that any member of the society in Europe could pass an examination in any Oriental language whatever. The third Object, on the other hand, has led to some real achievements. The society has not, perhaps, done much in the “investigation” line itself; but members of it have certainly supplied the most astonishing “unexplained laws of nature” and “psychical powers” for investigation by other people. It is this which has given it its success, its growth, its world-wide notoriety. It is this which first attracted and convinced its best-known converts, and it is this which has created the successive “booms” (as they would be called in a more purely commercial connexion) which have produced the biggest crops of entrance subscriptions from the wonder-loving public. I lay stress on this because the Theosophists have shown a good deal of inconstancy in their treatment of the third Object. They have always worked a given marvel for all it was worth until it got somehow blown upon; then they turn round and remark that mere material phenomena are, after all, of no great importance: the thing is the study of those great spiritual ideas which, &c., &c. In fact, they want to have it both ways. Mr. Sinnett, however, whose “Occult World” remains the classic description of Madame Blavatsky as a wonder-worker, confesses candidly in a memorial sketch of her which appeared in the Review of Reviews how much stress she herself laid on such things, as long as she could get anyone to believe in them:—
One could no more write a memoir on trigonometry and say nothing about triangles, than survey the strange career just concluded and ignore the marvels coruscating through it. And at this early period of her enterprise [he means, before the Psychical Research exposure] she seems to have depended more on the startling effect of surprising powers she was enabled to exhibit than on the philosophical teaching … which became the burden of her later utterances.
Just so. It is easy to hold your miracles cheap—after they have been found out. Madame Blavatsky fell back on Object Two—when Object Three was discredited. But the taste for such things, even when it is de rigueur to describe them as “occult applications of strictly natural laws,” is apt to grow upon any religious sect which once dabbles in them. Mrs. Besant, too, in due course fell a victim to the temptation
