Philosophers and Philosophicules

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Living the Life Series · 14 pages

First published in Lucifer, Vol. V, No. 26, October 1889, pages 85–91, and reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings XI pages 431–39. Two epigraphs open it: Locke on interpreting other men's words by the notions of our own philosophy, and Herbert Spencer's First Principles on knowledge of the lowest kind being un-unified, science partially unified, and philosophy completely unified knowledge.

A definition is placed before the argument, and it is the most compact statement of the position anywhere in this section. Theosophy is called the very synthesis of philosophy in its widest abstract sense as in its special qualifications, the quintessence of the highest transcendental philosophy; it is described as no national property but the universal code of science and of the most transcendental ethics ever known, lying at the root of every moral philosophy and religion. A qualification follows immediately, and it is one that the section's other files rely on: occultism is one of the sciences of Theosophy or the Wisdom-Religion, but by no means the whole of it. The article then turns to the new accusations brought by what it calls captious censors against the Society and against Theosophy in particular, undertaking to summarise them as it goes and to notice the freshest denunciation. The Spencer epigraph indicates how the reply will be framed — as a question about whether the critics have unified their knowledge sufficiently to judge — and the Locke epigraph as a caution against the habit of construing another system in the vocabulary of one's own.

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