianity, whose very foundation is the materialization of its Saviour; that if Spiritualism and Occultism are superstition and falsehood, so are the Mosaic miracles, the witch of Endor, the resurrections and the materialization of angels; and that belief in the Holy Ghost is no less blind than belief in the presence of departed parents, nor faith in an abstract and never-to-be-scientifically-proven principle any more respectable than the conviction of those who believe the spirits of the people they loved are near them. The closing contrast is methodological: physical and psychological phenomena court experiment and the investigation of science, whereas supernatural religion dreads it.

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