Masonic, Occult and Esoteric Online Library
The Theosophical Movement 1875-1950
By
Nineteenth Century Spiritualism
AS THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY, in its earliest days, found most of its supporters among the more thoughtful of the Spiritualists, or among those stirred by Spiritualistic phenomena to investigate the subject of psychic powers, it is pertinent to notice some of the events and fortunes of the Spiritualistic movement before 1875. Modern Spiritualism began with the mediumistic manifestations of the Fox sisters at Hydesville, New York, in 1848. Within a few years it had spread throughout the Western world. In the words of Alfred Russel Wallace, “other mediums were discovered in different parts of the country, as if a special development of this abnormal power were then occurring.” Famous mediums travelled Europe, demonstrating their wonders and gaining the patronage of royalty. Psychics and sensitives were found among all classes and the forthcoming revelations and physical manifestations shook to their foundations the established authorities of the day. Men began to wonder at these strange happenings, to ask questions, and some—although only the few—to think for themselves. It was the inner voice of the masses, their spiritual intuition—that traditional enemy of cold intellectual reasoning, the legitimate progenitor of Materialism—which had awakened from its long cataleptic sleep. However unsatisfactory their philosophical interpretation, these phenomena came to be regarded as evident proofs of a life beyond—opening, moreover, a wide range for the admission of every metaphysical possibility.
By 1850, séances were being held in California, Oregon, Texas, and in several southern states. Spiritualist revealers bloomed like the Hebrew prophets of old, and occasionally some figure of eminence made public admission of his interest in Spiritualism. Horace Greeley, famous editor of the New York Tribune, testified to the genuineness of the “rappings” produced by the Fox sisters, exonerating them from charges of fraud. J. W. Edmonds, a Justice of the New York Supreme C ourt, known for his integrity, defended mediums in the press. N. P. Tallmadge, a former Governor of Wisconsin, publicly supported the claims of the mediums. During the years 1851 and 1852, sufficient interest in Spiritualism developed to support the establishment of several journals entirely devoted to its phenomena and their interpretation.
From these beginnings, modern Spiritualism gained widespread popular attention, and while nearly all scientists of any reputation maintained a lofty skepticism, the few exceptions to this rule had the effect of increasing the fascination that the subject held for the man in the street. The impressive personal-experience aspect of Spiritualism commonly led to a fierce will-to-believe on the part of people hungry for spiritual verity, so that the handful of intellectually honest scientists who dared to admit the reality of psychic phenomena became heroes ceaselessly quoted by intoxicated enthusiasts. One such American scientist was Dr. Robert Hare, professor of chemistry at the University of Pennyslvania, who in 1854 published Spiritualism Scientifically Demonstrated, an account of elaborate experiments which convinced him the manifestations were genuine. He had originally undertaken the task of investigation in order, he said, to destroy with scientific weapons “the gross delusion called Spiritualism,” but was soon overwhelmed by concrete evidences of the supernormal. He failed, however, to interest the American Association for the Promotion of Science, which at one of its conventions rejected all his proposals for scientific study of psychic phenomena. No more successful in overcoming the unbelief of his colleagues was Prof. James J. Mapes, president of the Mechanics Institute of New York, a distinguished chemist who had been honored internationally by scientific bodies. Beginning a study of Spiritualism to redeem respected friends, who, he declared, were “fast running to mental seed and imbecility,” he ended as a determined witness for the phenomena.
