The Value of Theosophy in the World of Thought
_An Address on taking office as President of the Theosophical Society.
Delivered at the Queen's Hall, Langham Place, London, W., on 10th July
1907._
The Value of Theosophy in the World of Thought
You will have seen on the handbill announcing the lecture, that we are
holding this meeting in connection with my taking office as President
of the Theosophical Society, and it is my purpose, in addressing you
to-night, to try to show you, at least to some small extent, what is
the value which the Society represents, as regarded from the
standpoint of human activities, manifested in the world of thought. I
want to try to show you that when we say THEOSOPHY we are speaking of
something of real value which can serve humanity in the various
departments of intellectual life. I propose, in order to do this, to
begin with a very brief statement of the fundamental idea of
Theosophy; and then, turning to the world of religious thought, to the
world of artistic thought, to the world of scientific thought, and
lastly to the world of political thought, to point out to you how that
which is called Theosophy may bring contributions of value to each of
these in turn.
Now Theosophy, as the name implies, is a Wisdom, a Divine Wisdom; and
the name historically, as many of you know, is identical with that
which in Eastern lands has been known by various names--as Tao, in
China; as the Brahmavidya, in India; as the Gnosis, among the
Greeks and the early Christians; and as Theosophy through the Middle
Ages and in modern times. It implies always a knowledge, a Wisdom that
transcends the ordinary knowledge, the ordinary science of the earth;
it implies a wisdom as regards life, a wisdom as regards the essential
nature of things, a wisdom which is summed up in two words when we say
"God-Wisdom." For it has been held in elder days--although in modern
times it has become largely forgotten--that man can really never know
anything at all unless he knows himself, and knows himself Divine;
that knowledge of God, the Supreme, the Universal Life, is the root of
all true knowledge of matter as well as of Spirit, of this world as
well as of worlds other than our own; that in that one supreme
knowledge all other knowledges find their root; that in that supreme
light all other lights have their origin; and that if man can know
anything, it is because he is Divine in nature, and, sharing the Life
that expresses itself in a universe, he can know at once the Life that
originates and the Matter that obeys.
Starting from such a standpoint, you will at once realise that
Theosophy is a spiritual theory of the world as against a
materialistic. It sees Spirit as the moulder, the shaper, the arranger
of matter, and matter only as the obedient expression and servant of
the Spirit; it sees in man a spiritual being, seeking to unfold his
powers by experience in a universe of forms; and it declares that man
misunderstands himself, and will fail of his true end, if he
identifies himself with the form that perishes instead of with the
life which is deathless. Hence, opposed to materialism alike in
science and philosophy, it builds up a spiritual conception of the
universe, and necessarily it is idealistic in its thought, and holds
up the importance of the ideal as a guide to all human activity. The
ideal, which is thought applied to conduct, that is the keynote of
Theosophy and its value in the varied worlds of thought; and the power
of thought, the might of thought, the ability that it has to clothe
itself in forms whose life only depends on the continuance of the
thought that gave them birth, that is its central note, or keynote, in
all the remedies that it applies to human ills. Idealist everywhere,
idealist in religion, idealist in art, idealist in science, idealist
in the practical life that men call politics, idealist everywhere; but
avoiding the blunder into which some idealists have fallen, when they
have not recognised that human thought is only a portion of the whole,
and not the whole. The Theosophist recognises that the Divine Thought,
of which the universe is an expression, puts limitations on his own
power of thought, on his own creative activity. He realises that the
whole compels the part, and that his own thought can only move within
the vast circle of the Divine Thought, which he only partially
expresses; so that while he will maintain that, on the ideal depends
all that is called "real" in the lower worlds, he will realise that
his creative power can only slowly mould matter to his will, and
though every result will depend on a creative thought, the results
will often move slowly, adapting themselves to the thought that gives
them birth. Hence, while idealist, he is not impracticable; while he
sees the power of thought, he recognises its limitations in space and
time; and while asserting the vital importance of right thought and
right belief, he realises that only slowly does the flower of thought
ripen into the fruit of action.
But on the importance of thought he lays a stress unusual in modern
life. It is the cant of the day, in judging the value of a man, that
"it does not matter what he believes but only what he does." That is
not true. It matters infinitely what a man believes; for as a man's
belief so he is; as a man's thought, so inevitably is his action.
