earlier incarnation.)

The speculative aspects of Theosophy also appeal to tempers which love
to dream without accepting the laborious discipline of a truly reasoned
speculation. To quote a phrase of Macaulay's quoted in turn by William
James in one of his letters, there is a type of mind "utterly wanting in
the faculty by which a demonstrated truth is distinguished from a
plausible supposition," and there has been amongst us of late a marked
increase of this type of mind. There has been up to our own time no
great amount of such speculation as this in the West. It is not native
to the occidental temper and it has been held in control by our
scientific approach to the facts of our world and our experiences
therein. We have demanded for our speculations generally the
demonstration of fact and this has heretofore held us to a rather
narrow range, but that widening of the frontiers of the possible which
has attended the new psychology with its emphasis upon the subconscious,
along with the rather baffling character of psychic phenomena, has
opened the flood gates and released a tide of speculation which goes far
beyond the proved fact and accepts no limits but its own ingenious
audacity. We have already seen how evident deficiencies in the
discipline of present-day education and the loose state of mind too much
in evidence amongst us has contributed to all this. There are everywhere
a great number of perplexed people who want to believe something and
find it far easier to believe in dreams and guesses and cloud-built
systems than in restraining facts or even the rather clearly
demonstrated realities of the moral order, and such as these have found
a wealth of material in Eastern speculation.

_A Bridge of Clouds_

In trying to appraise the truth of Theosophy we have to disentangle the
system and the needs and the seekings which lead its adherents to accept
it. These needs and seekings are, after all, near and familiar; they are
only our old questions Whence? and Whither? and Why? Theosophy is at
least the attempt to really answer some of the questions which Western
science is either content or compelled to leave unanswered. The creative
point of contact between personality and matter and force is deeply
enwrapped in mystery. Orthodox Christianity has been content to affirm
the facts of creation without asking any questions at all as to its
methods. It has affirmed the omnipotence of the Creator and has found in
His om