e new light but to be ever progressive. It is
highly and intensely spiritual, and develops in some most marvellous
powers over natural forces. Its spirituality, however, does not leave
the earth untouched and mortal needs unrecognized. It is an advance
movement in the East, bringing substance and actuality to much that in
Buddhism is but vaporous ideality and bewildering prefiguration. It
claims that intervening land or water is no barrier to close personal
association of its brotherhood, and that they are confined to no land
or clime. Here in America it has followers who walk by its light, we
are told, without knowing it, and many students trying to encompass
the mysteries of the occult science, which claims only to be like
other science, the fruit of study and discovery, giving mastery over
subtle forces of nature which physical scientists fail to recognize.
Its ethics are the highest conceivable, and the individual existence
of the soul apart from the body a matter of commonest demonstration
among the adepts.

Mental science so closely resembles theosophy, as we understand it,
that we hardly know the difference, save that of immaturity. It is
theosophy in its infancy, adapted to the status of American thought in
the psychological direction. Confined though it is at present chiefly
to the curing of the sick it is by no means admitted that this is the
limit or more than the beginning of its adaptation to human needs. It
is spending in this country with amazing rapidity, and though yet a
child is certain to bring about a great change in the ideas of many
regarding mind, its power over and priority to matter. So far as its
students devote their attention to other than such comprehension of
its postulates as is necessary to become healers, they are Buddhistic
in thought and expression, and some even accept a modified theory of
metempsychosis known as reincarnation. Still they reject the
philosophy of Spiritualism respecting spirit life, and appear to be
all at sea as regards the immediate future of the individual. In their
utterances on this they are more Buddhist than Christian, as in other
respects. They doubt or deny individual existence of the soul. The
Spiritualist believes that his soul will have for all time a body of
some sort, spiritual or physical, and his spirit-world and life are
filled with very human occupations, thoughts and desires, carried on
amid familiar scenery in a very substantial and earth-like mann