There was a time in the world of thought when it was said with equal
error: "It does not matter what a man does, provided his faith is
right." If that word "faith" had meant the man's thought in its
integrity, then there would have been but little error; for the right
thought would inevitably have brought right action; but in those days
right thought meant only orthodox thought, according to a narrow canon
of interpretation, the obedient repetition of creeds, the blind
acceptance of beliefs imposed by authority. In those days what was
called Orthodoxy in religion was made the measure of the man, and
judgment depended upon orthodox acquiescence. Against that mistake the
great movement that closed the Middle Ages was the protest of the
intellect of man, and it was declared that no external authority must
bind the intellect, and none had right to impose from outside the
thought which is the very essence of the man--that great assertion of
the right of private judgment, of the supreme principle of the free
intelligence, so necessary for the progress of humanity. But like all
things it has been followed by a reaction, and men have run to the
other extreme: that nothing matters except conduct, and action alone
is to be considered. But your action is the result of your thought of
yesterday, and follows your yesterday as its expression in the outer
world; your thought of to-day is your action of to-morrow, and your
future depends on its accuracy and its truth, on its consonance with
reality. Hence it is all-important in the modern world to give back to
thought its right place as above action, as its inspirer and its
guide. For the human spirit by its expression as intellect judges,
decides, directs, controls. Its activity is the outcome of its
thinking; and if without caring for thought you plunge into action,
you have the constant experiments, feeble and fruitless, which so
largely characterise our modern life.
Pass, then, from that first assertion of the importance of right
thinking, to see what message Theosophy has for the world of religious
thought. What is religion? Religion is the quenchless thirst of the
human spirit for the Divine. It is the Eternal, plunged into a world
of transitory phenomena, striving to realise its own eternity. It is
the Immortal, flung into a world of death, trying to realise its own
deathlessness. It is the white Eagle of Heaven, born in the
illimitable spaces, beating its wings against the bars of matter, and
striving to break them and rise into the immensities where are its
birthplace and its real home. That is religion: the striving of man
for God. And that thirst of man for God many have tried to quench with
what is called Theology, or with books that are called sacred,
traditions that are deemed holy, ceremonies and rites which are but
local expressions of a universal truth. You can no more quench that
thirst of the human Spirit by anything but individual experience of
the Divine, than you can quench the thirst of the traveller parched
and dying in the desert by letting him hear water go down the throat
of another. Human experience, and that alone, is the rock on which all
religion is founded, that is the rock that can never be shaken, on
which every true Church must be built. Books, it is true, are often
sacred; but you may tear up every sacred book in the world, and as
long as man remains, and God to inspire man, new books can be written,
new pages of inspiration can be penned. You may break in pieces every
ceremony, however beautiful and elevating, and the Spirit that made
them to express himself has not lost his artistic power, and can make
new rites and new ceremonies to replace every one that is broken and
cast aside. The Spirit is deathless as God is deathless, and in that
deathlessness of the Spirit lies the certainty, the immortality of
religion. And Theosophy, in appealing to that immortal experience,
points the world of religions--confused by many an attack, bewildered
by many an assault, half timid before the new truth discovered every
day, half scared at the undermining of old foundations, and the
tearing by criticism of many documents--points it back to its own
inexhaustible source, and bids it fear neither time nor truth, since
Spirit is truth and eternity. All that criticism can take from you is
the outer form, never the living reality; and well indeed is it for
the churches and for the religions of the world that the outworks of
documents should be levelled with the ground, in order to show the
impregnability of the citadel, which is knowledge and experience.
