ot do this to glorify the Theosophical Society, but rather to show you that these ideas belong to all the world alike. You find constantly in your daily press, in your literature of fiction and amusement, that some idea that twenty-five years ago was said to be theosophical and absurd is alluded to in a commonplace way, or made the centre of a plot. Why, half the novels of today turn on some occult experience. Now that fact to me is full of encouragement; for if I found that Theosophy, in its garb of the Theosophical Society, was limited within that one Society and was only making one more sect amid the countless sects of the world, I should think little of the promise of its future. But if I find that these ideas do not belong to the Theosophical Society only, but that they are underlying the forward trend of thought in every direction, so that none may say, " they are mine, not yours," ah! then I realise that behind this little body that we call the Theosophical Society there is some great impulse, some mighty spiritual power.
Let us turn to look at it for a moment from that standpoint, and see where our work lies in such a worldwide movement. I discern, under the ordinary facts and theories of life as we have them today, an influence which is guiding humanity towards the ideal and away from materialism. Look at Science. When I was studying chemistry I learned about the atoms, and how they were ultimate particles of matter with unchangeable characteristics which they held from an unknown past, and would hold in an unknown future. Nay, in one book it was written, "from all eternity the atom of carbon has been an atom of carbon, and to all eternity it will so remain." But who says that now? Some say the atom is electricities linked together. Some say it is a body [Page 12] made up of innumerable particles in a rapid state of vibration, the vibratory speed changing under varying conditions. The atom is the most fluid of all things in the scientific concepts of the moment, and threatens to become nothing but a whirl in the ether, perchance made up of electricity, and electricity itself the only atom. But how different all that is from the science of our earlier days. No longer is Science studying matter, it is studying force. No longer does Science argue for the existence of force because there is matter; it argues for the existence of matter because there is force.
Electricity, too, has entirely changed its character, and now-a-days the words of Madame Blavatsky spoken in 1884 — laughed at then as the words of an unscientific charlatan — are being repeated by the foremost electricians — that electricity is atomic; that perhaps there are no atoms at all except electricity. So is Wisdom justified of her children.
And take Psychology. How marvellous the change in that! This wonderful "sub-conscious": what possibilities lie within it for the near future! What discoveries are our New Psychologists bordering in the strange observations that they are making year after year! And when I find among one set of materialistic scientific men, a number of experiments being made at the present time which are only repeating the observations that Sir William Crookes made some thirty years ago, and materialistic physiologists saying that they have proved beyond dispute movement without contact, and the weight of a force they cannot yet measure, I see that thirty years have made much difference, and that scientists can say safely today that for which Crookes nearly forfeited his scientific position in saying some years ago.
And so the trend in Science is toward those forces that as yet are immeasurable and intangible; and yet who can say that they shall not be measured, that they shall not become tangible in the days to come ? Only the scientist has to learn that he has well-nigh exhausted the [Page 13] possibilities of nature in the making of delicate mechanism exterior to himself, and that he must begin to evolve that more delicate mechanism within himself which will open to him other realms in which he can observe unchecked. And the work 