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Tantrika"—school, to whose philosophical tenets Mr. Maitland and his followers are quite welcome to address themselves.
I shall now deal with Mrs. Kingsford's objection to the whole system of evolution as given by Mr. Sinnett. "The mathematical precision," it is argued, "of the clockwork arrangement invoked by Mr. Sinnett's mechanical system" shows its disaccord with "the suggestions of scientific and spiritual thought."
Whatever may be the merits or demerits of the system in question, it is very hard to see how any system can be condemned as "unscientific" merely because of its mathematical precision. If everything in the universe is subject to a rigorous chain of causation, then, it cannot be denied that all natural facts are capable of being represented "with the mathematical precision of a clockwork arrangement," although the official science of the day may not acquire the capacity of so representing them. But, it cannot, for a single moment, be denied that the more precision any science acquires, the closer does it approach its abstract ideal—immutable Law. The only thing that seems to me unscientific in the whole matter is—Mrs. Kingsford's objections.
Attack is next directed by the gifted lady against the physical existence of the seven planets, which form the planetary chain spoken of in Mr. Sinnett's book. On the authority of some exoteric Buddhist dogmas, Mrs. Kingsford asserts that the seven planets in question are only "an allegory," and really indicate so many "spiritual states." But elsewhere she admits the reality of a diversity of spiritual states, and then with a strange forgetfulness of one of the fundamental axioms of Occult Science—"as it is above, so it is below"—denies diversity to material conditions of existence. If there are several conditions of Devachan, and several states of Nirvana, why should then material existence be limited to only one? I find, however, from a foot-note on page 6, that Mrs. Kingsford does not question the fact of "planetary evolution and transmigration;" and I infer therefrom, that