But in the world of religious thought there are many services, less
important, in truth, than the one I have spoken of, but still
important and valuable to the faiths of the world; for Theosophy
brings back to men, living in tradition, testimony to the reality of
knowledge transcending the knowledge of the senses and the reasoning
powers of the lower mind. It comes with its hands full of proof,
modern proof, proof of to-day, living witnesses, of unseen worlds, of
subtler worlds than the physical. It comes, as the Founders and the
early Teachers of every religion have come, to testify again by
personal experience to the reality of the unseen worlds of which the
religions are the continual witnesses in the physical world. Have you
ever noticed in the histories of the great religions how they grow
feebler in their power over men as faith takes the place of knowledge,
and tradition the place of the living testimony of living men? That is
one of the values of Theosophy in the religious world, that it teaches
men to travel to worlds unseen, and to bring back the evidence of what
they have met and studied; that it so teaches men their own nature
that it enables them to separate soul and body, and travel without the
physical body in worlds long thought unattainable, save through the
gateway of death. I say "Long thought unattainable"; but the
scriptures of every religion bear witness that they are not
unattainable. The Hindu tells us that man should separate himself from
his body as you strip the sheath from the stem of the grass. The
Buddhist tells us that by deep thought and contemplation mind
may know itself as mind apart from the physical brain. Christianity
tells us many a story of the personal knowledge of its earlier
teachers, of a ministry of angels that remained in the Church, and of
angelic teachers training the neophytes in knowledge. Islam tells us
that its own great prophet himself passed into higher worlds, and
brought back the truths which civilised Arabia, and gave knowledge
which lit again the torch of learning in Europe when the Moors came to
Spain. And so religion after religion bears testimony to the
possibility of human knowledge outside the physical world; we only
re-proclaim the ancient truth--with this addition, which some
religions now shrink from making: that what man did in the past man
may do to-day; that the powers of the Spirit are not shackled, that
the knowledge of the other worlds is still attainable to man. And
outside that practical knowledge of other worlds it brings by that
same method the distinct assertion of the survival of the human Spirit
after death. It is only in very modern times that that has been
doubted by any large numbers of people. Here and there in the ancient
world, like a Lucretius in Rome, perhaps; like a Democritus in Greece;
certainly like a Charvaka in India, you find one here and there who
doubts the deathlessness of the Spirit in man; but in modern days that
disbelief, or the hopeless cynicism which thinks knowledge impossible,
has penetrated far and wide among the cultured, the educated classes,
and from them to the masses of the uneducated. That is the phenomenon
of modern days alone, that man by hundreds and by thousands despairs
of his own immortality. And yet the deepest conviction of humanity,
the deepest thought in man, is the persistence of himself, the "I"
that cannot die. And with one great generalisation, and one method,
Theosophy asserts at once the deathlessness of man and the existence
of God; for it says to man, as it was ever said in the ancient days:
"The proof of God is not without you but within you." All the greatest
teachers have reiterated that message, so full of hope and comfort;
for it shuts none out from knowledge. What is the method? Strip away
your senses, and you find the mind; strip away the mind, and you find
the pure reason; strip away the pure reason, and you find the
will-to-live; strip away the will-to-live, and you find Spirit as a
unit; strike away the limitations of the Spirit, and you find God.
Those are the steps: told in ancient days, repeated now. "Lose your
life," said the Christ, "and you shall find it to life eternal." That
is true: let go everything that you can let go; you cannot let go
yourself, and in the impossibility of losing yourself you find the
certainty of the Self Universal, the Universal Life.
Pass again from that to another religious point. I mentioned
ceremonies, rites of every faith. Those Theosophy looks at and
understands. So many have cast away ceremonies, even if they have
found them helpful, because they do not understand them, and fear
superstition in their use. Knowledge has two great enemies:
Superstition and Scepticism. Knowledge destroys blind superstition by
asserting and explaining natural truths of which the superstition has
exaggerated the unessentials; and it destroys scepticism by proving
the reality of the facts of the unseen world. The ceremony, the rite,
is a shadow in the world of sense of the truths in the world of
Spirit; and every religion, every creed, has its ceremonies as the
outward physical expression of some eternal spiritual truth. Theosophy
defends them, justifies them, by explaining them; and when they are
understood they cease to be superstitions that blind, and become
crutches that help the halting mind to climb to the spiritual life.
