Masonic, Occult and Esoteric Online Library
The Theosophical Movement 1875-1950
By
The Path Of Progress
WHEREVER THOUGHT has struggled to be free, wherever spiritual ideas, as opposed to forms and dogmatism, have been promulgated, there is to be discerned that great surge of moral evolution which H. P. Blavatsky described and named as the Theosophical Movement. It may, therefore, be considered simply as the path of spiritual progress, individually and collectively, of human beings. The continuous effort of men to act upon their aspiration toward a higher and nobler life is always pressing against and bursting through the limitations of the established social order. Organized religion, invariably a bastion of the status quo, gives formal structure to the compromise between idealism and the forces of human timidity—the longing of men for external security. In this sense, churches, governments, parties, sects, are all “political” adaptations—expedient arrangements on behalf of the “practical” rather than the ideal. They all in time become irredeemably corrupt, and must change, as the times change, as human defects come out, and as the necessities of intellectual and moral evolution compel such alterations.
The Protestant Reformation, while ending in a multitude of Christian sects, began as a revolutionary challenge to sacerdotal authority, and was thus a part of the greater Theosophical Movement. Masonry, with its constructive ideals and devotion to religious liberty, served the purposes of the Movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and still doesto some extent, through its elevating symbolism and by its continuing defense of freedom of thought. The formation of the American Republic with its noble Declaration of Independence, its equality of all men before the law, its ideals of brotherhood and non-sectarianism, must be accounted a great forward step in the Theosophical Movement. And with the abolition of human slavery by all the great Western nations during the nineteenth century, another stride toward the emancipation of the race may be acclaimed.
Notable achievements in human liberation are commonly marked by the successful overthrow of some form of religious oppression. The “divine right” of an orthodox God speaking through a vested clergy was repudiated by every voice raised against the presumptions of Catholic hierarchy. The “divine right” of kings became an empty superstition after the American and French Revolutions. The “divine right” of one man or caste of men to enslave others was the real issue of the American Civil War. It is a fact attested by countless social historians that the heavy hand of religious authority always adds to the burdens of the simple and the poor. Religion, while containing keys to the highest mysteries, in its organized forms has seldom failed to confirm the hold of the intelligently selfish over the great mass of mankind—either directly, by siding with autocratic government, or more subtly, through fear-laden dogmas and by a “spiritual” escapism which ignores evil conditions and human injustice. Since the Renaissance, men devoted to the cause of human freedom have been anticlerical almost by instinct, having discovered through long experience the numerous common interests allying established religion with the agencies of social oppression. Thus the secular movements of recent centuries, Democracy and Socialism, the drive for universal suffrage, the Class Struggle and the endless controversies between capital and labor, have all been characterized at some stage in their history by a yearning for freedom of thought, for moral emancipation as well as for an end to economic and political bondage. In this aspect, they represent the rising current of the Theosophical Movement, however mistaken, misguided, or perverted to narrow or destructive purposes and ends.
The nineteenth century was above all a period of conflict between the old and the new, a time of ferment in the intel lectual and moral world, and of growing self-consciousness in the field of social philosophy. Nineteenth-century science was the fecund parent of scores of new doctrines and theories about the nature of things. The first half of the century was a sort of Indian summer, in which both Europe and America gathered in the rich harvest of Revolutionary freedom secured by the struggles of the eighteenth century. Transcendentalist idealism brightened the Western world, concealing for a time the maturing forces of materialism in science and masking the decline of revolutionary ideals into mere shibboleths of reorganizing conservativism. During the middle years of the century, however, two new factors of disturbance emerged—Darwinism and Spiritualism.
The far-reaching effects of Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 are still to be measured. The most important result of this theory was the final transformation of the idea of progress from the confining theological teaching of salvation into the modern concept of evolution. While the eighteenth century had opened up undreamed-of possibilities of political reform, and while the old relationships of caste and status, fixed institutions during the Middle Ages, were dissolving into other social patterns, there was, until Darwin, no popular idea of Evolution. Darwin provided an integrating principle for the loose rationalist conception of Progress. According to his theory, a desirable future for mankind was to be obtained only by furthering the growth processes possible under natural law, and he supported this idea by exhaustive researches in natural history. It was a principle easy to grasp, and soon seen as an attractive alternative to dependence on “divine grace”—the latter being a thoroughly irrational affair.
The response of free-thinking men to this doctrine was enthusiastic and immediate. The Theory of Evolution would serve as the foundation for deliberate human striving in all fields of human betterment. Its social and philosophical implications were endless. The materialism of the theory was hardly an objection; to the scientifically minded, eager for weapons in the war on theology, any plausible materialistic theory was welcome, and Evolution had the advantage of a great mass of scientific evidence in its support. Although the Darwinian theory was bitterly opposed by the clergy, and its author subjected to every form of ridicule, slander and calumny that religious bigotry could invent, the doctrine gained headway through the years, and Darwin himself lived to see his facts admitted, his conclusions adopted, in whole or in part, even by many of his detractors.
