Truth Is Always Mixed with Error

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 13 pages

Thirteen pages, first published in Lucifer volume I number 6, February 1888, pages 425 to 433, and republished in the Collected Writings volume IX under the plain title "What is Truth?". The frontispiece is by Igor Morski. Two verse epigraphs frame it — William Thompson Bacon on truth as the voice of nature and the startling monitor within us, and Hannah More on fair truth's immortal sun being sometimes hid in clouds, not because its light is defective but because it is obscured by weak prejudice, imperfect faith and the thousand causes which obstruct the growth of goodness.

That second epigraph states the whole argument in advance, and the essay is an unfolding of it. The distinction it works with is between absolute and relative truth, or celestial and terrestrial wisdom — the position being that absolute truth exists and is one, while everything anybody actually holds is a mixture, and that the mixing is done not by the truth but by the receiver. The second half of the title is the part that has aged most interestingly: that truth is hindered by technological knowledge. The claim is not that knowing how things work is bad, but that a kind of knowledge which is entirely instrumental — which asks how and never why — crowds out the other kind and leaves the person who has it satisfied. Read beside "Humanity seems to progress by inventing one discovery after the other" earlier in this section, it forms a pair: the one on what a century of invention does to a civilisation, this one on what it does to an individual's grasp of what is true. It is among the most quoted of her shorter essays, and among the easiest to read.

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