The appeal of Spiritualism was unique in the nineteenth centur y. With the rise of the rationalist spirit, fairly established by the revolutionary thinkers of the preceding epoch, Western intellectuality had made disbelief in ghostly or “occult” pheonmena into a virtual dogma—a dogma, more over, enjoying the emphatic endorsement of scientific authority. But Spiritualism, as a historical influence, was much more than an “intellectual” affair. It dealt directly with feelings, hopes and fears that are basic in all humans. “Death,” as The Bhagavad-Gita says, “is certain to all mortals.” Psychic or “spiritual” phenomena, promising more than empty theological phrases about life after death, were events which could arouse the intense interest and excitement of thousands who had despaired of any instruction on this subject from either religion or science. The facts of Spiritualism, if genuine, implied a whole universe of human experience untouched by modern thought. Investigators of psychic phenomena found themselves in possession of a stupendous discovery; they spoke to the world with impassioned declarations. Meeting disdain or contempt from the representatives of orthodoxy, they proceeded to form societies, cults and religious sects which rapidly grew to astonishing proportions, drawing a host of followers from the disillusioned, the bereaved, and the honestly curious. The shock of immediate psychic experience was a force that could not be denied.
The first serious attempt to investigate the possibility of metaphysical or psychic phenomena by a quasi-scientific body was instituted in 1869 by the London Dialectical Society. For eighteen months the Society’s Committee of thirty-four well-known persons took evidence, submitting a full Report to the Council of the Society in 1870. The Council, however, declined to publish the Report, whereupon the Committee itself published the results of the investigation, including a collection of startling opinions as to the “supernatural origin” of psychic phenomena. “A large majority of the members of your Committee,” the Report stated, “have become actual witnesses to several phases of the phenomena without the aid or presence of any professional medium, although the greater part of them commenced their investigations in an avowedly skeptical spirit.” The Report concludes:
. . . your Committee, taking into consideration the high character and great intelligence of many of the witnesses to the more extraordinary facts, the extent to which their testimony is supported by the reports of the sub-committees, and the absence of any proof of imposture or delusion as regards a large portion of the phenomena; . . the large number of persons in every grade of society and over the whole civilized world who are more or less influenced by a belief in their supernatural origin, and to the fact that no philosophical explanation of them has yet been arrived at, deem it incumbent upon them to state their conviction that the subject is worthy of more serious attention and careful 1 investigation than it has hitherto received.
One would suppose that a report of this sort, conservatively drawn by serious-minded and reputable persons, but with findings that seemed of extraordinary significance, would gain immediate and serious attention. However, the unwillingness of the Council of the Dialectical Society to publish the Report was symptomatic of the public reception it received when independently printed by the Committee. That organ of enthroned respectability, the London Times, called the Report “a farrago of impotent conclusions, garnished by a mass of the most monstrous rubbish it has ever been our misfortune to sit in judgment upon.” Other expressions of the London press were in a similar vein. The Saturday Review denounced spiritualism as “one of the most unequivocally degrading superstitions that have ever found currency amongst reasonable beings.” The Sporting Times recommended that “a few of the leading professional Spiritualists should be sent as rogues and vagabonds to the treadmill for a few weeks,” characterizing their “dupes” as “contemptibly stupid” or “insane.”
A few papers were more reserved, admitting the Report to be worth reading and allowing justification for the Committee’s belief that its evidence called for “further cautious investigation.” Strangely enough, it was the medical journals in particular which regarded the Report with some respect. The Medical Times and Gazette spoke of the volume as “a very curious one, and deserving of attention forseveral reasons.” The London Medical Jour nal found it “a mine of information,” throwing light “upon both sides of many important psychological questions.” The London Spiritualist offered this pertinent comment: “So the Report, when it was presented, was in favour of Spiritualism; at this unexpected result the Dialectical Society took fright. The Council ran away and refused to publish it, leaving its Committee in the lurch.” What the Dialectical Society avoided by “running away” was evident from the public scorn heaped upon the members of the Committee, despite the presence among them of so eminent a scientist as Alfred Russel Wallace.