While limited in its view of “evolution” from the stand point of occult philosophy, the Darwinian Theory was nevertheless the greatest advance in basic scientific inquiry since the time of Newton, and was indispensable in preparing the ground for the conception of spiritual evolution outlined in The Secret Doctrine. Whatever the defects of the Darwinian Theory, they are due to no lack of honesty, zeal or industry on the part of its great author, but rather to his mode of research, the assumptions of his age, and the inherent limitations of all inductive reasoning. So immense has been the influence of the Darwinian doctrine of evolution on the prevailing ideas of recent generations that it is difficult for the average mind of today to realize how this theory of physical evolution could ever have been questioned, denied, or opposed.
The impact of Darwinism on modern thought is well known, but the effects of Spiritualism have been seriously neglected by contemporary historians. Quite possibly, Spiritualism had more to do than any other single factor in producing among millions that transitional state of mind into which the rigid ideas of previous centuries had already begun to disintegrate. It struck a death-blow at all priestly claims to special knowledge of post-mortem existence, for the clergy had no better explanation of psychic phenomena than any one else. To the bereaved,who are often indifferent to orthodox vagaries on a future life, Spiritualism offered the prospect of immediate assurance and consolation. To the unreligious but curious, it brought a fascinating area for experimentation,resulting, in later years, in the semi-respectable science of Psychic Research. Spiritualistic phenomena also served as contemporary “miracles” on which might be founded a strongly emotional religion, undemanding in its moral requirements, and powerful in “conversion.” One could become a Spiritualist without too great sacrifice of cherished religious ideas. It is a fact of incidental interest that Spiritualist doctrines permitted an illegitimate union of religious fervor with the new scientific idea of evolution—for the “Summerland” of departed “spirits” soon assumed the character of an evolutionary series of states or degrees of progress after death. But the multiplicity of “revelations” offered by medi ums, who sprang up by the hundreds, each providing another version of the processes and modes of life after death, made any unity of doctrine or consistent philosophy out of the question. The function of Spiritualism was iconoclastic toward dogma, and personal for its believers. It disturbed, rather than replaced, conventional religious ideas.
The last half of the nineteenth century, therefore, formed an epoch during which old orthodoxies were undermined and discredited, while the possibilities of new faiths seemed limitless, although the chaotic expression of these new tendencies remained unharnessed by any central belief. In retrospect, nearly every cry for intellectual or moral unity during those troubled years may now be recognized as a partisan appeal which ignored or denied some important aspect of human affairs. It was, pre-eminently, an age of enthusiastic and specialized research, giving birth to at least a dozen new departments of science, and stirring the human imagination to strike out in directions overlooked by earlier generations. At its conclusion, the cosmopolitan thinker, William James, summed up the philosophical issue of its rich productiveness with the term, “Pluralism,” so naming the agnostic credo that Reality is not one, but many, and that a unified conception of human experience is not possible for the modern world. The skepticism of James, apparently justified by the overwhelming flood of unrelated “brute facts” pouring from every field of inquiry, gave sophisticated sanction to the conscious materialism of the twentieth century.
The same broad forces which undermined the speculative idealism of philosophers swept away the common man’s security in traditional religion. While the extraordinary progress in applied science filled for a time the ethical vacuum left by the decline of religious faith, so-called “practical” interests and labors blinded the great majority of men to the accumulating moral contradictions of Western civilization. Pseudo-philosophies founded on the biological concept of evolution, on the Freudian interpretation of emotions, and on the Rotarian slogans of business and trade, withheld for a time the ultimate disillusionment of the twentieth century, but these rule-of-thumb moralities lacked the vigor to with stand the physical and moral destruction of modern war. The world of today is a world without faith. It is a world, therefore, in somber preparation for despair—the condition of mind and feeling reached by men who have no foundation for their aspirations, no resting place for hopes.
One purpose of this book is to show that the Theosophical Movement, in the conception of its Founders, was inaugurated with a clear perspective of the historical forces that were recreating the mind and society of the Western world in the nineteenth century, and with foresight of the social and moral dilemmas that would confront all mankind during the present epoch. The Theosophical Society of 1875 opened a great channel for labors on behalf of the general welfare and enlightenment of the human race. It was not founded as a cult or sect to bring personal deliverance or special knowledge to the fortunate few who might accept its doctrines. The Founders of the Theosophical Movement had little interest in starting “societies,” or groups for “occult study,” as such. Their concern was with the long term view of human evolution, with the spiritual and moral needs of the race for generations and centuries to come.
