l 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 of Theosophy is not only to popularise still more its knowledge of the unseen worlds, but to put that knowledge in a form in which the scientist may take it up if he will, and use it as a reasonable hypothesis. For I do not suggest to the psychologist that he should swallow our theory of consciousness and its veils of matter; but I do suggest to him that as that theory is coherent, as it explains problems he cannot solve, that he might use our theories as hypotheses on which to experiment and so, perhaps, shorten the path of investigation which he treads so patiently.
Turn from Science to Art. What has Theosophy to say to Art? Theosophy declares that Art ought not to be the mere presentment of what is called the real, the objective, but the representation to us of the unseen, the ideal. There is much Art that is greatly admired which simply gives us Nature back on a canvas, often very beautiful as a reproduction of Nature, but still, I think, not the highest type that Art ought to be able to reach; for surely the artist, who is the man of genius, should make real to us the unseen behind the veil, should be able to show the hidden and make it manifest for the instruction of all men. And I see in Art that tendency is coming; I see in Art the ideal is being searched for more than it has been since religion dropped the pencil and the brush, and I look for a day in which again a mighty faith in the invisible will make an Art worthy to be called an Art. Only, instead of pictures of Madonnas and children, we shall have some of the secrets of the world invisible throwing themselves on the canvas of the painter, or living in the music of the musician. The progress of Art must be towards the ideal, to see more as beautiful and not less, and to show that even in things that people think unbeautiful there lies a true beauty for the eye that can see.[Page 14] For we want the poet that can sing the modern world as well as the ancient, and see the true fairy tale under the veil of the present as well as in the mirage of the pas