-admit that when society is
built on the foundation of common property in all that is necessary
for the production of wealth, the time will come for the consideration
of the population question. Nor do I now see, any more than I saw
then, how any Materialist can rationally avoid the Neo-Malthusian
position. For if man be the outcome of purely physical causes, it is
with these that we must deal in guiding his future evolution. If he be
related but to terrestrial existence, he is but the loftiest organism
of earth; and, failing to see his past and his future, how should my
eyes not have been then blinded to the deep-lying causes of his
present woe? I brought a material cure to a disease which appeared to
me to be of material origin; but how when the evil came from a subtler
source, and its causes lay not on the material plane? How if the
remedy only set up new causes for a future evil, and, while
immediately a palliative, strengthened the disease itself, and ensured
its reappearance in the future? This was the view of the problem set
before me by H.P. Blavatsky when she unrolled the story of man, told
of his origin and his destiny, showed me the forces that went to the
making of man, and the true relation between his past, his present,
and his future.

For what is man in the light of Theosophy? He is a spiritual
intelligence, eternal and uncreate, treading a vast cycle of human
experience, born and reborn on earth millennium after millennium,
evolving slowly into the ideal man. He is not the product of matter,
but is encased in matter, and the forms of matter with which he
clothes himself are of his own making. For the intelligence and will
of man are creative forces--not creative _ex nihilo_, but creative as
is the brain of the painter--and these forces are exercised by man in
every act of thought. Thus he is ever creating round him
thought-forms, moulding subtlest matter into shape by these energies,
forms which persist as tangible realities when the body of the thinker
has long gone back to earth and air and water. When the time for
rebirth into this earth-life comes for the soul these thought-forms,
its own progeny, help to form the tenuous model into which the
molecules of physical matter are builded for the making of the body,
and matter is thus moulded for the new body in which the soul is to
dwell, on the lines laid down by the intelligent and volitional life
of the previous, or of many previous, incarnations. So