If Theosophy does indeed offer knowledge of the laws of human evolution, then the course of the Theosophical Movement, its progress, as well as the character of the obstacles impeding its advance, provide the means of testing the validity of that teaching in practical experience. At this point, therefore, certain basic Theosophical conceptions of evolutionary law may be stated.
So far as humanity is concerned, Theosophy teaches a triple evolutionary scheme, in which, at the present time, the physical is subordinated to the processes of intellectual and spiritual, or moral, development. In short, Evolution is soul evolution, proceeding under moral law which is an essential part of the natural order. The ideal goal toward which mankind slowly moves is a great brotherhood of all human beings, in which, finally, will flower every evolutionary potentiality. Reaching this goal, however, is conditional upon deliberate human striving toward it, upon the achievement of knowledge of man’s nature and destiny, and upon the factors of moral decision which make every human being a free agent, capable of choosing to become either a Christ or a Judas, either an altruist or a self-seeking egotist. For the race, as for the individual, Theosophy preaches the doctrine of “salvation by works.” Such “works,” however, must be informed by knowledge of human needs; hence, mastery of Theosophy means study of the philosophical doctrines which it teaches, as well as their practical application in individual life and toward larger social ends.
If there is an underlying spiritual and intellectual evolution with visible effects in history, a study of the past should disclose that the formation of the Theosophical Society and the permeation of the mind of the race by Theosophical ideas were preceded and accomplished by numerous collateral efforts. In his History of Civilization in England, a work foremost among such influences, the great English historian, H. T. Buckle, sums up the lessons of the past in a statement which may serve equally as a prophecy of the future of Theosophy and the Theosophical Movement. In the first volume of this work, Buckle wrote:
Owing to circumstances still unknown, there appear, from time to time, great thinkers, who, devoting their lives to a single purpose, are able to anticipate the progress of mankind, and to produce a religion or a philosophy, by which important effects are eventually brought about. But if we look into history, we shall clearly see that, although the origin of a new opinion may be thus due to a single man, the result which the new opinion produces will depend on the condition of the people among whom it is propagated. If either a religion or a philosophy is too much in advance of a nation, it can do no present service, but must bide its time, until the minds of men are ripe for its reception. . . . Every science and every creed has had its martyrs; . . . According to the ordinary course of affairs, a few generations pass away, and then there comes a period, when these very truths are looked upon as commonplace facts; and a little later, there comes another period, in which they are declared to be necessary, and even the dullest intellects 1 wonder how they could ever have been denied.
According to the Theosophic view of history, Buckle’s “circumstances still unknown” are in fact due to what may be termed the karmic provision of spiritual and intellectual evolution. Under the great moral Law, called “Karma” by the Buddhists, and at transitional periods in the cyclic progress of humanity, wise teachers restore to mankind through both direct and indirect channels some of the knowledge once known in the past, but which in the lapse of time has become lost or obscured by the complexities of psychic and personal evolution. These teachers, sometimes termed “Elder Brothers,” in the Theosophical literature, are themselves at the forefront of the stream of evolution to which we belong. As such, they have a natural function to perform, taking an active, although often undisclosed, part in human history. And while this aspect of the operation of cyclic law is frequently delayed, even obstructed, by the ignorance of human beings, each rise and fall of civilization is succeeded by a regeneration and further progression.
The scene of the nineteenth-century cycle of the Theosophical Movement included the United States, Europe and India. In America, the rising energies of a new nation gave promise of great success for this movement of self-reform based upon a psychology of soul knowledge. India, an ancient source of the Wisdom-Religion, was slowly awakening from the lethargy of centuries, getting ready for a cultural renaissance that would revive her former glory and give contemporary vigor to the Eastern heritage of spiritual philosophy. England, where Madame Blavatsky made her headquarters during the closing years of her mission, was a natural link between the ancient East and the youthful West, both politically and geographically, and served also as a vantage-point from which to affect the main continent of Europe.
The flow of Theosophic ideas from these centers entered the ferment of nineteenth-century thought, leavening its spirit, and challenging both the bigotry of inherited religion and the arrogant assurance of scientific materialism. The establishment of the Movement in the West followed close upon a cycle of sudden progress in material achievement by Western nations. Change was in the air. The practical consequences of the great developments in invention, scientific discovery, transportation, manufacture and communication were bringing the members of the human family closer together. Old ways of life were rapidly transformed. Traditions died. Customs were altered. Natural as well as cultural barriersto human fraternity were falling all about.