Let us pass from the world of religious thought, and pause for a
moment on the world of artistic thought. Now to Art, perhaps more than
in any other department of the human intelligence, the ideal is
necessary for life. All men have wondered from time to time why the
architecture--to take one case only--why the architecture of the past
is so much more wonderful, so much more beautiful, than the
architecture of the present. When you want to build some great
national building to-day you have to go back to Greece, or Rome, or
the Middle Ages for your model. Why is it that you have no new
architecture, expressive of your own time, as that was expressive of
the past? The severe order of Egypt found its expression in the mighty
temples of Karnak; the beauty and lucidity of Grecian thought bodied
itself out in the chaste and simple splendor of Grecian buildings; the
sternness of Roman law found its ideal expression in those wondrous
buildings whose ruins still survive in Rome; the faith of the Middle
Ages found its expression in the upward-springing arch of Gothic
architecture, and the exquisite tracery of the ornamented building.
But if you go into the Gothic cathedral, what do you find there? That
not alone in wondrous arch and splendid pillar, upspringing in its
delicate and slender strength from pavement to roof, not there only
did the art of the builder find its expression. Go round to any
out-of-the-way corner, or climb the roof of those great buildings, and
you will find in unnoticed places, in hidden corners, the love of the
artist bodying itself forth in delicate tracery, in stone that lives.
Men carved for love, not only for fame; men carved for beauty's sake,
not only for money; and they built perfectly because they had love and
faith, the two divine builders, and embodied both in deathless stone.
Before you can be more than copyists you must find your modern ideal,
and when you have found it you can build buildings that will defy
time. But you have not found it yet; the artist amongst us is too much
of a copyist, and too little of an inspirer and a prophet. We do not
want the painter only to paint for us the things our own eyes can see.
We want the artist eye to see more than the common eye, and to embody
what he sees in beauty for the instruction of our blinded sight. We do
not want accurate pictures of cabbages and turnips and objects of that
sort. However cleverly done, they remain cabbages and turnips still.
The man who could paint for us the thought that makes the cabbage, he
would be the artist, the man who knows the Life. And so for our new
Art we must have a splendid ideal. Do you want to know how low Art may
sink when materialism triumphs and vulgarises and degrades? Then see
that exhibition of French pictures that was placed in Bond Street some
years ago, which attracted those who loved indecency more than those
who loved the beautiful, and then you will understand how Art
perishes where the breath of the ideal does not inspire and keep
alive. And Theosophy to the artist would bring back that ancient
reverence which regards the artist of the Beautiful as one of the
chief God-revealers to the race of which he is a portion; which sees
in the great musical artist, or the sculptor, or the painter, a
God-inspired man, bringing down the grace of heaven to illuminate the
dull grey planes of earth. The artists should be the prophets of our
time, the revealers of the Divine smothered under the material; and
were they this, they would be regarded with love and with reverence;
for true art needs reverence for its growing, and the artist, of all
men--subtle, responsive, sensitive to everything that touches
him--needs an atmosphere of love and reverence that he may flower into
his highest power, and show the world some glimpse of the Beauty which
is God.
And the world of science--perhaps there, after the world of religion,
Theosophy has most of value to offer. Take Psychology. What a
confusion; what a mass of facts want arrangement; what a chaos of
facts out of which no cosmos is built! Theosophy, by its clear and
accurate definition of man, of the relation of consciousness to its
bodies, of Spirit to its vehicles, arranges into order that vast mass
of facts with which psychology is struggling now. It takes into that
wonderful "unconscious" or "sub-conscious"--which is now, as it were,
the answer to every riddle; but it is not understood--it takes into
that the light of direct investigation; divides the "unconscious"
which comes from the past from that which is the presage of the
future, separates out the inheritance of our long past ancestry which
remains as the "sub-conscious" in us; points to the higher
"super-conscious," not "sub-conscious," of which the genius is the
testimony at the present time; shows that human consciousness
transcends the brain; proves that human consciousness is in touch with
worlds beyond the physical; and makes sure and certain the hope
expressed by science, that it is possible that that which is now
unconscious shall become conscious, and that man shall find himself in
touch with a universe and not only in touch with one limited world.
That which Myers sometimes spoke of as the "cosmic consciousness," as
against our own limited consciousness, is a profound truth, and
carries with it the prophecy of man's future greatness. Just as the
fish is limited to the water, as the bird is limited to the air, so
man has been limited to the physical body, and has dreamed he had no
touch with other spaces, to which he really belongs. But your
consciousness is living in three worlds, and not in one, is touching
mightier possibilities, is beginning to contact subtler phenomena; and
all the traces of that are found in your newest psychology, and are
simply proofs of those many theories about man which Theosophy has
been teaching in the world for many a century, nay, for many a
millennium.
