Blavatsky on the Divine Mind in Nature

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's Second Proposition Series · 8 pages

Eight pages from "The Mind in Nature," published in Lucifer in September 1896 and republished in Blavatsky Collected Writings volume XIII, with an abstract at the front and a frontispiece by Elena Aviar.

The abstract makes two claims before the article begins. The first is an accusation left deliberately to posterity: how many distinguished scientists have taken honour and credit by merely dressing up the ideas of the old philosophers they are always ready to disparage. The second is a prediction — that an era of disenchantment and rebuilding has already begun, the cycle having almost run its course, and that future pages of history may supply the proof. The doctrinal core concerns where mind stands in the order of things. The Primal Being is described as an emanation of the Demiurgic or Universal Mind, which contains the idea of the world-to-be-created within itself from eternity, an idea the Unmanifested Logos produces of itself; and a distinction is then drawn between two ideas, which the editorial footnotes key to the Logoi. The first idea, born in darkness before the creation of the world, remains in the Unmanifested Mind — the First Logos, divine thought concealed. The second, a reflection from the Universal Mind, becomes clothed with matter and assumes objective existence — the Third Logos, divine thought revealed. The article proper opens by describing the self-satisfaction of modern science and its claim that genuine knowledge of the cosmos and of man is all of recent growth, the luxuriant modern plant having sprung from the dead weeds of ancient superstition — a summary offered in order to be denied.

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