Proposition 3: Mind Is the Man

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's Third Proposition Series · 12 pages

Twelve pages with a contents page of central ideas. *Its title is the shortest statement of the Third Proposition anywhere in this library* — that what makes a man a man is mind — and the file sets out to justify it from philosophy rather than from revelation.

The opening propositions are Platonic in temper and are given one to a line: mind is the governor of the soul, and the benefactor of man; the intelligible is prior to intelligence; perceptions are motions towards the One, and an aspiration after it. The third of those is the one that carries the argument, because it makes perception itself a form of desire rather than a passive reception — which is why mind can be called the man. A fourth line states the practical conclusion the ancients drew from all this, and it is worth having: philosophy is the best remedy for every mental disease. The middle section compares higher and lower mind, the distinction on which most of the ethical files in this library depend, and which corresponds to the two conscienses compared in "Higher conscience is heroic" earlier in this batch. The last part is the one a general reader will most enjoy: an etymology of the words mind, man and human, taken one at a time and traced back to the Sanskrit root that connects the first two — man, to think — so that the English word for a human being turns out to mean, quite literally, the one who thinks. That is the file's title arrived at from the dictionary rather than from doctrine, which is a satisfying way to end.

Read the full text (PDF, 0.8 MB, 12 pages)