Humanity Progresses by One Discovery After Another

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 23 pages

Twenty-three pages with an abstract and train of thoughts. Its internal file name is more pointed than its title — Humanity keeps inventing discoveries on the trot — and the abstract opens on the image the whole piece works from: the dark cycle of Kali Yuga has brought back a Babel of modern thought, compared with which the confusion of tongues itself appears a harmony.

Three imperatives are set under that heading, in the voice of the builders of Babel: let us summon disciples and fill them with sacred fire; let us establish mysteries and teach the doctrine; let us build a temple tower whose top may reach unto heaven. What follows is a defence of The Secret Doctrine against the charge of novelty, and it is a modest claim rather than a grand one: no new philosophy is set up in that book, only the hidden meaning of some of the religious allegories of antiquity is given, light being thrown on them by the esoteric sciences and the common source pointed out from which all the world's religions and philosophies have sprung. The test proposed for any account of things is the one the file is worth remembering for. Truth, to be complete, must represent an unbroken continuity — it must have no gaps and contradictions, no broken or missing links — and the question is then put to the reader directly: which of our modern religions, sciences or philosophies is free from such defects? The polemic that follows is aimed at materialism specifically. One who affirms that the universe and man are objects of the senses only, and who chains thought within the region of senseless matter as the Darwinian evolutionists do, is called at best a sophiaphobe and at worst a philosophaster, but never a philosopher. The constructive claim behind the abuse is about direction of travel: the period in which nascent humanity was descending with spirit into matter has closed, and we are now helping matter to ascend toward spirit.

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