The “Aristotelean philosopher” is the mouthpiece of that majority in modern society which has worked itself out an elaborate policy full of sophistry and paradox, behind which every member clumsily hides his personal views. His “respectable deference to public opinion,” is short-hand for hypocrisy. He confuses phenomena for which the agency of “disembodied spirits” is claimed, with natural phenomena for which every tithe of supernaturalism is rejected. He, who does not believe in Spiritualism cannot believe in Christianity, for the very foundation of that faith is the materialization of their Saviour. If Spiritualism and Occultism are superstition and falsehood, so is Christianity with its Mosaic miracles and the witches of Endor, its resurrections and materialization of angels, and hundreds of other spiritual and occult phenomena. Is belief in the Holy Ghost less blind than belief in the “ghosts” of our departed fathers and mothers? Is faith in an abstract and never-to-be-scientifically-proven principle any more “respectable” or worthy of sympathy than that other faith of believers, as earnest as Christians are, that the spirits of those whom they loved best on earth, their mothers, children, friends, are ever near them, though their bodies may be gone? Physical as well as psychological phenomena court experiment and the investigations of science; whereas, supernatural religion dreads and avoids such. The former claims no miracles, no supernaturalism to hang its faith upon, while religion imperatively demands them, and invariably collapses whenever such belief is withdrawn. An abusive, uncompromising bigot is more honest than a mild-spoken, sneering hypocrite. A lady who will not blush to empty in the view of all a tumbler of stiff brandy and soda, will stare, in shocked amazement, at another of her sex smoking an innocent cigarette! Madame Blavatsky defends the Cause of Truth from its detractors and traducers. Facts existed in the “pre-scientific past,” and errors are as thick as berries in our scientific present. Modern science is atheistic, phantasmagorical, and always in labour with conjecture. Not to know is its climax. With whom then, is the criterion of truth to be left? Are we to abandon Truth to the mercy and judgment of a prejudiced society, constantly caught trying to subvert that which it does not understand? A society ever seeking to transform sham and hypocrisy into synonyms of “propriety” and “respectability”? During that incessant warfare, in which old creeds and new doctrines, conflicting schools and authorities, revivals of blind faith and incessant scientific discoveries running a race as though for the survival of the fittest, swallow up and mutually destroy and annihilate each other — it would take a sage much wiser than King Solomon himself to decide between fact and fiction! Mental slavery is the worst of all slaveries. It is a state which, as brutal force has no real power, indicates either an abject cowardice or a great intellectual weakness. Undisputed fact is the only tribunal we submit to and recognize it without appeal. The Theosophical Society is an absolute and uncompromising Republic of Conscience; preconception and narrow-mindedness in science and philosophy have no room in it: they are as hateful and as much denounced by us, as dogmatism and bigotry in theology. The worms of sham and hypocrisy have gnawed the roots of wisdom and hardened the human heart. Instead of spiritualizing matter, the Shakers of America, and the “Apostles” of the Calcutta New Dispensation, materialize spirit. Spiritualism, as a sect, has as much a right for recognition as any other Christian sect. But then, how can belief in spirits, the surviving souls of departed men — quite an orthodox Christian dogma — be held disreputable by the Christian public? As long as the Christian public professes belief in, and veneration for its ancestral faith, it behoves them little to throw the accusation of “degrading superstitions and credulity” into the teeth of Spiritualism. The scientific basis of Spiritualism corroborated by modern science.