...Still, the age has its own demands, and it is becoming imperatively necessary
that Indian knowledge should reveal in the Western way, its scientific
foundations. For if we do not do it ourselves, the Europeans will do it for us and
do it badly, discrediting the knowledge in the process. The phenomenon of the
Theosophical Society is a warning to us of a pressing urgency. It will never do
to allow the science of Indian knowledge to be represented to the West through
this strange & distorting medium. For this society of European & European-led
inquirers arose from an impulse on which the Time-Spirit itself insists; their
object, vaguely grasped at by them, was at bottom the systematic
coordination, explanation & practice of Oriental religion & Oriental mental &
spiritual discipline. Unfortunately, as always happens to a great effort in unfit
hands, it stumbled at the outset& went into strange bypaths. It fell into the
mediaeval snare of Gnostic mysticism, Masonic secrecy& Rosicrucian jargon.
The little science it attempted has been rightly stigmatised as pseudo-science.
A vain attempt to thrust in modern physical science into the explanation of
psychical movements, - to explain for instance pranayam in the terms of
oxygen&hydrogen! - to accept uncritically every experience & every random
idea about an experience as it occurred to the mind & set it up as a revealed
truth & almost a semi-divine communication, to make a hopeless amalgam&
jumble of science, religion& philosophy all expressed in the terms of the
imagination - this has been the scientific method of Theosophy. The result is
that it lays its hands on truth & muddles it so badly that it comes out to the
world as an untruth. And there now abound other misstatements of Indian
truth, less elaborate but almost as wild & wide as Theosophy's...
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