does each man
create for himself in verity the form wherein he functions, and what
he is in his present is the inevitable outcome of his own creative
energies in his past. Applying this to the Neo-Malthusian theory, we
see in sexual love not only a passion which man has in common with the
brute, and which forms, at the present stage of evolution, a necessary
part of human nature, but an animal passion that may be trained and
purified into a human emotion, which may be used as one of the levers
in human progress, one of the factors in human growth. But, instead of
this, man in the past has made his intellect the servant of his
passions; the abnormal development of the sexual instinct in man--in
whom it is far greater and more continuous than in any brute--is due
to the mingling with it of the intellectual element, all sexual
thoughts, desires, and imaginations having created thought-forms,
which have been wrought into the human race, giving rise to a
continual demand, far beyond nature, and in marked contrast with the
temperance of normal animal life. Hence it has become one of the most
fruitful sources of human misery and human degradation, and the
satisfaction of its imperious cravings in civilised countries lies at
the root of our worst social evils. This excessive development has to
be fought against, and the instinct reduced within natural limits, and
this will certainly never be done by easy-going self-indulgence within
the marital relation any more than by self-indulgence outside it. By
none other road than that of self-control and self-denial can men and
women now set going the causes which will build for them brains and
bodies of a higher type for their future return to earth-life. They
have to hold this instinct in complete control, to transmute it from
passion into tender and self-denying affection, to develop the
intellectual at the expense of the animal, and thus to raise the whole
man to the human stage, in which every intellectual and physical
capacity shall subserve the purposes of the soul. From all this it
follows that Theosophists should sound the note of self-restraint
within marriage, and the gradual--for with the mass it cannot be
sudden--restriction of the sexual relation to the perpetuation of the
race.

Such was the bearing of Theosophical teaching on Neo-Malthusianism, as
laid before me by H.P. Blavatsky, and when I urged, out of my bitter
knowledge of the miseries endured by the poor, that it