And physics and chemistry is there anything of value along
Theosophical lines of thought and investigation, which might aid our
physicists and our chemists, puzzled at the subtlety of the forces
with which they have to deal? Has it never struck some of the more
intuitive physicists and materialists that there may be subtler
senses which may be used for investigation of the subtler forces? That
man may have in himself senses by the evolution of which he will able
to pierce the secrets that now he is striving vainly to unveil? Has it
never even struck a physicist or a chemist that, if he does not
believe in the possibility of himself developing those subtler forces,
he might utilise them in others in order to prosecute further his own
investigations? They are beginning to to do that in France. They are
beginning to now try to use those whom they call "lucid"; that is,
people who see with eyes keener than the physical; they are beginning
to use those in medicine, are using them for the diagnosis of disease,
are using them for the testing of the sensitiveness of man, are
beginning to use them to try to discover if man has any body subtler
than the physical. And while I would not say to the scientific man:
"Accept our theories," I would say to him: "Take them as hypotheses by
which you may direct your further experiments, and you may go on and
make discoveries more rapidly than you can at the present time." For
there is many a clairvoyant who, put before a piece of some elemental
substance, could describe it very much better than is done by your
fractional analysis. And along other lines--chemical and
electrical--surely there is something a little unsatisfactory, when a
few years ago men told us that the atom was composed literally of
myriads of particles, and during the last year it has been suggested
that perhaps one particle is all of which an atom is composed. Might
it not be wise to try to get hold of your atoms by sight keener than
the physical, as it is possible to do, whether by the ordinary
clairvoyant who is sometimes developed up to that point, or by an
untrained sensitive whose senses are set free from the limitations of
the physical brain, and from that sensitive try to gather something of
the composition of matter which may guide you in your more scientific
search? I realise that what one, or two, or twenty people see, is no
proof for the scientific man; but it may give a hint whereby
mathematical deductions may be made, and calculations which otherwise
would not be thought of. So that I only suggest the utilising by
science of certain powers that are now available, keener than those of
the ordinary senses--a new sort of human microscope or human
telescope--whereby you may pierce to the larger or the smaller, beyond
the reach of your physical microscopes and telescopes, made of metal
and not of intelligence showing itself in matter.
Is there anything of value in Theosophical ideas, shall I say to the
science of medicine? Some say it is not yet a science, but works
empirically only. There is some truth in that; but are there not here
again lines of investigation which the physician might well study? For
instance, the power of thought over the human body, all that mass of
facts on which partly is built up such a science as Mental Healing, or
what is called Faith Cure, and so on. Do you think that these things
have been going on for hundreds of years, and that there is no truth
lying behind them? "The effects of imagination," you say. But what is
imagination? It does not matter of what it is the effect, if it brings
cure where before there was disease. If you put into a man's body a
drug that you do not understand, and find that it cures a disease and
relieves a pain, will you throw the drug aside because you do not
understand it? And why do you throw the power of imagination aside
because you cannot weigh it in your balance, nor find that it
depresses one scale more than the other? Imagination is one of the
subtlest powers of thought: imagination is one of the strongest powers
that the doctor might utilise when his drugs fail him and his old
methods no longer serve his purpose. Suggestion, the power of thought.
Why, there are records of cases where suggestion has killed! That
which has killed can also cure, and man's body being only a product of
thought, built up through the ages, answers more rapidly to its
creator than it does to clumsier products from the mineral and
vegetable kingdoms. Here again I only ask experiment. You know that
you can produce wounds upon the body of the hypnotised patient, in a
state of trance. By suggestion lesions are made, burns are caused,
inflammation and pain appear by the mere suggestion of a wound. A
blister is placed on a patient and forbidden to act; the skin is
untouched when the blister is removed: a bit of wet paper is given by
thought the qualities of the blister, and it will raise the skin, with
all the accompaniments of the chemical blister. Now these things are
known. You can see the pictures of wounds thus produced, if you will,
in some of the Paris hospitals, for along this line the Frenchman is
investigating further than the Englishman has done. And along that
line also lies much of useful experiment to be brought to the relief
of the diseases of humanity.
