s 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 m