What Is Matter and What Is Force?

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's First Proposition Series · 23 pages

Twenty-three pages, and *the only file in this section built as an exchange between two people. The first part, Is Electricity Matter or Force?, is by a theosophist and was first published in The Theosophist volume III number 12, September 1882, pages 318 to 319, republished in Blavatsky's Collected Writings volume IV. The second part, What is Matter and what is Force?*, is the reply by another theosophist. Reading them in order is the point of the file.

Three appendices follow the exchange and carry a good deal of its value. The first identifies Svabhava as the occult term for Kama-Eros. The second is a quick overview of the key concepts, which serves as a glossary for the argument just made. The third compares and contrasts Kosmos with Cosmos, a distinction that recurs across this whole series and is easy to lose track of — several other files in the section refer to it. A closing note discusses atomon and atmeton, the two Greek words for indivisible, which is the etymological pivot of the whole dispute: what the ancients meant by an indivisible thing, and whether the atom of nineteenth-century physics is the same idea or a different one wearing the same name. A page of suggested reading from this series sits between the appendices and that closing note.

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