The Struggle for Existence

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Living the Life Series · 11 pages

First published in Lucifer, Vol. IV, No. 20, April 1889, pages 104–11, and reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings XI pages 147–56. The frontispiece is Vasily Vereshchagin's Beggars in Samarkand of 1870, in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Two propositions stand at the head and state the position the article argues towards: that it is only by extending empathy and sympathy to all men and living creatures that we may approach the Majesty of Truth, whose spirit is self-sacrifice; and that by embracing all we joy and sorrow with them, gradually merging into the One which also joys and sorrows with all, but within which the pleasure of joy and the pain of sorrow are not. The article itself opens on the harshest possible statement of the problem — that the mother of life is death, nowhere more conspicuously than in the animal kingdom, where the life of the stronger is prolonged by the lives of the weaker and the survival of the fittest is proclaimed by the shrieks of the mangled and hapless unfit. The West is said to have long sought a solution to this grim riddle propounded to man by Dame Nature, the sphinx of the ages. The criticism that follows is directed at the manner of the answering rather than at any particular answer: that it has been found necessary, for the continuance of average intellectual contentment, to venture some guess that will decently dispose of an obnoxious problem — so that the doctrines offered by the leading minds of the age are treated as devices for restoring comfort rather than as explanations.

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