But as I have touched upon medicine, let me say--for I ought here to
say it--that there are some methods of modern medicine which Theosophy
emphatically condemns. It declares that no knowledge which is gained
from a tortured, a vivisected creature, is legitimate, even if it were
as useful as it has been proved to be useless. It declares that all
inoculations of disease into the healthy body are illegitimate, and it
condemns all such. It declares that all those foul injections of modern
medicine which use animal fluids to restore the exhausted vitality of
man are ruinous to the body into which they are put. Here again France,
by the very excess of its methods, is beginning to recoil before the
results which have come about. Only two years ago I was told by a
leading physician of Paris that many of the doctors had met together to
look at the results which had grown out of the methods that for years
they had been following without hesitation and without scruple, and that
they feared that they had caused more diseases than they cured. Why are
these things condemned as illegitimate? Because the building up of the
human body is the building by a living Spirit of a temple for himself,
and it is moulded by that Spirit for his own purposes. The higher powers
of intelligence have made the human body what it is, different from the
animal bodies out of which, physically, in ages long gone by, it has
grown. Your delicacy of touch, the exquisite beauty and delicacy of your
nervous system, these things are the outcome of the higher powers of the
Spirit expressing themselves in the human body, where they cannot
express themselves in the animal form. And if you ignore this, if you
forget it, if you forget that this splendid human temple built up by
the Spirit of man through ages of toil and of suffering, to express his
own higher qualities--compassion, tenderness, love, pity for the weak
and the helpless, protection of the helpless against the strong--if you
forget the whole of that, and act as a brute even would not act, in
cruelty and wickedness to men and animals alike, you will degrade the
body you are trying to preserve, you will paralyse the body you are
trying to save from disease, and you will go back into the savagery
which is the nemesis of cruelty, and ruin these nobler bodies, the
inheritance of the civilised races.
I pass from that to my last world, the world of political thought. Now
Theosophy takes no part in party politics. It lays down the great
principle of human Brotherhood, and bids its followers go out into the
world and work on it--using their intelligence, their power of
thought, to judge the value of every method which is proposed. And our
general criticism on the politics of the moment would be that they are
remedies, not preventions, and leave untouched the root out of which
all the miseries grow. Looking sometimes at your party politics, it
seems to me as though you were as children plucking flowers and
sticking them into the sand and saying: "See what a beautiful garden I
have made." And when you wake the next morning the flowers are dead,
for there were no roots, but only rootless flowers. I know you must
make remedies, but you should not stop at that. When you send out your
Red Cross doctors and nurses to pick up the mutilated bodies that your
science of war has maimed, they are doing noble work, and deserve our
love and gratitude, for the wounded must be nursed; but the man who
works for peace does more for the good of humanity than the Red Cross
doctors and nurses. And so also in the political world. You cannot
safely live "hand-to-mouth" in politics any more than in any other
department of human life. But how many are there in the political
parties who care for causes and not only for effects? That is the
criticism we should make. We see everywhere Democracy spreading; but
Democracy is on its trial, and unless it can evolve some method by
which the wise shall rule, and not merely the weight of ignorant
numbers, it will dig its own grave. So long as you leave your people
ignorant they are not fit to rule. The schools should come before the
vote, and knowledge before power. You are proud of your liberty; you
boast of a practically universal suffrage--leaving out, of course, one
half of humanity!--but taking your male suffrage as you have it, how
many of the voters who go to the poll know the principles of political
history, know anything of economics, know anything of all the
knowledge which is wanted for the guiding of the ship of the State
through troubled waters? You do not choose your captains out of people
who know nothing of navigation; but you choose the makers of your
rulers out of those who have not studied and do not know. That is not
wise. I do not deny it is a necessary stage in the evolution of man. I
know that the Spirit acts wisely, and guides the nations along roads
in which lessons are to be learned; and I hope that out of the
blunders, and the errors, and the crudities of present politics there
will evolve a saner method, in which the wise of the nation will have
power and guide its councils, and wisdom, not numbers, shall speak
the decisive word.
