Report of the General Meeting of the “Hermes” T.S. | Notes by H.P.B.
Far more interesting still, is the Report of the meeting of the “Hermes Lodge” on March 25th, 1889; and it is with sincere pleasure that we find these meetings qualified as “veritable fraternal communions in the Spirit of Truth.”
The meeting was opened by a paper read by the Vice-President, Mr. G. Caminade d’Angers, an analysis of Devachan according to Mr. A. P. Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism. Then came a very substantial summary of the unity of all theogonies, and their evolution through ages and nations by the Corresponding Secretary of the “Hermes” Lodge; and finally a paper was read by a member, called, “What is Theosophy?”
We regret our inability to give more than a few concluding paragraphs; but these are too good to be left untranslated.
The principal objection addressed to the Theosophists is the charge that they do not conform to the scientific methods of research and demonstration. “You postulate your principles à priori, hence you make them arbitrary. Starting from this, you deduce your conclusions which, supposing them to be strictly logical, have yet no scientific value, since they err by their very basis.”1
“In short, Theosophy is for our adversaries rather a theological than a scientific doctrine; it appeals to faith (?) more than to reason . . . and cannot be accepted by the scientist who does not admit (or pretends he does not) any other than inductive reasoning resting on positive facts (!) authentically demonstrated.”
(Vide Scientific Syllogism, infra).
The lecturer undertook to prove that the fundamental principle of Theosophy—indicated in the etymology of the term—was the result of strict induction based on positive facts and admitted as such by the scientists of every age and country.
He said that:
“1st. There are three sources of human knowledge; nature, written tradition, and oral instruction. Though no one need disdain the written testimony or the oral tradition, yet it is always to nature as a last criterium that both the others have to be made subservient.
“2nd. Among all the beings which people the world, man is the one from which every observation has to start, and to which it has to lead. As St. Martin said, healthy philosophy demands that things should be explained through man, and not man through things. Such a study of man” . . . led the lecturer to recognize three constitutional principles in human nature.
“3rd. Passing thence, from man to things, he showed rapidly, that these three principles (upadhis) were found in all Nature.
“4th. Further, in virtue of the hermetic (and also Aristotelian) axioms ‘as above, so below,’ analogy leads us to admit above men an indefinite series of beings, which we do not see, but the reality of which is demonstrated to us by the phenomena of clairvoyance, in short, of magic.
“5th. Finally, at the summit of the ladder, the same analogy makes us perceive the Esse of all Wisdom–Deity. Hence, the name of Theosophy, of that science which embraces all the chain of beings, as far as human mind can do so. But, instead, as in theology, of exhausting itself in sterile efforts to determine the attributes of God, which would amount to seeking to define the infinite,2 it limits our efforts to a tacit recognition of its necessity. It admits with Plato that one dare not say aught of Deity but that which is verisimilar; and with St. Bernard, that it is absurd to seek the supreme beneath or below man’s possibility of thought. By induction we thus arrive from Nature to Deity. Thus, the catechism of Theosophy could define God as: The Indeducible Induction.”
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We may end by remarking that “the Theosophists of the West are sending their greetings and wishes of prosperity to the Doyen of all the world’s journals and publications, the Gazette of Pekin, which prepares to celebrate in 1889 the thousandth year of its existence.” A millennium of literary activity is something that our “superior race” can hardly boast of anyway. In this, at any rate, the proud West has to submit to looking very cheap and small before an “inferior race.”
1. We strongly suspect this method of being precisely that of orthodox science, and not at all the theosophical. While their conclusions are always strictly correct and logical, their major premise is generally a hypothesis, and often not true in nature. The syllogisms of science run somewhat in this manner:
The catarrhine ape is dumb, and lost its tail; (Haeckel)
Speech arose from crude animal sounds, and early man had a tail; (Darwin)
Therefore, the two had a common ancestor.
It is for the Darwino-Haeckelians, evidently, that it has been said that, “If the premises are not true and the syllogism is regular, the reason is valid, and the conclusion, whether true or false, is correctly derived.”—Ed. [H.P.B.]
2. Leaving aside that trifling difficulty in philosophy, which shows to us that to postulate attributes, which are by their very nature finite, to the infinite, is like trying to square the circle.—Ed. [H.P.B.]