Theosophy Is the Science of Truth, Religion of Justice

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, William Quan Judge · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 15 pages

Fifteen pages with a contents page and train of thoughts. *Its title states a double claim* — that theosophy is at once a science and a religion — and the file's job is to say which sort of each: the science of truth, and the religion of justice.

The case for the science half rests on explanatory power: The Secret Doctrine, it argues, infuses a raison d'être and an intelligibility into a universe whose drift has been utterly unperceived by Western thought — that is, the claim is not to new facts but to a frame that makes existing ones cohere. The sharpest line in the file is an aside about civilisation and is worth having: the culture which renders man less like an ape has also licked the devil into shape. Two shorter sections follow that widen the file's range beyond argument. One recalls that Ceylon was once the pearl of the Indian Ocean, and gives insights into what the file calls the pith and marrow of true Buddhism — the same distinction between the original teaching and its later sects that runs through this whole section. The other is a note on Josepha North, a theosophical sculptor, which is the kind of small human detail that makes the section more than a body of doctrine. The closing section states the negative half of the title's claim: theosophy cannot be confined by dogmatism — so that calling it a religion is not to give it a creed. A page of suggested reading closes the file.

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