he affirmation of
Theosophy, that is its root-meaning and its essence.

And we find, looking back historically, that this has been asserted in
the various great religions of the world. They all claim that man can
know, not only that man can believe. Only in some of the more modern
faiths, in their own modern days, the knowledge has slipped into the
background, and the belief, the faith, looms very large in the mind of
the believer. Go back as far as you will in the history of the past,
and you will find the most ancient of religions affirming this
possibility of knowledge. In India, for instance, with its antique
civilisation, you find that the very central idea of Hinduism is
this supreme knowledge, the knowledge of God. As I pointed out to you
the other day with regard to this old Eastern religion, all knowledge
is regarded in a higher or a lower degree as the knowledge of God; for
there is no division, as you know, in that ancient faith, between the
secular and the sacred. That division is a modern division, and was
unknown in the ancient world. But they did make a division in
knowledge between the higher and the lower; and the lower knowledge,
or the lower science, called the "lower divine science," was that
which you will call "science" nowadays, the study of the external
world. But it also included all that here we speak of as Literature,
as Art, as Craft--everything, in fact, which the human brain can study
and the human fingers can accomplish--the whole of that, in one grand
generalisation, was called "Divine Wisdom," but it was the lower
divine Wisdom, the inferior knowledge of God. Then, beside, or rather
above that, came the Supreme Knowledge, the higher, the superior, that
beyond which there was no knowledge, which was the crown of all. Now,
that supreme knowledge is declared to be "the knowledge of Him by Whom
all things are known"--a phrase indicating the Supreme Deity. It was
that which was called the supreme knowledge, or, _par excellence_, the
Divine Knowledge, and that old Hindu thought is exactly the same as
you have indicated by the name Theosophy.

So, again, classical students may remember that among the Greeks and
the early Christians there was what was called the Gnosis, the
knowledge, the definite article pointing to that which, above all
else, was to be regarded as knowledge or wisdom. And when you find
among the Neo-Platonists this word Gnosis used, it always means, and
is defined to mean, "