Theosophy Is Deeper Monism Than Secularism

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Charles Bradlaugh · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 10 pages

Ten pages with an abstract and train of thoughts. *The opponent here is not a church but the secularist movement*, and Charles Bradlaugh — the atheist MP for Northampton and the most prominent freethinker in Britain — is given his own section of explanation, which makes this one of the more interesting arguments in the section.

It opens on the temper of the age, and the observation cuts both ways: our age is as greedy to set up new idols as it is to overthrow the old gods, and as ready to give lavish hospitality to new ideas as to kick out most unceremoniously theories that now seem effete. Facts, she notes, are eagerly sought by everyone, from the solemn conclaves of science who seem to hang upon them the destinies of the human race, down to a hack on the warpath after sensational news. Bradlaugh's words of explanation follow. Her reply makes two moves. The first is about what the Society is: neither sectarian nor a religious body, but simply a nucleus of men and women devoted to the search after truth, whencesoever it may come — and she backs that with the constitutional rule, which is stated here more clearly than almost anywhere else, that no member is obliged to be in full sympathy with all three of the Society's objects; it suffices that he be in sympathy with one of the three and willing not to oppose the other two. The second move is the one the title makes, and it accepts the secularists' own ground rather than rejecting it: theosophy teaches a far stricter and more far-reaching monism than secularism does, and it is more philosophical — that is, the objection that theosophy multiplies entities is turned round, and secularism is charged with stopping short of its own principle.

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