speaker; that consciousness, so
far from being dependent on the brain, is more active when freed from
the gross forms of matter than when encased within them; that the
great Sages spoken of by H.P. Blavatsky exist; that they wield powers
and possess knowledge before which our control of Nature and knowledge
of her ways is but as child's play. All this, and much more, have I
learned, and I am but a pupil of low grade, as it were in the infant
class of the Occult School; so the first plunge has been successful,
and the intuition has been justified. This same path of knowledge that
I am treading is open to all others who will pay the toll demanded at
the gateway--and that toll is willingness to renounce everything for
the sake of spiritual truth, and willingness to give all the truth
that is won to the service of man, keeping back no shred for self.

On June 23rd, in a review of "The Secret Doctrine" in the _National
Reformer,_ the following passages occur, and show how swiftly some of
the main points of the teaching had been grasped. (There is a blunder
in the statement that of the seven modifications of Matter Science
knows only four, and till lately knew only three; these four are
sub-states only, sub-divisions of the lowest plane.)

After saying that the nineteenth-century Englishman would be but too
likely to be repelled if he only skimmed the book, I went on: "With
telescope and with microscope, with scalpel and with battery, Western
Science interrogates nature, adding fact to fact, storing experience
after experience, but coming ever to gulfs unfathomable by its
plummets, to heights unscalable by its ladders. Wide and masterful in
its answers to the 'How?' the 'Why?' ever eludes it, and causes remain
enwrapped in gloom. Eastern Science uses as its scientific instrument
the penetrating faculties of the mind alone, and regarding the
material plane as _Maya_--illusion--seeks in the mental and spiritual
planes of being the causes of the material effects. There, too, is the
only reality; there the true existence of which the visible universe
is but the shadow.

"It is clear that from such investigations some further mental
equipment is necessary than that normally afforded by the human body.
And here comes the parting of the ways between East and West. For the
study of the material universe, our five senses, aided by the
instruments invented by Science, may suffice. For all we can hear and
see, taste and handle, thes