Except for Wallace and one or two others, the pioneers of modern psychic research found it difficult to persuade any scientist of note even to attend psychic demonstrations. Thomas Huxley, famous champion of the Darwinian theory, replied to an invitation of the Committee to cooperate by saying that he “had no time for such an inquir y.” He added: “But supposing the phenomena to be genuine—they do not interest me.” The physicist, John Tyndall, was aggressively opposed to Spiritualism, as shown by a passage in his Fragments of Science: “The world will have a religion of some kind, even though it should fly for it to the intellectual whoredom of Spiritualism.” Dr. Wm. B. Carpenter, a leading physiologist and Vice President of the Royal Society, glibly explained as “unconscious cerebration” all spiritualistic manifestations not the result of “intentional imposture.”
Except for Wallace and one or two others, the pioneers of modern psychic research found it difficult to persuade any scientist of note even to attend psychic demonstrations. Thomas Huxley, famous champion of the Darwinian theory, replied to an invitation of the Committee to cooperate by saying that he “had no time for such an inquir y.” He added: “But supposing the phenomena to be genuine—they do not interest me.” The physicist, John Tyndall, was aggressively opposed to Spiritualism, as shown by a passage in his Fragments of Science: “The world will have a religion of some kind, even though it should fly for it to the intellectual whoredom of Spiritualism.” Dr. Wm. B. Carpenter, a leading physiologist and Vice President of the Royal Society, glibly explained as “unconscious cerebration” all spiritualistic manifestations not the result of “intentional imposture.”
the most extraordinary in the annals of psychic research. The articles recounting these experiments, together with a general summary of the results, and the controversial correspondence in which their author became involved, were later presented in book 3 form under the title, Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism.
This book records a fundamental achievement in psychic research. It may be said that no subsequent work, similar in scope, has added anything essentially new to the dramatic report of these researches. Crookes brought the patience and meticulous care of a man trained in scientific method to the strange problems of Spiritualism, and he had the good fortune to become acquainted with mediums worthy of his attention. In his “Summary,” he describes thirteen classes of phenomena which he observed personally, including the levitation of human beings; the rising off the ground of heavy objects without human or other physical contact; alteration in the weight of human bodies; the appearance of luminous objects, and of human hands which were either self luminous or visible by ordinary light; phantom forms and faces; sounds of various sorts; direct writing without human agency; and finally, in some notes of Miss Cook’s mediumship, Crookes reported full materializations in which the “apparition” acted and talked like a living person.
After spending four years in a fruitless attempt to win the scientific world to impartial psychic research, Crookes withdrew from the public arena, thereafter devoting himself to strictly scientific pursuits. The response he had gained from other scientists was contemptuous, at times abusive, and he concluded that the loss of his professional reputation was too great a price to pay for continued championship of psychic wonders, however much he might believe in them himself. Crookes had learned, to his chagrin, that the boasted willingness of scientists to regard with interest all the facets of human experience, was, in this case at least, more of a pose than a principle. He resigned himself to the view which he clearly expressed, some twenty-five years later, as President of the British Association: “I have nothing to retract. I adhere to my already published statements. I only regret a certain crudity in those early expositions which, no doubt justly, mili tated against their acceptance by the scientific world.” Crookes allowed the words of an old friend, written to him in a letter, to account for the strange reluctance of men of science to admit the facts disclosed by his experiments. This friend, a scientist of some eminence, had said:
“Any intellectual reply to your facts I cannot see. Yet it is a curious fact that even I, with all my tendency and desire to believe spiritualistically, and with all my faith in your power of observing and your thorough truthfulness, feel as if I wanted to see for myself; and it is quite painful to me to think how much more proof I want. Painful, I say, because I see that it is not reason which convinces a man, unless a fact is repeated so frequently that the impression becomes like a habit of mind, an old acquaintance, a thing known so long that it cannot be doubted. This is a curious phase of man’s mind, and it is remarkably strong in scientific men—stronger than in others, I think. For this reason we must not always call a man dishonest because he does not yield to evidence for a long time. The old wall of 4 belief must be broken down by much battering.”
