Blavatsky on Divine Wisdom

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 3 pages

Three pages excerpted from "Philosophers and Philosophicules," first published in Lucifer for October 1889 and republished in Blavatsky Collected Writings volume XI. A headnote points to the full text in the site's Theosophy and Theosophists Series.

The piece sets out to show that theosophy answers to every standard definition of philosophy rather than to any definition of a religion or a sect. It begins from the word itself — theosophy as divine or god-wisdom — and from the classical definition of philosophy as the science of things divine and human and the causes in which they are contained. Philosophy's branches are then run through: applied to god it becomes theology, to material nature physics and natural history, to man anthropology and psychology, and raised higher, metaphysics. The definition of philosophy as the science of effects by their causes is identified with the doctrine of Karma, described as the most important teaching, under various names, of every religious philosophy. A second definition — the science of things possible inasmuch as they are possible — is used to separate theosophy both from dogmatic religion, which is said to enforce belief in things impossible, and from the materialists who reject the possible whenever it contradicts them. Ueberweg's "science of principles" and Hegel's "contemplation of the self-development of the Absolute" are brought in, with the remark that the whole of the secret doctrine, of which the book bearing that name is only an atom, is such a contemplation so far as finite language can record it. Sir William Hamilton's definitions close the argument, ending on the claim that whoever studies theosophy studies the highest transcendental philosophy.

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