Serjeant Cox on the Negators of Spiritual Evolution

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Living the Life Series · 16 pages

A sixteen-page compilation opened by an abstract and train of thoughts with page references, built around Serjeant Cox's reply to the scientific critics of spiritual evolution.

The opening describes the attack rather than the defence, and does so with some relish: the biologists, clad from head to toe in the panoply of the exact sciences and hardened in battles against ignorance, superstition and falsehood, rushed to their places in the ranks and began the work of demolition as men having authority. Against them, spiritualism is said to have fortified its positions by ocular demonstration, slowly replacing fanciful hypothesis and blind faith with a series of phenomena that invite the crucial tests of the most exacting experimentalists — the claim being that the argument has moved onto ground where evidence rather than authority decides it. A sharp observation follows about the position both sides have been left in: that the fundamental doctrines of theology and the cold negations of science have each been successfully assailed by learned and skilful writers, so that neither is standing on the ground it assumes. Haeckel is named as having sown wind and reaped the whirlwind, with the aphorism that for faith there is no middle ground — it must be either completely blind or it will see too much. The strongest claim of the file concerns influence rather than truth: that Haeckel's Anthropogeny has plunged more minds into profound materialism than any other book of physicalism, with the sour comparison that the cure-all of a street quack will often secure a larger audience than the medicines of an honest physician.

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