The granitic impenetrability of this “old wall of belief ” wassuch thatCrookes could do littlemore than scratch itssurface. Some sixty-five years later, a leading American psychologist, Dr. Joseph Jastrow, gave a similar though less sympathetic explanation of scientific scepticism.Ina discussionof Spiritualisticphenomena, and of the experiments in extra sensory perception carried on at Duke University, Dr. Jastrow referred to the unbelief in telepathy by psychologists as growing “out of a profound philosophical conviction.” This viewwas expressed tohimby a colleague:
“ESP [extra sensory perception] is so contrary to the general scientific world picture, that to accept the former would compel the abandonment of the latter. I am unwilling to give up the body of scientific knowledge so painfully acquired in the Western world during the last 300 years, on the basis of a few anecdotes and a few badly 5 reported experiments.
If, well along in the twentieth century, Jastrow could confidently claim the support of “four-fifths of the psychologists” in discrediting telepathy, how much more certain it was that in the nineteenth century, scientists would give no hearing at all to the daring experiments of William Crookes!
In his contention for the reality of psychic phenomena, Crookes had one eminent scientific ally—Lord Alfred Wallace, who shared with Darwin the fame of originating the theory of Natural Selection. In 1875 Wallace published a small volume entitled Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, devoted to the thesis that what men commonly call “miracles” may be capable of explanation in terms of cause and effect, by reference to superphysical agencies acting under unfamiliar laws, and contending that such apparently miraculous events do in fact occur. Wallace presented many sober arguments, drawing on both reason and human experience, to persuade his readers that the phenomena called “Spiritual” would bear looking into. He subjected the scepticism of David Hume to effective criticism and collected much historical testimony for the occurrence of psychic wonders. But so far as his fellow scientists were concerned, Wallace’s appeal to facts was ignored, and his appeal to reason fell upon ears more attuned to denunciation of the Spiritualists than to impartial arguments on their behalf. In those days, as many years later, the challenge of psychic phenomena to “the general scientific world-picture” was so unwelcome to the men who had played a major part in its construction that neither Crookes nor Wallace nor anyone else could obtain a fair hearing for what seemed to them to be the revolutionary discoveries of psychic research. The robust and proudly materialistic intellectuality of the West had just gained emancipation from the confining doctrines of the Christian religion, and it was, perhaps, too much to expect that the victorious combatants, flushed with triumph over the theological dogma of a seven days’ Creation, would now turn eagerly to a theory which seemed founded on equally abhorrent assumptions of supernatural power.
This characteristic mind-set of modern science is so firmly established as to invite a brief examination of its origins. The positive bent of science to practical experiment and its demand for evidence perceptible to the senses were of course due to the extraordinary achievements of such men as Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Boyle, Harvey, and many others. The negative side of the scientific spirit, resulting in the great struggle described by John W. Draper as The Conflict between Religion and Science, drew inspiration from the critical reflections of the Enlightenment, which preceded and prepared for the French Revolution. The themes developed by the early English Deists, by Lamettrie, d’Holbach, Rousseau, Voltaire and Diderot in France, and by David Hume and the historian, Gibbon, were either covert or open attacks on historical Christianity, its theology, its creeds, and its priests. Whatever the subject ostensibly considered by these founders of modern scepticism, “God,” as a historian has put it, “was on trial.” Although many of them were condemned as “atheists” during their lifetime, and avowed infidels like Lamettrie and d’Holbach were shunned in pious horror by polite society, their iconoclastic work was well done. In the succeeding century, however, the doctrines of the Enlightenment became rationalist dogmas which were as bigoted as any religion in their contempt for the superphysical.
Thus the materialism of the nineteenth century grew from an embattled rejection of priestcraft by freedom-loving men—thinkers who over-reached their original inspiration and bequeathed to their scientific successors an a priori denial of even the possibility of psychic phenomena. The French intellectuals of the time of Louis XVI had already adopted this blindly sceptical position. In 1784, when the Academicians were invited by the King to investigate the extraordinary claims made on behalf of Franz Anton Mesmer, a Viennese physician exciting much comment in Paris, the Commission of learned men who interviewed Mesmer and attempted to duplicate his methods reported that they could discover no merit in his “cures,” and that, in fact, Mesmer’s famous “fluid” was nonexistent. Among the members of this Commission were several of the most illustrious men of the eighteenth century—one, Benjamin Franklin, ambassador from the United States, another, the famous Lavoisier, soon to die by the machine invented by the eminent Dr. Guillotin, 6 who was also a signer of the Commission’s final report.
