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 t