Blavatsky and Tolstoy on the Science of Life

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy · Living the Life Series · 12 pages

First published in Lucifer, Vol. I, No. 3, November 1887, pages 203–11, and reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings VIII pages 240–49. Twelve pages. The illustration on page 9 is Paul Frankl's photograph of reflections on the frozen Leeds to Liverpool canal at Shipley, October 2010. It is the shortest of the four Tolstoy items in the library.

The article opens on the question and on the long record of failure to answer it: what is life? Hundreds of the most philosophical minds and scores of learned physicians have asked, to little purpose; the veil thrown over primordial Kosmos and the mysterious beginnings of life has never been withdrawn to the satisfaction of honest science. The observation that follows is characteristic — that the more the men of official learning try to penetrate the dark folds, the more intense the darkness becomes and the less they see, being like the treasure-hunter who crossed the wide seas to look for what lay buried in his own garden. Two candidate sciences are then named and dismissed in turn. Biology, the study of life in its general aspect, is rejected because it leaves the problem as much the riddle of the Sphinx as ever. Physiology is rejected on a sharper ground: that being based on the study of organic functions and the organs necessary to them, it is the science of death far more than that of life — since what it examines is the mechanism rather than what animates it. The remainder sets Tolstoy's treatment of the same question beside Blavatsky's own.

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