The scholars of the French Academy of Sciences were interested only in “mechanical” explanations of the processes of Nature. They believed, with David Hume, that the whole world was nothing but “one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, which again admit of subdivisions . . .” How, then, could they listen seriously to Mesmer, who explained his cures by a series of metaphysical propositions concerning an invisible fluid called “Animal Magnetism,” by which, he claimed, nervous diseases could be cured directly, and other diseases indirectly? The thing was impossible—mere “imagination.” This was precisely the charge laid against William Crookes nearly a century later when he dared to argue for the strange phenomena produced by the invisible forces of Spiritualism. Crookes, said his critics, was bemused by an appetite for miracles, and had lost his capacity for scientific judgment. Mesmer and Crookes were but two of many victims of the materializing spirit of the age, which drew deep emotional support for its denials from memories of a millennium of priestly imposture and of endless crimes and oppressions in the name of supernatural religion.
Mesmer, however, has a more important connection with modern Spiritualism than simply as an illustration of how scientific scepticism would deal with innovators in psychic research. Mesmer’s theories and experiments bore hidden relationships with the Spiritualistic phenomena of the nineteenth century, as later history would make plain. Had his views been widely accepted, Spiritualists might have been spared many of their delusions, and scientists the embarrassment of having to recant certain categorical denials. Fortunately, the conservative institutions of medicine, of academic scholarship and organized science, are not the sole arbiters of human belief. Mesmer’s mission was at least partially accomplished. The broad, popular effect of his work was to turn the attention of thousands of inquiring mindsto the mysteries of man’sinner life.
The reality of Mesmerism might be denied by scientific authority, but its influence was irrepressible. There were numerous students of medicine who recognized in Mesmer’s ideas the clue to physiological and psychological mysteries. Despite the extravagances so often found in doctrines developed in defiance of accepted authority, these ideas made their way into the thought of the time. During the 1840’s, two English doctors courted professional martyrdom by demonstrating that surgical operations could be performed without pain to patients in mesmeric trances. In Germany, Joseph Ennemoser wrote his comprehensive study of Animal Magnetism, bringing such scholarship to the subject that William Howitt entitled his translation of it a History of Magic (London, 1854). Another German physician, J. F. C. Hecker, compiled a history of the Epidemics of the Middle Ages in which the Black Plague was explained as an effect of a cosmic sickness of the earth’s “organism”—a theory wholly conformable to Mesmer’s ideas.
In the area of practical psychological experiment, while his metaphysical philosophy was increasingly neglected, Mesmer’s disciples and imitators worked tirelessly with various aspects and correlations of Animal Magnetism. The results, however, were not always the most desirable. The Hypnotism of James Braid was an illegitimate offspring of Animal Magnetism, and Mesmer, had he been alive, would have been the first to oppose both the theory and the practice of the English hypnotists. He would have looked with equal disfavor on the doings of the French magnetizers, who, by 1850, were devoted to “mind-reading” demonstrations and other forms of miracle-mongering with somnambulistic subjects. Persons like these later unhappy victims of psychic experiment were soon to be known as the “mediums” of nineteenth-century Spiritualism. Before he died, Mesmer noticed the beginnings of such tendencies in some of his followers. He spoke regretfully of the methods of the Puységurs, who inducted their subjects into a trance-like sleep. “Their experiments,” he said, “which show a lack of understanding, may harm the cause.”
