Perhaps the word "struggle" as here used is wrong. Deliverance for the East is not so much struggle as acquiescence. For the theosophist desire is the master mischief maker. Desire leads us in wrong directions, complicates our spiritual problems and thrusts us against the turn of the wheel. We are rather, according to the theosophist, to reduce desire to its simplest terms, thereby freeing ourselves from restlessness, above all taking care not to hurt or embitter others.
Theosophy Produces a Distinct Type of Character
There is no denying that here is a faith capable of producing a distinctive type of character. It tends at its best toward an extreme conscientiousness and an always excessive introspection; it creates also a vast and brooding patience. "In countries where reincarnation and karma [the law of Cause and Effect] are taken for granted by every peasant and labourer, the belief spreads a certain quiet acceptance of inevitable troubles that conduces much to the calm and contentment of ordinary life. A man overwhelmed by misfortunes rails neither against God nor against his neighbours, but regards his troubles as the result of his own past mistakes and ill-doings. He accepts them resignedly and makes the best of them.... He realizes that his future lives depend on his own exertions and that the law which brings him pain will bring him joy just as inevitably if he sows the seed of good. Hence a certain large patience and philosophic view of life tending directly to social stability and to general contentment."[68]
[68] "The Ancient Wisdom," Besant, p. 273.
If such a faith as this be informed with humaneness and be deeply tempered with the principle of sacrifice, it may, and does, result in a distinct type of real goodness. It is possibly a good faith for helpless and more or less despairing folk, though it likely creates many of the evils from which it desires to escape. The very reach and subtlety and even splendour of its speculation will make a strong appeal to minds of a certain type.
Two elements in the whole system doubtless account for what hold it has upon the Western mind. It does offer, to begin with, a coherent explanation of the problem of pain and sorrow. As we have seen more than once in this study, Western Christianity has been deficient just here. The accepted explanations of the shadowed side of life have not been great enough to meet the facts. Practically every cult we have studied has found its opportunity just here. Christian Science solves the problem by denying the essential reality of pain and disease. New Thought believes in an underlying and loving good to which life may be so attuned as to bring us generally into the current of health and happiness. Theosophy accepts pain, sorrow and all unhappy forces and explains them as the inevitable result of wrong action either in this or a previous existence.
Theosophy a "Tour de Force" of the Imagination
Christian Science saves the justice and affirms the love of God by making Him just a God with apparently no concern for and no participation in the shadowed side of life. New Thought saves the love and justice of God by discovering in pain and unhappiness our lack of harmony with Him. Theosophy meets the whole shadowed order along its full front and explains everything in terms of compensation. Now there is much in this to appeal to our modern temper. Directly we recognize the scales in which the consequences of our actions are weighed as being so sensitive that not even a thought can be thrown in the one balance without disturbing the equilibrium, directly we recognize ourselves as involved in a sweep of law from whose consequences there is no possible escape, we have at least a consistent scheme in which there is room for no evasion, and if we balance the manifold inequalities of one life by what has been done or left undone in some previous life, we are always able to add weight enough to the scales to make them hang level. True enough, there is nothing to guide us here but imaginative ingenuity, but it is always possible to imagine some fault in a previous existence which we pay for in pain or loss or disappointment, or some good deed done in a previous existence which accounts for our happy fortune in this. And so justice is saved if only by a tour de force of the imagination. (Mrs. Besant, for example, explains the untimely death of a child as a penalty due the parents for unkindness to a child in an earlier incarnation.)
The speculative aspects of Theosophy also appeal to tempers which love to dream without accepting the laborious discipline of a truly reasoned speculation. To quote a phrase of Macaulay's quoted in turn by William James in one of his letters, there is a type of mind "utterly wanting in the faculty by which a demonstrated truth is distinguished from a plausible supposition," and there has been amongst us of late a marked increase of this type of mind. There has been up to our own time no great amount of such speculation as this in the West. It is not native to the occidental temper and it has been held in control by our scientific approach to the facts of our world and our experiences therein. We have demanded for our speculations generally the demonstration of fact and this has heretofore held us to a rather narrow range, but that widening of the frontiers of the possible which has attended the new psychology with its emphasis upon the subconscious, along with the rather baffling character of psychic phenomena, has opened the flood gates and released a tide of speculation which goes far beyond the proved fact and accepts no limits but its own ingenious audacity. We have already seen how evident deficiencies in the discipline of present-day education and the loose state of mind too much in evidence amongst us has contributed to all this. There are everywhere a great number of perplexed people who want to believe something and find it far easier to believe in dreams and guesses and cloud-built systems than in restraining facts or even the rather clearly demonstrated realities of the moral order, and such as these have found a wealth of material in Eastern speculation.
A Bridge of Clouds