sing the worst human passions,
which are so dangerous in India. A marble statue could not be less moved
by the raging wrath of the crowd. We saw him once at work. He sent away
all his faithful followers and forbade them either to watch over him
or to defend him, and stood alone before the infuriated crowd, facing
calmly the monster ready to spring upon him and tear him to pieces.

Here a short explanation is necessary. A few years ago a society of
well-informed, energetic people was formed in New York. A certain
sharp-witted savant surnamed them "La Societe des Malcontents du
Spiritisme." The founders of this club were people who, believing in the
phenomena of spiritualism as much as in the possibility of every other
phenomenon in Nature, still denied the theory of the "spirits." They
considered that the modern psychology was a science still in the first
stages of its development, in total ignorance of the nature of the
psychic man, and denying, as do many other sciences, all that cannot be
explained according to its own particular theories.

From the first days of its existence some of the most learned Americans
joined the Society, which became known as the Theosophical Society. Its
members differed on many points, much as do the members of any other
Society, Geographical or Archeological, which fights for years over
the sources of the Nile, or the Hieroglyphs of Egypt. But everyone is
unanimously agreed that, as long as there is water in the Nile,
its sources must exist somewhere. So much about the phenomena of
spiritualism and mesmerism. These phenomena were still waiting their
Champollion--but the Rosetta stone was to be searched for neither in
Europe nor in America, but in the far-away countries where they still
believe in magic, where wonders are performed daily by the native
priesthood, and where the cold materialism of science has never yet
reached--in one word, in the East.

The Council of the Society knew that the Lama-Buddhists, for instance,
though not believing in God, and denying the personal immortality of the
soul, are yet celebrated for their "phenomena," and that mesmerism was
known and daily practised in China from time immemorial under the name
of "gina." In India they fear and hate the very name of the spirits whom
the Spiritualists venerate so deeply, yet many an ignorant fakir can
perform "miracles" calculated to turn upside-down all the notions of
a scientist and to be the despair of the mo