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words, which every spiritualist will understand. Vedantin metaphysicians, denying as they do objective reality or importance even to our physical body, are not likely to lose their time in dividing the lower principles in man, the compound aspects and nature of the phantom of that body. Practical occultism does; and it is one of the duties of those Theosophists who study occultism to warn their brethren of the dangers incurred by those who know nothing of the real nature of those apparitions: to warn them that a shell is not "spirit." This statement of mine I find qualified as "simply absurd." Having never regarded as absurd anything said or written by Mr. Subba Row, I could not retaliate even if I would, I can only pronounce the epithet, let us say—unkind, and demur to the qualification. Had the author to face "practical demonstration" in spiritual phenomena and "materializations of spirits," so called, he would soon find that his four principles could never cover the ground of this kind of phenomena. Even the lower aspect of the principle of manas (physical brain, or its post-mortem auric survival) and of kamarupa are hardly sufficient to explain the seemingly intelligent and spiritual principles (bhuta or elements) that manifest through mediums.
V.It is not consistent with fact and truth to charge me, "the original (?) exponent herself" with changing my conceptions about the nature of principles. "I have never changed them, nor could I do so." In this I claim my right, too, as Mr. Subba Row does, to my evidence being "the best and the most direct evidence available as regards my own states of consciousness." I may have used wrong Sanskrit expressions, (and even wrong and clumsily put English sentences, for the matter of that)—while trying to blend the Arhat with the Brahminical occult tenets. As to those conceptions, my "four principles" have to disintegrate and vanish in the air, before any amount of criticism can make me regard my ten fingers as only four; although metaphysically, I am fully prepared to admit that they exist only in my own mayavic perceptions and states of consciousness.