These great transitions were signalized in the political field by the careers of such leaders and reformers as Lincoln, Mazzini, Garibaldi, John Bright, and others who served the Rights of Man. The moral apathy of the Churches was exposed by freethinkers of enduring fame—Robert G. Ingersoll in America, Charles Bradlaugh in England, and in the church itself by such men as Charles Kingsley and W. E. Channing. By these and many others, trip-hammer blows were struck at complacent orthodoxy. Whether apparently pursuing the path of agnosticism, of a purely socialistic or materialistic altruism, or of a liberalized version of conventional belief, the efforts of these reformers commanded a wide following and to a large extent broke down the habitual acceptance of provincial and intolerant opinions.
Philosophical speculations like those of Herbert Spencer, the esthetic revolt of men like Ruskin, the penetrating truculence of Carlyle, and the rejection of conventional attitudes by such writers as Dickens, Eliot, Balzac, Tolstoy, Whitman, and Dostoevsky, all aided in the pioneer work of the Theosophical Movement. All fought for the unrestricted domain of individual conscience, a larger outlook upon human life and human duty, as opposed to anyone’s ipse dixit or “thus saiththeLord.”
Another tide of change began with the discovery by scholars and travelers of the philosophic wealth of the Orient. Until the nineteenth century, the masses of the West existed in almost complete isolation from the living East with its immense but alien stores of psychological and metaphysical teachings. The sources of Western culture had been limited by natural barriers to ancient Greece and Rome, and it was little suspected that the first civilized peoples of Europe, no less than their modern successors, had in fact derived both their inspiration and their learning from the exhaustless treasury of Oriental thought.
The first translation of The Bhagavad-Gita by Charles Wilkins, appeared toward the close of the eighteenth century. In 1807 William Jones rendered into English the Hindu classic, The Institutes of Manu, telling his readers that an understanding of Hindu custom and belief would assist in the administration of a colony destined to “add largely to the wealth of Britain.” A little later, Arthur Schopenhauer read a Latin translation of the Upanishads, done from a Persian version by Anquetil-Duperron, pioneer in Avesta scholarship, and its inspiration became manifest throughout the writings of the great German pessimist. Emerson’s journals teem with references to Oriental literature. Manu, the Gita, the Upanishads, the Vedas, and numerous other works found place in his library beside the riches of Platonism. Thoreau also, and Edward Bellamy, the prophet of social reform, were steeped in the mysticism and philosophy of the ancient East.
Sir Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia arrived in America in 1879, arousing extraordinary admiration among the Transcendentalists. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote twenty-six pages about it in a contemporary review. Lafcadio Hearn, having read this poetic account of the life and teachings of Buddha, predicted that “Buddhism in some esoteric form may prove the religion of the future.” He dreamed of a revolution in “the whole occidental religious world” through this Oriental faith. Many thousands in the West were led by this book to realize for the first time in their lives that the great ethical ideas of Jesus were all anticipated by Buddha, and were joined in his teaching with a rational philosophy entirely absent from the Christian tradition.
Multiplication of influences of this sort began to wear away the familiar Western contempt for “heathen” teachings, and with the appearance of many-volumed editions of Oriental religion, such as Max Muller’s Sacred Books of the East, the world of learning was forced to admit that in many respects the Eastern sages were our peers, if not our superiors, in matters of philosophy and ethical insight.
These, then, were some of the factors which had opened up the Western mind to new possibilities, had made men question old beliefs, causing them to look about for some affirmative doctrine that might synthesize the widening diversities of human experience and knowledge. The latter years of the nineteenth century offered great opportunity to one who could present facts rather than theories, principles rather than beliefs. Thus, in founding the Theosophical Society and making her first public exposition of the Theosophical philosophy, H. P. Blavatsky maintained that the hour had come for bringing some unified explanation to the besetting problems of the modern world. Religion claimed man to be a creature, tainted from his origin, ensouled by an outside God on whose favor depended all human happiness, in both this world and the next. Science, while challenging the authority of all religious beliefs, offered the alternative of bestial ancestors for the human species, traced from a ferment in the primordial slime, and allowed no idea of moral reality or spiritual existence to color the consistency of its materialism. Spiritualism, the third combatant in the struggle for human faith, was an intruder with no allies but its own fanatical conviction—a weird apostle from another world, bringing promise of release from great personal sorrow for some; for others, a nauseous revival of medieval witchcraft and necromancy.
It was among the Spiritualists, the friendless outcasts of both Science and Religion, that H. P. Blavatsky began her mission, because they had penetrated somewhat into the hidden realms of nature, and had brought to light the reality of forces disbelieved and laughed at for generations in the West. Understood and controlled, those forces might be used to restore a living faith in the immortal soul—in the godlike potentialities of the entire human race