Early in the nineteenth century, European mesmerists visited America, stirring to activity the latent psychic capacities that were later to burst forth in Spiritualistic phenomena. Andrew Jackson Davis, the chief prophet and leader of the Spiritualistic movement in the United States, underwent a period of psychic “development” as the somnambulistic subject of a traveling mesmerist, William Levingston. In 1830, John Bovee Dods lectured in New England on “Electrical Psychology,” proclaiming electricity to be the connecting link between mind and matter. A Frenchman, Charles Poyen, began giving public demonstrations of Mesmerism in America in 1836. Instructed by Poyen, Phineas Quimby of Belfast, Maine, learned to diagnose the ills of the people of his village, using the clairvoyant perception of a sensitive. He found by experiment that it made little difference what medicine he advised, becoming convinced that his cures were effected by mental nfluences alone. Quimby evolved the idea that all disease is a mental delusionwhich can he eradicated by thought, and in 1859 he began to set down his theories—now familiar to many as “Christian Science”—in whatbecame the famousQuimbyManuscripts.
All these developments proceeded in alienation from orthodox scientific inquiry. While great and original thinkers were too wise to deny the hidden potentialities of the human soul, strong barriers of scepticism prevented the great majority from even considering the idea of superphysical realities. It remained for a cultured élite, on the one hand, to acknowledge and adopt some of the implications of psychic inquiry, while half-educated fanatics and outcasts from conventional science carried them in degraded form to the masses, practising their strange lore among the humble and the ignorant. Meanwhile, the unbelief of the scientific fraternity drove William Howitt, Ennemoser’s translator, to write:
How can a petrified man believe? And the scientific, as a class, are petrified by their education in the unspiritual principles of the last generation. These principles are the residuum of the atheistic and materialistic school of the French Revolution. The atheism is disavowed, but the disbelieving leaven remains, and will long remain. It will cling to the scientific like a death-pall, and totally disqualify them for independent research into the internal nature of man, and of his properties and prospects as an immortal being. This education has sealed up their spiritual eye, and left them only their physical one. They are as utterly disqualified for psychological research as a blind man for physical research. . . . Our scientific and literary men stick by the death-creed of Hobbes, Diderot, and Co., and yet, not knowing it, cannot believe any great new spiritual fact on any amount of 7 evidence.
Howitt’s analysis of scientific scepticism obtains interesting confirmation from the later opinion of William Crookes’ friend and correspondent. The world of physical inquiry that was so hospitable to Faraday’s dynamo found nothing of interest in the weird aspect of the human “dynamo” that Crookes’ experiments revealed. Enormously preoccupied with the evolution of bodies, biologists fascinated by the Darwinian Theory had no ear for a scientific revelation which might bear upon the evolution of souls. Spiritualistic phenomena and claims were regarded as disgraceful distractions from the main busi ness of science, which was to establish on undoubted ‘physical” facts the laws of the physical world, leaving no place for “spiritual” theories of any sort. And because Science, as an increasingly authoritative cultural institution, would not allow even the beginnings of a rational explanation of psychic phenomena, no hypothesis, however cautious, to explain these wonderful events was available to assist the few individuals who did approach them with open and inquiring minds. The result, therefore, was a chaotic growth of sectarian fanaticism around the facts of Spiritualism, rather than disciplined investigation of their meaning. One reads with dismay the curious expressions of faith in the supernatural by men who distinguished themselves as careful thinkers in other fields. The deficiencies of the nineteenth century are nowhere more evident than in the enthusiastic acceptance by intelligent men of the sentimental Spiritualistic doctrines of an after-life. Persuaded of the reality of the phenomena by undeniable personal experience, they could find no principles of explanation, no acceptable rationale of psychic phenomena, in either scientific theory or religious tradition. With minds confused, therefore, such investigators accepted the inadequate explanations of the mediums and the “spirits.”