Now there is one criticism of politics that we often hear in these
days. It is said that behind politics lie economics. That is true. You
may go on playing at politics for ever and ever; but if your economic
foundation is rotten, no political remedies can build a happy and
prosperous nation. But while I agree that behind politics lie
economics, there is something that lies also behind economics, and of
that I hear little said. Behind economics lies character, and without
character you cannot build a free and a happy nation. A nation
enormous in power, what do you know of the way in which your power is
wielded in many a far-off land? How much do you know about your vast
Indian Empire? How many of your voters going to the poll can give an
intelligent answer to any question affecting that 300,000,000 of human
beings whom you hold in your hand, and deal with as you will? There
are responsibilities of Empire as well as pride in it, and pride of
Empire is apt to founder when the responsibilities of Empire are
ignored. And so the Theosophist is content to go to the root of the
matter, and try to build up for you the citizens out of whom your
future State is to be made. Education, real education, secular
education, is now your cry. They tried secular education in France;
they destroyed religious teaching; they tried to give morality without
religion. But the moral lessons had no effect: they were too cold and
dull, and dead. Is it not a scandal that in a country like this, where
the vast majority are religious, you are quarrelling so much about the
trifles that separate you, that the only way to peace seems to be to
take religion out of the schools altogether, and train the children
only in morality, allowing an insignificant minority to have its way?
Why! we have done better than that in India, we Theosophists. Hindu
Theosophists have founded there a College in which, despite all their
sects and all their religious quarrels, they have found a common
minimum of Hinduism on which their children can be trained in
religion and morality alike. I grant it was a Theosophical inspiration
that began the movement; but the whole mass of Hindus have fallen
in with it, and are accepting the books as the basis of education.
Government has recognised them, and has begun to introduce them for
the use of Hindus in its own schools. That is the way in which we
Theosophists work at politics. We go to the root to build character,
and we know that noble characters will make a noble and also a
prosperous nation. But you can no more make a nation of free men out
of children untrained in duty and in righteousness, than you can build
a house that will stand if you use ill-baked bricks and rotten timber.
Our keynote in politics is Brotherhood. That worked out into life will
give you the nation that you want.
And what does Brotherhood mean? It means that everyone of us, you and
I, every man and woman throughout the land, looks on all others as
they look on their own brothers, and acts on the same principle which
in the family rules. You keep religion out of politics? You cannot,
without peril to your State; for unless you teach your people that
they are a Brotherhood, whether or not they choose to recognise it,
you are building on the sand and not on the rock. And what does
Brotherhood mean? It means that the man who gains learning, uses it to
teach the ignorant, until none are ignorant. It means that the man who
is pure takes his purity to the foul, until all have become clean. It
means that the man who is wealthy uses his wealth for the benefit of
the poor, until all have become prosperous. It means that everything
you gain, you share; everything you achieve, you give its fruit to
all. That is the law of Brotherhood, and it is the law of national as
well as of individual life. You cannot rise alone. You are bound too
strongly each to each. If you use your strength to raise yourself by
trampling on your fellows, inevitably you will fail by the weakness
that you have wronged.
Do you know who are the greatest enemies of a State? The weak, injured
by the strong. For, above all States, rules an Eternal Justice; and
the tears of miserable women, and the curses of angry, starving men,
sap the foundations of a State that denies Brotherhood, and reach the
ears of that Eternal Justice by which alone States live, and Nations
continue. It is written in an ancient scripture that a Master of Duty
said to a King: "Beware the tears of the weak, for they sap the
thrones of Kings." Strength may threaten: weakness undermines.
Strength may stand up to fight: weakness cuts away the ground on which
the fighters are standing. And the message of Theosophy to the modern
political world is: Think less about your outer laws, and more about
the lives of the people who have to live under those laws. Remember
that government can only live when the people are happy; that States
can only flourish where the masses of the population are contented;
that all that makes life enjoyable is the right of the lowest and the
poorest; that they can do without external happiness far less than
you, who have so many means of inner satisfaction, of enjoyment, by
the culture that you possess and that they lack. If there is not money
enough for everything, spend your money in making happier, healthier,
purer, more educated, the lives of the poor; then a happy nation will
be an imperial nation; for Brotherhood is the strongest force on
earth.