A curious and lonely exception to this baffling ignorance of psychic phenomena appeared in the United States in 1854, under the intriguing if pedantic title, The Apocatastasis, or Progress Backwards. The author of this scholarly work, Dr. Leonard Marsh, a professor of physiology at the University of Vermont, was by no means a Spiritualist; rather, he opposed the Spiritualistic movement with all the resources his prodigious classical learning could bring to bear upon the subject. What is of interest in his book is the fact, clearly disclosed, that the Neoplatonic philosophers and other learned men of antiquity were well acquainted with the strange events which Spiritualists hailed as introducing a new and great dispensation of miraculous religion. Dr. Marsh began by quoting from Synesius the doctrine of cycles—teaching a return, at regular intervals, of “lives on earth, generations, educations, dispositions and fortunes,” which, 8 as Synesius put it, “will be the same with those that formerly existed.” Spiritualistic phenomena, Dr. Marsh declared, were a return of what had been before, and he found cause for disturbance in what seemed to him a modern acceptance of the “heathen” teachings of “spirits”—a “progress backwards.” His book nevertheless reveals the superior knowledge of the ancients with respect to the identity of the spirit “guides” and “controls” of the mediums. He repeats the opinion of Porphyry, “a very competent judge of them in the ancient period, that ‘it is their very nature to lie!!’ ” Porphyry, Iamblichus, Plutarch, Minutius Felix and many others are made to testify concerning “spirits” which are “depraved demons”—entities that deceive and obsess human beings, and which are invoked by the necromantic practices of men who, in Porphyry’s phrase, “lead, as it were, to things of a divine nature in an illegal and disorderly manner.” Such was the ancient opinion of “séances.”
Somewhat against his pious purpose, Dr. Marsh was obliged by his extensive quotation of pagan authorities to expose the inability of the Christian religion to account for the wide variety of psychic phenomena known to both the Platonic philosophers and the modern Spiritualists, although in radically different terms. Without this classical support, his attempt to controvert the claims of the Spiritualists would have been weak indeed. But despite the help of the theurgists, his learned strictures against Spiritualism could bear little weight at a time when ancient psychology—that of the Neoplatonists in particular—was indiscriminately classed with medieval superstition by the “physical” scientists of the nineteenth century. The Apocatastasis remained a curiosity of erudite research which, in later years, may have influenced a few independent thinkers like William James to conduct investigations of their own, but which certainly left unaffected the minds of both the Spiritualists and the scientists of the same generation as its author.
The nineteenth century, however,was notwhollywithout psychical and philosophical interests that might help the West to understand Spiritualistic phenomena.The genius of Balzac had created a suggestive atmosphere for mystical events, his Seraphita containing many germs of occult teaching. Bulwer Lytton’s novels, also, were destined to serve, in Theosophical literature, as illustrations of certain obscure tenets of the Wisdom Religion. Europe had its own occult tradition in the lore of the Rosicrucians, and there was something like a philosophy of Spiritualism in the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg. A few learned Masons and Kabalists in Europe and America still pored over ancient volumes and sought the elusive secrets of ceremonial magic from medievalists who concealed more than they taught. Writers like Wallace, Howitt, and Catherine Crowe with her curious Night Side of Nature, helped to acquaint the Spiritualist Movement with earlier cycles of psycho-religious phenomena, providing the beginnings of a contemporary literature on the subject. The treatises of Reichenbach, Du Potet and Deleuze, dealing with important ramifications of mesmeric or magnetic phenomena, showed that a new universe of subjective life awaited exploration by Western man.
But who would provide the charts for such exploration? Who could gather into one great scheme of man’s psychic and spiritual existence these disparate currents of experience and bizarre and bookish learning? Was there anyone who could reduce this clamor and competition of ideas, theories and unrelated facts to some semblance of order? And who could add—what was needed most of all—a foundation of moral verity which, in a world of decaying faiths, the heart of man might welcome, and his intellect accept?
This was the great task assumed by H. P. Blavatsky, and after her, by the men and women who became disciples in the course of the Theosophical Movement.
